Batman history
One of the interesting things I learned from
Batman Unmasked was that Batman's history is even more complicated that I thought. One of Brooker's points is that the fans who complain about the 60s TV series or Schumacher's
Batman and Robin not being "true to the original comics" are suffering from selective memory. Both the dark grim Batman and the goofy campy Batman have a long and established history in the comics.
1939. First appearance of Batman. At this stage he was way over on the dark/grim side, even carrying a gun and killing baddies. I don't think many fans would hold those qualities up as part of the "authentic" Batman.
1940. First appearance of Robin & the start of some gradual changes to Batman in response to parents' concerns about violence in the comic. This is when it was established that he doesn't kill, and when Robin brought the series more of a sense of humor and fun.
1954. Psychologist named Wertham hears about queer readings of the Batman/Robin relationship. There are quite a few plots that feature one of the team rescuing the other, or freaking out because he thinks the other one is dead, or worrying that people might find out about their big shared secret. There are also cute panels where they talk over their current case at the breakfast table. Brooker argues that Wertham was actually a decent guy and has been a bit demonized by later generations of writers. (Some hate him for even mentioning the idea that anyone could consider reading Batman as gay. Others hate him for suggesting that there might be something wrong with reading Batman as gay.) But there's no doubt that his observations set off a wave of 50s panic about sexual perversion. My point here is just that the late 40s - early 50s comics definitely don't sound like they were about a dark vigilante loner.
1956. Batwoman introduced.
1961. Bat-Girl (not "Batgirl"/Barbara Gordon, but a previous incarnation) introduced. Women superheroes, yay! Oh, wait, they are just there to "prove" that our real heroes are straight. Sigh. Unfortunately, gay teenagers who are reading Batman and Robin as a couple just interpret Batwoman and Bat-Girl as the
beards they are. This interpretation is helped along by the clunky comedic scenes where women come on to Bruce or Dick and get panicky, flustered golly-gee-a-girl! responses. It still doesn't sound like a story about a dark vigilante loner to me.
As a side note, in this light, how funny is it that
the new Batwoman is a lesbian?
Anyway, it seems like the dark/grim mood and the comedy/camp mood alternated or were both present throughout 40s, 50s, and 60s comics.
The 60s TV series, then, picked up on the camp side, not the dark side, but it is a mistake to argue over which side is the "authentic" Batman from the comics. Brooker has lots of interesting things to say about the series. He sees relationships to other TV genres of the time, both the sitcoms like
Bewitched and
The Monkees, and action shows like
Star Trek and
Man From UNCLE. This dual relationship was what allowed kids to watch it seriously, like the other action shows, while adults picked up on the comedy cues and watched it as a satire. Brooker also talks about the series' borrowing from pop art, which celebrates a flat style, bright colors, a camp aesthetic, and cheap and ephemeral art forms (like advertising - and comics).
Anyway - Batman comics apparently took their cue from the series for a while - it was very popular, after all. Then in the 80s, Frank Miller's
The Dark Knight Returns and
Year One swung the pendulum back - and I mean WAY back - away from camp/comedy back towards the dark/grim. Well, fine - it was probably time - but calling that a move back to "authentic" comics Batman is at least an oversimplification, if not just flat out wrong.
As far as the feature films, we have had
two from
Burton (dark and grim) and
two from
Schumacher (campy comedies). (The
IMDB plot summary for
Batman and Robin starts out "Batman & Robin try to keep their relationship together" while they fight someone or other... Was it actually
meant to be a romantic comedy? Maybe I should watch it again.) And most recently, we have had
two from
Nolan, back to dark and grim.
The moral of the story, fans, is that you can feel free to state your preference as to which Batman you like best, but you have no basis whatsoever for claiming that yours is the most "authentic."
Philosophy and popular culture
I just finished reading
Batman Unmasked by Will Brooker. He is a cultural studies professor, although he apparently belongs to a department of "Communications." (Is it me, or does "communications" just not sound like an academic discipline? It is one step up in specificity from "Study of Stuff.")
