Our Mr. Batman

I have been asked by several good folk whom I respect and whose esteem I value what my thoughts are on the casting of Ben Affleck as the next Batman. For two weeks (an eon in an age when opinions fall like rain, breed like guppies, and go stale before they've hardened in their molds) I stubbornly resisted. It wasn't shock or denial that stayed my opinion, nor fear, rage, confusion, depression or any such feelings or others along the emotional spectrum. No, the simple truth is, dear readers, I had a more selfish and puerile reason for not weighing in when the Affleck iron was white hot:

I couldn't bring myself to care.

Stay in your seats, I beg you. This is NOT another anti-Hollywood rant (though I've yet to unload all my ordinance on that subject, I promise), but I'll admit my ambivalence is more easily explained if my stance on Tinsel Town and its ways are already good n' clear to all concerned. In short: I don't like it, I don't trust it, and I wouldn't count on any of these studio bigwigs to sit on a toilet seat correctly, much less at the head of conference table where the future of film is decided by studying columns of digits. The decision to cast Affleck struck me as many things – a compromise and a calculation chief among them – but as something worth devoting a polemic of my own? No. Viewed analytically, Affleck makes an easy kind of sense:

• They were looking for an older actor to stand up and over Henry Cavill's Superman, who looks and seems quite youthful despite his joyless interpretation of the Man of Steel; an actor who would adequately fill a jaded mentor role for a still wide-eyed Supes
• Affleck has been enjoying a resurgent career thanks to Argo, inching his star up to the level of A-lister once more, but on the merits of his directorial skill and general ease with how the system works, not by stalking plumb roles
• Affleck will command a decent paycheck, but not a bank-breaker like the rumored $50 million Warner Bros. was supposedly offering Christian Bale
• Thanks to Argo and the praise/controversy/loathing it generated worldwide, Affleck is now a known quantity in the coveted overseas markets, a benefactor of the old axiom that any publicity is good publicity.

All valid points, all damn hard to argue against, and nine-tenths the reason I was neither surprised nor incensed at Affleck's selection. Hollywood is a business like any other, and businesses like sure things, known quantities, chicken instead of sushi, Sam Adams instead of Ol' Grandad, everyone's second choice. Sure, Affleck doesn't have the glaring, mercurial quality of a Wes Bentley (another rumored choice) and he certainly can't compete with Bale in the intensity department, but he is extremely good at looking bored, acting thoughtful, and furrowing his dark eyebrows down to a vanishing point resembling a quantum singularity. And that, my friends, is a fair quantity of what it takes to be Batman in Hollywood.

You'll note, I hope, the qualifier in my last sentence: what it takes to be Batman in Hollywood. We all know what we want to see from Gotham's defender in an ideal world, a world where they would make a faithful adaptation of The Dark Knight Returns, blood, Cold War, Ronnie Reagan as president 'n everything. Or The Long Halloween serialized for HBO a la Game of Thrones. Or any interpretation that allowed Batman to be Batman, free of compromise, free of PG-13 Nerf violence, free of David Goyer and his script-in-a-can formula; a Batman we got to know somewhat in Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy but with whom we never really swapped stories because we always had to hurry to the next plot point. Yes, a truly bold, truly patient, truly dynamic interpretation of the Batman might require an actor with more chops, but we'll cross that bridge if ever we come to it.  Hollywood demands something a little more beige, and for that I won't waste my breath with quibbles.

Everything else, the multitude of voices from every which corner portending doom and ruin, the johnny-come-latelys who don't remember the 90's except from the inside of a crib, and the 'real fans' – YES, thank the gods for the 'real fans', the very same who suggested Heath Ledger would 'play the Joker as gay' simply because the Oscar-winner had played a homosexual in another movie – all their shit is just glossy, graphical, World Wide Webbed-up for your protection bellyaching. I won't belabor the point by reiterating the reams of anti-Affleck complaints.  Nor will I, despite the temptation, repeat some of the truly excellent pro-Affleck research that's been cited recalling the horror and vitriol from Keaton's casting back in '88, or Hathaway's for The Dark Knight Rises, two decidedly oddball choices that ended up being home runs. And Ledger? That's too easy – no other actor suffered such a magnitude of discrimination and backlash than he; no other actor unleashed a proportionate magnitude of raw performing power that had even his harshest critics eating crow long after the poor young man was cold in the grave. Suffice to say my fellow geeks have already put in hours of homework refuting the notion that Affleck will do to the Dark Knight what Joel Shumacher did to nipples.

And you know what? All things considered, with these preceding paragraphs as my ballast and counterweights, I'm more than willing to say I'm hopeful about Affleck. Hell, I'll do it one better and say I even like the idea of Affleck. Now I DO care, and no one is more surprised about it than Yours Truly. Am I expecting him to add another golden trophy to his mantlepiece for his performance? Certainly not. But he's got a damn fine performance as the morose George Reeves in Hollywoodland to his credit (I don't think Affleck playing Batman in a Superman movie having previously played another actor who played Superman fits the definition of irony, but it's funny, if nothing else) and he knows his way around a pair of tights thanks to Daredevil.

Ah, yes. He went there. Thought we'd get away easy. But as Biff Tannen once said: “You thought wrong, dude.”

Daredevil has been the sticking point for a LOT of detractors thus far, a plague rat repellently held aloft by the tip of its diseased tail as proof that Affleck 'can't do a superhero' or that he 'ruined the character'. To this I can only say 'what a fantastic windfall for Daredevil!' For if in the intervening years since that masterpiece first grazed the cinema we've managed to forget every other thing that made it eye-watering, knee-buckling bad save Affleck's performance, then we've brought new dimension to the phase 'selective memory'. It was a piss poor movie, folks: poorly written, poorly conceived, poorly executed, slipped somewhere into the middle of the deck at a time when comic movies were still sloughing off the stigma of only being for the glavin-prone. Poor Ben had very little to work with. That he managed to get through it with his dignity and career more or less intact is testament to his ability to roll with the punches, and maybe even learn from his mistakes.

Or have we forgotten that Heath Ledger made Ten Things I Hate About You before he gave us his terrifying vision of the Clown Prince of Crime? Have we forgotten that Viggo Mortensen cut his teeth in big blockbusters not in The Lord of the Rings but in G.I.Jane? Or that before he was the curmudgeonly Dr. House, Hugh Laurie was the hapless dandy fop Prince Ludwig in Blackadder? Shall we speak of one of my very favorite actors, Paul Giamatti, who before winning an Emmy for his brilliant turn as President John Adams starred alongside Martin Lawrence in the Citizen Kane of fatsuit comedies, Big Momma's House? Shall I not? No, I think I've made my point. Writers write better with time. Actors likewise have the capacity to improve.

I know that by committing this piece to the deep of the Internet I'm sticking my neck out there and leaving myself open to backlash should our new Batman truly lay an egg. But for now let's give Mr. Affleck a chance.