EMINENT ICONS AND PROPOSITIONS PT. 3

 

So if centric icons within a narrative are "organizational matrices," is there a better term to assign to the organizing principle? Astute readers of this blog (are there any other kind?) will guess that the previously unused term of "eminence" will now assume that position...-- EMINENT ICONS AND PROPOSITIONS.

Looking over this essay and its companion from last July, I don't think I adequately defined the organizational interactions of icons and propositions, which takes place through the agency of a master trope, rather than just tropes in general, as I said here.

I offered a definition of tropes long ago, back in 2018, but the best breakdown is that tropes describe actions: "orphan must learn the secret of his birth," "hero may refuse the call to adventure but must in time answer said call and do heroic things." In contrast, icons are like "solidified" tropes, concretized into particular entities, forces, or settings in order to invite the identification of a work's audience. --MY SHORTEST POST YET. 

The one thing I left out in the above formulation is that any professional author decides in advance what sort of proposition will govern his narrative, and this means becoming more specific as to what sort of icons will work best for his master trope. Charles Dickens can't just put "orphan must learn the secret of his birth" out there; he must decide who the orphan is-- Oliver Twist-- and what the secret is; that Oliver still has a living relative from whom he and his mother got separated. 

Thus, there's an operative difference between a "generalized trope," which can be applied to many works, and a "specialized trope," which applies only to a particular work, or a particular linked set of works. Other aspects of the work will include "bachelor tropes" that are not nearly as important as the master trope. Oliver must meet some opposition so that his discovery of his secret heritage doesn't seem to be too easy. That opposition doesn't have to be Fagin and his faux-family of thieves, so that part of the proposition comprises a bachelor trope in relation to the master trope.  

OLIVER TWIST is a monadic work with no further iterations, so its proposition is unitary. Serial works are cumulative, given that even the most stereotypical serial-- I might cite my earlier example of the Golden Age BLUE BEETLE from a related essay-- may have a specialized trope (Blue Beetle protects his city from crime) that is barely distinguishable from a generalized trope ("hero protects his city from crime.") 

However, in cases where the cumulative narratives of the series are not broadly stereotypical, the specialized trope must be refined. Will Eisner's SPIRIT varies between direct confrontations with evildoers and indirect encounters with either human error or simple fallibility. In the cover Will Eisner prepared for a Kitchen Sink reprint of the 1940s SPIRIT stories, the artist depicts a scene that doesn't literally transpire in the story "Gerhard Shnobble," but one which symbolizes a key moment in the tale. The Spirit's crimefighting activities take second place in "Shnobble" to the tragic end of the title character, which the Spirit doesn't even personally witness. Nevertheless, even in stories where the dominant action takes place in the life of a one-shot character, the Spirit still provides a moral compass for Eisner's implied reader, even when he has no impact upon the one-shot character's life. So even though the SPIRIT series started out with a specialized trope like "The Spirit protects his city from crime," that master trope became in time inaccurate because of changes in the propositional priorities. Thus a more appropriate specialized trope, capable of taking in all of the propositions Eisner offered to readers, would be something more like, "The Spirit bears witness to the many manifestations of human fallibility."  

 

AUTHENTICATING ARTIFICE PT. 3

 In Part 2 of this essay-series, I provided a broad sketch of how the specific genre of "the costumed superhero" had been treated in American movie serials, stand-alone films, and TV shows both live-action and animated for several decades. I purposely excluded narrative radio-shows, about which I have no expertise, as well as all of the "superhero-adjacent" genres, like jungle-hero tales, superspies and spacemen. In this essay, I want to include some "costumed crusaders" I omitted for the decades of the 1950s and 1960s (up until 1966 and the birth of Batmania). In addition, I'll mention some of the "adjacent" genres that arguably affected the superhero's development in movies and TV, though I'm going to set aside both space opera and all forms of archaic heroic fantasy as too complicated for this essay.

So I noted that the last serial of any kind appeared in 1956, and that American television in the 1950s did not show nearly as much enthusiasm for costumed heroes:

Though five space-opera teleserials showed up during the first decade of television's ascension, only three costumed crusader shows appeared-- THE LONE RANGER (1949-57), THE ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN (1952-58) and ZORRO (1957-59)-- and the first two of those were indebted to earlier radio serials, even using some of the same scripts. 

 

As for "adjacent types," DICK TRACY got a live-action teleseries that lasted from 1950 to 1951, which did adapt some of Chester Gould's freaky fiends, like Flattop and the Mole. Later, around the time both Bomba and Jungle Jim stopped appearing in features, Jungle Jim and Sheena both got one-season TV shows in 1955. One year later, ADVENTURES OF FU MANCHU presented the classic non-costumed super-villain with his own series. And all of the above did better than James Bond. One year after Ian Fleming published the first Bond tale, that novel was adapted into a single episode of the teleseries CLIMAX, which didn't exactly launch a new media franchise for the hero. During that decade Fleming would use more Gould-like villains in the novels, but in movies and TV the character would not catch the world on fire until nine years after the appearance of the book CASINO ROYALE. 

I also noted that though there had been a smattering of stand-alone films for live-action costumed heroes in the 1930 and 1940s, in the 1950s there was nothing but two LONE RANGER features, INVISIBLE AVENGER (a failed TV pilot issued as a feature), and a handful of "masked swashbuckler" movies. (I don't count SUPERMAN AND THE MOLE MEN, the pilot for the teleseries, even though it received theatrical release.) The only "superhero-adjacent" franchise that continued production of feature-films throughout the fifties and into the sixties was that of Tarzan. 

As for 1950s cartoons, I mentioned only the packaging of Mighty Mouse cartoons for THE MIGHTY MOUSE PLAYHOUSE, but there are others worth noting, and sometimes excluding.

The first made-for-TV cartoon was CRUSADER RABBIT, produced in 1950 by Jay Ward's animation studio. I've seen a few episodes of this cartoon-- which loosely borrowed the format of the live-action serial, albeit with episodes of five minutes at most. I don't think CRUSADER was relevant to the superhero idiom despite the fact that the opening shows the bunny dressed in a knight's armor. From what I've seen, Crusader and his buddy Rags Tiger just walked around sans costumes (or any attire but their fur). In fact, the opening cartoon emphasizes that even though Crusader wants to be heroic he doesn't have any powers, like flight or X-ray vision. As more than one person had asserted, Crusader and Rags, being an intense little guy and a big dumb guy, look like a template for Ward's later Rocky and Bullwinkle.