Having invested a lot of time on academia in my life, as well as a lot of time on SF fandom, I'm naturally interested in the spaces where these two things interact. I think Brooker's book is a good example of how they should interact. He is a sharp and thorough scholar but also a loving fan, and he is reflective about how these two roles sometimes reinforce each other and sometimes pull against each other. I will say more about his Batman book in the next post.
I have a standard spiel about "academics take on popular culture" type books, which I don't think has made it onto the blog (until now). In philosophy, these
books are
proliferating right and left these days, and their editors often have a certain fuzziness about what the mission of their book is supposed to be.
There are three things you can do if you want to do "philosophy and popular culture."
(1) "Hey, this bit of
Buffy is just like this bit of Heidegger." This is basically using
Buffy as an accessible on-ramp to teach people about Heidegger. Nothing wrong with that; Gazza teaches a popular and successful Philosophy and Science Fiction course that is probably the most fun of all possible ways to learn about philosophy. (I guarantee he doesn't cover any Heidegger though.) But I think people sometimes deceive themselves into thinking that by writing this kind of stuff they are also saying something deep and profound about
Buffy. And, really? Not so much.
Unfortunately, a whole lot of contributors to the philosophy and popular culture books seem to do these essays, and after making the point "this is like that!" they may not have said anything particularly interesting about either the TV show or the philosopher.
Looking at the table of contents of
Batman and Philosophy, for example, I see articles on Batman and Wittgenstein, Batman and Kierkegaard, and "Aristotle, Kant, and Dick Grayson on Moral Education." I haven't read this book, but these topics really threaten to be This Is Like That topics.
(2) "
Star Wars has genre relationships to fantasy and westerns as well as to science fiction." The second kind of mission you can have is using the tools of your discipline to say something interesting about your TV show (or comic or movie or whatever.) This is my favorite approach, because I think that subjects like Buffy, Batman, and Star Wars deserve study in themselves. I aimed to do this kind of thinking back when I was teaching a course called "Aesthetics of Film." About a third of the course (my favorite third) was about genre films - what are genres? should you apply the same standards of quality to a "genre film" versus an "art film"? are art films really genre-less? I saw us as using the philosophy "toolbox" of analyzing/defining/categorizing things, and applying broader aesthetic questions about how to properly judge artworks to case studies like summer blockbuster movies. I really resist the idea that a philosophy of film course should cover a specific canon of films - that is what Film Studies is for. One of the great things about philosophy is that you can do philosophy about whatever you think is interesting. Sometime I should put up my spinoff spiel on
Spiderman 2 as an examination and reaffirmation of the superhero genre. I see I never blogged it, though I did review
Spidey 3.(3) I used to think that the above two options were the only choices, but I have been corrected by English/Comp Lit/Cultural Studies folks who prefer a third approach. They like to use the popular culture artifact to say something about the culture that produced it. This is not something analytic philosophers tend to do, but it strikes me as an interesting project.
Brooker is a cultural studies guy, as I said, but he is mostly focusing on #2 in his Batman book. This may be partly because he is a big Batman fan, and therefore (like me) thinks that it is worth focusing on Batman for his own sake. In the next post I will talk about what he has to say about him.
Labels: books, comics, ideas, movies
Wolverine & Star Trek - Spoilers
Good month for movie loving geeks.
I liked the Wolverine movie, but was kind of disappointed in the Star Trek one. I didn't have one big problem with it, but the string of small annoying things kept on, well, annoying me.
Uhura. Her competence and professionalism get
mentioned, but all we are
shown is Kirk hitting on her, followed by an underwear shot and after that all of her appearances are as You Know Who's Girlfriend. We barely see her do any work at all, competently or otherwise.
Kirk. Generic Teenage Rebel. It was original when James Dean did it -- in the
fifties. Probably perfectly in character for a younger version of the Kirk we knew, but it was still annoying to sit through. And his birth in the escape pod was lame melodrama.
Chekhov. The accent joke again? really?
