Batman Never Goes Bad

Posted on February 28, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

Various people had informed me that the Batmobile drove off a cliff in the third season of the Adam West TV series. Budgets plummeted, single episodes rather than two-parters became the norm, direction was lost, and sadness reigned even among the giggling villains. Matt Yockey argues that the growing political turmoil of the 60s made it harder for the show to sustain its delicate balance between conservatism and satirizing conservatism, leading to incoherence, dwindling market share, and falling quality.

At least as far as the last goes, it ain’t necessarily Bat-so, though. The low points of the series aren’t in the third season, I don’t think — nothing is clearly worse than the first episode of the 2nd season, or than the limping crossover with the Green Hornet. There are certainly weak moments — the three-part trip to Londinium, largely composed of half-hearted jokes about how the British are so British, is pretty crappy, and the special sexism episode where Nora Clavicle takes over the police department is just about as offesnive as Chief Screaming Chicken. But, on the other hand, the shorter episode length and the sense of improvisatory confusion lends some episodes a manic genius rare in the rest of the series. The Joker surfing episode is particularly brilliant, abandoning all pretense of coherence as the Joker uses a machine to sap the abilities of a pro-surfer and challenges Batman to a surf-off because supervillains want to rule the beach? The whole episode seems like an excuse to get Chief O’Hara to declare, “Cowabunga, B’gora!”

So, if the quality doesn’t fall off, particularly, why do people insist it does? Hard to say…though I think there’s an impulse to try to find some aesthetic reason, or (with Yockey) some historical reason, or really any reason at all for the show’s meteoric ascent and equally meteoric fall. Everyone loved it, so the show must have been doing something right — then everybody stopped loving it, so the show must have been doing something wrong.

I do think popularity often has something to do with quality or aesthetic choices — but what or why is often hard to figure. Maybe Batman grabbed the zeigeist just right as Yockey suggests, and then the times passed it by. But then again, maybe people just got tired of it. Capitalism is prone to bubbles of various sorts; for a second there everyone wanted Batman, the way everyone wanted mortgage securities or tulips. Then people stopped wanting them. The tulips were never worth anything to begin with; Batman never changed in quality. But the market revalued them because that’s what the market does. It’s sort of like the Penguin infecting all the cash in Gotham city with a beetle-carried sleeping sickness. It doesn’t have to make much sense.

Holy Unstable Hierarchy, Batgirl!

Posted on February 8, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

In his study of the Batman TV show from last year, Matt Yockey argues that season three’s introduction of Batgirl (Yvonne Craig) carefully maintains patriarchal norms. Batgirl is always subordinate to Batman, Yockey says, and/or to her dad, Commisioner Gordon — or even to Alfred. “The implicit threat of the female crime fighter is contained by Alfred’s knowledge of her dual identities.” Batgirl gets to be somewhat heroic, but ultimately some guy in Gotham is always the boss.

This analysis fails to take into account one small fact. Namely, Season Three (or at least the first few episodes I’ve seen) is not an ordered hierarchy. Instead, it is a huge, staggering, lurching mess. The second episode in particular, with Frank Gorshin returning as the Riddler after a season long absence, teeters on the verge of utter incoherence, before plunging gleefully over the edge.

Seasons 1 and 2 followed a regular two-episode formula arc, from the introduction of the villain to the meeting with the commissioner through the cliffhanger to the escape and on to the defeat of the bad guy. But season three exchanges the two-parters for single episodes, and throws in the addition of Batgirl as an extra bonus crimefighter. The result is a plot that see-saws widely every which way. The Riddler pretends to be the prizefighter Mushi Nebuchudnezzer, drugs various prizefighters, wheels Joan Collins out as a super-villainness who sings a high-pitched note to mind-control other prizefighters, calls Batman a coward to lure him into a fight, uses magnets, tries to mind control Batgirl, fails, and connives with a sports reporter as the narrative veers back and forth between Batgirl running around and Batman and Robin running around, with a brief interlude for Dick Grayson’s aunt Harriet Cooper to explain that she’s been traveling abroad. The winking, knowing humor of the first two seasons dissolves into manic idiocy, summed up by Frank Gorshin bouncing and bobbing around the prize-fighting ring, looking punch-drunk one moment, walking into Batman’s fist the next, gleefully punching the magnetized Caped Crusader from behind in the third.

