Heroes vs. Villains - 1989 vs. 2009

So Batman (1989) with Michael Keaton, Kim Basinger, and Jack Nicholson was just on the telly.

Of course, being a child of the 80s, I watched it! Michael Keaton is the best Batman, hands down. But that's off topic.Kim Basinger, as our heroine / requisite damsel in distress is playing a role that now, twenty years later, she would be crucified for. She faints constantly, screams like a little girl at every turn, and is entirely useless.

Nowadays, of course, she'd be proficient in muay thai and a wise-cracking bitch who allowed herself to be rescued. In Batman, not so much. She tweaks men around by their noses, but is not sexually "liberated" in the sense of our heroines today. Nicholson's Joker is, I think we can all agree, epic. It's indicative of the time period as well as of Nicholson's personal "style" and works well within Burton's vision of the topic.

But this Batman character... he's a cock-up. Nowadays, we expect our heroes to be nigh on infallible. They can be bested, physically, because we all know they will come out on top in the end. But they can't make stupid little mistakes. Batman flies directly towards a Joker who is standing there, with his arms out, waiting. Of course, we all know what that means - Joker's got a trick up his sleeve. How does Batman not see this? So he winds up with a shot-up chassis and a spectacular crash on the steps.

Today, that wouldn't work with audiences. Batman making such a monumental - yet inanely stupid - mistake? Pfft! Test audiences would be leaving the theatre and claiming it was just not realistic for a hero. Why? Because we don't want our heroes to have any sense of human failing. A sense of humanity, yes. A tortured sense of morality, yes. But an everyday, human inability to thwart his nemesis at every turn? BAH! Unrealistic.In the same vein, the best villain ever created - by anyone, anywhere - is Maleficent from Sleeping Beauty.

Why? She has no humanity, and no reason for being a villain - she simply is. She eats, sleeps, and lives the evil nature we all want in a villain. But it's not because she was thrown in a vat of acid. It's not because she was an unfortunate looking child who was raised by penguins. (Right, Batman Returns is on now) It's simply because she is evil. Her raison d'etre is raising hell. And yet, in 1959, this was an acceptable villain for a children's movie.

And now? Not only do we expect our heroes to be infallible, but we expect our villains to be at least recognizably human. We want to know the backstory for our villains, we want to know why and how they tick.

Strange. That we identify more with our villains than our heroes, and expect more of the heroes than the villains.

Or perhaps not so strange - perhaps we're only hoping to better understand the darkness in humanity while providing ourselves with a reason for not raising to the level of our heroes - we can be excused for not measuring up with a superhero in all that we do, simply because of their superness. Villains are, in a word, human.

So we can be forgiven for acting like one.

But then again... we're talking about movies.

Not real life.