Yes, it's the difference between being childlike and childish, and part of the difference is self-consciousness.
Perhaps I overstate it - there is a difference between self-conscious sentimentalism (i.e. "how nice it is to be feeling this" without regard for the object of the feeling) and being twice-born in the sense of knowing that one's earlier feelings/experiences were simplistic and perhaps even delusional, but yet grasped at something real which can be grasped by working through it. (The point of GALAXY QUEST is that Star Trek may have been a simulacrum, and in many ways an absurd one, but it's too facile to just be cynical about it.)
One problem may not be that BAtman comics could not in theory be great literature, but the content of what is being praised. There is a tendency for some fantasy genres to develop in ways that are presented as adult and mature, when they are really brutal and nihilistic:
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But if Hanson had bothered to use his intellect, which is undoubted, then he might have seen that the story has a tendency which, far from supporting Hanson's own beliefs and values, should have troubled him deeply. The superhero is more rooted in moral reflection than any other genre. In the course of their battles, heroes and villains often spout whole ethical debates. And this is one of the appeals of the genre: the classic image of a single individual placed in front of the responsibilities and demands of power. Now Frank Miller came in, in about 1978, as a particularly eloquent and passionate defender of normal ethics and morality, especially of the laws by which men live and that stand as a barrier between society and chaos.
However, somewhere between the beginning and the end of his great run of Marvel Comics' DAREDEVIL character, Miller went mad. His fascination with violence became sickeningly dominant, in the same way as his artwork moved from the stylish to the brutal, and later to the stylishly brutal - bestowing on unspeakably odious material the gloss of a vicious visual refinement. In a small number of limited-run comics series ("mini-series" and "maxi-series") featuring the characters of The Batman (DC Comics) and Elektra (Marvel Comics), he set out with horrifying clarity his new view. I wrote what I thought of it at the time, and I have never seen any need to alter my judgment; what follows is drawn from an article written some twelve years ago, and should explain just why Miller rewrote history to present society - even Spartan society - as divided between a gutless majority and a healthily brutal vicious minority that breaks all laws to deliver its salutary violence.
Now I hope I am not the kind of person who just throws around the words Fascist and Nazi as a catch-all for anyone who disagrees with me. I have learned, both from the pages of history and in the streets of the city of Rome, what Fascism is. And when I say that Frank Miller's mind turns to Fascist ways of thinking and acting as naturally as the needle turns to the north - just as when I say that Marvel Comics' most important franchise is basically Nazi in orientation - I mean something very specific and detailed. Frank Miller cannot be described as a Fascist, because there is no properly Fascist or near-Fascist body to which he can attach himself in America, and therefore no way for the basic tendency of his ideas to become self-conscious. I think the cast of his mind is certainly Fascistic, just as that of Alan Moore is fellow-travelling or even Communistic; I see that not only in his work, but in his attitude, which is hostile in a rather rabid and yet unfocussed manner, always ready to pour invective on any fancied enemy - especially large, impersonal, distant ones. It is my view that Miller is as close to Fascism as any artist in America.
In both ELEKTRA: ASSASSIN and THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS, Miller's moral is: the brutes are right. To cope with the world as it is, you have to be brutal. The way to deal with the Russian bastards (ELEKTRA: ASSASSIN was created when there still was a Soviet Union) is to scare them to death. (And consider the significnce of the fact that this story, which implicitly suggested that America was losing to Russia because democratically elected politicians were either gutless or in league with the Devil, was created and published under Ronald Reagan.) By the same token, the way to deal with social disaster is to organize a vigilante committee led by the Batman. Everybody else loses: psychologists are pap-minded incompetents, big business is corrupt (one characteristic of the genuine Fascist and Nazi is his intense distaste for big business) and elected politicians - well, in Frank Miller's ELEKTRA: ASSASSIN, elected politicians are the Devil. Quite literally the Devil. The Devil enters the world through the electoral process, and the country and the world are saved by a Strong Man with a military background, who insinuates himself into a position of supreme power without anybody voting for him, and proceeds to strong-arm everybody else into doing what's good for them under threat of machine-guns. It is impossible to miss the tone of exultation in the last page of the maxi-series - damn straight!
