The Cruellest Batman of Them All

My family is happily watching our way through the newly released Batman TV 60s TV show DVDs; I think we’re up to 14 out of 120 episodes now.

For the most part the Batman TV show is remembered as goofy fun — and goofy fun it is. But the first two episodes (with Frank Gorshin’s Riddler as the villain) are unexpectedly…not dark exactly, and not grim, but cruel in a way that’s all the more shocking for being casually off-hand.

A couple of times in the show, Bruce Wayne, with little prompting, segues into a discussion of his murdered parents. It’s presented as pro-forma and, with Adam West’s tongue-in-cheek delivery, as fairly ridiculous. The show essentially sneers at murder and childhood trauma; they’re presented as ridiculous.

Even more egregious is the fate of the Riddler’s girlfriend, Molly (Jill St. John). Molly dresses up as Robin (insert disquisition on camp here) and tricks Batman into letting her into the Batcave. She then runs up to the atomic pile that powers the cave. Batman begs her to come down, but she mutters vaguely about being scared, and, overacting all the while, spins, staggers, and falls into the reactor even though Batman is standing like a foot away from her holding out his hand. Batman mutters something regretful about how he wishes he could have saved her (“Poor deluded child!”), and the show barrels on cheerfully. Molly’s death, like the Wayne’s, is viewed as a joke. Batman’s traumatic backstory and the tragic death of the villainness are both portrayed as glib narrative heart tuggers — cynical melodramatic boilerplate.
 

BatTV-SC-S1E02-Molly-68

 
The rest of the shows I’ve seen so far don’t engage in this kind of sneering; it seems like an early tonal blip. It’s interesting just how jarring that blip is, though. Grim and gritty in genre is usually seen as brutal, or tough — blood on the Batglove is a sign of unflinching viciousness, as is shooting Batgirl in the stomach. But I think in a lot of ways the Adam West Batman is actually meaner than Frank Miller or Alan Moore. Those guys took violence seriously, they treated bloodshed with reverence, at least in the sense that bloodshed was important to them and meaningful in their writing. But for the 60s Batman, violent, hideous death is just a punch line. Or maybe after all the 60s Batman just shows that violence in Batman is never anything but a punch line; in its cynicism, it reveals the callow cynicism of all that grim and gritty violence that. How many times can you shoot Bruce Wayne’s parents before you start to feel like Bat-trauma is just another disposable Bat-product?

9 thoughts on “The Cruellest Batman of Them All

  1. The moment I saw the title I knew exactly what this was going to be about. Although I thought the line was “What a way to Go-go.”

  2. I saw this episode on its first broadcast; even age 11 I was able to snigger at the deluded-diluted pun. Hope you’ll return with periodic posts on this series, Noah.

  3. I was at Comic-Con this year at the ’66 show DVD release press junket, and West and Ward talked about that scene and the original line as it was scripted was something along those lines of “poor deluded child”. West changed it to “What a way to go-go” to make it funnier. To be fair I’ve not seen it in forever, so the error may be mine.

  4. “Molly’s death, like the Wayne’s, is viewed as a joke”

    It’s viewed as a joke, but isn’t the idea of the Wayne’s (or presumably Molly) being “real” characters also treated as a joke?

    Moore and Miller tool the violence seriously because they are committed to viewing the characters as “real”, Adam West’s show doesn’t see them as really alive, so doesn’t see them as really dying. So I would argue the show isn’t meaner. (Though I don’t know that I’ve seen the episodes you are discussing)

  5. I would say, yes, it views them as tropes…but I don’t think there’s exactly a firewall between viewing them as tropes and viewing them as people, I guess.

  6. Oh, don’t worry, it gets serious. Just wait till Catwoman falls (apparently) to her death and Batman pulls out a bat-kerchief to mourn her.

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