The Taste With Vir: When the character dwarfs the story

Do you know that the new Flash movie has two different Batmen? (Or should it be Batmans?) That there is also a Supergirl who has nothing to do with the Supergirl from the popular TV show? That even the Flash of the movie is unrelated to the Flash whose TV show ran for nine seasons?

And it is not just a TV vs. movie thing. The two Batmen of the Flash movie have nothing to do with the Batman played by Robert Pattinson in last year’s hit movie The Batman.

You may well ask: what the hell is going on? Isn’t there just one Batman? Why are three of them floating around at the same time?

Well, the movies are doing what the comics have been doing for a long time. They have realised that, at least when it comes to DC, the super-heroes are much better than the stories they feature in. Batman is one of the great fictional characters of the 20th century. Superman is as big (if not much bigger) a deal as James Bond or Sherlock Holmes.

With all great heroes of pop fiction (especially those who appear in more than one movie/book), the character dwarfs the story he is features in. Think of Pierce Brosnan’s Bond. Was there ever a great Brosnan Bond movie on par with say, Goldfinger or From Russia With Love? Personally, I find it difficult to watch any Brosnan Bond movie more than once. But who can deny that Brosnan made a good James Bond? He kept the character going for over a decade.

So it is with Indiana Jones. Despite a stinker like Temple of Doom, Harrison Ford kept the character flourishing and the series bounced back with The Last Crusade. And the dud that was Crystal Skull has not stopped us from looking forward to the release of the new Indiana Jones movie this month.

The problem with James Bond is that, like Indiana Jones, he exists in a linear universe. The studio had to wait till Brosnan was too old to play Bond before replacing him with Daniel Craig and starting the story all over again. Now that Craig’s Bond is dead, the franchise will get another reboot. But it’s always one Bond at a time.

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Harrison Ford is already much too old to play Indiana Jones but because he refuses to give up the role (there were rumours that the producers were talking to Bradley Cooper about replacing him which had to be denied when Ford got upset), they will have to wait till he is 90 (he is already 80) before recasting the role.

The comics got around these one-hero-at-a-time problems by a) creating stories that were out of the ‘continuity’ and b) discovering parallel universes. Way back in the 1960s, DC’s writers created ‘imaginary stories’ (as though all the other stories were grittily realistic!) in which, say Superman married Lois Lane. The following month it would be back to business as usual with Lois pursuing an unmarried Superman.

Then DC started doing one-off special stories that were said to be ‘outside the continuity’. So, the Batman of Frank Miller’s influential 1986 comic book The Dark Knight Returns had nothing to do with the Batman who then starred in his own book for DC. Both versions appeared on the newsstands side by side.

This gave DC space for many versions of the same character to appear simultaneously, something movie producers can’t do with say, James Bond. (Though inventive producers have managed to create three different Sherlock Holmes: Johnny Lee Miller, Benedict Cumberbatch and Robert Downey Jr played different versions of Holmes simultaneously across TV and movies).

Then DC took to fanciful science fiction. Long before science seriously entertained the idea, the comics told us that there were many parallel universes. Each had a version of Earth which was similar to ours but also different. So, each Earth had its own Batman who was not exactly the same as our Batman. Some universes served as life-after-death outposts for heroes who no longer existed in the comics. Superboy, for example, existed in a ‘pocket universe’ created by the ‘Time Trapper’. (If you can figure out what that means, good luck to you.)

Comic book writers have often thought that this parallel universe stuff has gone too far. DC’s first Crisis on Infinite Earths series (which killed off Supergirl) was an attempt to tell us that there was only one universe. But, of course, it did not work.

These days TV and the movies work on the multiple-versions-of-the-same-hero principle. Comic fans use phrases like ‘the DC Extended Universe’ (or ‘DCEU’ for short) to try and explain what the hell is going on.

Sometimes, the concepts of outside-the-continuity and parallel-universes are combined. In the new Flash movie, our universe’s Batman is played by Ben Affleck who seems to have forgotten that last year, they sacked him and Robert Pattinson took over the role in The Batman. (Affleck was dropped from that movie though he was once set to direct and star in it.) But Pattinson’s Batman was ‘outside of the continuity’ apparently. So, the second Pattinson Batman movie will also pretend that the events of The Flash movie did not happen.

But they did happen and more is to come. In the new movie the Flash tries time travel only to arrive in a parallel universe where he meets the Batman of that universe’s Earth, played by Michael Keaton. And when he finally returns to our Earth, he meets Bruce Wayne who, this time, is not played by Affleck but by George Clooney.

Is your head spinning yet? Mine certainly is.

But just as comic fans have accepted that there are alternate realities for each hero so have TV and movie fans. In 1984, Alexander Salkind, who had made the Christopher Reeve Superman movies, released Supergirl, starring Helen Slater which was a huge flop. The following year, DC killed off the character in the comics. And yet, she never really went away. In this decade, she has had her own TV series. And a new Supergirl turns up in the Flash movie. As does Helen Slater’s Supergirl!

The Supergirl series on TV is part of what is called The Arrowverse, a TV-only universe of DC characters that has nothing to do with the movies. The Arrowverse has its own Supergirl, its own Flash, its own Superman etc. None of them have very much to do with the way the characters behave in the movies. The TV shows pretend that the movies don’t exist. And vice versa.

Does this not confuse people? Apparently not. Superhero fans are willing to compartmentalise their own parallel imaginations. A character may be dead in one continuity but still be flying around in another.

In story-telling terms, this may have long-time consequences. If the Flash can appear in a TV series and in a movie, played by two different actors as two different characters inhabiting different environments and this can be accepted by audiences, then the possibilities are limitless. When Amazon bought MGM, the studio had a share of the rights to the James Bond movies. There was much speculation then that Amazon might try a comic book–like stunt with Bond.

Why wait for three years for a Bond movie? The movies could be produced at their own pace but why not do a Bond streaming series? A weekly TV show? Different actors could pay Bond simultaneously. There could be spin-off shows starring Bond characters. Q could get his own show. So could Moneypenny.

Don’t laugh. It’s exactly what they have done with Batman. The Gotham TV show is about the city where Batman grows up. Pennyworth is about the adventures of Batman’s butler. The Joker is a movie about a Batman villain. (A sequel is on the way). The Penguin will soon have his own TV show. Robin starred in a show called Titans. Catwoman had her own movie.

So now that all entertainment is following the lead of comic books, and Hollywood is dominated by superheroes, get ready for the next wave: forget about the stories themselves. Just clone the characters and milk them for everything you can!

Let’s have lots of James Bonds. A dozen Darth Vaders. Two or three Indiana Joneses.

It works for super heroes. Maybe it will work for all characters.