Once you see The Dark Knight, you’ll understand the inclusion of the Rachel character and that it wasn’t simply a ‘Hollywood conceit’. It delivers.

And personally, I’d much rather have a love interest than Robin.

Thanks for your discourse. You make many excellent points.

But regarding the whole “Spiderman isn’t dark” thing, um, I guess they haven’t read the “Back in Black” arc?

A ghostbusters were the ghostbusters aren’t the main characters? What? Sorry, I love the Office and I’m sure those guys would write a great flick, but I’m just not on board with that idea.

More Battlestar = Frakin Awesome.

Also, I think its funny how many actors these days are saying in reviews that they wanna do the Riddler in another movie.

Thanks for doing this every week, I love this feature!

You’re thinking the Steve Engelhart & Marshall Rogers Batman stories from 1977/1978. I was talking about the O’Neill/Adams stories from circa 1970. But those Engelhart/Rogers stories were great also however I’d point out that Silver St. Cloud was pretty much the first serious female relationship Bruce had and we’re talking since he debuted in 1939 forty years prior. Sure there was Vicki Vale in the mid-50s but she was more a reporter-pest in the Lois Lane mold than a true love. As for the balancing factor preventing Bruce from becoming a sociopathic monster, that was Robin’s role. He represented that lost youth stolen from him by (in the comic) Joe Chill when his parents were murdered.

Of course, as others have said, nowadays the Robin thing is too questionable/inappropriate to be taken seriously without all the Freudian subtext being added. As a kid that was never there for me. And as a kid the idea of being trained by Batman was appealing and it was easy to see Robin as someone to identify with. This was the main reason sidekicks were so popular for super-heroes in the 40s — lots of kids had absent fathers thanks to the war and the depression. I had an absent father.

There is a part of Bruce Wayne that is human, that would like to have a normal life. It’s not just about a love interest, it’s about another conflict every bit as important to Batman/Bruce Wayne – the need for love. Unless you want your Batman to be a sociopath.

But I agree about Katie Holmes. The character herself didn’t bother me in the context of the film, though.

This was a big reason I didn’t care for Batman Begins: Katie Holmes was a girl and I couldn’t stop thinking of her as some inconsequential girl. There was never an analogous character in the Batman comics to her. Bruce was always described as a playboy, someone whom you always got the impression had decided women were a distraction and rarely ever got serious with. I guess it made for some internal struggle but let’s face it — Batman already had enough internal struggle without having a childhood love interest mucking things up. The logistics of juggling a double life preclude the conscious decision not to get deeply involved with women.

I understand they replaced Katie Holmes in the new film (haven’t seen it yet, waiting for the DVD) and I think whatshername is a better choice for the character than Katie Holmes but really — the decision to include a love interest for Batman is merely a Hollywood conceit and anathema to the whole concept. Totally unneccessary and just a distraction from the real story.

Batman has always been a prepubescent fantasy and really that’s the way it works best, at least in my nostalgic mind. I discovered Batman (the 60s TV show in reruns and the groundbreaking Denny O’Neill & Neal Adams comics ofthe early 70s) when I was 7 years old. I liked how Batman/Bruce had just far too much going on to be bothered by icky girls who usually turned out to be dangerous femme fatales like Talia al Ghul anyway. Yes, it’s naive but it was my childhood, dammit, and I gotta stick with that opinion.