Bring Back Doofus Batman Attention, Ben Affleck: The Dark Knight is better when he's an idiot.

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http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/08/bring-back-doofus-batman/279038/



The fan conniption over the fact that Ben Affleck will be the next Hollywood Batman offers one more reminder of Batman's greatest superpower. He is, in the words of Richard Cook, "really, really popular." It's that popularity that allows him, with no other special abilities, to come out on top against magic wishing-rings, super-speed, and god-like aliens. And it's that popularity that causes fans to lose their minds when an actor with insufficient gravitas or grittiness or what have you is foisted upon them.

For my part, I can't say I really understand why Christian Bale's self-satisfied Batman is supposed to be so, so much better than Affleck's whiny, wooden Daredevil. But, to be fair, I've rather lost patience with super-popular Batman altogether. I'm still fond of Frank Miller's hyperbolic, crusty, hard-ass from the Dark Knight Returns comic book — but if I want to read that, I can go back and read that. I don't need the 600th retread.

Besides, the greatest Batman stories aren't the ones where he's the ultra-competent grim and charismatic avatar of grittiness. The best ones are the ones where he's a doofus. So many people gush about how mature the bleak, dark version of Batman is — how Heath Ledger's prisoner's dilemmas show us something dirty and true about the human soul, or how Alan Moore shows us what superheroes would be like in the real world when he makes his Batman-analog Rorschach into a demented right-wing obsessive who smells bad. I, too, quite like Heath Ledger's Joker and love Watchmen. But the truth is that the most sophisticated and knowing Batman we've had thus far isn't Frank Miller's or Alan Moore's or Christopher Nolan's. It's Adam West's.

Under the guise of gritty realism, Nolan and Miller give us a cheerful, libertarian, cowboy power fantasy — billionaire savior as Bernhard Goetz. The ‘60s television Batman, on the other hand, presented fantastically wealthy would-be do-gooders as helplessly square busybodies, fighting crime less out of sober obsession than as a kind of decadent game of dress-up. When those stately Wayne bookcases slid back to reveal the Batpoles, you got the sense that crimefighting and/or the entire society in which crime occurred was a kind of amusement park for the obscenely rich.

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1. Yeah, I could never understand the 'dark Batman' thing

It was supposed to be an entertaining character, not a psychological treatise.