I guess it’s possible that the show’s creators were nervous about the threat of a female crime fighter and were trying to carefully maintain patriarchal order. But that’s not what happens. Instead, the introduction of Batgirl coincides with a show going utterly off the rails. Batman, who in earlier seasons has every answer at his bat-gloves’ finger-tips, now seems to be almost drowning in the whirlwind of plot. He doesn’t know who Batgirl is, and barely seems to know what he’s doing as he thrashes around in the ring with the Riddler until Batgirl demagnetizes him. In the next episode, (featuring Joan Collins again in a skirt so short it’s amazing it got past the censors) Batman, who has been resistant to the blandishments of all other villainnesses, has his Batbrain scrambled, and has to be rescued by Batgirl and Robin.

I wouldn’t say this is some sort of programmatic feminist message. But the first two seasons of Batman always carefully balanced celebrating the superhero as all powerful fuddy-duddy force of order and mocking him for being an all powerful fuddy-duddy force for order. In season three, the female crimefighter arrives, and the fuddy-duddy force for order experiences some sort of apocalyptic bat seizure. System disintegrates; super-villains profligately flock together, Bruce Wayne’s will, heretofore inviolable, is mushed by the exigencies of plot and the power of Joan Collins.

Most of the mix up is no doubt a simple the failure of capital, as cratering popularity and slashed budgets undermined the Wayne fortune and the shows’ shooting budget. But part of it is, too, the addition of that Domino Daredoll. Spending narrative time with the Batgirl-cycle may not topple the patriarchy, but it at least leaves it in massive disarray.

Bruce Goes Camping

Posted on December 14, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

The Batman TV Show is known for its campiness, but it reaches an apotheosis of arch gay subtext in the episode with Liberace as the villainous pianist Chandell and his evil(ler) twin brother, the cigar-chomping, Harry — who essentially gives Liberace the opportunity to don butch drag.

I’ve mentioned before in this series that the Batman TV show tends to play shell games with objects of desire; the camera lingers on scantily clad lovelies, who then express visible/audible lust for the delectably paunchy Batman. That scrambling of hetero and homo (whatever the identity of the watcher) reaches its apotheosis in this episode, which features not the usual single villainness, but three, who improbably dress up in Scottish highlander garb (with mini-kilts) and/or Orientalist Balinese wisps of nothing. They undulate sensuously about the screen, and especially around Liberace, who undulates sensuously himself about a besotted Aunt Harriet. Chandell’s manly charms conceal and reveal his manly charms, just as Harry imitating Chandell reveals the truth of Liberace elaborately imitating himself — and someone else.

The Chandell episode is wonderful in part because it is the most explicit revelation/elaboration of the meaning of the show’s camp, and the one which connects the show’s irony and flamboyance most directly to drag and homosexual performance. Liberace’s presence is not just a camp display in itself; it infects everyone and everything around it; with Chandell nearby, Bruce and Dick rushing into a closet can’t help but have a double meaning. Then there’s the scene where Dick is sitting and sighing with a high school sweetie — and suddenly he gets a call from Batman, and instantly dumps ice cream in his girl’s lap so he can talk to his true love. A crime fighter has to make sacrifices, he sighs — but his eagerness to drop that desert suggests that maybe he’s protesting too much.

The message of the camping here isn’t just “Batman and Robin are gay!” Rather, it’s that heroism is a pantomime of masculinity, linked to and comparable to Liberace’s multiple pantomimes, and dependent on a deferred sensuality, in which the fetishization of women is rerouted into a fetishization of masculinity. Thus, the show suggests, it is Liberace, with his double identity, his capes, his colorful costumes, and his virtuoso mastery, who is the greatest superhero of them all.

Special Guest Villain: Racism

Posted on December 13, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

Vincent Price as Egghead is as good as any villain in the Adam West Bat-canon. Physically large, he looms ominously and awkwardly, while rolling every “eggs…actly” and “eggs..quisite” off his lips and past his moustache with an gigantically delicate delight. The preposterous plot lurches back and forth precariously, culminating in a delightful, messy egg battle in a barn. Bat-goodness all around.

Except, alas, for the racism.

