DUH DUH DUH DUH--
--BATMAN!!
Perhaps you’ve heard, there’s a new movie featuring the “character” named in the subhead above.
Really, it’s true.
In the interest of full disclosure, despite the generalized rapture that has been a response to this movie, whatever curiosity I have about it can well wait until it ends up on television in a month or so. Three hours of movie without an intermission is no way to treat an audience, to my mind, but I seem to be in the minority in this regard.
And in regard to the audience, one of the odder things, to me at least, about the response to this event is the reference to it, by consumer, critics and cognoscenti alike, as “…a Batman movie.” This for good, bad or indifferent.
“A Batman movie.”
As I’ve noted, despite the efforts of a colleague or two to remind or at least correct the consumer, critics and cognoscenti that comics is a medium, and not a genre, these efforts have failed, to a certain extent because of the unbridled commercial success of movie franchises based on comics, which source material remains of no interest whatsoever to the customers, and functionally invisible as secret subject matter for these cash crops.
I have to assume that any civilian who stays with this stuff long enough to see those lists of comic book talent, names utterly unfamiliar to the millions digging these action fests, thanking them for their contribution after all that computer enhanced mischegas, are, if they think about it at all, mystified.
Who the fuck are these people, and why should I care? Didn’t Stanley what’s his name make all this shit up, right?
They’re just grateful to be acknowledged, sir or madam. Really.
Really.
Mainstream comics, and movies based on those comics, are a genre, and as I’ve indicated in a previous post, despite the defensive postures of enthusiasts, desperate for validation of their tastes, there has yet to be a genre transcending example in this trope dependent narrative, to make these movies worthy of the attention beyond the in and of itself videogame/theme park ride nature of the material.
Now, with “…a Batman movie…” we have come to a crossroads where one of those non-transcendent franchise movies has grown into a sub-genre of its own, with, to be sure, sub-tropes of its own, too.
Am I alone in regarding this as, if not completely fucked up, an abject surrender to the law of diminished expectations?
And that might be a rhetorical question, or it might not. Let me think about it and get back to you.