Batman Trailer

So there’s a teaser trailer for the the new Batman film.

We can certainly debate whether or not there’s a great crying need for another Batman movie right now, and indeed there’s also a lot of criticism of the Batman character as a concept overall, some of which I think is pretty valid. On the other hand, whatever we think of the suitability, wisdom, or desirability of another Batman movie coming out, we’re getting one, and since I remain a fan of the character and don’t have another idea for this week’s blog, here are my thoughts.

First of all it looks like it might be very dark and bleak, which probably would not be exactly a shock given the subject material, but at the same time I’m not sure you reinvigorate or refresh the franchise with yet another dark take on Batman. The dark aspects of the character obviously attract a lot of writers, and fans, so there’s a reason we keep going back to this well. And at it’s core, the story of a kid whose entire life is dictated by childhood trauma is, uh, not exactly fun.

Or at least, not obviously. But that doesn’t have to be the story of Batman that you tell. One of the things I think is powerful about many characters that endure for years and years is that you can tell their stories in a lot of different ways, making them different, yet somehow still the same. Sherlock Holmes is one. King Arthur is one. So, I think, is Batman.

So how else could you do it? Well, at least one of my friends would like to see a return to Campy Batman, although I think it might be a tough sell these days. I am still very attached to Grant Morrison’s take on the character, which made Batman into an almost mythic, larger than life figure, who talks about not just ‘fighting crime’, but ‘fighting the idea of crime with the idea of Batman.’ Morrison’s Batman is not a scared, broken kid, he’s the figure who will always be there on time, always has the plan, always comes through when things seem the worst. That’s a character I’d love to see someone take on.

I have also seen it mentioned on Twitter that part of what makes Batman special is the ‘found family’ aspect, the friends and allies he is surrounded with: Robin(s), Batgirl(s)/Oracle, Nightwing, and on and on. Again, Morrison called that ‘the first truth of Batman’ and ‘the saving grace’ – that he was never alone, he always had help – starting with Alfred, and building from there. A Batman story about the family we find through our toughest, worst moments: there’s another one I’d be allll over in a way I’m not nearly as excited by what was in the teaser trailer.

But enough of what I’d like to see, what’s actually there? It looks dark, although it might be a noir-ish mystery, which would be a neat take. I like the way Batman looks, and the Batmobile design seems cool. I’m not entirely sure why, but there’s something in the greeting cards and notes that immediately made me think of The Long Halloween.

Which brings me to my biggest issue – if someone hadn’t told me that the villain in this is the Riddler, I don’t think I would have recognized the character. The bandage/tape covered figure we see in the trailer looks much more like Hush, and I guess it could be a fakeout. But while I understand perhaps not wanting to present one of the goofier versions of the Riddler, I’m not sure it works to slap the name on a completely different character. Which, in fairness, we don’t know enough about what they’ve done here to say. Just reacting to the trailer, though: I have misgivings.

I really hope we skip the origin story entirely. One of the best things the new Spider-man movies did was leave out the parts that absolutely everyone knows and get to telling a new story. We don’t need another look at how Bruce Wayne became Batman for like, at least a generation, if even then. Everyone knows that bit. Tell us something we don’t know.

They found an even more cornball line to replace ‘I’m Batman’ with, and I hope that indicates a least a bit of a sense of humour.

We’ll see. I’ll see this film, of course I will, but like the Riddler, I have questions.

Thanks for reading.

Lovecraft Country

So we’re only one episode in but I already want to write something about this new series Lovecraft Country, primarily because I almost didn’t watch it. I saw plenty of people mention it and lots of ads, but I confess I dismissed it almost entirely because, to be blunt, I am really very tired of H.P. Lovecraft. I find him a figure that looms entirely too largely over SFFH fiction today, especially when so many writers are doing what he did so very much better, these days. ‘Lovecraft’ is one of those names that I think we could mention a lot less (you can probably guess some others) and I think we would lose very little thereby. (Among other things, I think renaming the genre ‘cosmic horror’ rather than ‘Lovecraftian’ would be a positive move)

But, of course, this reveals mostly my own ignorance, for I had not heard of the book Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff, upon which the series is based, and the concept of both – a young black man navigating both the racism of the Jim Crow United States and horrifying monsters – is a better one than I expected just from the title.

