I Watch TV: Batman: Caped Crusader

 

Batman: Caped Crusader

It’s the 1940s, at least in style and technology, and Gotham City has corrupt officials, dirty cops, flamboyant criminals and a gang boss trying to take over the city. Who stands against them? The Batman, vigilante. A few honest cops, the Commissioner James Gordon, under pressure from the mayor, and Detective Renee Montoya. Lawyer Barbara Gordon (Commissioner’s daughter). Maybe – maybe – the District Attorney Harvey Dent, if he can avoid his political ambitions from stopping him.

In each episode a criminal of some sort begins a crime spree and various characters investigate. Sometimes Batman is at the centre, other times he’s a more peripheral figure. Some interesting ones are where the corrupt cops Flass and Bullock insist on an interest. They want to capture and unmask Batman as he makes them look bad.

This is good Batman (especially it’s good Bruce Wayne; after someone makes a crude comment about his mother’s pearls at an exhibition of jewels he punches him and is ordered to see a therapist – Dr Harleen Quinzel). He does some period-appropriate detective work, he dives through windows he punches and leaps about, dodging bullets. This is a cartoon, though not for young kids, and a little constrained by the (slightly under) half hour episodes. Occasionally we could have seen more of the regular people of Gotham, or even a bit more of the great and the good.

It's the 1940s in many ways, but not in others. Firstly the race, gender and sexuality diverse characters. Most obviously there’s the female Penguin, Oswalda Cobblepott who runs a criminal empire from the Iceberg Lounge, a floating nightclub, presumably outside city limits/ in international waters. The Gordon’s are not white, and no one comments. Harleen Quinzel goes on a date with Renee Montoya and no one blinks an eyelid (it goes poorly mostly because a crime plot intervenes, these episodes are packed). And of course Flass is black. None of this in noted, except Montoya being a woman in the macho police department. It’s very 21^st century.

Another way it’s not the 1940s is the gaping absence of WW2. Is the US not yet at war? Why is no one interested in it. Is it going on and no one is talking about it? That might explain something of the women in senior positions yet still, that’s an impressive silence. Or perhaps it’s over, and the supervillains are a creation of the horrors and technology of war. That’s the most plausible explanation, yet in that case someone ought to mention they were a veteran. They’d seen things, or to appeal to fellow veterans. This is an aesthetic 1940s Gotham City, not one that wishes to engage with the real 1940s in any significant way.

Watch This: Cool period re-imagining of the vigilante superhero
Don’t Watch This: Batman beats people up, fails to make things better