Anghus Houvouras on the news that Gotham will follow a young Bruce Wayne on his path to donning the cape and cowl as Batman, and why the series has already lost him….
We’re living in a day and age where the comic book adapted superhero story is a staple of every discernible medium. There’s the monthly serialized stories where they originated. There’s the big budget movie adaptations that are becoming all too frequent. And there’s the television shows hoping to capitalize on a seemingly insatiable appetite for our favorite costumed heroes. This week the hype around a new Batman live-action television series was ratcheted up as names were dropped and characters were thrown into the mix. If we’re being honest, I’m reluctant to openly embrace a Batman television series. As a fan of the character, this might seem a little strange. Allow me to explain.
The series is set to explore the fertile territory between the murder of young Bruce Wayne’s parents and the eventual donning of the iconic cap and cowl. In my head, the working title is ‘Batman Begins Very Slowly‘. Network television. Twenty two episodes per season. Forty-four minutes per episode. That’s a lot of ‘beginning’.
I’m just going to say it. I’m tired of the origin story.
It feels like that’s all we get these days. Every super hero has an origin, and the vast majority of them are tasked with telling the story. In some cases, re-telling the story, like Marc Webb being forced to waste a two hour film telling us the well documented and well established origin of The Amazing Spider-Man. I understand the creative burden, even though I am totally bored by it all. Truth be told, as a lifelong comic fan I’m the last quadrant you have to worry about with these movies. I know the origin stories of these characters well, and having to sit through a variation on them with every subsequent reboot feels like a chore.
But my growing disdain for the origin story pales in comparison to this idea of exploring a character’s early years mining every little corner in some long and drawn out 100 episode effort to explain the inner working of Batman’s mind. Don’t need it, and frankly, don’t want it.
To me, Batman is an interesting character because of how the persona envelop the character. Batman isn’t the mask. Bruce Wayne is the mask. For me, the most quintessential character moments involve those great detective moments when Batman is in the Batcave investigating a crime in full costume only momentarily removing his cowl to take a sip of coffee or have a conversation with Alfred. He’s always Batman, and when the cape and cowl come off he’s merely hiding in plain sight.
Batman is insane. Batman is obsessive. To me, Batman is a lot like Andy Kaufman in those later years when he began to abandon reality and embrace wrestling. Robin Williams tells a great story about the moment he realized the Kaufman was wearing his wresting ensemble underneath his button up shirt and pants, the spandex poking out beyond the sleeves and peeking out underneath the collar. It’s crazy, and strange, and a level of obsessive that few will ever achieve. To me, that’s Batman, and that’s what makes him interesting.
Do we need an exploratory series that explains everything? A deep dive into a damaged psyche that lays the groundwork like some kind of psychological profile? Batman is never more interesting than when he’s in the costume. And the area between the inciting incident of his parent’s murder and the moment he puts on that cape and cowl are, at best, marginally interesting. It’s where creators go when they’ve run out of forward momentum. It’s the pablum that makes up crap like X-Men Origins: Wolverine. I don’t care how or where Logan got his adamantium. The truth is, it was a pretty damn boring explanation. It doesn’t matter the path Bruce Wayne took from tragedy to vigilantism. What matters is that he got there.
‘Why’ is such a lazy choice. It’s like that Patton Oswalt routine about Star Wars and how awful the prequels were. Wasn’t Darth Vader infinitely more interesting before you realized he was a pussy-whipped twat? Did the prequels do anything to make you enjoy the character? Or did it have the opposite impact and actually take away the mystery and the allure of the Galaxies most dastardly villain? Did discovering that Boba Fett was a clone do anything for you?
I don’t need Batman: The Back-Story. Discovering the character’s origins does little to improve my enjoyment of the character. In fact, I would argue that exploring every nook and cranny of a character’s genesis detracts from the iconography of the characters. Expanded backstories is often a creatively bankrupt enterprise. An exercise in milking that feels so utterly pointless. Give me a Gotham PD series, or a Batman TV show that starts with the character already in costume on a weekly adventure. But let’s not act like a low-rent, modestly budget TV show trying to stay out of the way of the big budget Batman movie projects is something to celebrate. This is the kind of market penetration that giant corporate conglomerates get hard over.
It’s impossible to judge anything at the inception stage. Right now it’s a collection of ideas waiting to be realized. However, I’m rarely a fan of this kind of obsessive fleshing out that seems to be the backbone of this new Batman themed series.
What do you think?
Anghus Houvouras is a North Carolina based writer and filmmaker. His latest work, the novel My Career Suicide Note, is available from Amazon.
Originally published January 20, 2014. Updated April 11, 2018.
