Wrapping presents can be tedious business; sometimes I’m tempted to turn on the TV to half-engage my mind as I struggle with scotch tape and dull scissors. But what to watch?
Netflix hit “Leave the World Behind,” which takes America’s sweetheart Julia Roberts and transforms her into a brittle Karen whose clumsily “racist” interactions with the dapper Mahershala Ali are about as dramatically convincing as an old HR sensitivity training video? Thanks, Obama(s)!
Or Scorsese
snoozefest “Killers of the Flower Moon,” in which the esteemed director rewards his faithful audience by turning one of his most iconic leading men into a cowardly, brick-stupid woman-poisoner who gets paddled by his other most iconic leading man in some kind of penitential “stolen land” declaration?
Or should I just thrill to the crackers-gone-wild trailer for “Civil War” (I hear if you say “White Christmas” into a mirror three times, rose-colored-tactical-glasses Jesse Plemons appears); or prepare to “take a seat” and “do the work” as I chuckle at the preview for the tired white-folks-be-like “satire” of “The American Society of Magical Negroes”?
No. Not in this house. Not this Christmas. The demoralization campaign must stop. And I know just the American hero to ensure that it does.
In 1965, ABC tasked playwright and screenwriter
Lorenzo Semple Jr. with turning the “Batman” comic book into a TV series. Although the network had something dramatic in mind, for Semple the material clearly required a comedic touch: “I mean, golly gee, how else can one view a character who enters a nightclub in full bat garb and mask, accompanied by a gorgeous chick, and when greeted by the maître d’ with an obsequious ‘Good evening, Batman! A table for two?’ gravely replies, ‘Yes, thank you. But please, not too near the music. I wouldn’t want to appear conspicuous.’”
The resulting series (available to
stream on YouTube and a few other sites) was certainly campy, but it was played so straight that a child encountering it (as we did, when it was syndicated in the ‘70s and ’80s) could find it genuinely thrilling. Much of this is thanks to Adam West’s hypnotically mannered performance, which takes Batman’s virtue and single-minded focus on doing good to absurd extremes without ever making fun of it. While the show remains some of the funniest television ever produced, there’s also something noble about this Batman’s steadfast refusal to relax his standards, even as his enemies have a ball giving in to their worst impulses.
In his essay
“Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to Be Said,” C.S. Lewis dismisses the notion that his Narnia books were written “for children”:
The Fantastic or Mythical is a Mode available at all ages, for some readers; for others, at none. At all ages, if it is well-used by the author and meets the right reader, it has the same power: to generalize while remaining concrete, to present in palpable form not concepts or even experiences but whole classes of experience, and to throw off irrelevancies. But at its best it can do more; it can give us experiences we never had and thus, instead of “commenting on life,” can add to it.
While much of our popular culture today is childish, very little of it “adds to life” in the sense Lewis mentions. “Commenting” is very much our preferred mode (often with a sarcastic smirk, as in the case of many “updated” fairy tales). Our stories get bogged down in the unmagical tedium of faddish ideology. We give our protagonists flaws to humanize them, yet in the end it is the flaws that capture our attention and ease our guilt. Easier to drag a hero down to earth than aspire to his heights.Of course, Batman and his costumed cohort are big business now. Our culture – besotted as it is by the multibillion-dollar comic book industrial complex – could learn a lesson from the small-screen, low-budget Caped Crusader: Sometimes being a hero means looking like a square.