Batman is Silly; Dark Knight is Pretentious

Batman & Robin is on TNT...

I think this approach to Batman works better than the Batman Begins / Dark Knight approach...if only because Batman & Robin acknowledges how absurd the idea is...whereas Batman Begins tries to make it...realistic.

That's the problem I had with Batman Begin. It was so fucking silly and pretentious and inharmonious with itself due to that attempted realism. In Batman Begins they're trying to realistically portray some incredibly rich guy dressing like a bat who snoops around late at night fighting crime. They’re providing depth, backstory, motive and an appeal to realism.

But it can't be made realistic. It's not realistic. It's fundamentally absurd.

Gritty semi-realistic Batman works as a comic, as a cartoon. It works in forms of media which fundamentally suspend realism and create a new world in which the story can be told. I can understand cartoon Bruce Wayne prowling the streets of cartoon Gotham. That makes sense; that’s coherent. But if you have a real person, an actual human being, put on the batman costume, with the little ears and cape? That is silly. That is absurd. Trying to make that not silly…trying to make that realistic…is where it all falls apart.

George Clooney as Batman makes sense. Adam West as Batman makes sense. That casting, that approach to the series, acknowledges how silly the concept fundamentally is when made real, when portrayed by human beings, and finds a harmony with that silliness by embracing it.

But Christian Bale moodily brooding over his destiny, his lost parents, his grasping at an idealized form of justice all while dressing up as a widdle bat? That is fundamentally not harmonious, not realistic. It is inconsistent with itself.

I’ll watch Dark Knight and enjoy Heath Ledger as The Joker. But throughout the movie I’ll continually ask myself, “Why the FUCK is he dressed like a clown?” In the same way that when Christian Bale puts on his widdle bat ears I’ll continually ask, “Why the hell doesn’t he just shut up, make a large donation to the Gotham police department, and fuck Maggie Gyllenhaal?!”

Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, attempt to make realistic something which is fundamentally absurd. If they were just superhero movies? If they embraced the Superman, Fantastic Four, X-Men approach and abandoned realism to compliment the fundamentally unrealistic components of the stories? Then they would be awesome. But as it stands they are simply frustrating, inharmonious, silly, and pretentious.