Quick, Robin! To the Bat Serial!

The Adam West Batman TV series is always fairly self-referential, but it goes above and beyond in its meta-metaness in the episodes Death in Slow Motion/The Riddler’s False Notion. The episodes are built around the Riddler’s convoluted, incoherent, but nonetheless fiendish plot to film Batman and Robin in a silent movie.
 

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The main motive here is obviously to give the insanely (in various senses) talented Frank Gorshin a chance to do a dead on Charlie Chaplin imitation. But beyond that, the episodes are one long homage to the show’s own constant homages. The height of this is the obligatory Bat cliffhanger, a trope cribbed from the silent melodramas, which here is deliberately parodied with a trope from the silent melodramas, as Robin is strapped to a conveyor belt and threatened with a circular saw as the Riddler (with fake mustache) laughs maniacally. Batman rescues the Boy Wonder — only to discover that it’s not Robin on that belt, but a dummy. The fake imitation of a fake imitation of a fake trope has been faked. Holy curses, holy foiled, holy again.

In part it seems like Batman comic book fans have been wary of the show precisely because it situates superhero comics not in the relatively sober tradition of gritty pulp noir, but in the (often comic) tradition of serial melodrama. Yet, as this episode is well aware, that melodramatic tradition is in some ways actually more high-brow, or more accepted as high-brow, than those supposedly more validating pulp sources. The Riddler’s manic re-enactment of the mechanisms of slapstick — from pies in the face to free-for-all brawls — is a deliberate effort to show the links between venerated old comedy and new Bat-comedy. Our heroes having a giant book dropped on their heads — that’s “art”, and what’s more art than art in quotes? Batman and Robin perform in the last silent film ever made; an ersatz masterpiece of ersatzness, precious for its imitation genius, its great hijacked tradition of lack of verisimilitude.

Handsome, Clean-Cut, and Groovy

“Handsome, clean-cut, and groovy” is how the nefarious villainness Nefertiti (Ziva Rodann) describes Batman when she sees him (significantly) on the television. This sparks the ire of the evil King Tut — but if he’d only watched previous bat-episodes, you’d think he’d be resigned. The henchwomen are always falling for Batman’s brand of paunchy, be-tighted goodness and/or grooviness; there’s just something about a cape that makes the bat-fans swoon.

Batman isn’t only an object of desire on the 60s television show; he’s actually the only object of desire. The show includes gratuitously scantily clad lovelies, especially in the first King Tut episode, with its gleeful harem tropes and Nefertiti herself chewing anachronistically but enthusiastically on a phallic hot dog.
 
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But the lovelies are never identified within the dialogue as objects of erotic interest; Batman and Robin are impervious to their charms, and (in Nefertiti’s case) appear to forget about her altogether after she’s tragically driven insane by pebble torture and engages in a beguiling bat dance. The only clue that anyone notices she’s hot is the voice over of the second episode, which refers to her as a “dish”. This is the case with virtually all the other leading ladies as well; Julie Newmar as Catwoman wears a skin-tight, jaw-dropping outfit, but no one’s jaw drops; the Moth, one of Riddler’s associates, wears a skin-tight, eye-raising outfit, but no one’s eyes are raised. The only sex object which is acknowledged as a sex object is the Batman himself. In this show, it’s women, not men, who visibly lust.

Batman is often described as “camp.” Camp can mean various things, but it’s often connected to queerness, gay themes, or the closet. In this case, the show is certainly reversing, or inverting, the expected economy of desire. You could say that the female concupiscence directed at Batman is a humorous stand-in for the male gaze that viewers are encouraged to cast at Nefertiti and her sisters. But you could just as easily say that the male gaze is the concealed deception which hides the obvious truth — which is that the show presents Adam West, for both male and female viewers, as the central erotic point of interest, from Bat bulge to Orientalized sensuous Bat dance. Superheroes are sexy, Adam West tells you; groove on it, Bat fans, surreptitiously or otherwise.
 

