I suppose we should be grateful to Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice if only for giving us something to argue about instead of Trump v Clinton: End of Mankind. I've received a number of messages from folks telling me that the movie is wonderful and/or terrible and that anyone who says the opposite doesn't know what the hell they're talking about.
And I suppose there's also something to be said for any movie that can whip up that diversity of opinion and passion. I once heard a filmmaker say, when asked what he wanted his films to not be, "Inconsequential." Since I didn't recognize the guy's name then and cannot recall it now, I guess his films were just that…but it's not a bad goal to shoot for.
Anyway, people: You don't need to write and try to convince me not to listen to those who say it's the greatest/worst thing since sprocket holes were invented. I don't see this as an issue about which I must have an opinion…and if I did, I'd go see it myself. For what it's worth, there have been lots of versions of these characters — in comics, movies, TV, everywhere — that friends of mine loved but which left me, at best, indifferent.
I'm not a particular fan of characters so much as I'm a fan of characters as done by certain creators. I like some interpretations of Superman and not others, some interpretations of Batman and not others. A point I should have made in yesterday's essay was that there's a fundamental difference between characters or properties that are controlled by their creator(s) and those that are owned by a company. When they're owned by a company, they're controlled by whoever's in charge of the company that week — who may or may not understand the property or may feel that you maximize profits by saturation-bombing, marketing various versions by various creative subcontrollers.
Some of those versions may be wonderful, some certainly will not be. Some may even lose what was great about the property in the first place. I'm not among those who believe that a character is or was always handled best by its creator(s). Other versions can be very good and can even be more popular than the original. But once a character becomes a community project, its nature changes. It becomes more hit-and-miss. It becomes something that goes from hand to hand, rather than the singular creation of one creator or one team of two or three creators.
A lot of us loved Calvin and Hobbes because of the clear, consistent vision of its sole maker, Bill Watterson. If Mr. Watterson passed away and his heirs sold his property to a big corporation, they might do some neat things with the material but they'd surely do a lot that made us cringe or feel that something we loved had been despoiled.
It helps me, as an appreciator of good work, to differentiate…to not expect all the different team-produced versions of Superman to match or be as consistently good as the best comic book versions created by tiny groups of collaborators. It also helps to remember the story of the author whose novel was made into a very bad movie.
You've probably heard this tale. Someone went to the author and said, "Oh, how could they have destroyed your wonderful novel like that?" And the author showed no anger, no despair. He just pointed to a shelf and said, "They didn't destroy my novel. My novel is sitting right on that shelf, just the way I wrote it!"