It becomes clear that Miller resents all the slow work of compromise, negotiation, backtracking, law enforcement, discussion, opposition and sheer bloody-mindedness that is a fundamental part of democracy. He has no patience with civilized measures. Behind the work of convinction that any elected politician must carry out to take the masses with him, there is only the smile of the Beast. The institutions are corrupt to the core, a field for the Devil to play with (yet another typical Fascist aspect is the sick fascination with magic, especially with magic as power - irrational power).This is Miller's mood and mind since the last few issues of DAREDEVIL. I can tell you that I left ELEKTRA: ASSASSIN feeling soiled, as though I had been in touch with dirt. Miller's world has no grace, no simplicity, no softness, no love, and no courage: only obsession and cruelty.
And in this sick world, only the explosion on to the scene of a positive new element, militaristic, vindictive, violent, cleansing, healthily brutal, can clean the Augean stables. When the Bolsheviks, after a single day of pretending to respect the elected constituent assembly of Russia, threw it out, the officer performing this despicable duty used a sentence that went down in history: "The Guard is weary". In the same way, Mussolini, in the speech which broke the last democratic resistance in Parliament, said: "I could have turned this grey, dumb, deaf hall into a bivouac for volunteers". There you have it: the weariness, the irritation, the burden of greyness, compromise, inglorious management of events, visible deal-making perceived as corruption; this is the Fascist's attitude to normal democratic life. And bear in mind that there is a fascination in it. We Italians learn Mussolini's threatening sentence in school, as an object-lesson in Fascist bullying and violence, but the significant percentage of votes the Fascist party MSI had throughout the First Republic - from 3% to 5% at every general election - prove that, on some minds, they had exactly the opposite result. A part of society, however small, is always drawn to violent short cuts.
Miller’s two famous Batman mini-series state this even more clearly than even ELEKTRA: ASSASSIN. In BATMAN FIRST YEAR, the Batman charges the whole civic leadership of Gotham, en bloc, not so much of having robbed the city, as of having "fed on its spirit". The metaphysical tone is important, because the true Fascist is never so much angry about specific acts of corruption as about the general sense that his and his people's lives have been devalued, emptied of meaning. It shall never be repeated enough: Fascism is the attempt to recover a lost sense of meaning through the use of systematic brutality. Fascist brutality, whether real or only threatened, means a recovery of meaning and sense in a life that is felt to be have been made senseless by the vampiric group usually referred to by the dreadful word "they". The flaunted uniforms, the songs, the parades and festivals, all represent a protest against this loss of meaning.
In THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS, we have the extreme result of this same mindset: the corrupt institutions have not so much collapsed as been made quite irrelevant: the streets belong to the cleansing brutality of the grim Man of Destiny. The whole thing, while a complete flight of fancy, dismissing from its sight half the factors of American life, is in detail, and very unpleasantly, a blueprint for a specifically Fascistic movement. The Batman seizes control of the city’s disaffected youth, the thugs and the muggers, and turns them into squads of strong-arm enforcers. He is even shown on horseback, like Mussolini; I do not think any other Batman writer ever showed him in such a pose, wholly out of keeping with the character as a creature of night and shadows. And nobody who knows anything about Fascist history can miss the creepy similarity between the Batman's strong-arm squads, who don't need rifles, and Mussolini's squadracce, with their blackjacks and bottles of castor oil, whom the police watch "clean up the city" without intervening. Two successive Commissioners of Police who stand aside and allow old grim-and-gloomy to deal out justice any he sees fit, both repeating the same mantra: "it is too big for us". It is, in fact, History, the goddess that justifies anything the true Fascist does. And anyway, the story implies, the unleashing of “justice” squads on a strife-torn Gotham City, at the command of a self-appointed hero, is probably is a good thing. And this is also creepily similar to many very real policemen, generals and public administrators in Italy and in Germany, who consented to Fascism and Nazism, not just to the party as a political power, but to the brutalities and street violence. For them, too, “it was too big for us” and anyway it was probably a good thing.
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