Egghead’s plot involves gaining control over Gotham by subverting the city’s contract with the original Indian tribe, the Mohicans. Chief Screaming Chicken is the last of the Mohicans, and he is played by white actor Edward Everett Horton with mugging, unwittingly vicious contempt. Every Native American stereotype is blithely trotted out — Screaming Chicken performs silly rituals; he is thunderingly dumb (when given the chance to reorganize his contract and get more than nine raccoon pelts, he bargains gleefully for tens of dollars); he speaks in pidgin Tonto English; he is an anachronism, an amusing relic of a lost, irrelevant past, to which his quaint idiocy forever confines him.

A big part of the pleasure of the Adam West Batman is the way it presents the superhero as all powerful, ridiculous…and ultimately benign. Batman always wins, but he always wins while obeying traffic cops, driving below the speed limit, endorsing prison reform, and drinking wholesome milk. Batman’s power is super-niceness — and the show mocks the unrealism of that while enjoying the fantasy that the heroic daddy protecting us all is somehow also utterly harmless.

Chief Screaming Chicken, though undermines all that. Suddenly, Batman doesn’t seem so nice. It’s not nice for a millionaire like Bruce Wayne to enforce manifestly unfair contract terms in order to screw over someone who is obviously struggling (Chicken runs a roadside concession.) For that matter, it’s not nice to mock the descendents of the people whose forefathers you butchered and robbed, or to pretend that you bamboozled them through superior intellect rather than superior firepower, wielded with cold, ugly ruthlessness. Batman in this episode is not an avatar of niceness and decency. He’s a Bat-dick.

At one point in the show, Batman and Robin corner Egghead, who manages to escape by using a laughing gas egg. Batman and Robin start chortling and giggling uncontrollably.

Adam West’s performance quickly veers from over the top to maniacally unhinged; there’s something about the combination of his masked eyes and nose combined with his gaping, gasping mouth which is more disturbing than Jack Nicholson or Heath Ledger ever managed to make the Joker. The good, wholesome daddy is gone; in his place is an unaccountable, unpredictable leer — not a grim avenger of the night, but a feverish white grin, which might do anything, and then laugh about it.

TV Superheroines of My Lovelorn Youth

Posted on December 9, 2014 by Chris Gavaler

It took almost a half century, but Fox and Warner Bros. finally put aside their film rivalry to co-release Batman: The Complete Television Series last month. It makes me want to drag my parents back together and sit them down on my living room couch to watch.

I had no idea why they were laughing the first time we watched the show together. It seemed like a pretty serious situation to me: Batman facing down that dastardly cowboy villain “Shame.” They were sitting with me on the couch in the den, enjoying the apparently hilarious subtleties of Adam West’s superheroic performance. If I can trust the episode guide I skimmed online, this is February 1968. Which puts me a little under the age of two. So maybe we were watching a rerun?

Whatever my extremely prepubescent age, I’m sure I had zero idea what Eartha Kit was doing in that slinky Catwoman costume. Nowadays I squirm just hearing the late Ms. Kit’s “Santa Baby” rasping from my favorite Christmas mix. I assume Julie Newmar’s Catwoman was equally incomprehensible. No smoldering voice, but the same cartoon-tight faux leather.

I don’t know when a kid’s sexuality kicks in (“When did you first suspect your might be straight?”), but I must have had a thing for good girls early on. Because Batgirl I noticed. Yvonne Craig in costume still produces an impressive Google search.

I sat through an entire episode of That Girl waiting for Marlo Thomas to open that secret compartment in her apartment wall and motorcycle out of the alley with her cape fluttering (I swore my mother had said the show was Bat Girl). But when Ms. Craig appeared on Star Trek as a green-skinned seductress who lap dances for Spock and lures Kirk onto a dimly lit bed, nothing in me recognized her. Apparently my pre-pre-adolescent id didn’t go for scantily clad She-Hulk types.

“Spidey,” PBS’ mute Spider-Man mutation, premiered on The Electric Company when I was seven. I was too busy blinking at my first full TV crush to take notice of him. I’m relieved to report no nostalgic reactions to The Electric Company cast portraits I just scrolled through. I can’t even figure out which actress arrested my attention. Rita Moreno is my best guess. According to her online bio though, she would have been around forty at the time. I’m even more surprised looking back at the shows advertising slogan:

“We’re going to turn you on!”