For comparable reasons I also dismiss 1957's TOM TERRIFIC from consideration. The titular character was a little boy with a magic hat, and he sometimes used his magic to thwart villains, but mostly in a comic manner, lacking the superhero's emphasis on action. But 1957 also introduced a spaceman/spy/superhero hybrid in COLONEL BLEEP. In this series-- some episodes of which may be missing from circulation-- Bleep, a super-powered alien with a gumdrop-shaped head, functioned as an "intelligence agent" hunting down criminals with names like Doctor Destructo and the Black Knight of Pluto, some of whom made multiple appearances. In fact, one surviving episode, "Knight of Death," may be the first time in which previously established villains teamed up on a TV cartoon, for in that episode Bleep is challenged not only by the aforementioned Black Knight, but also the Black Robot and a pirate named Black Patch. (I sense a recurring motif in there somewhere.) The same team returned in "The Hypnotic Helmets."

Even though I asserted that the TV studios seemed unwitting of the "birth of the Silver Age" in comic books, oddly 1960 opened with an animated parody of Batman and Robin. A studio known for very crude early TV toons-- one online article called the studio-head "the Ed Wood of TV cartoons"-- accepted a pitch for COURAGEOUS CAT AND MINUTE MOUSE. And as most fans know, the pitch came from the man who co-created Batman, Bob Kane. The show has its fans, but though I'm not one of them, there's no debating that CCAMM is a costumed-crusader show, in which cat and mouse used a variety of super-weapons to defeat villains. (I should also note that in 1960 Kane was still packaging BATMAN comics for DC, who would buy out Kane's contract in 1966.)

Like Mighty Mouse, Popeye's theatrical cartoons had been airing on TV for some time, and in 1960 King Features commissioned 220 new Popeye cartoons, at least some of which still showed the sailor-man using spinach-power to smite such nogoodniks as Brutus and the Sea Hag.

Briefly detouring into live-action, in 1961 one production company made the attempt to adapt another King Features property: the superhero/jungle adventurer The Phantom, but all that resulted was an unsold pilot. The same year saw the debut of a DICK TRACY cartoon show. However, though the slapstick scripts did utilize mild versions of classic Gould grotesques like Mumbles, Pruneface and The Brow, Tracy himself only appeared in the role of a supervisor, handing off the arrest-chores to four goofball detectives. Again, I disallow this one due to the downplaying of the combative mode.

Jumping back for one paragraph to the general category of live action, James Bond made his movie debut in 1962's DOCTOR NO, which arguably re-created the "superspy," realizing effects far beyond anything the genre had accomplished in serials like SECRET AGENT X-9. Though NO and later Bonds were British productions, the American company United Artists provided funding, thus tying the franchise into the American aegis. Surprisingly, it took about two years for either America or Europe to begin coming out with their own superspies. Then France initiated in 1964 a "re-imagining" of the FANTOMAS property, a three-film series that showed some Fleming-esque aspects. The U.S. launched THE MAN FROM UNCLE that same year, and WILD WILD WEST would follow in 1965 . After that, the floodgates were opened, though few imitators were as good as Fleming at creating vivid super-villains. Also, as mentioned in the previous essay, in 1963 Disney released its second costumed crusader TV-show, a three-episode adaptation of Russell Thorndyke's "Scarecrow of Romney Marsh."

Back to TV cartoons. THE MIGHTY HERCULES, debuting in 1963, deserves a quick mention, despite my disallowing archaic fantasy here, because the Greek strongman kept encountering a regular rogue's gallery, AND kept defeating them with the softness in his eyes and the iron in his thighs (if you believe the theme song). 

UNDERDOG showed up in 1964, and got right everything that COURAGEOUS CAT did wrong. The super-powered dog in the baggy long underwear had a decent rogue's gallery, though only two evildoers, Simon Bar Sinister and Riff Raff, made more than one appearance. JONNY QUEST debuted that year as a night-time animated show, and some Bond influence can be seen there as well, as in the debut episode "Mystery of the Lizard Men," with its very DOCTOR NO-like plot.

With 1965 we get into nebulous territory. The idea of adapting BATMAN as a live-action series began to get serious consideration in 1964, but it's hard to say if the earliest negotiations were known to the public. The actual show had to begin production at least by late 1965, but Hollywood would have been gossiping about the project long before the actual production. Did any cartoon shows about superheroes and their near-relations take influence from such gossip? Probably not 1965's SINBAD JR, about a heroic sailor who obtained super-strength from a magic belt (rather than a green vegetable). Nor ROGER RAMJET, with Jay Ward finally dipping his toes for real into the genre of the funny superhero. But in Fall 1965 Hanna-Barbera released its comical versions of both a superhero and a superspy-- i.e., ATOM ANT and SECRET SQUIRREL-- and the former might have been inspired in part by some notion that superheroes might start getting hot again.

And that's where I will leave things for now, because after BATMAN came the deluge.

DARK GROTESQUES AND COLORFUL ARABESQUES

As I’ve noted here and thee, most serial narratives never evolve any sort of discourse-thread beyond the level of “good will triumph over evil.” Though I’ve defended the idea of the Golden Age Superman more than once, I can’t say that the execution of the idea rises above this level in its first fifteen years.

Although Bob Kane and Bill Finger created Batman as a response to Siperman’s sudden popularity, they evolved a far more creative property than either the Man of Steel or the great majority of Golden Age serial concepts. During the first six years of the feature’s history—the period I’ve termed “Gothic Batman”—displayed a unique approach to the characters, even though the stories might appear to advocate simple “good vs. evil” morals for the kid-readers. I, like many critics, have emphasized that the early years possess an extravagant, somewhat morbid creativity that bears some comparison with the better prose Gothics. And yet, it’s recently occurred to me that those years are also marked by a certain amount of whimsical fantasy, closer in spirit to stories of swashbuckling adventure than to Gothic deeds of darkness.

To be sure, both adventure tales and Gothic horrors loosely descend from the courtly romances of the Late Middle Ages, so such an alliance has a certain appeal. I’m now of the opinion that the introduction of Robin to Batman’s grim world insured that sinister Gothicism and fanciful adventure would become conjoined; a true marriage of the grotesque and the arabesque.

(I could write a long sidebar as to why I chose to hijack these art-history terms for my own purposes, without agreeing with the way the terms are used in art history, or by such luminaries as Edgar Allan Poe and Sir Walter Scott. But at present, it seems to me that commonplace dictionary definitions back up my usages, so I’ll let it go at that.)

As I stated earlier, Batman’s pre-Robin world depicts the hero battling common criminals, malefic masterminds and supernatural horrors with stoic determination. Batman’s seventh adventure, scripted by Gardner Fox, roots the crimefighter’s joyless struggle in personal tragedy. To be sure, though, a lot of earlier heroes began with traumatic backstories, ranging from Dick Tracy to the Lone Ranger to the Shadow. Indeed, Batman’s devotion to stamping out evil—with no reference to finding the killer of his parents—bears strong resemblance to the origin of the first Phantom, who devotes himself to fighting evil after losing a parent to vicious pirates, and then passes the same cause along to his descendants. But Golden Age authors did not tend to revisit origin-tales as have later generations. In a world where Robin never joined Batman, it would have been routine had readers eventually forgot the reason why Batman became a costumed hero.

