Batman Breeds Thoughts on Culture High and Low, Along with Musings on the Current Cultural Crisis

Yesterday we looked at Glen Weldon’s wonderful new book, Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture, and that got us to thinking.  (Before we get to thinking, though, let’s reiterate that Weldon’s book is quite terrific and highly recommended.)  Is Batman art?  And is a deep engagement with Batman (or other facets of Nerd Culture) a worthwhile endeavor?

Before we start exploring, let’s set some ground rules.  We here at The Jade Sphinx have given serious consideration to pop fiction and film, along with kiddie books.  We have also examined literary, artistic and musical works by great masters.  Clearly, we think that pop fictions are worthy of serious consideration … but the mistake this discussion often makes is equating serious consideration with serious art. 

But that is not the case.  Kiddie lit and pop fiction can be crafted with varying degrees of artistry, but that does not necessarily make it art.  Oh, it can be art, but it does not transmute into art simply through virtue of its examination.  A doctoral thesis on Batman, for example, may result in a diploma, but the intrinsic quality of our pointed-eared friend and the body of work about him remains unchanged.

Now, the call to canonize kitsch is a relatively new phenomenon.  From the 1930s through the 1960s – a time of unprecedented media saturation – junk art for children was enjoyed by children.  In what seems was a more innocent time, there were whole industries creating art for children: comic strips and books, movie serials, radio shows, animated cartoons and hosts of literary options created expressly for everyone from beginning readers to teenagers.  Adults could sometimes dip in an appreciative toe to remember the sweet currents of youth, and may even enjoy much of the material, but to become an avid consumer of such was a sign of feeble-mindedness.

Pop fiction for adults also fully realized (and embraced) its limitations.  One well remembers Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s dedication to his 1912 novel The Lost World (a masterpiece of its kind): I have wrought my simple plan/If I give one hour of joy/To the boy who’s half a man,/Or the man who’s half a boy.  That lovely and poetic preamble is suitable for so much that came before and after, everything from Fu Manchu and Tarzan, to James Bond and Indiana Jones.  Good pop fiction can be terrific stuff: insightful, bracing, engaging and amusing.  It is not to be sneered at; nor, however, is it to be overestimated.

We are not saying, to be clear, that it is impossible for a piece of genre fiction or popular entertainment to elevate into the realm of higher art.  Wind in the Willows, The House at Pooh Corner and Peter Pan are magnificent books, transcending the designation of mere kiddie lit to soar to literary heights.  And one need only to think of Poe, of much of H.G. Wells and Robert Louis Stevenson, of Graham Greene or Dashiell Hammett, to realize that many classic novels could also be shelved in the genre sections of your local bookstore.  But, again, such company doesn’t elevate a genre en toto.

But over the last few decades what has changed in the culture at large is a flight from adulthood and complexity, from the challenges of great art and great beauty, and a retreat into comfortable and childish enthusiasms.  Worse than that, consumers of pop culture are demanding that attention not only be paid, but that entry to the Canon is fair and just.  And, in so doing, they debase the wonderful raw power of pop fiction, and the innocence of kiddie lit.

In the 1990s, I was frankly amazed at the adult craze for Harry Potter books.  This is in no way to say that these books were bad, but they were written for children, and a deep identification with them signifies a lack of seriousness.  Worse still, as more and more adults read them, the books lost more and more of their grounding in a child’s world, ending with what was to be the Gotterdammerung of kiddie books.  It became almost impossible to read the last novel in the corpus and remember that it all started with some kids playing ball from atop some brooms.

Much the same thing for adults who obsess over Batman.  It is adults (of questionable maturity) who have demanded the darker, brooding, psychopathic Batman.  It was the same adults who have consigned the sunnier, smiling, and more optimistic Superman into oblivion, insufficiently violent or complex and now hopelessly passé.

What these adults playing with children’s toys forget is that amusements made for children cannot bear the weight they wish to impose upon them.  We are supposed to move on from the amusements of our youth to more challenging, complex and elevating fare.  Enjoy them as palette cleaners, but then get onto the main meal.  The answer is not to make Batman relevant to adults (an impossibility), but to embrace the challenge of real adult art. 

And, again, read and look at what you want.  But a steady diet of aesthetic and cultural junk is much like a steady diet of junk food: it will significantly impair your physical and mental health, greatly diminish your quality of life, and, in the long run, it will kill you.

Now, we make our children’s entertainment for adults.  I can think of few more damming condemnations of us as a culture and as a people that we actually make Batman or Superman movies that are so violent … that children cannot see them. Stop for a moment and ponder how … impossible that would have been as little as 50 years ago.  The idea of a “serious” Batman movie would have been met with well-deserved derision.  But not today.  The cheapening of our culture since the 1960s (and the concomitant tenets of aesthetic relativity), have made this dumbing down not only possible, but inevitable.  The highest grossing films of the year are blockbusters based on 40 year old superhero comics.  This lack of adulthood has poisoned our language, our music, our political discourse. 

