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Glen Weldon, The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture: I thought about how harsh to be here, and then I thought: I’m done giving cookies for lack of active hostility to female-oriented forms of fandom. This well-written, well-intentioned book by a Batman fanboy covers Batman’s various incarnations over the years, arguing that Batman’s success in popular culture has culminated in his current Nolan-esque version. Nolan’s Batman is popular with both fanboys and the general public, which should be a subject of great satisfaction to fanboys but actually makes them nervous and overly possessive, convinced that other people are liking Batman wrong. (No discussion of “fake geek girls,” but it fits.) Except Weldon calls them “fans,” despite the fact that he’s also clear that he’s only writing about male fans; they are very much the unquestioned default in the book. Though he tries to be welcoming, he is writing from the perspective of someone with the right to welcome, and doesn’t seem to understand that we always lived here too.
He also has a very specific view of Batman’s essence. Nolan’s Batman is all wrong, for example, because he hangs up the ears for good at the end of the third movie, which the real Batman wouldn’t ever do because his quest is eternal. I’m all about having your own Batman, and Weldon does discuss Batman as inkblot, but it’s at least worth discussing why Weldon gets to decide what’s really Batman while also calling out the homophobia and other creepy characteristics of the judgmental fanboys who, these days, “feel themselves deputized” to defend Nolan-esque Batman from critics. As he points out, fanboys harassed many people-especially women-who didn’t like the films, but “[w]hen it came to disparaging reviews from members of their own fraternity, like Ain’t It Cool News’s Harry Knowles, however, no concomitant backlash ensued. This is likely because they recognized something familiar in the timbre and specificity of Knowles’s objections.” They didn’t object to Knowles’s “timbre,” apparently, because “game recognize game” (even after he quotes a bunch of “die, bitch” rhetoric). Uh-hunh. I also raised an eyebrow at his extraordinarily kind reading of Frank Miller’s All-Star Batman and Robin as parodying 90s superheroes through sexism and thuggery.
I liked some of Weldon’s observations about the Batman narrative itself, such as that Batman’s true superpower has always been his wealth, but that in class-blind America, many fans don’t even consider wealth to be a core element of his character. As Weldon says, this is “a) nuts, and b) fascinating,” because of the “abiding and uniquely American belief that anyone can become obscenely rich.” Weldon considers Batman’s core feature to be his commitment to “never again”-hope, rather than obsession or vengeance. I also loved the factoid that, in the first page of Robin’s very first appearance, “a lettering error in the introductory text … elides the space between the two words ‘an ally,’ causing that opening passage to instead inform us that Batman ‘takes under his protecting mantle anally.’” Since then, Weldon says, Batman has alternated between paterfamilias/baterfamilias and loner status, always eventually rebuilding a family after a new round of writers jettisons his existing family as insufficiently Batman-like. (Frank Miller’s DKR “struck on a simple way to obviate the gay panic that so often hangs over depictions of Batman and Robin in the wake of Wertham: He made Robin a girl,” projecting all the gayness onto the Joker.) Weldon also spends a fair amount of time calling out fanboy homophobia in things like the reaction to Bat-nipples, which Weldon understands as a mockery of the hypermasculinized superhero tropes popular in 90s comics.
Weldon thinks the current adult generation of fanboys connected to Batman’s obsessive lonerdom, his technology given a real-world equivalent in their careful collecting and detailed knowledge of the Batworld. Batman: The Animated Series is, for Weldon, the perfect Batman, with just the right mix of characters kids could love and the traits adult fanboys want, as compared to the Tim Burton movies. (Which, full disclosure, I love; I’m less of a fan of the later ones, but “Was that over the top? I can never tell” is still one of my favorite lines.) Weldon thinks that Burton erred in making the Joker the killer of Bruce’s parents, because it reduces his quest to simple vengeance and makes the links between the two characters “banal,” but I don’t see that at all-Batman does still have a broader mission, and the Joker is still a mirror of his strengths and his failures; what Weldon calls a “closed feedback loop” is to me the eternal, bigger-than-life narrative Weldon says he wants from Batman. Likewise, where he sees Catwoman emerging from the abuse Selina Kyle suffers, and not from any choice she makes, that’s the opposite of how I read the film, which to me is in large part about Selina figuring out who she is and what she’s willing to do. But Weldon is confident that Tim Burton missed the “essence” of Batman, “like a moth mistaking a porch light for the moon,” or in this case a Goth aesthetic. His criticisms of the Burton version as too particularized, not universal enough, made me think of how women, too, are often dismissed in that way. Only certain kinds of people get to speak for all of us; so too with Weldon’s Batman.