This may also be the year I started first grade, the year of my first crush on a non-TV entity. Her name was Marisa Moesta. Not quite as snappy as Lois Lane, but I understood the allure of comic book alliteration from an early age. I can’t picture Ms. Moesta, just the pink poodle key ring she gave me after I’d given her my own trinket of affection—what I can’t remember. But I carried her poodle in my utility belt for years. Though not, thankfully, to the Batcave of my current home.

Wonder Woman premiered next, with Lynda Carter “In your satin tights / Fighting for your rights.” I had less interest in her underoos than my own. Ditto for Isis. Even I knew they’d only made her up to give the Shazam! Hour‘s Captain Marvel a girlfriend.

My wife remembers Electra Woman and Dyna Girl, a female spin on the old Batman and Robin gag. I must have been too lazy to stand up and channel surf. Which is just as well since Dyna looks like she might have been my type. Those brunette ponytails. Electra’s Farah Fawcett curls still horrify.

I’m sure I was continuing to miss subtleties, but my parents weren’t beside me on the couch anymore. When I set my smiley face alarm for cartoons one Saturday morning (Batman and Robin had recently guest starred on Scooby-Do), my mother was sleeping on the fold-out mattress in the den. I don’t know when they told my sister and me they were divorcing, but it was on that couch, the TV off for a change.

When Batgirl and Robin showed up on a 30-second public-service announcement, it was some other guy in the Batman costume. Adam West was gone, desperate to escape his Caped Crusader’s shadow, a mission he would never complete. If Batman hadn’t been cancelled back in 1968, ABC would have broken up the Dynamic Duo anyway. Robin was to be replaced by Yvonne Craig’s more popular Batgirl. But bad ratings killed them all.

Congress had passed the Federal Equal Pay Act a decade earlier, but employers were still ignoring it. I don’t know if that included the University of Pittsburgh. After moving out, my mother got a job as an assistant in one of their research labs. My sister and I helped her feed rats on weekends. It couldn’t have been much above minimum wage. I doubt Batman: The Complete Television Series includes the PSA, but I remember every second:

Batman and Robin are tied to a warehouse pillar.

NARRATOR: A ticking bomb means trouble for Batman and Robin.

Batgirl swings through a window.

ROBIN: Holy breaking and entering, it’s Batgirl!

BATMAN: Quick, Batgirl, untie us before it’s too late.

BATGIRL: It’s already too late. I’ve worked for you for a long time, and I’m paid less than Robin.

Robin sneers.

BATGIRL: Same job, same employer means same pay for men and women.

BATMAN: No time for jokes, Batgirl.

BATGIRL: It’s no joke. It’s the Federal Equal Pay law.

ROBIN: Holy act of Congress!

Batgirl moves the minute hand forward on the ticking bomb.

BATGIRL (voice over): If you’re not getting equal pay, then contact the Wage and Hour Division, U.S. Department of Labor.

At least Yvonne Craig and Robin actor Burt Ward were paid the same for the commercial: $0. The PSA started airing in 1973, when Craig was thirty-six. My mother was thirty-four. Craig’s final appearance as Batgirl also marked the end of her acting career. When she couldn’t get parts, she moved on to producing and then real estate.

Lynda Carter held on to her magic lasso for four seasons, but it didn’t matter. The joke was over. The Incredible Hulk was the new, angsty breed of superhero. No camp, no gratuitous display of women in swimsuits and bodystockings, just the brooding Bill Bixby wandering away alone once a week. By the time The Greatest American Hero premiered, I’d already turned off the TV.

A Whiff of Bat-Wake Should Arouse Her

Posted on December 7, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

The 60s Batman TV show is full of gas. Joker gas, Penguin gas; Bat gas — heroes and villains alike are constantly being knocked unconscious with colorful whiffs of floating fragrance. Guns show up occasionally, but they’re largely useless — knocked from hands instantly or (in the memorable Ma Parker episode with Shelly Winters as the bad guy) the villains aim is so bad that firearms are irrelevant. The real danger is from gas — whether its sneezing powder, a black cloud to hide an escape, or that trusty, never failing knockout draft.

