If you look at the portrayal of superheroes in film over the past three or four decades, it is clear that the characters are becoming darker in their personal nature, their motivations and the way they act in the films. If you look at the way that Adam West acts in the Batman film from the 1960s and in the television program, it is fairly clear that the emphasis of the show is campy in nature, and while his Batman does state lessons in a paternal sort of tone, the humor of the show makes the whole thing seem a little silly or fanciful at times. In Batman’s later iterations, his film portrayals become increasingly dark. This begins with the Michael Keaton portrayal in the films Batman and Batman Returns, which spent a significant amount of time on the backstory of Batman and the personal demons that he had to fight. It is true that the portrayals by Val Kilmer (Batman Forever) and George Clooney (Batman and Robin) tried to turn the series back more toward a camp portrayal, but then the three films with Christian Bale (Batman Begins, The Dark Knight and The Dark Night Rises) are even darker than the ones that portrayed Keaton in their rendition of the hero. The question that is worth pursuing here is the artistic motivation behind the shift in the way that the superheroes were portrayed. Does it represent a shift in what the populace finds entertaining (referring to the poor showings that especially the Clooney representation had in the theater) or in a loss in the ability to portray a campy presentation with the right amount of quality.
It might seem to some that the topic at hand is primarily of artistic interest only. However, it is definitely arguable that the art that comes from a culture reflects the values of that culture, or at least reflects some of the affective realities of that culture. When the original Batman television series with Adam West and Burt Ward came out back in the 1960s, American culture was markedly different from what it was when the Michael Keaton films came out and then again from what it was when the Christian Bale films came out. In the 1960s, even though the Adam West version reflected a great deal of camp, and good always triumphed over evil, the silly nature of a great number of the episodes threw that dichotomy into a bit of question. During the 1960s, the news headlines featured one Presidential assassination as well as the assassination of another Democratic presidential candidate and two major civil rights leaders. They also featured a massive protest against the most unpopular war in the history of the nation (at least up to that point). They featured the appearance of a counterculture that, for the first time, voiced an active mistrust of the American government. Shows like Batman provided an uneasy respite from the concerns of the day, giving people something to laugh about. It’s true that law and order were still in charge in that show, but the silly way in which they were portrayed also poked fun at that institution. This reflected the uneasy line that American culture walked during that time period, trying to figure out what to do with the hippie generation and how to handle the seismic shifts in society that the civil rights movement brought.
If we shift the scene to the late 1980s, when the Michael Keaton pair of movies came out, we see a culture that had used Richard Nixon to cauterize the counterculture out of society and then heeded Ronald Reagan’s message that government could not help us, in fact should not help us. The fact that this message came from the titular head of that very same government produced a cognitive dissonance in political realities that continues to resonate to the present day. So when Michael Keaton spent a great deal of time revisiting the deaths of his parents, and his own transformation into Batman, and when it turns out that Jack Napier (later the Joker) had killed his parents – and then Batman caused Napier’s transition into the Joker – it was clear that the franchise had shifted from a source of camp entertainment into an introspective act that welcomed the reader to join in Batman’s journey of self-discovery. By the time we had reached the end of the 1980s, we were once again questioning ourselves, wondering what kind of world would greet us now that our great enemy, the Soviet Union, had collapsed under the weight of its own corruption.
So when we talk about the reflections of society in its art, the shifts in the Batman series form a visible example of this synergy. The examples in this paper will serve to show how changes in this franchise have mirrored changes in our own society, as time has gone by and cultural values have shifted.
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