Now, I’m not saying that the Golden Age stories, as we have them, make any more reference to the origins of either Batman or Robin than, say, the CAPTAIN AMERICA title kept coming back to the origins of that hero and his sidekick. However, in contrast to most features that paired superheroes and kid sidekicks, BATMAN continuously emphasized the daily familial interactions of Bruce Wayne and his youthful ward. Thus, even if a reader didn’t know exactly how the two characters came together, he’d be able to find out from readers-in-the-know that Batman quasi-adopted the Boy Wonder because they’d shared a similar tragedy. And even if some readers never knew about these interlinked origins, the authors knew, and they played the contrast of the worldly adult with the exuberant youth for all it was worth. (To be sure, once Robin shows up Batman rarely affects his original obsessed, near-humorless attitude, though on occasion the writers allowed the Big Bat a few moments of fear-inspiring brutality.)

Batman, then, despite his handsome face and ripped body, is at heart a grotesque, because the very look of his costume inspires fear more than admiration. Robin’s costume, in contrast, evokes the fanciful spirit I term arabesque. He affects bright daytime colors of red, green and yellow in direct contrast to Batman’s night-hues, and some of his garments, such as boots and tunic, are designed to evoke famed swashbuckler Robin Hood. Even his main weapon in early stories, a David-style sling, carries an arabesque quality in comparison with Batman’s deadly looking Batarang.

The dynamic between Batman and Robin also extended to the way the raconteurs created their super-villains.

Some villains project fearful visages, just as does Batman. These include such notabes as the Joker, the original Clayface, the Scarecrow, Two-Face, the Monk and Doctor Death.

Yet others, however destructive, project images that are more fanciful in character. Thus, the somewhat shorter list of notable arabesques includes the Penguin, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the Cavalier, and the Catwoman (who, it should be noted, had as her first costume a simple dress and a cat-head mask).

With the grotesque-arabesque distinction in mind, it’s possible to see that later creative eras can be seen as putting increasing emphasis on one mode over the other. “Dark Procedural Batman” doesn’t entirely eliminate all sinister content from the feature, but the Joker becomes more of a harmless clown, while villains like the Riddler and Killer Moth never project any sort of fearful aspects. I sardonically termed the period after the Comics Code ‘Candyland Batman” because the dominant art-style emphasized lots of daytime scenes and new villains who were usually characterized by bright colors, ranging from goony aliens to goofy one-note villains like the Kite-Man and Mister Polka Dot. This overemphasis on the arabesque resulted in a downturn of the BATMAN franchise, and the following era, “Gothic Procedural,” borrows from all three previous periods, emphasizing ratiocinative detective tales and occasional forays into the Gothic, but not entirely dropping goony sci-fi menaces. Probably most of Bronze Age Batman, to which I’ve assigned no name, became almost totally focused upon Gothic images and tropes.

What I find interesting is that in the 21^st century, some fans-turned-writers have become intrigued by the arabesque craziness of the Candyland era. Grant Morrison revived bizarre figures like the Rainbow Creature, and the teleseries BATMAN: THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD celebrated all the light-hearted aspects of both the Bat-comics and numerous other DC features. Arguably, though, the biggest influence that the Candyland era ever had on the career of the Dark Knight was its effect on the 1966-68 BATMAN teleseries, which took the wacky kid-fantasies of the early sixties and viewed them through an ironic prism. (And yes, I know that they borrowed story-content from the following era as well, but the show’s producers never showed much interest in the franchise’s more grotesque aspects from any era.)

Thus, there's definitely something to be said for the aspect of Bat-mythology that Alan Moore called "funny uncle Batman." At some point in the future, I may incorporate this bachelor-thread concept into a wider analysis of the 1966 BATMAN teleseries.

DEGREES OF MASTERY AND BACHELORDOM

Back in April 2020 I formulated the term “master thread” as a perhaps less didactic substitute for the common literary phrase “theme statement.” Therefore earlier essays, such as February's CATEGORIES OF STRUCTURAL LENGTH PART 3, don’t use the term, though that particular essay does mention a “structuring principle” and its significance with the operations of concrescence.

Had I coined the new term back at the time of the February essay, I probably would have said something like, “Because a hyperconcrescent symbolic dialogue requires a very strong master thread, it’s impossible for the form termed a ‘basic serial’ to exhibit more than a fair level of mythicity.” This type of serial narrative—which henceforth I’ll term the “open serial”—lacks any potential for the closure one can generally find in the eight narrative forms discussed previously. “Closure” in this sense refers to the closure of the discourse, symbolic or otherwise, and has nothing to do with whether or not there currently exist a finite number of installments in the open serial.

The open serial, as I remarked before, can be comprised of several long or short arcs, several short stories, or combinations thereof. It’s because the open serial depends on a loose assemblage of sub-narratives that the overall narrative cannot attain closure. Not that its authors want such closure: the entire appeal of the open serial is that it gives its audience a constant situation that either does not change at all or changes very slowly. Open serials fall into three categories:

The Story with a Planned Conclusion—here, though the overall narrative may include any number of sub-narratives that don’t tie into one another, the author intentionally designs for the narrative to end with a culminating incident. LOVE HINA and many other manga fall into this category. The FUGITIVE teleseries also managed to wrap up its hero’s arc in its final season. In some cases, producers may plan for a serial to be open-ended, but upon receiving bad reviews, the show-runners successfully manage to wrap up a saga’s continuing arc just before termination, as with the one-season wonder GUNS OF WILL SONNETT.

The Story with an Accidental Conclusion—in this category, the narrative, though designed to be open-ended, is terminated by outside forces. Serials consisting of unconnected short stories, like Classic STAR TREK, have no culmination as such; they simply have a last episode. Dozens of serial narratives have simply stopped at an arbitrary point, leaving protagonists in mid-cliffhanger, a phenomenon I’ve frequently observed in the first few years of DC’s early title ADVENTURE COMICS. Up to the filming of the last episode of DARK SHADOWS, the production team apparently didn’t know whether there would be another season or not, so that the last episode concluded with a tacked-on narration explaining how things finally shook out. On rare occasions an arbitrary last episode seems to provide an accidental summing-up. MARRIED WITH CHILDREN’s final episode just happened to spotlight Kelly Bundy’s incredible lubricity and Bud’s eternal victimization, certainly a recurring motif throughout the show’s history.