Huge carnivorous monsters on frozen abandoned planet. What do they eat when Star Fleet officers AREN'T being marooned there? Eco-system FAIL, Abrams.
Speaking of locations, Iowa. Now with its own Grand Canyon. I guess it was supposed to be a quarry? Hey, should we put a fence or something around this bottomless pit we just dug in the middle of the Midwest? Nah, the local kids need
something to drive their convertibles off of!
I did love Simon Pegg as Scotty. He brought the funny, which is good, because no one else was going to.
And I was thrilled to see Nimoy play Spock again. I especially loved his scene with Quinto.
Effects-wise, I like the way ships enter and leave warp VERY abruptly. That was cool.
I tried to love it overall, but it was an uphill battle. It strings together a whole lot of silliness and a whole lot of cliche in between the moments of greatness.
Cliches were not absent from
Wolverine either. But the biggest and potentially most annoying cliche got turned on its head: what looked like a standard revenge-for-murdered-girlfriend plot (yawn) turned out to be something completely different. Thank goodness.
I was excited to see Gambit on the big screen, even in a small role. (What? it is like a law of nature that straight women Marvel fans have to crush on Gambit. Like Nightwing in the DC-verse. Who am I to fight a law of nature?) He was great, though I wish he'd had a bit more accent. He sounded
maybe mid-South, not at all New Orleans. I get that they didn't want to exaggerate it, but they barely even tried. The
actor turns out to be from freakin' British Columbia so I guess I should be grateful that there was any southern accent.
Overall, somehow I had fun watching Wolverine and less fun watching Star Trek.
What other films are you geeky friends looking forward to this summer? Of course there is a new Harry Potter in July...
Labels: movies
Torchwood season 2: Spoilerful!!
We have finished watching season 2 of
Torchwood. Suddenly we are caught up, with no more new Whoniverse stuff to watch until Scifi gets off their butt and shows us either season 2 of the
Sarah Jane Adventures or the damn Christmas special of
Doctor Who COME ON SCIFI HURRY UP.
Anyway, season 2 - the online consensus seemed to be that it was better than season 1, and I thought that was true.
Looking back at my thoughts on season 1, it's clear that there were no clunkers in season 2 as cringeworthy as the Weevil Fight Club episode was, so we are already ahead of that game.
John Hart the Evil Ex-Boyfriend was pretty over the top, but since it was James Marsters, he managed to keep me involved instead of turning into a cardboard cutout. I even felt sorry for him, though not as sorry as I felt for everyone else around him.
After the first four episodes of this season I was thinking that they were overdoing the darkness. I know it is a darker show that Doctor Who, but there is a point at which you are just manipulating the viewers: tune in next week and we will kick puppies and throw orphan children out into the snow! muahaha!
(That was how I felt after the woman who didn't know she was an alien agent, the time traveler they sent back to die in 1918, and the alien whale who was being slowly cannibalized. Good grief. And please, why can't Toshiko have a nice normal relationship??)
But then there was "Adam" which I thought was a really great episode. Some of the best acting I had seen from Burn Gorman so far. He really didn't get enough to do last season, other than be a jerk and spout the occasional medical technobabble.
Next three episodes I also really liked: nice to see Martha again, and Owen gets an amazing arc. For God's sake, has Jack learned his lesson about the glove this time?? I hope so.
"Something Borrowed" - one of those episodes where the
plot depends on everyone being really really dumb. Gwen didn't think about how her parents would feel, thinking she was pregnant??? And everyone forgets every five minutes or so that the bad guy is a SHAPESHIFTER and could be anyone. Good grief. I usually hate Too Dumb To Live plots, and I wasn't nuts about this one, but it had a few moments of such brilliance that I forgave it. Specifically, Rhys brandishing a chainsaw at the alien impersonating his mother. Great zombie-movie-cliche moment. I just wish they had let him chainsaw her instead of yet another Jack-saves-the-day-with-big-gun resolution. I also liked the way Tosh brushed off the idiot groomsman ("Banana" was it?) who was hitting on her. I expected them to write Tosh all flustered, so it was pretty satisfying that she just told him to get lost.
