Yes, Robin, Superheroes Do Exist

The Joker wore face paint. Two-Face was a burn victim. The Scarecrow was a drug dealer. The Batmobile was never named. The Batcave was a warehouse. And Gotham City was Chicago.

This was not a movie to make you believe a man could fly. This was a movie to make you believe a superhero could exist.

If the first era began with Superman and died with Batman and Robin, then this second era of superhero movies, beginning with X-Men, has been less of a desire to experience the childlike glee and more a desire to legitimize our love of these fantastical creations by making them realistic.

To make ourselves more respectable to the mundanes out there who don't understand our passion for spandex, we accepted changes to the representations of superheroes on celluloid. Superheroes could be respectable by being real. For the most part, these changes have been on a superficial level, or necessitated by the constraints of adapting decades' worth of material into two to three hours onscreen. Overall, they have retained the kind of adventurous, jovial nature common to superhero stories: Bad guy threatens city/world/universe, superhero(s) rise up to save the day. The superheroes are toned down to appear more possible in our world, but we still knew they could not be.

Then along comes The Dark Knight.

A year before the movie was released, we could see the degree to which Christopher Nolan wanted to make his Batman realistic. The marketing campaign promoted the tangibility of Gotham City through creating online virtual spaces for non-existent Gotham businesses. Just as we do for our physical world, banks, government offices, restaurants and media outlets all became as real as our postmodern notion of community.

What we finally saw onscreen was more crime drama than superhero fare. This could have been a battle in downtown New York City between a gritty young detective dealing with a serial killer hired by the mob to take down the police. Instead, it was the Joker versus the Batman.

But this wasn't a Batman of immovable parts, as the movie acknowledged with its swiveling-cowl gag. This wasn't a Batman of Batarangs, attack bats, and Bat-rappelling. There were gadgets — and, yes, that sonar was pretty fantastical — but overall they felt plausible, as we hear stories of real scientists developing invisibility cloaks. While Iron Man's suit seems plausible as far as it goes, it was unabashedly futuristic and unashamedly computer-generated; meanwhile, one can believe Batman's suit could be stitched together and worn by a modern flesh-and-blood man burdened with the passion to fight crime.

Yes, Robin, superheroes do exist — or perhaps we just really want them to. Perhaps that is one reason The Dark Knight has made so much money. Of all the celluloid superheroes to date, only he seems ready to step off that screen and take down the problems we face.

And who wouldn't want a hero strong enough to withstand all our hate, fear and doubt, and still be a symbol of hope, of what is possible with enough heart and soul? When you next see me in line for this movie, you'll know I do.