What have we learned from the Ben Affleck as Batman brouhaha?
Can we even ask that a few hours later? Yeah, probably (unless you’re these people). Like much pop culture outrage, it burns passionately and brightly with
about as much duration as the lamest firework in the value pack on the fourth
of July. Personally, I’m not too invested in it. The first Superman reboot was
pretty bad disaster porn so I’m not expecting a quality sequel regardless of
who is cast. Plus, my bat-love doesn’t even come close to my Spider-Man allegiance. Still, it’s worth seeing what we can take
from this.
People Love to Rant (Shocking, I Know)
When popular culture officially made a love-child with
social media, the result was a forum for the angry little critic in all of us.
And this is a wonderful thing. As my own work argues, popular culture is best
studied from a sociological/rhetorical standpoint. I’ve got little interest in
dissecting and analyzing a text to death and suggesting what effect it has on
culture en masse (see last post). Why and how people took to their Facebooks,
Twitters, blogs, etc. to whine about Affleck will always be a more interesting conversation
than any discussion of the actual film once it comes out. Some of the tweets I saw will always be infinitely
funnier than any line that gets written into the movie. By the way, people complained about Heath Ledger too.
People Are Invested in Characters
Again, hardly shocking news here. Questions. Are certain kinds of characters
more subject to representational scrutiny? Are characters from certain genres
more likely to be scrutinized this way? What causes these deep investments with
characters, and how does that investment become altered through varying
representations of the character? What responsibilities (if any) do people put
in charge of a pop culture icon have to fan expectations and desires? Does
Affleck have a “no bat nipples” clause in his contract?
Ben Affleck/Batman is an Assemblage
Affleck might do a bang up job. I doubt it, but I was wrong
once. Did I mention people complained about Heath Ledger too? The thing is: Affleck comes with contextual
baggage of cultural associations. These are different for everyone, but a
generalized referent certainly emerges. The overwhelmingly negative backlash
proves this. The touchstones of this referent can be seen most clearly in the
kinds of comments people have made (his Daredevil and Gigli debacles seem to be
big ones). Again, this isn’t exactly a mind-blowing observation (I’m trying
really hard here, huh?). But Batman, as
a character, is an assemblage too (like any pop icon with a long history). No
two people love Batman for the same reasons, but it’s more interesting to
rephrase that as: no two people love the same Batman. Take this further. No two people love or hate the same celebrity
(a celebrity being, to the general public, somewhat of a character his or
herself). Mash the personal (but not without those cultural touchstones)
feelings about a celebrity and a character together and you’ve got a complex
network of varied investments ripe for exploration.
Where might that exploration lead? It depends on what you’re
interested in. But if all identities, to a certain extent, are characters we
play, and if all identities are assemblages of who you believe yourself to be
interacting with who others see you as, you might wonder how your own
surprising, unexpected, or “out-of-character” actions/responses similarly
disrupt other people’s expectations. I echo and alter a question from the
previous section: What responsibility do you have to control your own expected
image in the eyes of the Other (insert Lacan here). Can you? In fact, I want to take this opportunity to coin the term "being Afflecked" to refer to a moment where criticism highlights for people that they have a public identity assemblage that is not entirely their own.
We ended up pretty far from Batfleck at the end here. Which
is what the study of pop culture should probably do.
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