THE DARK SIDE
Batman is a heroic icon, but he doesn't belong on your kid's Happy Meal
The man in tights is not your friend. He has his own problems, a head full of violence and childhood trauma. This is the essence of Batman: twisted, brutal, an orphaned rich kid with an unhealthy compulsion for street justice, ready to pummel local hoods and super-creeps, and armed with nothing more than a fast car and some gadgets lifted from the Sharper Image catalog. He is a madman vigilante, the dark Dark Knight. And any suggestion that the Caped Crusader could be "deputized" for his services is just kid stuff. He is outside the law, an antihero and a menace. He is Travis Bickle in a bat-suit: "Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets."
This is scary stuff, an urban myth suited for the likes of Scorsese, a tale of iron will at war against modern dystopia. And it's mostly been bungled onscreen and even on the page since Batman was created by Bob Kane in 1939. Adam West infamously portrayed Batman in the '60s as an earnest simpleton with a paunch, his Bat-gut hanging over a plastic utility belt, every episode at the same Bat-time! on the same Bat-channel! TV's Batman was a hipster joke of broad camp, and it was also an accurate reflection of what the comic-book character had become by the late '50s: a laughable loon in a stupid costume battling robots and criminal goofballs. To the kids stressed out by every ridiculous cliffhanger, it was all deadly serious stuff, but the dark soul of the character transcended adolescent entertainment and was always ripe with dramatic, disturbing possibilities, the superhero most likely to cross over to adult readers.
Even the keepers of the Batman franchise often seem confused by what they have. Time Warner, parent company of DC Comics, is fiercely protective of its property and merchandising bonanza, and yet willing to rent him out as a pitchman for the OnStar car navigation system or your next Happy Meal. And why not? Bats is funny that way, a tortured soul haunted by the murder of his parents, yet still fitting enough to have his smiling face on your toddler's underwear. The artists and writers at DC do what they can to keep it real.
Batman's dignity was rescued first by artist Neal Adams in the late '60s, recasting him in darker shades, rendering him on the page amid the kind of grit and realism that was emerging then in the films of Scorsese, Coppola, and Altman. Mainstream comics are an infinite setting for stories that step deep into the supernatural and sci-fi, but Batman was always at his best when facing more earthbound crises. So he was fully resurrected as a character of grim retribution by writer-artist Frank Miller in 1986's The Dark Knight Returns, which found an aging Batman in a story that was impressionistic but pointed and topical, exploring how society might truly respond to the presence of costumed vigilantes in the age of Reagan. (The answer: Not well.)
The crossover success of Miller's take led directly to 1989's big-budget Batman movie. Tim Burton was an inspired choice as director, a fabulist with a mean streak, but the initial results were erratic and unsatisfying, as corporate meddling sent the thing wildly off course (inappropriate music by Prince!). And yet it was the closest the Caped Crusader had ever come to a legit film interpretation, with no mention of the inherently dubious Boy Wonder, never ever. At the screening I attended then, actor Cesar Romero was in the lobby afterward, laughing his crazed TV Joker laugh, complaining about the violence and missing the point. Burton's sequel, Batman Returns, was better, darker, and as complete a personal statement as his Edward Scissorhands two years earlier. But when I mentioned this to director Kevin Smith, a sometime comics writer and full-time comics fanatic, he objected to a scene where our hero dispatches a thug with some of the gang's own dynamite. Burton had Batman killing!
The truth about the DC universe is that the modern Batman (like Superman, etc.) never kills, but merely delivers his villains to the grim Arkham Asylum, from which they will inevitably escape to provide more excitement and mayhem in some later issue of Batman or Detective Comics. A true vigilante on the streets of Gotham could save himself a lot of misery. These are genuine serial killers he's dealing with. The body count and general maiming attributed to the preposterous Joker, Riddler, Penguin, Mr. Freeze, et al., is endless. It's a paradox unlikely to be resolved by Christopher Nolan's promising Batman Begins. Or ever. And that can't be much of a message for a Happy Meal.
Published: 05/26/2005
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