Published With Thanksgiving

“Because, right now we see as if through a distorted mirror, but in the future it’ll be like seeing face to face. Now, I know only parts, but, one day, I’ll know as I am known” (1 Corinthians 13.12).

Once upon a time, movies about comic book heroes and villains were rare. And good ones—those made on more than a shoestring budget—could be counted on one hand. No one took costumed folk from the funnybooks seriously. And, then, 1989 rolled around.

Batman was, in the year of its release, the fifth-highest grossing film in history. It had big names like Jack Nicholson and Michael Keeton in the main roles. It had the director who’d done Beetlejuice. And, it had a different look for its hero.

At the time, kids of my age thought of Batman as he’d been portrayed two decades earlier by Adam West—a serious rule-keeper surrounded by camp and the BAM! POW! and CRASH! every time there was a fight. He had a cool car and poles that slid down to the Batcave and a lot of gadgets. But he wasn’t serious. He wasn’t, for lack of a better word, adult.

Burton’s Batman changed that perception of the character, not just in my mind but in the culture. The gray suited, blue-cowled figure in his day-glow town had been replaced by a quiet figure in black surrounded by an art deco city.

The film didn’t reinvent the character. The Batman of the comics has never been the person the old TV series led us to believe. He was a vigilante, a detective, and a haunted boy grown into a man. The movie just helped change our perspective, gave us a new way of seeing someone many of us had known for years.

That’s the magic and the power of stories—they can change our perception of something with which we’ve grown far too familiar. This is exactly why, for centuries, stories have been seen as something dangerous, even subversive. Whether they’re told through books, movies, video games, or passed along orally from one person to another, stories are a means of seeing the world around us in a way we might never have imagined possible.

Paul’s words to the community in Corinth are about perception, how we understand the world around us. How we see, he writes, is as if we were looking through clouded and darkened glass. The image before us seems obscured and distorted. And our understanding—of God, one another, our world, and even our selves—is incomplete.

It’s funny, thirty-plus years later, that Batman is now almost always portrayed as the darker, haunted figure and the Adam West version almost forgotten. I don’t think I want the silliness of the old television show to return, but I think it might be nice to see a version who broods more over mysteries than his past. After all, Batman, like any character in real life or fiction, is never just one thing. He’s as dependent as we are on the stories we tell and are told about us. Stories that define our worlds and how we see and interact with them.

Stories that, may help us see the world more like it could be.

Jesus, my living story that walked amongst us, help me to read, tell, and preserve stories that help me and those I love see the world through eyes like yours.