I've always ranked Batman low on my personal scale of superheroes, below Superman, say, and particularly Spiderman, on sort of political grounds--that he doesn't really have any superpowers, just money, that his invincibility is all hardware, which he pays for by calmly writing a check, whereas for the others there is some fatality in their being different from everybody else, born on a different planet, bitten by a radioactive spider, and some big emotional cost in getting there.
Yes, I know Bruce Wayne lost his parents to criminal terrorism and this is why he fights, but that just proves the point: it's his own personal therapy, not some broader vision; he doesn't have to choose against private happiness, unlike Peter Parker, who is constantly forced to think about how happy he could make Aunt May and Mary Anne if he dropped the quest, even became a criminal himself.
My son, as a small boy, hated Batman, whose name I think he misheard as "Badman", and wanted nothing to do with him, but by the time he was 11, when The Dark Knight was released, he wanted to see it, and so we did. I felt very peculiar about it--extraordinary in parts, but I hated the structure of the screenplay building to its greatest tension when they blow up Maggie Gyllenhaal at the end of act 2 and then nobody ever speaks her name again, like poor Clover Adams, as if it were all her fault instead of the writers. And then I was repelled by the way Batman collaborates with the transparently fascist district attorney, does a torture interrogation himself on the Joker, and never distances himself from that Dark ideology even after the DA is revealed to be a Two-Face, a hypocrite who has never been more than a step away from being a criminal all the while. Harry, meanwhile, thought it was the best film he had ever seen.
Still does, too; we were talking about it, the other night. The interesting thing is this: he didn't disagree with my moral scruples at all. He just doesn't expect the protagonist to be a good guy, and it doesn't interfere with his pleasure if the hero is a dick. I thought that was pretty sophisticated.
Yes, I know Bruce Wayne lost his parents to criminal terrorism and this is why he fights, but that just proves the point: it's his own personal therapy, not some broader vision; he doesn't have to choose against private happiness, unlike Peter Parker, who is constantly forced to think about how happy he could make Aunt May and Mary Anne if he dropped the quest, even became a criminal himself.
My son, as a small boy, hated Batman, whose name I think he misheard as "Badman", and wanted nothing to do with him, but by the time he was 11, when The Dark Knight was released, he wanted to see it, and so we did. I felt very peculiar about it--extraordinary in parts, but I hated the structure of the screenplay building to its greatest tension when they blow up Maggie Gyllenhaal at the end of act 2 and then nobody ever speaks her name again, like poor Clover Adams, as if it were all her fault instead of the writers. And then I was repelled by the way Batman collaborates with the transparently fascist district attorney, does a torture interrogation himself on the Joker, and never distances himself from that Dark ideology even after the DA is revealed to be a Two-Face, a hypocrite who has never been more than a step away from being a criminal all the while. Harry, meanwhile, thought it was the best film he had ever seen.
Still does, too; we were talking about it, the other night. The interesting thing is this: he didn't disagree with my moral scruples at all. He just doesn't expect the protagonist to be a good guy, and it doesn't interfere with his pleasure if the hero is a dick. I thought that was pretty sophisticated.
