Monday, October 4, 2010

The Batman Phenomenon

You know who is amazing: Batman. No, I didn't make a mistake a type a fictional characters name in where a non-fictional character should be, I absolutely mean Batman. You might have already stopped reading this because you are thinking that this is about to be some nonsense post about how I think Batman is the man (no pun intended) or so on, but I really do mean this in a serious matter. Earlier today I tweeted a comment that was on the lines of "the batman character is great because you never have to explain how he showed up in a scene/place/room". Do you realize the significance of that observation? If not, let me tell you. In any literary piece of work, any television show or movie scene you have to detail exactly how the character came into the scene. The writer literally has to think of a way to have the character get in the area, whether the character has walked through a door or climbed in a window or even transported. Even in spy movies, the spy has to use some high-tech gadget to get his/her way into the locked unit. Not with Batman. Batman is one of few well-known characters who a writer can literally place in a scene/room with no justification of how he got there. And what makes the matter even more impressive is that after the writer does so, there is no uproar from the audience about how he got there, they are contempt with the fact that he is Batman and in lack of better words, got it like that. I call situations like these the Batman Phenomenon, not the greatest of names, but it works for the topic. The Batman Phenomenon allows the writer to place characters in critical areas in the story without having to give a reason to how/why they are there. I find it even funnier is that in the reboot of the Batman film series, Chris Nolan (the director) wrote into the story on how Bruce Wayne obtained the skills to do what he does, by simply saying he learned it from ninjas. Now, I'm not going to get into a side journey on how amazing ninjas are, but even if Chris Nolan didn't include that minor piece of information the audience would have still continued to believe that Batman can show up anywhere because he's Batman. If anything, it shows the strength of the Batman brand as well as identity, because I swear I don't remember anyone explaining how Batman came to be in the original Tim Burton film, besides the fact that his parents were murdered in front of him, thats something you can't change nor leave out in his origin story. With that said, let me not forgo off the subject for too long and sum everything up by saying, Batman is an amazing character to have in a story, not because he is multi-leveled in personality as well as in coolness but because you can practically do anything to/with the character and no one is going to think otherwise about it.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Go ninjas!