Someone expressed surprise to me the other day about how many men seem to love Batman.
When we were very young, of course, it was all Superman, all the time. (Very young. Like, three.) Superman isn't so popular these days. I'm not sure what happened, but I suspect the tight tights and little red trunks started worrying the less-secure or more homophobic among our male population.
Or, of course, it could be a Batmania reaction to the relatively recent string of Batman, The Next Generation movies.
One of the things that offers intermittent amusement on Stargate: Atlantis, is the geeky love two characters share for the camp 60's Batman. I adored that show. It didn't take itself, or the "superhero" genre too seriously. When I was five, that was the kind of thing I liked in my entertainment. (And the amusement of BLAM! POW! OOF! fight scenes, of course. When you're two, those big cartoon graphics covering any hint of Actual Violence are a lot of fun.)
I've been largely ignoring the newer B:TNG movies, because they take themselves so very seriously. I want angsty depression, I can find it anywhere. I don't have to go to a movie theatre and plop down $10 or $15 for it.
But none of that is actually what I wanted to say.
What I was going to say and what I'm determined to say before I side-track myself again is that maybe guys find a superhero who's a little less super a little more accessible these days? I mean, a few sessions at the gym and a mansion full of expensive and electronic toys and any guy could pretend he was Batman, right?
Or it could be the anti-hero edge to B:TNG. The original Batman might have been swayed by a pretty face or a bulging bosom, but you knew he'd never be anything but Heroic. Today's Batman is very, very flawed.
Where did this whole anti-hero thing come from, anyhow? Seems to me, as I ponder my sketchy memories of the last 20 years, that anti-heroes started becoming big just about when politicians and actors and sports figures started falling off their pedestals with a tedious regularity.
Maybe no one believes in heroes any more? Maybe in today's world of terrorism, terror-mongering, and blatant lying by those in positions of power and responsibility, it's just no longer possible to believe in someone doing the right things in the right ways for the right reasons?
I'm pretty sure that wasn't where I was going, either.
Anyhow. I wrote that yesterday (Tuesday) but didn't get it posted. Today, in one of those rare moments of serendipity, I found this CNN story about this summer's superhero movies and how the characters are all somewhat less than traditionally "Hollywood Heroic."
I grew up with those early Batman shows as daytime TV, and was just the right age to be quite impressed by the first Superman movie, not to mention Star Wars....
The problem with most superheroes really is that they are too super: for the stories to stay interesting, they either have to be ethically subtle (and talky) or escalate (and then you end up with "Galactus: Destroyer of Worlds" and crap like that).
Batman -- and to a somewhat similar extent, Spiderman -- had very real limits on his knowledge and abilities which allowed the challenges he faced to be somewhat realistic. In some ways, the newer Batman is actually less limited -- more technological fixes, more physically freakish -- but still deals with limitations and problems at a level of complexity that makes some sense.
Of course, my favorite comic book character for the last fifteen years has been Neil Gaiman's Morpheus (aka Sandman): He's actually a god (or something more) but still has enough limitations and personality to make for good storytelling.
Anti-heroes? In a world of strict laws and procedures, anti-heroes are necessary to get anything dramatic done.
posted by: Jonathan Dresner on 04.30.08 at 04:25 PM [permalink]