The Never-Ending Story— in terms of structure this type is identical to the Story with the Accidental Conclusion, but this feature/franchise has existed continuously over many generations, executed by dozens of raconteurs. Thus, though a critic should know when the feature began, he may have no indication as to when it might end. Certainly I expect that, whenever Superman and Batman finally cease publication, I won’t be around to witness it.

All of these types of open serials are far too disorganized to maintain a master thread as such. At best—and here I reference the setup of my essay-title—one could devise “bachelor-threads,” which are, as per the collegiate metaphor, not as advanced as the masters. Bachelor-threads simply codify the most prominent story-motifs used in the open serial, but there’s no sense that they all add up to a coherent discourse.

MARRIED WITH CHILDREN, for instance, came close to expressing its own bachelor-thread with Al Bundy’s comic credo, “A Bundy never wins, but a Bundy never quits.” Still, this could use a little modification. The Bundys actually do win a few minor conflicts, but it’s usually because they’ve worked together. But because they feed off of fighting with one another, the thread might read more like, “Hell is the other members of your family.”

To segue to a serial more focused on long arcs, I could codify the thread of LOVE HINA as, “Constantly bothering girls (whether intentionally or not) gets you punched a lot, but at least that way you’re bound to wind up with a hot-looking sadist.”

Classic STAR TREK certainly lends itself to a more profound-sounding bachelor-thread, if one renders it as, “Humans, though advancing to the heavens with logic and reason, forever carry with them their primitive natures, which must always be controlled, sublimated, or, more rarely, weaponized (see “I,Mudd.”) But again, one can always find episodes that don’t exemplify this quasi-theme, usually because some writer has chosen to plop Captain Kirk down in a Roman arena or at the O.K. Corral.

A “never-ending story” is even harder to break down, since its focus may change over generations. In my essay THE MANY MYTHOI OF BATMAN, I attempted to break down the Cowled Crusader’s career into different “creative eras,” characterizing each era by the dominant visual and/or narrative tropes used by the storytellers. It would be functionally impossible to find even a single bachelor-thread that described all of the eras together. However, in my next essay, I’ll take a shot at formulating a bachelor-thread for the many disparate creative eras of the Dark Knight’s career.

SOAP OPERA SOAPBOX

I've watched reruns of the original 1966-71 DARK SHADOWS twice before this, but only in this third re-watch that I've started attempting to analyze the series in terms of its mythicity. But to even make the attempt, it's necessary to dwell on the way the series told its stories, particularly in terms to the topic of structural length.

I introduced my CATEGORIES OF STRUCTURAL LENGTH last year, in which I made one reference to the form of melodrama known as the soap opera, in my section dealing with "the long arc:"

the long arc also takes place within a larger continuity, but like the short arc doesn't entirely stand on its own. The American "soap opera" did not originate the long arc, but it's the genre best known for particular plot-lines that could be extended for weeks, if not longer.

Now, I should specify that there are two different subspecies of soap operas, and that when I made this statement, I was speaking of what I'll term the "weekday soap" rather than the "weekly soap." While there may well be any number of other subspecies of which I'm not aware, I think of "soap opera" as productions that appear five times a week on daytime television. (I presume that early radio dramas of this type, of which I know nothing, followed this general tendency.) For most of my life, television dramas that aired on a weekly basis-- almost always in the evening-- tended to be episodic stories with only marginal continuity between one another. Eighties serials like DALLAS and DYNASTY weren't the first "weekly soaps" on television, but since then they've provided a storytelling model not only for serials in the exact same mold but also those that alternate between long arcs and self-contained short stories, like most of the seasons of BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER.

Despite the fact that I'm now going to generalize on the structure of the weekday serial, I confess that I've only followed three in my lifetime: the supernatural soap DARK SHADOWS, the spoof-soap MARY HARTMAN (which was technically a "weeknight" serial), and PASSIONS, which was a little of both. Still, I believe that the typical weekday serial consists almost entirely of long arcs, short arcs, and the occasional vignette. The narrative appeal of the soap opera is that for the most part it forestalls pleasing resolutions-- perhaps very loosely comparable to the Freudian notion of disavowal-- with the result that even when a given problem seems to be wrapped up, a new problem ensues so quickly-- often one introduced through the uses of subplots-- that there's no real pleasure from the first difficulty's solution.

If it's accurate that the first American soap was a 1930 radio drama called PAINTED DREAMS, then it may be that newspaper comic strips like 1924's LITTLE ORPHAN ANNIE, began utilizing the essence of the long arc first. Yet even though a number of comic strips appeared on six out of seven weekdays-- and sometimes on Sunday as well-- the comic strip doesn't make heavy use of subplots, except to lead into the very next ensuing storyline. The weekday soap comes closer to the jumble of real life, in that neither long arc, short arc, nor vignette has dominance. The viewer seems to be seeing regular lives-- even those of 18th-century vampires-- to be unfolding before them.

Following the innovations of Stan Lee's Silver Age Marvel comics, the comic-book medium was able to master many of the rudiments of the weekday soap. Nevertheless, even though comic books had a greater potential to master narrative forms than did comic strips, they weren't published as often. Even the rate weekly comic-book feature could not develop its narrative any more quickly than could a weekly television serial.

Because there's so little resolution in the weekday soaps, the writers behind the scripts tend to repeat themselves a lot. Thus a serial like DARK SHADOWS exhibits not Nietzsche's "eternal recurrence" but an "eternal recursion," going by this American Heritage definition of the word:

A method of defining a sequence of objects, such as an expression, function, or set, where some number of initial objects are given and each successive object is defined in terms of the preceding objects. 

With this in mind, a serial like DARK SHADOWS doesn't have "continuity" so much as endless variations upon a theme, which become more and more complicated as new information is added.
The serial starts out in 1966, and its central Gothic mystery seems to be the familial background of Victoria Winters, who may or may not be related to the Collins family. Victoria's relation to the Collins past shifts into a new phase with the introduction of vampire Barnabas Collins. Though the two of them originally have no direct relation to one another-- Barnabas is searching for the reincarnation of his long-dead lover Josette, and thinks he's found her in Maggie Evans-- but eventually Victoria becomes identified, however imperfectly, with Josette. At the same time, when the actress playing Victoria leaves the show, the serial simply shifts into exploring other mysteries of the Collins family, with or without involving Barnabas.

It's almost impossible to analyze a single episode of a weekday soap like DARK SHADOWS, because the incidents of one episode are designed to lead quickly, albeit often not seamlessly, to yet more and more incidents, with hardly a breath taken to reflect upon the Meaning of It All. Rather, SHADOWS can only express any mythicity in its primary structural forms of the long arc, the short arc, and the vignette-- which I'll attempt to show in a forthcoming review.