One problem we often wrestle with, dealing with writers like Lovecraft, is what to do about the abhorrent ideas about race and culture that underly the stories that can still be enjoyable to read. Lovecraft Country spends a brief moment having its main character (Atticus Freeman) discuss the problem, more or less right off the jump. And it is a problem. Do we ignore the racism in the work of a writer like Lovecraft? It’s so integral to it that I’m not certain that you really can, but obviously you don’t want to build on that foundation either.

Lovecraft Country chose what I think is a fairly bold and elegant solution by making racism central to the story it tells. At least to judge from the first episode, the racism of 1950s America is at least as big of a threat as whatever horrible things live in the woods. Lovecraft’s stories, the parts of them that work well anyway, are about human beings struggling to cope with forces far more powerful than them, that they cannot really hope to defeat, only to perhaps survive. Although the writer himself would probably not have appreciated the parallel, it’s not a bad analogy for racism, when you think about it.

But because people are (again, based on ep 1 anyway) the real danger in Lovecraft Country, so far I would say that although I enjoyed the show very much and am looking forward to more, I didn’t really get that ‘cosmic horror’ vibe from it, not yet*. In Lovecraft people and their doings are the next thing to insignificant beside the immense malevolent forces that are out there. In this story, so far, people and what they do are the problem.

Now, that tends to be the kind of fiction I like (as you will know if you read much of this blog), so I’m happy to see them go down this road. I think recentering some of the things Lovecraft imagined on people is ultimately the right decision, although ‘make the story about people’ is kind of what I always think writers should do.

Anyway, all of which to say that if you were like me and dismissed Lovecraft Country, you should consider checking it out. If the rest of the series is like the first episode, it’s going to be very good indeed. And now I need to track that book down.

Thanks for reading.

*-The <<<SPOILER ALERT>>> opening scene with flying saucers and Jackie Robinson exploding Cthulhu was definitely into over-the-top territory, and if more of the series was like that I’d be delighted, but to me that still wasn’t ‘cosmic horror’ the way it is usually defined.

The Geranium

If you follow me on Twitter or Instagram you’ll have seen/heard me mention my garden from time to time and perhaps post pictures. By ‘garden’, I mean ‘plants in containers’, because what I have is a deck and some space to put a few pots and boxes on. It isn’t much, but my plants give me great pleasure and peace each summer, although somewhat unavoidably, nearly all of them are only with me for a few months.

There is, however, this one exception. I have had this geranium plant for 18 years now, which is a long time for a geranium, really. I got it the first summer I had a garden, on a tiny little deck in Montreal. Since then it has moved apartments and cities with me, and I have kept it alive through winters inside with not enough light, one repotting, and one near-disastrous misjudging of the danger of frost.

It looks a little rough, if I’m honest. Its shape is kind of a mess, and its flowers that used to be a deep deep red now come in the faded pink that you can see in the picture. It’s not as leafy as it used to be, either, but it hangs in there. There was one winter, in one apartment that really lacked for a window that let in natural light, when the geranium was down to one tiny green sprig, and really took all summer to recover from it.

But it did, more or less.

I could, of course, replace it with a new plant that would have more and brighter blooms and fuller foliage and all the rest of it. I don’t even remember what I paid for this geranium, all those years ago, so I’ve certainly had my money’s worth out of it.

But I’ve never even considered doing so. I like this plant a lot, and I’m proud of it in a way. It has been through a lot, and it shows, but it still hangs doggedly on and grows a little and blooms a bit, as it can, and it seems to me it makes the most of every summer. (I have a better window for it in the winters, now)

I think many of us are like my venerable old geranium plant, showing the effects of things we’ve lived through and circumstances rather beyond our control. Perhaps we don’t produce whatever we’re meant to produce in exactly the way the wider world would like to see, but we do our best as we can. And when there’s sun and space to bloom, we do. As we can.