That one about the traveling show coming to life from the film stock - eh. Had to suspend belief pretty damn hard.
"Adrift" - I liked this one quite a bit. It's nice for Andy the policeman to have a little character development.
"Fragments" - Another good episode. I guess no one gets recruited to Torchwood unless something really horrible happens to them first. I can see that, actually. If your life isn't ruined already, then joining Torchwood will ruin it for you. I see why Jack wanted Gwen as Token Sane Person (pity she turned out to be crazy after all).
"Exit Wounds" - hellovalot better than last season's finale. The story with Gray I didn't think was that great. But Owen and Tosh! :( wow.
Apparently instead of a third season, they are making a miniseries to air on several consecutive nights. That'll be interesting, whenever we get to see it over here (airs in the U.K. in June).
Labels: TV
Not dead yet.
New record for disappearing from the blogosphere: over 2 months. Arg.
I have been obsessed with playing
Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords on the X-box. KOTOR I and II have really re-awakened my inner Star Wars fan, who had been in hiding ever since
Attack of the Clones came out. Oh man are those games great.
I'm also trying to teach myself to play by ear. I learned to play flute in high school band, and then college private lessons, which means I got one of those school-type musical educations where you learn to read music, memorize the fingering that matches the symbol on the page, and off you go. It's all reading and muscle memory, and your ears are pretty much sidelined. That's why I laugh when people (on rare occasions) suggest I might have musical talent. Anyone can learn to read music, and then you just spend some hours doing drills for your fingers (that part is just like learning to type).
I have had a lot of fun playing like that for a lot of years, but I am finally getting bored and frustrated with it. So I'm trying to learn to play by ear. I was actually pretty intimidated by the idea, but I thought about it and broke it down like so. Think about a song you know well enough to "hear" in your head. Hear it? Okay, you are halfway there. The other half is memorization - only instead of matching a printed symbol to a fingering, you match the fingering to the pitch you need to hear next, in order to match what you hear in your head.
Well, it made sense to me, anyway.
I have hopes that being able to play by ear will open up other kinds of music to me, besides the limited range of classical that is easy enough for me to play. Most other traditions of music (jazz, rock, folk, Irish) rely on learning tunes by ear rather than reading.
Check out
flutist Greg Pattillo for some non-traditional playing...
Labels: KOTOR, music
Black Canary, part III of III
Part three: Black Canary in
Birds of Prey. Actually, as strangething pointed out, BoP started prior to the Green Arrow series I was talking about last week. So technically, this should have been part two. Oh well.
This image is the cover of the trade volume
Birds of Prey: Of Like Minds, written by Gail Simone, drawn by Ed Benes. This volume was published in 2004.
Post-feminist backlash ahoy!
Black Canary is the blond Barbie. The brunette Barbie is Huntress, and the redhead Barbie is Oracle (the former Batgirl).
Yeah, good thing they have color-coded hair, isn't it? What will they do if they recruit another team member, have her dye hers green?
It's too bad I'm icked out by the way the women are drawn, because this book is really well written for them. BC and Oracle are convincing women friends that worry about one another, laugh together, and bliss out together over great Italian food. Even Huntress, who is supposed to be too scary even for Batman's taste, here has a sense of humor and a secret love of babies. (Too bad about her costume... WTF?)
They get a good storyline too, with a satisfying balance of beating up of bad guys mixed with thinky parts, and all of it with nice teamwork and decent character interactions. BC is written as tough as nails, even though she looks like Porn Star Barbie.
I get that superheros of both sexes are going to have idealized bodies. I guess I wish that our culture was better at appreciating a tougher-looking, more muscled ideal woman. It makes me sad that to be sexy, a woman character can have only one type of look: stick thin, big round floaty boobs, and pouty lips.
I have to admit that I kind of like her anime-girl hair though. ;)
Labels: comics