This corruption has bled into everything.  For example, in the just-released Against Democracy, a political screed published by Princeton University Press (!), author Jason Brennan breaks the body politic into three classes:  hobbits, hooligans and vulcans. 

Hobbits…?  Vulcans...?  Really?  Is that what 21^st Century adulthood has become?

I love pop fiction.  And when pop fiction is working on all cylinders, it can be wonderful, terrific and … art of a kind.  But it’s like a twinkie: I’ll eat them, but it’s not my sole diet.  And if the very notion of adulthood is to survive, we have to get back to the business of serious art, or our emotional, intellectual and philosophical selves are finished.

Tomorrow: James Bond – it aint art, but nobody does it better.

Tolkien Will Never Be a Hobbit With Me

We here at the Jade Sphinx spent the Christmas holidays reading The Hobbit, written in 1937 by J. R. R. Tolkien (1892-1973).  It was the sole blot on a wonderful season.

I should state here that I have been reading – with great satisfaction and complicity – works of science fiction and fantasy for more than 40 years.  In my high school days (or, perhaps, daze), Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy was pressed into my hands by appreciative classmates, and I was never able to get beyond the mid-point of the second novel.  I have been allergic to hobbits, trolls, orcs and dwarves ever since.

As I reached my middle years, I have become more and more fascinated by the great works of children’s literature, books that I missed entirely during my actual growing up.  I did not read Wind in the Willows (1908) or Peter Pan (1911), or the Pooh or Oz books until well into adulthood.  Friends insisted that The Hobbit was a classic children’s novel, one of the most important of the 20th Century, and that I could not seriously say that I have read deeply in the field until I have digested this book.

My misgivings were exacerbated by the spate of recent truly awful film versions of Tolkien’s books.  I had an uncontrollable fit of the giggles during the first Lord of the Rings film (exploding into loud hilarity when I saw Christopher Lee and Ian McKellen beat up one-another), and the visuals of the films never quite gelled with the fleeting mental pictures I had made while trying to read the books.  I always think of hobbits as sort hominid rabbits, and seeing well-known actors in big-foot shoes and Mr. Spock ears does not quite gibe with my mental image.  We left the first film after the mid-way point, and kept our distance from all others until the recent first-film of The Hobbit series, and saw, with disappointment, that things never got any better.

But, on to the book.  The Hobbit deals with Bilbo Baggins, a member of a race of little people called hobbits, who travels away from his comfortable home in the company of dwarves to kill a dragon called Smaug and retrieve the treasure Smaug stole from the dwarves.  They are accompanied by a wizard, Gandalf, for the first and final halves of the journey – he is unaccountably absent from the hazardous middle-section.

At the end, dragon dead and dwarves reunited with gold, various groups of dwarves and elves and men, now in conflict over the treasure, band together to defeat a marauding band of goblins.  After much death and slaughter, Bilbo returns to his country home, a sadder but wiser hobbit.

In summary, it sounds like an interesting read, but the entire book is rendered a thudding bore by Tolkien’s lugubrious, turgid literary style.  Tolkien struggles to give his work the cadence of fairy tale or baldric epic, but succeeds only in creating faux-King-James-Bible or slightly rancid Kenneth-Grahame-knockoff. 

It is amazing that Tolkien, who made his career as a philologist as well as a professor of English Language and Literature, should have such a tin ear, but there it is.  Listening to The Hobbit read aloud (as I did to my better half during much of the holiday), is to experience a particularly donnish deconstruction of a tale created to excite into something quite bland and uninteresting.

The sections of The Hobbit that I enjoyed the most were those passages in the early part of the book where Bilbo Baggins is at home.  Hobbits, it seems, like good food (and lots of it), pipes and tobacco, a wee dram of something every now and then, warm homes and a life close to nature.  In short, all the best things found in Wind in the Willows and the Pooh books.  I actually love that part of the book … and certainly wish there was more of it.  (I dimly recall the opening birthday party scene of The Lord of the Rings, and hoping the books would get back on track with that – to no avail.)  As soon as the ‘adventure’ starts, my sympathy evaporates.  Tolkien obviously shared my sympathy for a pre-Industrial world, but the quest tale he creates for his ancient world invariably disappoints.

More telling, too, is that Tolkien often writes himself into a corner and then takes the easy way out.  Gandalf seems to have extremely limited powers for a wizard (he seems to be quite good with fireworks, and that’s about it), and the one time Gandalf can actually do some good, Tolkien absents him from the action while he is away on “other business.”  Worse yet, for a coming of age story, Bilbo uses his ring of invisibility much too often to keep himself out of any real danger; indeed, during the climactic battle, he spends most of his time literally invisible on the sidelines, keeping out of trouble.

Tolkien also drapes his cultural prejudices a little too thinly.  Clearly hobbits are the rural English, caught up in outer-world events not to their tastes and beyond their control.  The avaricious dwarves seem uncomfortably Jewish to this reader, and the wood elves a bit too much like gypsies.

Some wag at The New Yorker has called The Hobbit The Wind in the Willows Meets The Ring of the Nibelungen, and I can’t seem to top that.