THE PESKINESS OF POSSIBLE RESOURCES

One of the consequences of my brand of literary pluralism is that I can't dismiss any particular genre or genre-work without sussing it out for myself (in contrast, naturally, to the elitists who depend on good reputation to make their determinations). However, it can be a lot of work to make such judgments.

Take today's review on my film-blog. In the history of popular films, or even of SF-films or buddy-comedies, REAL MEN is pretty negligible. But it did serve a purpose in terms of stimulating an aspect of my "superhero idiom" theory, which I continue to refine "behind the scenes" even when not posting about it here.

In most of my ruminations on works within the superhero idiom, I've paid a great deal of attention to the resources of both heroes and villains-- by which I mean (for the most part) weapons or non-sentient helpers. This can create a problem, though, with respect to a lot of works in which both heroes and villains struggle over some item that they both want, but which isn't something the combatants can employ against one another in a fight, as Wonder Woman uses her lasso and the Joker uses his acid-squirting flower.

REAL MEN is problematic to my system. It qualifies as a "combative comedy," given that if focuses on its heroes-- two good guys in this case-- mounting a struggle against assorted enemy agents. But neither the good nor the bad guys use anything but standard firearms and mundane fighting-techniques. There is one silly moment where some of the villains dress up in clown-outfits for no good reason, and this element by itself does push the film into the realm of the uncanny-metaphenomemal, as per my formulation of the trope "outre outfits, etc." However, I found myself wondering: if REAL MEN had dropped that one visual joke, then the only remaining source of the metaphenomenal was that of the aliens, who offer humanity one of two gifts: a "big gun" or a good package." Toward the end of the film good guy Bob Wilson reaches the aliens and gets the "good package," which is meant to benefit humanity, thus foiling the attempt of the bad guys to get the super-weapon.

The viewer of REAL MEN never sees the "big gun" that the villains desire to possess. However,  the gun's function in the story is allomorphic with many of the scientific objects or processes that villains ceaselessly seek to acquire in assorted serials, such as BLAKE OF SCOTLAND YARD, LOST CITY OF THE JUNGLE, and THE MASTER KEY.

All three of these serials bear a slight structural similarity to REAL MEN in one respect. Just as the villains in REAL MEN have one metaphenomenal aspect-- their "clown posse"-- the villains of these serials usually have one or two gimmicks that lift them out of the isophenomenal domain. However, it would be easy to imagine their scripts leaving out those piddling gimmicks, just as one could imagine sending out the clowns.

In my review of THE MASTER KEY, I was at one point particularly exercised by the fact that for most of the serial the viewer sees both heroes and villains in mostly mundane circumstances, except that from the first they're struggling over a scientific breakthrough that allows one to harvest gold from the ocean. I wrote:

The Nazis, working under a mysterious figure called "the Master Key," are trying to obtain the scientific breakthrough of Professor Henderson, whose "Oroton Tubes" can harvest raw gold from the ocean, presumably without spending more than one uses for the harvesting-techniques. Despite the efforts of G-Man Tom Brant (GUNSMOKE's Milburn Stone in his salad days) and his aides, the spies do capture Henderson, but the scientist fears being killed if he simply gives up his secret. He cooperates only to the extent of buying time with requests for the materials to build the Tubes. Thus, as in many serials, both good and bad guys are sent chasing after any number of McGuffins. The idea of a gold-making device is sufficiently advanced that it registers as a marvelous phenomenon, although one doesn't see it in action more than once or twice. 

And later:

 So why is my phenomenality-category still bifurcated? In essence, though the masked mastermind and the zap-trap seem like last-minute additions to the story, they are still *centric* to the story, whereas the gold-machine is truly *peripheral."

Though I'm not going to alter what I wrote in the review, I'm reversing myself on this verdict. The gold-machine might be function the same as a more mundane McGuffin, but it is meant to change the scope of the adventure in the same way that a death ray or some similar gimmick will. The gold-making device has been originated by a scientist aligned with the Allies, but the narrative danger was that it would fall into the hands of the Axis and thus endanger the outcome of the War.

In a handful of other essays I've used this distinction between "in posse" and "in esse:"

1. A child living is in esse, but before birth is only in posse.-- from Your Dictionary's definition of *in esse.*

My original context for using these paired terms was to state that a particular work-- namely Wilkie Collins' THE MOONSTONE-- possessed clansgressive aspects *in posse* even if neither Collins nor his audience recognized them (more on which here). I've thus belatedly realized that I was only considering the resources of both heroes and villains *in esse,* while overlooking the fact that sough-after McGuffins can function as resources *in posse.* Even if the villains never actually get the powerful dingus, narrative suspense is generated by the possibility that they might-- and so the dingus-- in this case, the gold-making process-- is allied to the sphere of the villains' resources.

More on these matters as they occur to me.

MYTHCOMICS: "THE ADVENTURES OF PHOEBE ZEIT-GEIST" (1965-66)

Somewhere in Leslie Fiedler's voluminous writings, he asserts-- and I obviously must paraphrase-- that even though Western literature is replete with dozens of images of women suffering cruel fates at the hands of men, this does not necessarily make the women into mere victims. On the contrary, in some cases-- such as the classic English novel CLARISSA, written by one of the founders of modern prose literature-- woman's ability to survive the perils that ought to break her spirit provides proof of her *perdurability.*

"Perdurability," though not exactly a commonplace word, would almost do as well for me as "persistence," one of the two literary goal-affects I first categorized amidst these Hobbesian-Bataillean meditations. Persistence is certainly not a quality confined to females, but I'd argue that from one point of view it's possible to assert a logical-- though not to say "necessary"-- correlation between "femaleness" and "persistence," as well as a concomitant correlation between "maleness" and the other goal-affect, "glory."

I don't imagine that Michael O'Donoghue, the writer who created Phoebe Zeit-Geist, was thinking in quite these terms. My reading of PHOEBE is that it was meant as an extreme satire of all the "women in peril" stories that had permeated popular culture for decades. O'Donoghue might not have known Richardson's Clarissa from a hole in the ground (so to speak), but he almost certainly knew of the long tradition of melodramas that placed women in peril, perhaps epitomized by the 1914 film-serial THE PERILS OF PAULINE. Some of these melodramas put the woman in peril so that she could rescue herself; sometimes she is set up to be rescued by a more dynamic male character. Since O'Donoghue consistently places his heroine in situations where she cannot rescue herself, clearly he expected the audience to default to the latter formula-- for throughout the episodic storyline, Phoebe is almost never rescued in "the nick of time," or if she is, it is only to subject her to some even more terrible danger and/or humiliation.