So, the fangirl erasure: An easy example: “Schumacher’s two audiences, however, were split not by age but by sensibility: 1) gay men and 2) everyone else.” There may be a gay aesthetic-I was a student of the great DA Miller, I’m cool with that-but when you conflate artist with audience I get nervous. Weldon has a good point about how the 60s camp Batman was a different gay aesthetic than the 90s, post-AIDS, carrying “something harder, angrier, and more unambiguously and unapologetically sexual.” But then:
Throughout modern history, the mostly male cohort of nerds had received a given narrative’s characters and plot with deference and treated them as sacrosanct, inviolate, fixed in a permanent stasis. The flow of information ran downhill ….
In the fanzines of the sixties and seventies, alongside the familiar nerd disputes, price guides, and exhaustive inventories of every Golden Age appearance of favorite characters, some contributors had begun to offer something new-something that displayed a subtly different attitude toward the characters they loved.
Instead of simply receiving stories about Captain Kirk, or Doctor Who, or Batman, these contributors created their own. Within a few short years this movement had birthed a full-fledged genre with the blandly descriptive name of fan fiction…. The result was something the historically male nerd audience had never experienced ….
How to suppress women’s fandom, part the zillionth. (The “counternarrative” he identifies against fanboy brutalism comes from “the internet,” not people, definitely not girls.) The conflation of different types of zines is symptomatic of the assumption that transformative fandom began after and entered “real” male fandom (and was welcomed). Weldon allows Lev Grossman to say nice things about fanfic, but can’t find a single female academic or reporter to talk about it. Grossman’s article is good, but in combination with the rest of the book, it feels tone-deaf. As Weldon sees it, transformative, more inclusive fandom arose “between the 1997 of Batman and Robin and the 2005 of Batman Begins” and fanfic and cosplay “began to truly infiltrate nerd culture” (emphasis added). Two separate groups emerged: “a male-dominated contingent that prized the rigorous and exacting reproduction of costumes, props, and characters, and a weirder, queerer cosplay community that assumed a less demanding and more playful approach.” Condescension much appreciated, because playing Rule 63 Bucky Barnes is definitely less demanding. Especially when you film a comic.
Weldon clearly likes the creativity of “Pimp Vader, Gender-flipped Wonder Woman, and Steam-punk Ghostbuster,” but it’s notable that these are all guy’s roles. Supposedly, had Batman and Robin come out in 2005, “hard-core nerds would have hated it just as much as they had in 1997, but theirs would have been one reaction among many. The world had changed.” Note again the implicit identity of “hard-core nerds,” which apparently I never was. Likewise, new Batman fans who liked Justice League cartoons are distinguished from “hard-core” fans, and also “alongside these new voices were cosplayers, makers of fan art, and fanfic writers.” Because I guess us makers weren’t fans of Justice League etc., we just sort of wandered in? Near the end, we learn of “a strain of hard-core comics readers who were smaller in number but who had been there from the beginning” (not that he mentioned them before): “These fans could throw down Bat-trivia, cite chapter and verse, and argue arcana with the best of them…. They were also, not for nothing, women.” I’m all for the power of the internet, but it didn’t supply us with “new agency”-we had that; you just started to notice. And in a few sentences he’s back to distinguishing us from “old-school fans.”
Weldon seems as surprised as DC that “a larger-than-expected female audience swiftly manifested on FanFiction.net.” And he contends that Batman/Joker stories set in the Nolan universe are “the eighth most popular subject on FanFiction.net,” which is … just not true. Eighth most popular Batman subject, I’ll accept, though I haven’t checked, but that clarification would raise some questions about the import of the seven above it, not to mention that he specifically says that he’s conflating “confrontations” and “romances,” which also kind of misses a pretty big point about fanfic.