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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.
 

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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?

To the Bat Tunes, Robin!

This first appeared on Madeloud.
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The old sixties Batman TV show with Adam West and Burt Ward is best known for the Batmobile, Bat Shark Repellent, and Bat Overacting. However, the show also featured a number of high profile musical guest stars. Here then, are some of the greatest Bat-cats ever to swing through stately Wayne Manor and environs.

Liberace
“The Devil’s Fingers/The Dead Ringers”
Episodes 49 and 50
October 19 & 20, 1966

Liberace was too perfect a choice to be contained in a single Batman villain guest spot, so he did two at once, portraying both piano maestro Chandell and Chandell’s evil twin brother Harry. The plot starts off strong as Chandell declares, “Listen for a moment; I’ll toy idly with the keys, and set the mood.” He then launches into a highland air, instantly summoning a trio of criminal Scottish lassies toting inhumanly piercing bagpipes. From there the plot only get sillier, featuring attempted murder by piano-roll puncher, the lassies transformed into Burmese dancing girls, and Bruce Wayne deducing the whole evil scheme when he realizes that Chandell made a mistake in a C-minor chord (“Holy impossibility, Batman!” as Dick Grayson says.) Oh, and we get to watch that ladies’ man Chandell seduce Aunt Harriet. And he utters the immortal line “I’ll cast off my criminal skin like a molting butterfly!”

While it’s fun to watch Liberace play himself as Chandell; watching him adopt a tough-guy, cigar-chomping persona as Harry is brain-meltingly preposterous, and somehow even gayer than gay — it’s like he’s wearing butch drag. Not to be outdone in flamboyance, Bruce Wayne spends a certain amount of the episode literally camping, and then he and Dick fake their deaths by incinerating themselves in a flaming closet.

Chad and Jeremy
“The Cat’s Meow/The Bat’s Kow Tow”
Episodes 63 and 64
December 14 & 15, 1966

Gentle moderately popular sixties British folk duo Chad & Jeremy appear here as insanely popular, dangerously wild sixties British folk duo Chad & Jeremy. However, in a daring plot twist, the dangerously wild sixties British folk duo Chad & Jeremy reveal to Bruce Wayne’s Aunt Harriet that they are in fact gentle and civilized, sipping tea and declaring, “Really we hope to go back to school as soon as we can to complete our education… Just think of it: every record our fans buy brings me closer to becoming a brain surgeon!”

Alas, their fans are not so cultured, and they screech, holler, and throw up their hands when their idol’s voices are purloined by Catwoman (an incandescently yummy Julie Newmar.) Catwoman’s dastardly plan is to hold the voices for ransom, demanding twenty-two million dollars from Britain since “Chad and Jeremy pay so much income tax to their native land,” and that if they stopped the entire economic structure of the world would collapse.

In other highlights, Chad & Jeremy provide jovially irreverent interviews like the Beatles and seek out hair salons. They also perform a few verses of the sunnily inoffensive “Distant Shore,” and almost all of the peppily inoffensive “Teenage Failure.” “Aren’t they great, Alfred?” the enraptured Dick Grayson asks. “Well, they do sway, don’t they?” replies the stoical Butler.

Also in this episode…Batman and Robin climb down the side of a building past the window of Hawaiian singing legend Don Ho.

Leslie Gore
“That Darn Catwoman/Scat Darn Catwoman”
Episodes 74 and 75
January 19 & 20, 1967

Leslie Gore was not only a teen pop sensation; she was also the niece of Howie Horwitz, the producer of Batman. On the strength of that connection, she got to wear a skintight pink outfit, pink cat ears, a pink bowtie and (improbably) big pink mittens as Catwoman’s evil protégé Pussycat. Pussycat comes on to Robin so strongly that the Boy Wonder’s voice jumps an octave, a scene all the more amusing since we now know that Gore was far more likely to have had eyes for Julie Newmar than for Burt Ward. Perhaps, though, Pussycat was under the influence of cataphrenia, a drug which reverses all a person’s moral and ethical standards, as Catwoman helpfully explains.