This isn't to say that O'Donoghue was totally unaware of the more capable heroines of fiction. Indeed, according to an essay on THE COMICS JOURNAL site, the editors of the literary magazine EVERGREEN REVIEW asked O'Donoghue to do something along the lines of Barbarella, the saucy siren of French comics. Barbarella had debuted in 1962 and, according to Wikipedia, had three of her adventures translated for EVERGREEN in the same year that PHOEBE began. Barbarella wasn't exactly a tower of strength in the comics I've read, but she was sometimes capable of extricating herself from trouble, and so, assuming that O'Donoghue even looked at the translations, I'd assume that he decisively rejected that approach. If anything, O'Donoghue's approach with PHOEBE has strong affiliations with the ouevre of Sade, who liked nothing better than images of degraded women, though on occasion he does torture his fictional men as well.

So is PHOEBE ZEIT-GEIST a Sadean work? Well, sort of. Once Phoebe loses her clothes in the opening chapter, her lithe feminine charms remain on constant display throughout the narrative; not even at the conclusion, with its ironic "victory," is she allowed to put on any clothes. So O'Donoghue, whether or not he personally enjoyed his heroine's humiliation, played to the "sexploitational" tastes of some potential readers. Of course, the fact that PHOEBE appeared in a literary magazine meant that it wasn't overtly directed at pure porn-lovers-- not even to the extent that the original BARBARELLA was-- and in theory, one could interpret the trope of continuous exposure as hypothetically ironic. And although Phoebe is subjected to loads and loads of sadistic punishment-- including being killed outright-- O'Donoghue treats these torments in a much more cartoonish fashion than Sade. Sade would certainly never conjure up an Eskimo magical ceremony to restore one of his deceased victims, and if he had one of those victims beat to a pulp by a huge lesbian (O'Donoghue's cunningly named "Blob Princess"), Sade would have savored every wound. But when Phoebe endures this fate, she somehow suffers pain without having any wounds to mar her flesh, at least as rendered by Frank Springer's luscious, Caniff-style artwork.

I called the work episodic, and therefore there's no point in summarizing the faux-plot. What makes the work mythic, however, is the over-the-top inventiveness with which O'Donoghue tortures his bizarrely named heroine. He also takes a number of shots at other contemporary forms of pop culture. At one point the author teases the reader into thinking that Phoebe may be rescued by a super-competent Bond-like agent, only to have him killed out of hand before he even begins the case.

Strangely, though the satirist's intention may have been to lampoon popular fiction-formulas-- like having Phoebe facing the prospect of rape by a Komodo lizard-- there's a sense in which he reveals his own dependence on those formulas. O'Donoghue sets things up so that the reader never sees what happens to his imperiled heroine, thus making fun of the reader's desire to see the narrative played out. And yet, not fulfilling the narrative expectations is just as much a storytelling trope as fulfilling them. I would say that when O'Donoghue simply shows Phoebe surviving the ordeal without explanation, he's simply tapped into tropes like those of the animated cartoon, where the characters can survive insane violence for no reason but because the author says that they can. By conjuring up so many stock villains to menace Phoebe-- Nazis, poncey gays, lesbians, foot fetishists-- O'Donoghue gives them new life in this ironic form, rather than undermining their influence by creating new and more viable menaces. In any case, Phoebe may not really be a *femme formidable,* but she is at least a *femme perdurable.*

ASPIRIN FOR ANTHOLOGIES

In the previous essay I alluded to some of the phenomenological headaches I incur in trying to analyze a series like Frank Miller's SIN CITY. Because it doesn't focus either upon one serial protagonist or upon an ensemble of such protagonists, it's difficult to decide how to classify the phenomenality of the series as a whole.

But the problems of what I'll call "non-centric serials" are nothing next to that of anthologies in the medium of cinema. In other media-- I'm thinking primarily, though not exclusively, of prose, comics, and television-- every story within a serial anthology stands on its own. However, a film-anthology represents a concatenation of stories that cannot stand apart from one another, unless they are surgically separated. In some anthologies, the stories are not associated in any way, except by dint of appearing in the same collection. Some are tied by virtue of being adaptations of the work of a single author, as is the case with 1963's TWICE TOLD TALES, and some are associated through a common framing-device, as in 1945's DEAD OF NIGHT, where all of the stories may been dreamed by a single interlocutor, leaving it unclear as to whether the stories "really" happened or not within the film's diegetic reality.

Then there are what might be called "shared universe" films. This term is usually applied to franchises where some person or company owns the concept but other raconteurs are allowed to contribute to the universe. The Marvel Universe is a concatenation of franchises in which every fictional event can hypothetically be linked to every other fictional event. In contrast, some shared universes feature multiple authors crafting stories set within the parameters of some fictional universe, but each author's conceptions can be independent from those of other contributors-- or else, at very least, no one tries to tie them all together.

Miller's SIN CITY comics-franchise, one of those aforementioned "non-centric serials," never invited authors other than Miller himself to participate. However, though it might have been possible to adapt selected SIN CITY stories as stand-alone films, producer/director Robert Rodriguez chose to utilize the anthology-format. I'm sure his purpose in so doing was to sell the moviegoing public on the diversity of Frank Miller's hardboiled cosmos. The anthology-format does create some headaches for the devoted taxonomist, though.

I reviewed the two Rodriguez adaptations here last year, saying in part:

Frank Miller's SIN CITY graphic novels and the films adapted from them prove difficult, though not impossible, to classify.
The difficulty inheres in the fact that Miller's quasi-anthology series takes its primary inspiration from naturalistic sources, such as films noirs and the hardboiled detective genre, particularly as executed by author Mickey Spillane, ostensibly one of Miller's strongest influences.  However, while these works usually take their rigor from the sense that their protagonists exist in a world without miracles, Frank Miller made his mark in comic books with costumed superheroes like Batman and Daredevil. He could have chosen to make his Sin City books entirely naturalistic, but instead he injects moments of the metaphenomenal, usually dealing with uncanny forms of grotesquerie.

Unlike the comics-serial, there's no questions about what phenomenality is dominant for the first film. In my original review, I pronounced two of the first film's stories naturalistic and the other two uncanny, but I've changed my mind on that, and would now say that only the story called "The Customer is Always Right" can be deemed naturalistic.

SIN CITY: A DAME TO KILL FOR creates a few taxonomic problems, though, because it's the only work in which the phenomenality of the marvelous intrudes.

The film adapts two stories done for Miller's comics-series and two stories that Miller has not yet rendered into comics-form. By my current evaluations, the two comics-derived stories are both uncanny, while one of the "original" stories, "The Long Bad Night," is entirely naturalistic. The other original story is principally an uncanny tale due to the presence of the monstrous character Marv, but it has one marvelous element: the ghost of John Hartigan, last seen blowing his brains out at the end of "That Yellow Bastard."