Ultimately, despite some attempts to say things about popular culture (cf. the wealth observation), Weldon is mostly interested in what the different versions of Batman mean for the Batman story, rather than what different versions mean for the culture that tells them at a particular point in time. Aaron Bady’s review of The Dark Knight Rises, by constrast, is a brilliant explication of what Nolan’s movie does given its cultural surroundings.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
He also has a very specific view of Batman’s essence. Nolan’s Batman is all wrong, for example, because he hangs up the ears for good at the end of the third movie, which the real Batman wouldn’t ever do because his quest is eternal. I’m all about having your own Batman, and Weldon does discuss Batman as inkblot, but it’s at least worth discussing why Weldon gets to decide what’s really Batman while also calling out the homophobia and other creepy characteristics of the judgmental fanboys who, these days, “feel themselves deputized” to defend Nolan-esque Batman from critics. As he points out, fanboys harassed many people-especially women-who didn’t like the films, but “[w]hen it came to disparaging reviews from members of their own fraternity, like Ain’t It Cool News’s Harry Knowles, however, no concomitant backlash ensued. This is likely because they recognized something familiar in the timbre and specificity of Knowles’s objections.” They didn’t object to Knowles’s “timbre,” apparently, because “game recognize game” (even after he quotes a bunch of “die, bitch” rhetoric). Uh-hunh. I also raised an eyebrow at his extraordinarily kind reading of Frank Miller’s All-Star Batman and Robin as parodying 90s superheroes through sexism and thuggery.
I liked some of Weldon’s observations about the Batman narrative itself, such as that Batman’s true superpower has always been his wealth, but that in class-blind America, many fans don’t even consider wealth to be a core element of his character. As Weldon says, this is “a) nuts, and b) fascinating,” because of the “abiding and uniquely American belief that anyone can become obscenely rich.” Weldon considers Batman’s core feature to be his commitment to “never again”-hope, rather than obsession or vengeance. I also loved the factoid that, in the first page of Robin’s very first appearance, “a lettering error in the introductory text … elides the space between the two words ‘an ally,’ causing that opening passage to instead inform us that Batman ‘takes under his protecting mantle anally.’” Since then, Weldon says, Batman has alternated between paterfamilias/baterfamilias and loner status, always eventually rebuilding a family after a new round of writers jettisons his existing family as insufficiently Batman-like. (Frank Miller’s DKR “struck on a simple way to obviate the gay panic that so often hangs over depictions of Batman and Robin in the wake of Wertham: He made Robin a girl,” projecting all the gayness onto the Joker.) Weldon also spends a fair amount of time calling out fanboy homophobia in things like the reaction to Bat-nipples, which Weldon understands as a mockery of the hypermasculinized superhero tropes popular in 90s comics.
Weldon thinks the current adult generation of fanboys connected to Batman’s obsessive lonerdom, his technology given a real-world equivalent in their careful collecting and detailed knowledge of the Batworld. Batman: The Animated Series is, for Weldon, the perfect Batman, with just the right mix of characters kids could love and the traits adult fanboys want, as compared to the Tim Burton movies. (Which, full disclosure, I love; I’m less of a fan of the later ones, but “Was that over the top? I can never tell” is still one of my favorite lines.) Weldon thinks that Burton erred in making the Joker the killer of Bruce’s parents, because it reduces his quest to simple vengeance and makes the links between the two characters “banal,” but I don’t see that at all-Batman does still have a broader mission, and the Joker is still a mirror of his strengths and his failures; what Weldon calls a “closed feedback loop” is to me the eternal, bigger-than-life narrative Weldon says he wants from Batman. Likewise, where he sees Catwoman emerging from the abuse Selina Kyle suffers, and not from any choice she makes, that’s the opposite of how I read the film, which to me is in large part about Selina figuring out who she is and what she’s willing to do. But Weldon is confident that Tim Burton missed the “essence” of Batman, “like a moth mistaking a porch light for the moon,” or in this case a Goth aesthetic. His criticisms of the Burton version as too particularized, not universal enough, made me think of how women, too, are often dismissed in that way. Only certain kinds of people get to speak for all of us; so too with Weldon’s Batman.
