Batman Begins

[poliphilo]

1. It's another one of Hollywood's daddy films. Bruce Wayne's daddy is killed and he grows up to be a sulky, emo kid. Then a number of older men- good daddies and bad daddies- mentor him into a shape of which his daddy would be proud. No-one seems to notice that he lost his mommy too.

2. Note to the critics: Crime and Punishment is "dark"; Batman Begins is merely portentous.

3. All those car wrecks and nobody is killed. It's just like The A Team.

4. Batman is mythic. The more you try to fit him into the real world- real politics, real psychology- the more ridiculous he becomes.

Comments

[kishenehn.livejournal.com]

Well said, all around.

That movie just made my eyes roll.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

It just didn't work, did it!

[halfmoon-mollie.livejournal.com]

one - or two - people's opinions. I thought it was a good movie. I think Christian Bale beats the crap out of Val Kilmer, Michael Keaton, George Clooney AND Adam West as Batman. It all depends on HOW it's being played. It's all PRETEND, after all.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Bale was pretty good, I think. I just didn't believe in the character.

[oakmouse]

I haven't seen (and won't see) the movies, but a key element to Batman is that he's just not a real world guy. He's nuts, he has almost superhuman physical abilities, he's nuts, he has endless wealth, he's nuts, and did I mention he's nuts? Just not somebody you'll meet on the street, even on the streets of NYC.

Also, true about the fact that he lost his mother as well as his father, and in the original early comics rather much was made of the fact that he lost, not his daddy, but his parents. Both. That was important. But then again, when does Hollywood ever stick to the book in making a film?

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

The more you try to make sense of the character- to make the psychology plausible- the crazier it all seems.

I think Tim Burton got it about right. His Gotham is so mad that Batman, in comparison, seems almost sane.

[michaleen.livejournal.com]

Yes! Tim Burton got it right, I think. His second Batman film was too overwrought for my taste, but that first movie, with Keaton and Nicholson before the camera and Burton behind it, was pretty good, I thought.

[mamadar.livejournal.com]

Liked the first two Burton films with Michael Keaton, hate the Christian Bale movies. The animated Batman of the early nineties will always be my favorite version--it's a lot more subtle and intelligent than these new movies.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I'm not a huge fan of Burton's work (The only one of his movies I really admire is Ed Wood) but I think he got the tone about right. Batman is a crazy guy in a world gone mad.

[mamadar.livejournal.com]

Burton's Batman films are about people acting out their neuroses. Everybody is engaging in some kind of weird psychodrama. Everything looks art deco. It's all very stylized.

The animated Batman is not quite so stylized or quite so mad, but you do see over and over again that he chooses Batman over Bruce Wayne, revenge over a chance at a normal healthy life. And he winds up a lonely, grim old man living alone in a huge mansion with nobody but a guard dog for company.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I've not seen the animated Batman. It sounds really interesting.

[veronica-milvus.livejournal.com]

Luke Skywalker, Captain Kirk, Harry Potter, Batman, even Indiana Jones. Is there any heroic character who hasn't lost either a father or both parents and runs around trying to make up for it / live up to him for several movies at a time? Maybe it's the zeitgeist, too many absent fathers in our society, too many boys with no role model. No wonder "fathers for justice" are dressed as superheroes.

It's also a big motif in fairy tales. Working out who you are. but wouldn't it be great if we could be somebody different from our parents?

[arielstarshadow.livejournal.com]

True. And let's not forget Pip, Oliver Twist, Tom Sawyer, Anne (of Green Gables)...the list goes on - it's not just some recent pop culture thing.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Victorian heroes and heroines are often orphans- it's a way of freeing them up. But I don't think those stories show the same obsession with fathers and fatherhood.

[daisytells.livejournal.com]

It's bildungsroman(spelling?) - the heroic quest of the youth-on-his-way-to-manhood.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I'm sick of the daddy thing. Hollywood is obsessed with it. Spielberg is a major offender. Don't they have other stories to tell?

[sovay]

Don't they have other stories to tell?

"All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his."
—Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest (1985)

[sovay]

Then a number of older men- good daddies and bad daddies- mentor him into a shape of which his daddy would be proud. No-one seems to notice that he lost his mommy too.

I blame Freud for this one.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

He casts a long shadow- even though he's desperately out of fashion.

[sovay]

He casts a long shadow- even though he's desperately out of fashion.

He was out of fashion by Spellbound, and that was 1945. The one good piece in that movie is Salvador Dalí's dream sequence, and then Hitchcock explains every single component of it with thudding precision. After which I would have thought that screenwriters would stop using Freud to mean "and between step two and step three, a miracle occurs," but it's still going!

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

There's a Dali museum in London which has a part of the huge curtain covered in eyes that Dali painted for the nightclub sequence in Spellbound.

[daisytells.livejournal.com]

Of all the Batmans offered in my lifetime I liked the old TV series of the sixties with Adam West. It was, as we said then, "campy". I used to watch it with my then five year old daughter after we put the two year old to bed for the night. It was our special time. The show was obviously not meant to be taken seriously, which was its main appeal for me.
Mythic: that's an excellent word.
I do not like what Hollywood has done with Batman, especially "The Dark Knight". Terrible!

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I find it odd that people take their comic book heroes so much more seriously than they did forty years ago.

[solar-diablo.livejournal.com]

The darker and more desperate the times, the more we collectively seek refuge in the fantastical. I haven't done any research on it, but I suspect in that sense things were no different during the Great Depression or world wars.

[manfalling.livejournal.com]

Dawn doesn't seem to notice he doesn't have a father. For him it's all about his mother. Glad I don't fall completely into that stereotype, then.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's good.

Could cause you problems, though, when you come to sell the film rights....