And yet, for a marvelous element, Hartigan is singularly impotent. No one in the SIN CITY universe can see him as he drifts about, watching his former beloved Nancy planning revenge upon the evil Senator Roark, nor can he Hartigan do anything upon the physical plane. Only the fact that the audience is seeing things through Hartigan's spectral viewpoint confirms that the ghost is part of the diegetic reality, rather than being conjured up by mere guilt, like the spirits that haunt Shakespeare's Richard III.

Once, and only once, does the ghost get the chance to interfere. At the film's conclusion, Marv and Nancy team up to attack Roark's sanctuary. Marv takes out all the guards but is wounded, so that Nancy alone must face Roark. She attacks a painting of Roark, mistaking the image for the evildoer, so that Roark is able to wound her. However, by sheer dumb luck Roark too gets distracted by an image-- the image of the watching Hartigan, who somehow becomes visible to Roark only when seen in a large mirror. Nancy never knows what has distracted Roark, but it gives her the chance to draw down on him, and to kill him.

My review therefore classifies SIN CITY: A DAME TO KILL FOR as a "marvelous" film. Over the years I've classified other films as marvelous for the same reason: a film, being a unitary construct, cannot be just a "little bit marvelous" any more than a birth-mother can be "a little bit pregnant."

And yet, I must admit that Hartigan's ghost seems a bit like a wild card, rather than something that really belongs to the Frank Miller cosmos. The ghost serves a purpose in one of the stories, much like the element of telepathy in Wilkie Collins' novel THE MOONSTONE, discussed in part here. Certainly Miller's image of the almost impotent ghost at least coheres with his overall themes, which is more than one can say for films which toss in marvelous elements as quickie jokes, as one can see in these two films of the "marginal-metaphenomenal."

I'm playing around with some possible re-classifications that might better represent the roles played by the uncanny and the marvelous, when it is clear that they do NOT cohere with any thematic underpinnings. But I confess it probably won't provide me with an effective aspirin for all my taxonomic headaches.

SWORD, MEET CHALICE PART III

"Sugar and spice and everything nice,
"That's what little girls are made of"-- familiar nursery rhyme.

""When a dog bites a man, that is not news, because it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is news."-- Alfred Harmsworth.

In Part I and Part II of this essay-series, I referenced a transformation of will that must take place for real or fictional human females to personify the "feminine will:"

A male human being does not have to transform himself radically in order to become a vessel of all those things I associate with Nietzsche's "willingness"-- receptivity, romantic ardor, and so on. A female human being must undergo such a transformation, in order to make what I have called "the feminine will" possible.

Since I had been focusing upon the "Athena archetype" in fiction, this assumes that any fictional character subsumed under this archetype must be, like the Greek goddess, a female able to master the arts of war. This means, in the "dynamicity-terms" I introduced here, that I've been addressing megadynamic archetypes, whether they were dominantly armed or unarmed types.

However, I would be remiss if I did not follow up on the refinements I made in COMPENSATION CONSIDERATIONS PART 4, to wit:

The terms "combinatory mode" and "dynamicity mode" are new extrapolations from the established terms "combinatory-sublime" and "dynamic-sublime."

What this means is that although functionally the "Athena archetype" should only apply to female characters who undergo a transformation into a megadynamic mode, some audience-members may evince similar reactions to less dynamic versions of the archetype, which is to say any "girls" who show themselves to composed of something other than "sugar and spice." Thus even characters whose power of action is less than exceptional (either "mesodynamic" and "microdynamic") can inspire a fascination in that it's perceived as unusual that female characters can utilize violence at all. In other words, for most audiences, "man gets violent" is the equivalent of "dog bites man," while "woman becomes violent" lines up with "man bites dog."  In this review of a pair of film serials which atypically featured female protagonists, I noted:

Very few serials of the period depicted heroines who could fight.  It was a commonplace notion that any time a fight-scene broke out, any female characters would get shoved to the ground, where they would bump their heads and immediately pass out for the length of the scene. 

This may have been an extreme form of chivalry, implying that in most cases women had to be got out of the way of a real man vs. man fight, and that a bump on the head was a small price to pay to keep them from more serious injury. And yet, few if any persons of that time-period, male or female, would have really believed that women could not raise any kind of defense of themselves, either from men or other women.

Perhaps inevitably, specialized fetishes arose in reaction to the portrayal of "violent femmes." In my opinion, the three most popular at present are:

(1) BALLBUSTING. Though this fetish doesn't always concern only violent encounters of males and females, it certainly takes its cue from the real-world practice by which women, unable to equal male opponents in strength, can resort to kicking or kneeing the opponent's vulnerable nut-sack in order to discourage an assault. Since the fetish by itself does not place any priority upon fighting-skill, most fictional characters who practice this form of assault are likely to be *microdynamic*-- though of course there are a fair number of exceptions.

(2) CATFIGHTS. This fetish is by definition a violent encounter of two women. All three dynamicities can be represented here, ranging from characters who have no intrinsic fighting-skill, those who can fight with some modest skill, and those who are genuinely exceptional. While I'm not precisely a catfight enthusiast, it's my observation that a number of the hardcore fans tend to favor either the microdynamic or mesodynamic types, rather than the megadynamic types. Although their fetish depends on a trope in which women do not "act like ladies," there seems to be a sense in which the enthusiasts do not want these encounters to stray too far from the familiar associations of femininity.

(3) MIXED-GENDER FIGHTS: Fetish-scenes of this type can also encompass all conceivable combinations of dynamicity-types, but the most familiar type here will be one that opposes two megadynamic types, since this is the one that evokes the greatest sense of the feminine will that "swims against the current." As one example, I cite scenes from the 1992 film LADY DRAGON, in which Cynthia Rothrock takes out villainous Richard Norton, despite the fact that he probably outweighs her by over a hundred pounds.

I may develop these matters somewhat more in a separate essay. For now, I'll just note in passing that this argument references my definition of "impure states" in which the usually opposed phenomena of sex and violence join with one another in what I've termed "impure states."
In CROSSING THE LAWLINES PT 5 I specified that these states took two distinct forms: "erotic violence" and "violent sex." Only the first of these applies to archetypes that prioritize violence: the latter apply better to archetypes of *eros.*

TOO ILLEGIT TO QUIT PT. 2

The remarks in this essay dealt with the ways in which popular art is or is not viewed as legitimate. Of course "is not" proves far common than "is," despite those infrequent works that receive both great critical and commercial success. The cinema, even in its formative years, proved subject to the same elitist critical attitude that dominated other, older media.

In BATTLE PT. 1, I asserted that "serial melodrama" was not granted any particular legitimacy by critics of the silent-film era, and that the only ways in which it ever come close to such legitimacy was when the serious works of the period were being parodied:

If Berlatsky is correct that at some point "highbrow" critics venerated any sort of melodramas, it would only be through this arguably distorting lens, as ironic or comic takes on material that was originally meant to be taken seriously, at least in terms of rousing strong emotional involvement.

