reconsidering heroes

So, snowed in today with nowhere to go, I finally had to opportunity to crack open my fresh copy of The Dark Knight on DVD. I’ve loved Batman my entire life–photos exist of me at four or five walking around in a black turtle neck, carrying a batman action figure, my makeshift cape billowing out behind me.

Anyway, watching it tonight got me thinking about icons, our touchstone mythologies that carry through to the next generations. There are films like Star Wars or The Godfather that introduce characters that become landmarks on the map of culture. And what’s interesting to me about the current state of Hollywood, and comic movies in particular, is the propensity of companies to constantly reintroduce, reorganize, reconstruct these iconic characters. In my childhood, Michael Keaton was Batman. Then Kevin Conroy’s gritty portrayal in Batman: The Animated Series became my standard. And now it’s Christian Bale. It seems as though each successive generations has had their own incarnation of the character to suit the tastes of that generation.

We can see this also in Daniel Craig’s James Bond. To someone like my father, Sean Connery is James Bond, or Roger Moore is James Bond. That was his first introduction to the character, and the one which whom he most strongly resonated. For me, it was Pierce Brosnan. Brosnan was the first Bond that I thought could actually exist in the world in which I was living; Connery, Moore and Dalton were great, but their world was a fantasy, an old postcard. And yet I find it interesting that all of the different actors bring something to their performances that is essentially Bond. Though there is a disconnect in chronology between the actors that play the character, somehow the character is still singular entity. For that reason, I think Bond will continue to be a viable screen character because he’s already undergone so many generational transformations that he will continue to be reconstructed into perpetuity. After Daniel Craig (who I love), it will be someone else.

That sense of timelessness, a longevity to a character is something that modern comic movies seem to be striving for, at least with their reboots. Some have been more successful than others. I think I am one of eight people on the planet who actually liked Brian Singer’s Superman Returns. It seemed to be a logical and not sacrilegious extension of the Christopher Reeve mythos I grew up with. He was updated, but not completely reinvented. He was still Superman. And I think that worked because there was such a gap between the films that the audience was able to maintain that suspension of disbelief; their imaginations were able to accept that these two men were the same character even if the actors were not the same man.

Others have been less successful. If I was one of eight people who liked Superman Returns, then I was one of three who liked Ang Lee’s Hulk film. My own love for it notwithstanding, it did poorly at the box office and even worse with the critics. Then last year Marvel pulled what was essentially a reboot and recast all of the primary roles and tried to take the series in a different direction. My major problem with the film was that it felt like it couldn’t decide whether it wanted to be a sequel or not. On one hand, it retold the origin of the Hulk, but on the other it treated a lot of the relationships (not notably that of Edward Norton’s Banner and Liv Tyler’s Betty Ross) as pre-givens, something established in the last film. It seemed to be playing more on an audience’s sense of nostalgia for the old TV show then even the Hulk comics. And unlike the distance between the Supermans, the distance between Bana’s Hulk and Norton’s Hulk was only a couple of years, and for that reason, as a reboot, I think it failed.

I think the reason reboots are so in vogue today is that audiences like origin stories (X-Men Origins: Wolverine, coming May 9 2009); we like seeing how things started, even things we’ve seen before in comics, or other movies. Which brings me to a paradox as a movie and comic lover. On one hand, I loved seeing Christian Bale’s Batman begin in the last film, and I loved seeing the consequential progression of his actions extending into this second movie. Still, while Heath Ledger’s Joker is incredible, I still have nostalgia for Jack Nicholson, Mark Hamill, and even Cesar Romero. And a part of me wonders how long this continuous reinvention of characters can continue. We’ve seen what happens when a movie series goes on too long (I’m looking at you Batman & Robin and Superman IV). I worry that Hollywood is in a cycle now where a story arch can only sustain itself over two, maybe three movies. And since movie’s take so much time and so many resources to create, those three movies may take ten years to make. After ten years, you have a whole new generation of viewers who want to be introduced to a character in a way that will allow them to connect to it. In the case of super-hero movies, they want a character that seems like he or she could actually occupy the space that they find themselves in. Every generation needs their heroes, but I worry that this trend will result in the same characters being recycled and reconstructed. In the case of Batman and James Bond, I think that reconstruction can work, and can result in some great films. But others, like the eventually third Hulk film, or the new Punisher movie, I don’t think will be nearly as successful.

So, that’s the biggest question I’m left with after watching The Dark Knight. Nolan’s vision is the Batman we have in the movies and in the pop culture consciousness today. And even if Christopher Nolan or Christian Bale do not come back (and part of me really hopes they don’t), someone, somewhere is going to make another Batman movie. He, and other heroes like him, are our modern mythological pantheon. They are woven into the fabric of the culture. They are not going away.

What will our heroes look like in ten years? What Batman will my children know? And will they care at all about the Batman that mattered to me?