The Batman (2021) Will be Garbage.

the ultimate origins of batman
do not define what batman should and must be batman originated as a rip-off of the shadow the shadow was a success primarily in the form of short illustrated novels not comic books and radio broadcast drama the shadow was not created as children's entertainment the shadow was created as pulp fiction really a genre of fiction that doesn't exist in the year 2020. both batman and the joker as characters originated directly as rip-offs of specific stories of the shadow published prior to the first appearance of batman in dc comics however this does not define what batman is nor what he now should be in the first say two three years of the batman comic book what happened the creative team behind batman which yes included bill finger but bill finger didn't do anything they at first were just responding to the challenge of trying to rip off the success of superman and the success of the shadow simultaneously and they came up with batman who was really in no sense whatsoever a hero and batman went around with a gun sometimes a gatling gun and mowed down his opponents if you don't know the shadow massacres people the shadow will just show up in a warehouse and murder everyone there with a gun and the shadow in part descends from and represents a kind of pulp detective novel that even the name of the company detective comics reflects or represents a genre of fiction more associated with the 1930s and 1940s that doesn't exist anymore and that wasn't created as children's entertainment that didn't have a moral to the story the creative team behind batman didn't just face censorship the normal story that's told about batman is that these evil forces compelled the creative team to censor batman more and more until we got the 1950s image of batman and robin as best friends and good old chums being friends with commissioner border pardon me being friends with commissioner gordon walking around in broad daylight working with the police deputized by the police the family-friendly watered-down batman and this is considered the antithesis of the raw original vision of batman which as mentioned has this much more adult deadly edge partly derived from the shadow and let's not forget originally batman was a detective inquiring into supernatural villains the tension the creative team had to deal with was between this blatantly dark violent murderous material and the fact that comic books were and still are primarily children's entertainment in what sense was batman a hero rather than a villain and what they came up with by the way this was not billfinger what they came up with was the idea that batman was an orphan that batman witnessed his own parents being killed and he witnessed them being killed by a gun then out of this gnarled once in little steps and stages over time out of this emerged the idea that batman had taken a vow that he would never kill anyone with a gun that he would never use a gun at all that's not in the original batman that's not in the first few issues of the first three few years that he would take a vow that he was gonna fight crime with his wits with his fists working in and out of the shadows there was this idea of batman as an incorruptible super cop as someone who would arrest the villains literally tie them up and leave them in front of the police headquarters leave them with an envelope full of evidence or photographs proving who did what that he was going above and beyond the limit of what the police would do but only to accomplish the same kind of non-violent idealized outcome that the police would or should try to accomplish now only now batman becomes a hero it's batman's decision to renounce violence to refuse the way of the gun it's batman's decision to differentiate himself from the thug in the street who shot his parents dead that's what makes him a hero and this moral uh fable is repeated for robin his sidekick robin also witnesses his parents being killed basically by corrupt mob figures pulling out an extortion extortion scheme within the circus in the year 2020 small teams of creative people work within huge corporations i know it's easy to imagine that like a staff of hundreds of people are responsible for a batman movie or a star wars movie it boils down to just a couple of people in the writer's room especially in the first stages of developing a script or a pitch for a script which may be a very simple idea of what that movie ought to be two things one those creative teams those few dozen people who have worked on batman for the last 20 years they have utterly lost sight of what it was that made batman a hero in the first place and to be clear that's not the ultimate origin of batman when he was just a rip-off of the shadow wearing skin-tight clothing and a cape with a symbol on his chest because the creative team knew skin-tight clothing and a cape with a symbol in your chest is what had made superman a smash hit commercial success that's the ultimate origin but there's this intermediate transition where batman's redeveloped with some kind of ethical purpose that is in some sense heroic and is in some sense meaningful as children's entertainment the creative teams who have worked on batman in the last 20 years have sneered at the notion that what they're doing or what they ought to be doing is developing a form of heroic fiction that actually works as children's entertainment writing for an audience of children is simple but it's not easy i remember reading a review of a disney film that was an adaptation of the mythology of hercules and the reviewer pointed out this film is full of jokes that maybe the parents or maybe the grandparents could get but none of them are funny for children and the writing team behind