Superheroes come to feast...

Superheroes are being gleefully strip-mined by Hollywood and just about everyone else.

Adrien Veidt would point out that in times of economic hardship, we turn to symbols of strength and solidity as well as escapism for entertainment. After the glut of Reality shows, perhaps we as consumers are ready for things to be more fantastic and less about the humdrum?

It helps that Hollywood seems to have picked some decent projects and seems to want to take them seriously - at least for a given value of "serious". A case in point, "The Dark Knight", which has the advantage of being about normal humans. Strip away the Batman stuff and you have a good, soild, mob thriller. Get rid of Batman and the Joker, and the idea of the movie playing out with Harvey, Rachel and Jim Gordon in the spotlight still works. Nolan's use of real locations gives the movie a grounding in reality that Burton's Gotham didn't have, and I'm pretty sure that Gotham was always based on an uneasy amalgam of New York and Chicago anyway.

Adding Batman and the Joker gives the movie another layer, pushes it into interesting and mythic territory. And let's be honest, the ongoing twisted romance between the Joker and Batman is the one relationship in the film - and the one relationship in the comics - that the fans really care about. I was pleased that Nolan allowed the Joker to say it in such loving terms, turning the idea of being completed by another person firmly on it's head. Bruce Wayne wants to be completed by Rachel, sees her as his safe haven, his Penelope.

The moment we know that Rachel is what Bruce is looking forward to is the moment we should realise that she's doomed. It's almost a war movie cliche - the war weary soldier drawing strength from the knowledge that the girl he left behind is still waiting for him.

Coming up, of course, is the Other Great Graphic Novel: Watchmen.

It's going to make an interesting movie. The characters, in their graphic novel form, are not the superheroes we're used to seeing. Batman might be an extremist, but he still has rules and he's still recognisably human. Rorschach, Dr. Manhattan, even The Comedian and Ozymandias are already a long way away from that state when the story begins. The other characters are even less of the heroic norm, which makes me wonder whether the movie will use Dan Dreiberg as the audience identification character.

Frankly, if there are still people out there who think Rorschach has an identifiable point of view, I don't want to know. Even the happy nihilism of the Comedian is uncomfortable.

This might be why it's taken so long to get the movie made. Not all of the issues in turning that book into a motion picture are to do with the technology and the technique. Alan Moore created a dense, literate, intelligent story that should more or less defy translation and, like a lot of "the movie of the book" situations some of it certainly will.

Perhaps the way to think about this is to look back at Stallone's "Judge Dredd". Without judging the man too harshly, one of his reported comments was that he didn't understand where the humour was in the script, felt that a comic book of that nature ought to be more broadly funny, which might explain why the movie captured some of the look but none of the edge. What didn't translate was the idea that you shouldn't like Dredd, that Dredd was, in fact, the embodiment of everything that is wrong with MegaCity One, and that he's a cold, mudering bastard.

That people liked him for it is perhaps a bit of a tragedy, or just shows that what Pratchett said about humans getting carried away by any new idea which includes a uniform and a slogan is true.

Dredd, Rorschach, the Comedian, Batman, the Joker...they all have something in common.
They believe. Utterly and completely, they believe in something. It can be hard to disagree with their point of view when it's presented in such a stark fashion, and there is something about that steely belief which lends them a charisma that they shouldn't have, or at least bends our will far enough out of shape that we begin to find their dissonant views harmonising with ours. Yeah, criminals. They probably deserve a kicking. Or shooting. Yeah, torture. Justified, as long as we're only doing it to bad people, and only to get information to prevent worse crimes. Yeah.

So perhaps the current infatuation with Superheroes is more of a reflection of the times than we thought?