Chiroptophobia

Now I have no objection in principle to taking a simple story of adventure, hyping it up with pop psychological analysis and dark metaphorical portent, and creating a complex artistic endeavor worthy of being subjected to the full battery of tools available to critical analysis.  Richard Wagner proved that such an elevation could work quite nicely, transforming simple heroic tales told by Germanic warriors as they sat around a campfire into the heavy-breathing Sturm und Drang of an opera like Götterdämmerung.

But Batman?  I have just finished reading the New Yorker's review of The Dark Knight Rises, Christopher Nolan's third part of his ponderous Batman trilogy.  The review cleverly (and rather snarkily) mocks the seriousness of the entire enterprise, notes the uncoolness of both Bruce Wayne and his Batman alias, laments Batman's frustrating (to the reviewer) asexuality, and remarks on the absence of any real political relevance of the movie to today's political world.  What we have left, according to the review, is cool gadgets: the Bat-Pod and "the Bat" (a sort of airplane).  The review observes of the director:

We go to his films to gasp, not to yearn or pity or weep, except over the paucity of our own automobiles.

I haven't seen the latest Dark Knight, nor do I intend to.  (I did see Batman Begins, the first of the series.)  I can't analyze the movie, therefore, but I have some thoughts about the entire endeavor.

Batman was my favorite comic hero as a kid.  He didn't leap tall buildings in a single bound, he didn't achieve super powers by exclaiming, "Shazam!", he didn't fly like a hawk, or have magic bullet-repellent bracelets and lariat, or possess a power ring and power lantern.  He was just an ordinary guy -- an ordinary hyper-rich guy, admittedly -- who was fed up with lawlessness in Gotham City and had the money and determination to do something about it.   Luckily, his mansion rested astride a large cave (the Bat Cave, of course), whence he and his sidekick Robin jumped into the Batcar and shot out into the night in response to Commissioner Gordon's Bat Signal.  That was pretty much it.

(And no -- no decent all-American kid ever questioned Bruce Wayne's relationship with young Dick Grayson.  That was left to decadent literary critics of the day.  What could seem more normal to us than that a hero should be accompanied by a young sidekick?  A Tonto to his Lone Ranger, a Lucky to his Hopalong Cassidy?)

We knew the general lines of the back story -- that Bruce had witnessed the murder of his parents, and had vowed a revenge on criminals -- albeit a revenge taken within the law and tempered with justice.  That was all we needed to know.  We didn't worry about Bruce Wayne's psychological profile, his presentation of symptoms codified in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, his complicated relationship with his butler Alfred, his obsession with bats.  Batman was not acting out some obsessive-compulsive disorder resulting from childhood trauma.  As American kids, we had a simple trust in free will, untainted by Calvinist intellectualism.  Good people chose to be good; bad guys chose to be bad.  Batman was good.  Commissioner Gordon, although at times obtuse, was good.  The Joker, the Penguin -- they were evil -- although fascinating, like Milton's Satan -- and fully deserved whatever blows to the jaw (and their egos) came their way in the course of each episode.

The stories of Batman and Robin were no folk tales arising out of a nation's childhood. They were simple commercial kid's stories arising out of the need to make a buck (or a dime) during America's 1930's. Batman should have been left to those murky drawings of DC Comics, not transformed into a cinematic blockbuster superhero, encased in a rubber batsuit worthy of some S&M cult.  If the age-old struggle between the noble Caped Crusader and DC Comics's peculiar agents of Evil seems too old-fashioned and naïve for today's audiences, then let's leave Batman (and the now-neglected Robin) to those piles of old comic books still stored in the attic.  The original Batman premise was too simple and straightforward a base on which to build a trilogy of multi-million dollar epics (the estimated cost of the current movie being $250 million).

Next it will be "Goldilocks: Porridge Too Hot! -- A Modern Tale of Blonde Aryan Lust and Familial Ursine Rivalry, Deep in the Dense Forests of Northern Europe." Bah! I'm going up to the attic to dig out my old comics.