Christian Bale – Balegasm Blog

Grant Morrison, leading comic book writer, about Batman:

I got interested in the class element of Batman: He’s a rich man who beats up poor people. It’s quite a bizarre mission to go out at night dressed as a bat and punch the hell out of junkies. And then he goes home and lives in this mansion.

That’s an interesting element and I never looked at it that way, but if you think about it, it’s really almost outrageous. This recent article in the Boston Globe addresses a similar issue the author has not only with Batman, but with the whole superhero genre:

Here’s the thing, though: All of these developments are defensive actions designed to shore up a genre of fiction that is, at its core, immature — that reacts to real-world issues of conflict and corruption with power fantasies that solve nothing. This extends even to Nolan’s 2008 “The Dark Knight,” possibly the genre’s high-water mark. Can any movie truly be hailed as the Greatest Film of All Time, as its fans would have it, when it traffics in costumed villainy and requires the Batpod to make things right? Don’t really great movies address how things are rather than how we would like them to be? Isn’t that what growing up is about? Or is that a foolish hope in an entertainment culture that profits by keeping us in suspended adolescence?

I know, I know, my own supervillain name should be Captain Bringdown. And, actually, I don’t mind one superhero movie, or even a few. But when a genre this fundamentally built upon daydreams and wish-fulfillment becomes the motor of a billion-dollar industry, one worries about the things we’re not paying attention to. Is there evil in the world? Sure. Can it be dealt with by Superman spinning the planet backward? Uh, not really, and why waste time thinking so?

So Batman is immature, and a class enemy. But is he also gay?

Back to Grant Morrison:

He’s very plutonian in the sense that he’s wealthy and also in the sense that he’s sexually deviant. Gayness is built into Batman. I’m not using gay in the pejorative sense, but Batman is very, very gay. There’s just no denying it. Obviously as a fictional character he’s intended to be heterosexual, but the basis of the whole concept is utterly gay. I think that’s why people like it. All these women fancy him and they all wear fetish clothes and jump around rooftops to get to him. He doesn’t care—he’s more interested in hanging out with the old guy and the kid.

That would be an interestig aspect to pick up in a reboot, LOL