this movie disney circulates it seems like they never really committed to the idea that this wasn't a satire making fun of hercules but that children would actually come to see this movie trying to look up to hercules as a hero that this really was on that deeper level children's entertainment point two it's really easy to take the creative process itself for granted especially when you as a creative person never chose it the way comic books were written in the 1970s nobody designed that process nobody chose it i'm saying the 1970s quite intentionally here rather than talking about the 30s 40s 50s 60s in the period of the 1970s developing out of assumptions in world war ii in the post-war period the creative process at comic book headquarters whether for marvel or dc reflecting quite a number of push and pull factors in society including the fact that it was possible for comic book writers to afford rent in at least some of the boroughs of the greater new york city area and to come in physically to an office and visit and speak with their editor face to face it was possible for teams of artists to work together in the same room if you asked those artists in the 1970s if you asked those writers would you rather work at home alone and send in your art through a magical computer device that today doesn't exist that didn't exist in the 1970s wouldn't you prefer to not have this editor staring over your shoulder to not have to justify the creative decision wouldn't you prefer to have that privacy and that just that ease of being able to wake up in your pajamas rather than put on a suit and tie and go to marvel headquarters put on a suit and tie and go to dc comics headquarters and deal with this authoritarian establishment i'm sure every artist working in the 1970s would have said yes yes yes that's much better tell me about this marvelous computer technology you're talking about let's transform the whole industry so we can all just stay at home in our pajamas and draw and ink and illustrate comic books each of us in isolation in hip-hop music when rappers stopped sleeping in the same house to record their lyrics in the same booth something changed there's something there you can never retrieve that's been lost forever there's a wu-tang track called winter wars and famously one of the breakout vocalists was passed out sleeping on the carpet in the living room when the other artists were working on this track and trying to record it and they woke him up off the carpet and said look man we're getting nowhere with this song can you come in and record some lyrics and as as the legend goes he brushed himself off and he went in and he gave this amazing performance on the mic and then everyone else got excited and they tried to compete with them and make lyrics in response to it just being in the same room that part of the creative process you might not value it you might even resent it you might think why do i have to put on this suit and tie and go over why do i have to sleep on the carpet why do i have to hang out in this guy's house to have access to this recording studio's basement today hip-hop artists record their lyrics they send it as an email attachment to one another as an mp3 and someone sits at a computer and stitches it together into a hip-hop album and it's not the same and it's never going to be the same all right it's really easy to look back at the creative crucible of the 1970s editorial office the 1970s story meeting having a picture story and justify your story and talk uh back and forth to a guy like julia schwartz right not not the most creative and open minded guy you explained to julia schwartz what your idea is for the new green lantern story and he tells you why he thinks it's a terrible idea and you go back and forth and you sit in that room with other artists and there's somebody telling you that you know the proportions aren't quite right and what you're drawing you have to go back and do it again there's an authoritarian structure there there's a collegial structure that there are many elements to that that have disappeared partly just because the rent in new york city went up and up and rather than relocating the business to the middle of the desert or southern florida or something right what happened is that the comic book industry relocated from somewhere to nowhere it's now just isolated people sitting at different desktops different computers with different keyboards all right so a fundamental idea a fundamental question like what is it that makes batman a hero rather than a villain are we writing for an audience of children or for an audience of cynical adults is this movie about batman or is it a satire of what batman used to be in the same sense that the walt disney company sleepwalks through making a satire of an ancient greek myth rather than really trying to sincerely present that mythology trying to present hercules as someone you'd respect or even worship children are still looking for somebody to admire somebody to emulate they're still looking for symbols of virtue they're still looking for films to show them the meaning of life and talk about really simple fundamental things like why it is the police don't just shoot and kill the bad guy why it is people are innocent until proven guilty why it is that you shouldn't take your law why it is that you shouldn't take the law into your own hands from the perspective of a child struggling with childlike notions of justice and injustice and why isn't it that people with guns and fists can't just solve everything that's wrong and bad in the world those things still matter they're still meaningful and there are millions of dollars to be made in trying to sincerely express those meanings through the medium of film who wants the work