So, the fangirl erasure: An easy example: “Schumacher’s two audiences, however, were split not by age but by sensibility: 1) gay men and 2) everyone else.” There may be a gay aesthetic-I was a student of the great DA Miller, I’m cool with that-but when you conflate artist with audience I get nervous. Weldon has a good point about how the 60s camp Batman was a different gay aesthetic than the 90s, post-AIDS, carrying “something harder, angrier, and more unambiguously and unapologetically sexual.” But then:
Throughout modern history, the mostly male cohort of nerds had received a given narrative’s characters and plot with deference and treated them as sacrosanct, inviolate, fixed in a permanent stasis. The flow of information ran downhill ….
In the fanzines of the sixties and seventies, alongside the familiar nerd disputes, price guides, and exhaustive inventories of every Golden Age appearance of favorite characters, some contributors had begun to offer something new-something that displayed a subtly different attitude toward the characters they loved.
Instead of simply receiving stories about Captain Kirk, or Doctor Who, or Batman, these contributors created their own. Within a few short years this movement had birthed a full-fledged genre with the blandly descriptive name of fan fiction…. The result was something the historically male nerd audience had never experienced ….
How to suppress women’s fandom, part the zillionth. (The “counternarrative” he identifies against fanboy brutalism comes from “the internet,” not people, definitely not girls.) The conflation of different types of zines is symptomatic of the assumption that transformative fandom began after and entered “real” male fandom (and was welcomed). Weldon allows Lev Grossman to say nice things about fanfic, but can’t find a single female academic or reporter to talk about it. Grossman’s article is good, but in combination with the rest of the book, it feels tone-deaf. As Weldon sees it, transformative, more inclusive fandom arose “between the 1997 of Batman and Robin and the 2005 of Batman Begins” and fanfic and cosplay “began to truly infiltrate nerd culture” (emphasis added). Two separate groups emerged: “a male-dominated contingent that prized the rigorous and exacting reproduction of costumes, props, and characters, and a weirder, queerer cosplay community that assumed a less demanding and more playful approach.” Condescension much appreciated, because playing Rule 63 Bucky Barnes is definitely less demanding. Especially when you film a comic.
Weldon clearly likes the creativity of “Pimp Vader, Gender-flipped Wonder Woman, and Steam-punk Ghostbuster,” but it’s notable that these are all guy’s roles. Supposedly, had Batman and Robin come out in 2005, “hard-core nerds would have hated it just as much as they had in 1997, but theirs would have been one reaction among many. The world had changed.” Note again the implicit identity of “hard-core nerds,” which apparently I never was. Likewise, new Batman fans who liked Justice League cartoons are distinguished from “hard-core” fans, and also “alongside these new voices were cosplayers, makers of fan art, and fanfic writers.” Because I guess us makers weren’t fans of Justice League etc., we just sort of wandered in? Near the end, we learn of “a strain of hard-core comics readers who were smaller in number but who had been there from the beginning” (not that he mentioned them before): “These fans could throw down Bat-trivia, cite chapter and verse, and argue arcana with the best of them…. They were also, not for nothing, women.” I’m all for the power of the internet, but it didn’t supply us with “new agency”-we had that; you just started to notice. And in a few sentences he’s back to distinguishing us from “old-school fans.”
Weldon seems as surprised as DC that “a larger-than-expected female audience swiftly manifested on FanFiction.net.” And he contends that Batman/Joker stories set in the Nolan universe are “the eighth most popular subject on FanFiction.net,” which is … just not true. Eighth most popular Batman subject, I’ll accept, though I haven’t checked, but that clarification would raise some questions about the import of the seven above it, not to mention that he specifically says that he’s conflating “confrontations” and “romances,” which also kind of misses a pretty big point about fanfic.
Ultimately, despite some attempts to say things about popular culture (cf. the wealth observation), Weldon is mostly interested in what the different versions of Batman mean for the Batman story, rather than what different versions mean for the culture that tells them at a particular point in time. Aaron Bady’s review of The Dark Knight Rises, by constrast, is a brilliant explication of what Nolan’s movie does given its cultural surroundings.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.