In any case, though Pussycat has turned to a life of crime and frequent flirtatious moments with Catwoman (and a couple with an ethically-inverted Robin), she still sometimes wishes she could pursue her dream to be a rock and roll singer. And, in fact she performs a wow-that’s-obviously-lip-synced version of the hit, “California Nights” for Catwoman’s henchmen in front of a giant green cathead with a glowing purple mouth.

Ethel Merman
“The Sport of Penguins/A Horse of Another Color”
Episodes 98 and 99
October 5 & 12, 1967

Teamed up with the Penguin (Burgess Meredith), the famously stentorian Ethel Merman elocutes her way through the role of Senora Lola Lasagne, a.k.a. common crook Lula Schultz. Merman doesn’t actually sing, though she does seem ready to burst into bombastic warble when she declaims “I am Senora Lola Lasagne!”

Eartha Kitt
“Catwoman’s Dressed to Kill”
Episode 108
December 14, 1967

“Funny Feline Felonies/The Joke’s on Catwoman”
Episodes 110 and 111
December 28 & January 4, 1967

Singer and actress Eartha Kitt stepped into Catwoman’s whiskers for the third Batseason, appearing in one stand-alone episode and a two-parter with co-villain the Joker. Where Julie Newmar played Catwoman as luxuriantly playful, Kitt was downright feral — when she widened her eyes and hissed, you really believed she wanted to pounce on and devour some flying rodents. She also threw herself into the vocal tics more enthusiastically than her cat predecessors, embracing lines like, “Rrrrr, I glow with the thought of that garment,” and rolling her rrrrs through words such as “Spaarrrrrk plug,” “perrrrsuaive,” “perrrrrturbring,” “perrrrrfidious,” and of course, “perrrrrhaps.” Despite such verbal shenanigans, Kitt never actually sings, though she does recite some doggerel verse (prompting the Joker to comment “Oh your voice has a nice lilt, Catwoman!”), as well as lapsing into a foreign tongue for a moment in homage to her big exotica hits (“That’s the first time I ever heard a cat purr in French!” enthuses the Joker.)

Incidentally, Orson Welles called Kitt, “the most exciting woman in the world.” You might think he was exaggerating…until you see her in that skintight black Catwoman suit.

Bat History

Dark Knight Rises is an odd movie. It’s a mish-mash of Dickens, adventure stories, geek nostalgia, Hollywood bombast, and a smattering of “ripped from the headlines” topicality. The movie manages to be a fairly enjoyable diversion, but as other reviewers have noted, it’s a mess from both a narrative and ideological perspective. But its messiness isn’t entirely the fault of the filmmakers. The latest film is part of a decades-long process where a children’s adventure story was modified to appeal to an older audience, specifically an audience that remained attached to the childish elements of the story. Live-action Batman films (and TV) are required to satisfy both a nostalgic attachment to childish adventure stories while insisting that such entertainment is not childish.

In ancient times (i.e., before I was born) live-action Batman was a simple concept. No one would accuse the original Batman series (1966-68) of being too complicated. It was children’s television at its most basic: bright colors, catchy music, unvarnished plots, and violence that never went beyond a punch to the jaw. The series had no pretensions of being either great art or politically relevant, which is not to say that it was bad. In fact, Batman was and is consistently entertaining. The over-the-top performances of the villains, the deadpan earnestness of Adam West, and the 60’s camp were successfully mixed with the more ridiculous premises from the comics. But while the series became a cult classic, it had its share of detractors. Its unabashed silliness was less appreciated by the aging community of comic fanboys who wanted their Batman stories to cater to their adult tastes.

