[  Currently: Listening to Lacuna Coil ]
Watching the most soapy of soapy episodes of Smallville ever it reminded me of why the team up of Batman and Superman works. Kal-El just doesn’t quite get us, Bruce Wayne understands us way too well. There is an odd psychological balance there.

That is why I sort of look forward to a Justice League movie, to see that paring of yin/yang. Compare messianic Superman Returns to the gutterfighting, bitter war of Batman Begins. Obviously characters from two different ends of the spectruum, but with a common thread. Trying to do right by people.

But these swing to extremes, the Dark Knight series (1 and 2) speak volumes about this. Superman is perverted by the system, Batman is forced to take him down to defend the values that at one time Supes himself would have held dear. But there have been more then a few series where Supes had to seek Batman when he crossed the line and went to ground.

We still rooted for Batman though, didn’t we? He’s human and can have broken limbs.

While they get seperated, I would argue that these two characters are fairly indetachable in modern psyche. Our shining warrior for truth and justice, our dark thirst for revenge at all costs. Both are viable archetypes and should both be at war and sometimes fighting side by side.

So, poor Supes, left with out the council of all to human Bruce Wayne spirals into melodrama. Things understood by, but alien to the Bat-Noir.

I was hoping they might use Ollie Queen as a humanizing force on Kal-El, but they played him suprisingly close to type. And rightly so, Green Arrow was always about saving the WHOLE WORLD. He was the classic neo-socialist. Green Arrow fought the battles in the street because he thought they echoed larger social injusticies.

Bruce Wayne never felt that way. Every fight in the street was a personal affront to him.

The only DC hero that could have replaced Bruce Wayne as a humanizing factor on Smallville would be The Question, and he was always a bit too weird of a DC hero to use indescriminately among the striaghts.