Batman Knightfall is comprised of
several different stories that begin with an event and continues through the
resolution of that event. Because of
this, the theories learned in this class were fairly easy to find an example
pertaining to the particular theory from each week. These theories taught me a lot about how to
analyze a piece of popular culture and gave me the ability to learn more from
popular culture rather than just get entertainment from them. Of the many theories that I learned from this
class, the one that seemed to have the biggest impact on my understanding of
Batman Knightfall is the analysis of heroes and celebrities.
At first there seems to be little
to no difference between heroes and celebrities. Reading about the two subjects and looking up
definitions I was able to find that they are similar, even sharing some
synonyms in the dictionary, but rather different in understanding and
definition.
Of course when we think about how
the theory of a hero applies to Batman it is obvious, the bad guy threatens the
people of Gotham City, and Batman stops the bad guy becoming the hero for the
people of the city. We can also see how
Batman’s true identity, Bruce Wayne, fits the definition of celebrity, making
Batman/Bruce Wayne fit into both sides of these theories.
Through these analysis’ I found it
interesting to see how the culture was shaped by popular culture artifacts such
as Batman, not just this story but the character himself. It seems to be hard to tell how much of the
culture is shaped by the artifact, and how much of the artifact is shaped by
the culture. What it seems to me from
these analysis’ is that each shape each other, and when an artifact influences
the culture, the culture influences the next artifact, until after many iterations
of different artifacts, the culture and artifacts have changed dramatically.