I will admit that I'm no expert on the era of silent films. However, I do know where to find experts, and I found three in the 2004 collection of academic essays ACTION AND ADVENTURE CINEMA, edited by Yvonne Tasker.

First up we have Jennifer M. Bean, whose essay "Trauma Thrills" examines in part the use of shock tactics in early action cinema, which the trade papers of the period labelled "sensational melodrama" or "thriller melodrama." Bean's express interest in "hysteria, or shock, or astonishment as a key aesthetic effect of early film" is rooted in her "dissatisfaction with the way that both traditional and revisionist historians have told the story of cinema's turn to a predominantly narrative form." She examines, among other things, the series THE HAZARDS OF HELEN, and concludes that "far from a homeostatic model that "aims at... the regulated order of the spectacle," this narrative machine is calibrated for spectacular excess"-- a remark that I find to be in line with my own observations about the relevance of Bataille's concept of "expenditure" to popular fiction.  She also notes that the highbrow film-maker Sergei Eisenstein is known to have studied HAZARDS OF HELEN for the purpose of "his experiments with shock-like montage techniques."


Second, Richard Abel examines "The Culture War of Sensational Melodrama," asserting that according to the trade papers of the period, most of the audience for "sensational melodramas," whether in serial form or not, was "the ordinary moving picture audience," as opposed to the more well educated upper classes. He mentions, too, how cinematic melodramas usurped the popularity that had once belonged to stage melodramas of the late 1800s and early 1900s, though his chief concern is to point out how American audiences had an early flirtation with melodramatic movies from France. However, the audience's interest in exotica waned in deference to home-made products, and Abel notes that the audiences of the time rejected what is probably the only silent French film that's anything to conjure with these days, 1913's FANTOMAS.


Finally, Ben Singer offers the most complete picture of "serial melodramas" within the greater context of general film melodramas. Today one of the greatest short-hands for silent-film thrills is that of the feminine beauty tied to the train-track-- winsomely spoofed in the cartoon DUDLEY DO-RIGHT-- but Singer mentions a male character, a "tenderfoot," who gets tied to a train-track in 1907's THE BAD MAN, and is for good measure rescued by his girlfriend.

More importantly, Singer points out that D.W. Griffith, "the finest director of melodramas in the feature-film era," learned his craft while working on "blood and thunder melodrama" with his short films for the company Biograph, roughly from 1908-09. Many of these have not survived, but Singer, drawing on trade journals, presents a panoply of effects that are not especially comic in tone: "extreme moral polarity, abduction, brawling, brutality, binding and gagging, murder, and 'infernal machines' (intricate death-dealing contraptions used to prolong suspense.)"  In keeping with Bean's remarks on the transition from early sensational melodramas to films with a "predominant narrative form," there's something satisfying about knowing that Griffith, often lauded as the Father of Film-as-Art, once did a melodrama, THE FATAL HOUR, in which a detective was doomed to be killed by a pistol tied to a ticking clock.

Singer provides a summing-up that ought to put paid to any notion that sensational melodramas were regarded, by audiences or contemporary critics, as comic in tone. Rather, "they epitomized a new, or at least newly accentuated, cultural appetite for powerful stimulus." It was an appetite that did not conveniently disappear once the relatively more sophisticated works of the feature-film era, for even the more restrained dramas never entirely got away from the need to stimulate and thus direct its audience with the allure of the forbidden and the illegitimate.

THE BATTLE FOR BAT-LEGITIMACY

Once again, a commentary on the 1966 BATMAN  show by Noah Berlatsky provides me with more grist for my mills, which, as the saying goes, grind exceeding slow. I'm not debating his take on the particular Bat-episode he cites, but I will respond to this passage in terms of the fannish history involved.

In part it seems like Batman comic book fans have been wary of the show precisely because it situates superhero comics not in the relatively sober tradition of gritty pulp noir, but in the (often comic) tradition of serial melodrama. Yet, as this episode is well aware, that melodramatic tradition is in some ways actually more high-brow, or more accepted as high-brow, than those supposedly more validating pulp sources. 

First, I have to take issue with the implied distinction between "gritty pulp noir" and "serial melodrama." Melodrama itself is a capacious category that takes in any work, in any medium, that makes an appeal to sensation rather than Aristotelian *dianoia.* Merriam-Webster's primary definition is relevant even though I don't agree with its comment re: "characterization":

a work (as a movie or play) characterized by extravagant theatricality and by the predominance of plot and physical action over characterization

One may think of "pulp noir" as connoting the arty detective stories of BLACK MASK, or the highly regarded films noirs of the 1940s and beyond. However, to the extent that they depend on extravagance and the emphasis on plot over character and/or theme, all of them are melodrama.  As far as the Golden Age Batman is concerned, though, his main influence from the pulp magazines stems from the even more outrageously melodramatic pulp-hero tradition.  It's common knowledge in fan-circles today that the very first Batman story in DETECTIVE #27 was a swipe from a SHADOW story.

I'm not sure that I would call even the more respectable forms of pulp melodrama entirely "sober," whether one is talking about the Continental Op or DOUBLE INDEMNITY, but the term can be fairly used in a comparative sense. The most famous pulp melodramas are "serious" rather than "comical;" ergo, they are more "sober" than a work than seeks to spoof those tropes, as the teleseries BATMAN does.

Admittedly, Berlatsky isn't talking about all melodramas, but the sort of "serial melodramas" that BATMAN frequently imitates, particularly in the Riddler episode cited. But if one is speaking of the sort of serials that commenced in the silent years of American filmmaking-- that is, films that purport to tell a story broken up into short chapters-- then it's questionable as to whether the majority of these were comic in nature.

I'll cover the matter of silent serials in a separate post, but for the time being, I'll put forth the generalization that most of them were not comic in tone. Comic send-ups of adventure-stories have a long history, though, and silent film had its share, notably Buster Keaton's SHERLOCK JR. I suggest that when modern fans think of silent melodrama films at all, they're seeing them through the lens of their spoofs. This is understandable but inaccurate; a little like assuming that medieval epics were all funny because Cervantes is better-remembered than the epics he was satirizing in DON QUIXOTE.

If Berlatsky is correct that at some point "highbrow" critics venerated any sort of melodramas, it would only be through this arguably distorting lens, as ironic or comic takes on material that was originally meant to be taken seriously, at least in terms of rousing strong emotional involvement.By this logic, William Dozier's BATMAN might find himself in the same category as Douglas Sirk's witty inversions of women's melodramas.

But what should this mean, if anything, to those readers who wanted emotional involvement from their BATMAN stories?

For the answer, Stay Tuned Till Tomorrow, Same Bat-essay, Same Comics-Blog.