So I hope the geranium forgives me for the times I haven’t given it the best of care, and I hope it enjoys each summer on the deck, in my garden, as much as I enjoy having it there. I like to think we understand each other, this old plant and I.

(Why yes, I was a bit uncertain what to write about this week)

Thanks for reading.

Best of all time

So if you are involved in the world of SFF, you will probably not have been able to avoid seeing a bit of a controversy that emerged over the weekend, having to do with the recent Worldcon and Hugo Awards. A lot of issues came out of all of it, and many of them have been written on very well by people directly involved and I’m not going to try to ‘me too’ that discussion here. The main points have been said, and said very well, and now both writers and readers are gonna wait and see what the response will be.

One thing that is rumbling on a bit that I’d like to write about a bit tonight is the question of ‘the old guard’, and how much time we should spend on writers of the past today. Is it somehow necessary for either fans or writers in the genre to go back and read ‘the classics’? Do we need to continually pay homage to authors from decades past? This debate is still playing out as I write this tonight.

It is clearly the time for a sports analogy.

If you have ever been a sports fan or hung around any of them for very long, you will probably have encountered a conversation about who the greatest player of all time is or was. Baseball, football, hockey, whatever sport, it seems to be a universal question, and it can make for a fun discussion around the TV – has any player surpassed, say, Babe Ruth? Is the greatest NHLer Wayne Gretzky, or Bobby Orr? You can even get into rather SFF-y scenarios imagining how players from different points in time would match up against each other, and if you have the right sort of interests, well, it can be entertaining to kick these questions around. I’ve done it a fair bit myself.

But of course, then there’s reality. Because if you really did bring Babe Ruth forward through time and put him into an MLB game today, he’d almost certainly strike out on like 3 pitches and swear off the game forever because he’d never seen anything like a 97 mile an hour breaking ball before. Go back and watch NHL highlights from the 1980s, and you will realize that a fairly ordinary player from today’s league would have terrorized those teams for like 300 goals a season because the standards of defensive play and goaltending are so very different. It’s true for every sport you look at.

The perhaps not-as-fun answer to our question of ‘who is the greatest player of all time’ is whoever the best player in the world is right now, because today’s athletes are bigger, faster, and stronger than ever before, better trained and better coached, and play the game at a far higher level than anything seen in the past. They play against more diverse competition too, and although it’s a challenge many sports are still working on, it’s fair to say there’s far less athletes excluded from the field than in past generations. So whoever is at the top of the field right now stands as the best athlete in the strongest field of athletes, ever. It’s not necessarily a fun answer, but you take a minute and look into the question seriously, and you know it’s the right one.

None of this detracts from the achievements of past athletes – the first person to break a 4 minute mile still did what had never been done before – but today a 4 minute mile is just the minimum standard to be considered competitive at the distance. There’s still a lot of enjoyment to be had from watching great performances from the past – I still get a little tingle watching the increasingly-distant last time the Canadiens hoisted the Cup. But I also know that that team, in today’s league, would not repeat the feat.

So all of which to say that I would apply the same principle to writing. If you want to know who the best SFF writer of all time is? It’s whoever the best writer is right now, because they’re writing in a much larger and more competitive field than ever before, for readers with far higher expectations, and as much work as there still is to do, that field includes such a wider array of voices than it ever has. We can have one of those fun debates about who, precisely, that person may be, but I don’t think there’s any serious argument to be made that the best writer of today is not the best writer ever, any more that you could really truly argue that you could bring (say) Gordie Howe forward through time and have him dominate today’s league.

As a historian I always have a certain amount of love for the past, and always will. Studying the history of a thing is, to me, intensely interesting. But it’s not (as I am also very personally aware) interesting or even relevant to everyone, and the past is not more important than the present. For some people, learning the history of SFF will be of great interest; some people will not care. Some people will enjoy going back and reading stories from 50 years ago just as some people enjoy watching classic games from past World Series. Probably far more watch the game that is on tonight, and so they should, because they are seeing the game played the best it ever has been. And if you pick up the stories being written and published by today’s authors, you are reading the best fiction that has ever been written.

What a wonder. We should celebrate it.

Thank you for reading.