Comic book Batman entered a “grim and gritty” phase during the 1980s, and this was reflected in Tim Burton’s Batman (1989). Significantly darker and more violent than the TV series, the movie was clearly targeted at an older fanbase. It was also the first attempt to turn Batman into a Hollywood blockbuster, along the lines of Jaws or Star Wars. Blockbuster status meant lavish production values, fancy special effects (which haven’t aged well), marketing deals with fast food chains, and an A-list cast, including Michael Keaton, Kim Basinger, and Jack Nicholson. But the childish elements of the character remained: the Batmobile, the Batcave, and all those “wonderful toys.” Another director might have produced an incoherent disaster, but Burton cobbled together a reasonably entertaining, if shallow, film that satisfied both the fanboys and mainstream audiences.

The secret to Burton’s success was due to his idiosyncratic vision of Gotham City, a heaping dose of film noir with a touch of BDSM and goth sub-culture. Batman and its sequel, Batman Returns, could be described as noir-lite, lacking most of the typical noir preoccupations but relying on dark, brooding imagery to enhance a plot that relied on mood more than substantive content. The goth and BDSM influences factors more heavily in Returns, particularly during the famous origin sequence of Catwoman. Among the many superhero film franchises, the Batman films by Burton stand out as having a distinctive look.

Burton’s idiosyncrasies allowed the various pieces of the Bat franchise to co-exist, albeit uneasily: the fanboys got their “dark” story, mainstream audiences got an action film that didn’t look like all the other action films they had already seen, and the more juvenile elements appeared slightly less ridiculous if they were bathed in shadow. But in aiming for an adult audience, Burton could never fully embrace the most childish parts of the Batman franchise. Most obviously, Robin is nowhere to be seen (to say nothing of Batgirl, Bat-Mite, or Bat Shark Repellent).

The Bat-franchise went through a number of changes with Batman Forever (1995). Officially a sequel to Batman Returns, Forever could more accurately be described as a soft reboot, given that the film had a new lead actor (Val Kilmer) and a new director, Joel Schumacher. And Schumacher’s movies had a different visual style and a greater affinity for the childish content in Batman comics. This Batman film would have a Robin (Chris O’Donnell). Gadgets and other wonderful toys would be on full display, and Schumacher even worked in a joke with the “Holy ___!” exclamations made famous by the original Robin, Burt Ward. And the dark Gotham of the Burton films was replaced by a much more vibrant and cartoony city.

But many of these features were overshadowed by the presence of Jim Carrey (as the Riddler), who was at the height of his fame when Batman Forever was released. The next film lacked Carrey and his massive ego, allowing Schumacher to shape the Batman franchise to his own preferences.

Batman and Robin (1997) is widely regarded as the worst of the Batman films, and perhaps the worst superhero movie ever made. While my inner contrarian would love to defend the film, in truth it was fairly awful. Bad acting, worse writing, and not a single moment of genuine excitement. But for many fans, the movie’s greatest sin was that it was campy. It had Batman and Robin fighting on ice skates. It had godawful puns delivered by Arnold Schwarzenegger (as Mr. Freeze). And there were nipples on the bat-suit.

Schumacher’s great mistake was in assuming that Batman was a campy character for kids (and maybe adults who enjoy children’s entertainment). It’s an honest mistake, because Batman really is a campy character for kids (and kids are still interested in Batman, as demonstrated by more than one successful animated series). But something big happened over the course of the 80’s and 90’s – fandom got older and became mainstream. And over the past two decade superheroes went from being a niche product sold to young children and antisocial geeks to being a significant chunk of Hollywood’s revenue. People who had never picked up a comic were getting excited about the latest Batman, X-Men, and Spider-man films. But the mainstreaming of superheroes meant the contradictory preoccupations of fandom – a reverence for source material with an insistence that such material be updated for an older audience – also became mainstream.

