Someone is wrong about Batman on the internet!
“Without getting into specifics, the key thing that makes the third film a great possibility for us is that we want to finish our story … [I’m] viewing it as an ending….[The villain] won’t be Mr. Freeze.”—
Director Christopher Nolan on Batman 3 [NYP] (via peterwknox)
Lets NOT make some Ice?
(via jasencomstock)
I think there’s a flaw (only implied here) in thinking that villains like Mr. Freeze are too silly or ridiculous for Batman. For one thing, fuck off, Batman’s silly. For another thing, you have only to look at the Animated Series episodes devoted to Freeze to see that it is absolutely possible to tell thoughtful, well-constructed stories with a lot of depth as well as action in them with those sorts of villains. The problem with Freeze in the existing movie franchises has more to do with terrible writing and ridiculous casting.
I agree with most of this, but the bolded text is a bridge too far, and I can’t let it go by without comment.
There are a lot of fanboys out there who seem very attached to childish interpretations of their favorite superheroes, who have kneejerk reactions at all the post-Alan Moore/Frank Miller work in which their favorite heroes are depicted as dark and tortured, and/or fighting against scary villains under the cover of darkness. I agree that this style can be overdone, and I further agree that it doesn’t fit with all superheroes. Superman and Green Lantern, for example, are both characters I find ill-suited for this approach (then again, Grant Morrison’s All-Star Superman is the only writing about that character that I’ve ever found interesting, so take me with a grain of salt here).
On the other hand, when people get all disagreeable about Batman stories in which the character is depicted as dark and tortured, I get very frustrated. Sure, the Batman TV show of the 60s was a campy piece of pop art, and the comics of the time reflected that. But if you go back to the original source material, the Bill Finger/Bob Kane/Jerry Robinson stories of the late 30s and early 40s, you’ll find that they were quite dark. Batman only exists because his parents were murdered in front of him when he was a child. He got shot in the stomach in one of the first issues of the Batman comic book. Those stories are not “silly” by any stretch of the imagination. I’m not going to complain, necessarily, if someone wants to write a silly Batman story. But complaining when people don’t want to write silly Batman stories is ridiculous. Dark, intense Batman stories are far more true to the original spirit of the character than silly, campy stories are. Hate on Christopher Nolan’s interpretation of the character all you want, but he’s not the revisionist—you are.
No, he’s absolutely a revisionist. Re-revision is still revision.
But beyond that, the original Batman comics are silly. (Which is what’s great about them, but that’s not my point right now.) They’re entertainment pitched at ten year olds featuring a man dressing up as a bat to fight criminals: the silliness is inherent in the concept. (They are also, as far as I’m concerned, nearly unreadable. But I stopped being able to read any old shit just because it had superheroes in it a long time ago. It’s a loss, not a gain.) What’s interesting about the Alan Moore and Frank Miller reinterpretations/”darkenings” is that they tackle serious themes and achieve a certain level of badassery without forsaking the silliness. Moore’s Joker is all the more horrifying because he’s a clown in pinstripe trousers; Miller’s Robin doesn’t stop being ridiculous because it’s a girl wearing the short-shorts.
Aaaaand you posted an update in the time it took me to compose this. Oh well. For the record.