So why gas? I think it may serve a similar function to Wonder Woman’s lasso in the original Marston/Peter comics. Marston used bondage as a way to have conflict without violence. Similarly, the gas allows people to be rendered quietly inert without resorting to bullets or any kind of conflict that will leave a mark. There are fights between Batman and the villains, it’s true — complete with goofy bang! kerpow! special effects. But there’s a difference between seeing the superheroes battle the villains in a goofy choreographed slapstick-fest, and watching the Penguin pistol-whip some inoffensive receptionist. Gas is colorful, flamboyant, and (as depicted here, anyway) gentle. It lets the villains be villainous while still being funny.

Wonder Woman, of course, used bondage not just because it was non-violent, but because it was sexy — violence was deliberately replaced by sexuality. Batman’s gas isn’t as directly erotic — but there’s still a whiff of something there, maybe. Batman using the bat-gas to knock out the Bookworm’s moll, for example, and render her helpless, seems to have some overtones — which are both denied and highlighted when Batman insists that Gordon accompany him and the moll ot the Batcave in order to avoid the appearance of impropriety. The gas also seems like it’s a variation on, or related to, the various mind-control potions and nostrums and techniques that float through the series — the Penguin brainwashes Alfred, Tut (thinks he) brainwashes the Batman, Catwoman flips Robin’s moral code. This kind of domination again suggests Marston’s series, with its games of top/bottom and eroticized command. For that matter, Batman and Robin are tied up an awful lot in the show — not as much as Wonder Woman, certainly, but enough to raise those painted-on Bat eyebrows.

The Batman writers weren’t ideologically committed to substituting sex for violence in the way that Marston was. But the combination of a desire to avoid too much bloodshed and the need for conflict pushes them towards some of the same solutions Marston developed — with some of the same results. The TV show looked for ways to pantomime violence — and when violence is turned into a patomime, you end up hinting at BDSM, whether intentionally or otherwise.

The Bookworm’s girl (Francine York) in bondage.

The Worst Is Yet to Come

Posted on December 6, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

We finished the first season of Batman, and started the second…and holy jumping the shark, Batman. The two initial episodes with the Archer were by far the worst in the series.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what went wrong. There were a number of funny jokes — the Pow! and Bam! were replaced with “Poweth!” and “Bameth!” to reflect the Archer’s pseudo-Shakespearian diction, for example, and there’s a great line where Alfred is imitating Batman and Robin tells him to stick out his chest and be virile. But the episode as a whole just had no snap or joy; the actors seemed lost, wandering from campy bit of dialogue to campy bit of dialogue like tired, underpaid drones.

If I had to identify one thing that really undoes these episodes, I’d point to the villain. Art Carney, as the Archer, is pretty flat — again, the thees and thous are the main joke, but he doesn’t have anything like the manic goofball energy of Frank Gorshin as Riddler or Victor Buono as King Tut, nor Burgess Meredith’s bravado mugging.

More than that, though, the Archer is too effective. He’s got a pack of trick arrows (a la Green Arrow) and they all work really well; the first thing he does is to legit take out Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson from afar and steal their stuff. He goes on to mount a very reasonable plot involving robbing the Wayne foundation with the help of an inside man. Along the way, he turns the citizens of Gotham against Batman and Robin. He just comes across as a real, legitimate threat, with achievable, fairly well-conceived goals.

This throws everything out of whack. Most Bat villains are way more interested in goofiness for its own sake than in criminality; in subsequent episodes, Catwoman steals a catalog for reasons, or King Tut reanimates beatles trapped in amber to create a secret mind control formula and then has Chief O’Hara dance on a flagpole. The plot zigs and zags around the villain’s obsessions and neuroses, rather than around their actual efforts to steal something. That allows Batman and Robin to race from here to there more or less inefficiently and still save the day, because there wasn’t a whole lot of day to be saved anyway.

The show at its best is really a kind of masquerade; it’s a dress-up game, where everyone pretends that they’re good and/or evil; it’s a collaborative pantomime of bat nonsense. In the Archer, episode, though, the Archer doesn’t quite seem to be in on the joke; he actually wants the money. He’s bad according to genre conventions, rather than using the genre conventions to signal “bad” while wandering off to play with beetles or leave riddles scrawled on bat undies or what have you.

There were other problems too — the soundtrack, usually a delight, was weird and off, as just one example; the sets and backgrounds looked fake and clunky in a half-hearted way, rather than winningly, as with Tut’s preposterously ersatz crocodiles. But the show’s real incompetence is in making the Archer competent. Real villains are boring; they take the joy out of life.

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a pundit in every panopticon

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