The change was driven by a number of factors. Comic nerds may be a minority, but they are disproportionately likely to have disposable income and are fiercely loyal to certain intellectual properties, two things which make them an attractive market to the Hollywood suits who own those IPs. Also, the older distinctions between “children’s entertainment” and “adult entertainment” were declining, the result of the creation of the PG-13 rating in 1986. Previously, the MPAA ratings systems drew a stark contrast between films appropriate for children (G and PG) and films restricted to adults (R) because of sex or violence. But the PG-13 rating effectively created new genre of action movie – with just enough violence and sexual content to please adult males but not so violent or sexual that parents wouldn’t allow their kids (or at least their teens) to see them. And the “grim n’ gritty” superheroes preferred by older fanboys fit perfectly into this new rating. Tim Burton seemed to understand the new approach, so he toned down the goofier aspects of Batman. Schumacher highlighted that goofiness, and the fans never forgave him.

Which leads me back to the recent trilogy of Batman films directed by Christopher Nolan: Batman Begins (2005), The Dark Knight (2008), and Dark Knight Rises (2012). Superficially, Nolan’s films are similar to Burton’s. The three movies  are dark, both visually and figuratively. They were surprisingly violent, even by the standards of PG-13 movies. And many of the more juvenile elements of the Batman comics were either excised or downplayed. For example, Robin is largely absent from the trilogy (except for a brief reference at the very end of Dark Knight Rises). But the Nolan films went even further in the pursuit of seriousness. Batman was grounded in a realistic world, so his vehicles and gadgets became less fanciful and were explained away as next-gen technology (memory cloth!), persuasive to audiences as long as they don’t stop to think about it. And the outlandish versions of Gotham created by Burton and Schumacher were replaced with spliced footage from real cities such as Chicago and Pittsburgh. Nolan was also determined that his movies touch upon important current events. In other words, he wanted his films to be topical. In The Dark Knight, Batman uses an illegal surveillance system to track down the Joker, referencing the growing “surveillance state” in the U.S. and the obvious risks to civil liberties. Dark Knight Rises includes an homage to “A Tale of Two Cities,” and it’s not hard to see a link to the Occupy movement and growing inequality in the U.S.

Nolan went further than Burton in promoting Batman as a character that adults could appreciate, but at the end of the day he couldn’t ignore the childish roots. The character of Batman is still a boy’s adventure story, and the elements which make the Batman stories juvenile are the same elements that actually make them fun. So Batman still drove a rocket car, used cool (if less ostentatious) gadgets, and fought supervillains. And in the third film, Batman was flying around in a vehicle that was obviously pure fantasy, brawling with Bane, flirting with Catwoman, and prepping a would-be Robin. Altogether, Dark Knight Rises was actually rather “comic booky.” For all their pretensions at maturity, realism, and topicality, the Nolan films are still about a guy who dresses like a bat and fights supervillains.

So Batman can’t escape his goofy comic book origins. The various stabs at maturity will generally be in conflict with the juvenile appeal of superhero stories, namely the fistfights, the toys, and the empowerment fantasies. It is also extremely difficult to address political issues with any degree of nuance or intelligence, because boy’s adventure stories are not known for either of those qualities. But Batman will not be going back to the days of Adam West and the batusi. Given the huge success of the Nolan films (and the bitter hatred directed at the last Schumacher film) it’s clear that mainstream audiences have embraced the preferences of fanboys. Batman is going to be dark, violent, and pseudo-mature for the foreseeable future.

The Best Superhero Movie Ever

This originally appeared over at Splice Today.
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So what’s the best superhero movie of all time? Perhaps you love Dark Knight because Heath Ledger is dead now and Morgan Freeman taught us about the dangers of surveillance technology. Or you may love Spider-Man because it drips with pathos and daddy issues. Or maybe you like Robert Downey, Jr.’s charm in Iron Man, or, if you’re old school, Christopher Reeve’s charm in Superman. Or maybe you’re just cranky enough that when someone asks you “What’s the best superhero movie ever?” you answer with a waggish sneer, “There are no best superhero movies ever!”

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