In a follow up to this post I wrote a couple of weeks back, I am ridiculously happy to say that Paley Center posted the entire ‘Batman at 75’ webcast on their website here. If you’re a Batman fan, or even if you’re not, but at anytime in your life you were at all inspired by Batman, it’s worth your time to watch.
On a side note, I tried to embed it into my blog, but discovered some rather fascinating discrepancies. The embed code simply wasn’t working, and according to wordpress’s policies: “Flash and all other embeds are not allowed in WordPress.com posts, pages, or text widgets…” This doesn’t explain to me why youtube’s embed codes work…I guess they aren’t flash based? I always thought they were, but I guess I was wrong. C’est la vie.
Near the end of the talk, one of the things that Kevin mentioned as being a contributing factor to the Dark Knight’s popularity is the dichotomy of Batman and Bruce Wayne, and how we all live with this type of mask. Batman is the person; Bruce Wayne is the mask he puts on when needed. For us, there’s our public persona, the face we put on throughout the day. Then there’s our private persona, the person we are behind closed doors, the person we have the most difficulty sharing with people, even our friends and loved ones. For some people, they may be one and the same, or at the very least, they believe their personas to be one and the same, but I believe that for most people this is an accurate remark. It’s part of our humanity, and helps us relate to Batman at a very human level, beyond the lack of superpowers and what not.
So what is the third mask?
Well, I’m a Wil Wheaton fan, and both him and his wife Anne maintain blogs. In Anne’s latest blog post (as of this date), she writes about her PTSD, past abuse, therapy, etc. It’s very well written, honest, and open. I was going to post a reply saying something along the lines of:
Wow! That was very well written, honest, and pretty damn gutsy to put yourself out there like that. Especially in this day and age, with so many keyboard warriors and trolls permeating the internet. I must admit that I probably would have refrained from writing something so personal.
This relates to experiences on online gaming (which can feel like treading a minefield at times) as well as past “discussions” I’ve had in forums in the past, where the most innocent comment can set people off, and they feel a need to bully you into submission. That’s probably the first time I ever heard the phrase mentioned: Don’t feed the troll.
So in the age of social media with twitter, facebook, instragram, linkedin, etc., is the internet persona we promote and maintain our third mask? I’m fairly confident that with at least some people, how they act online is vastly different from how they’d act if they were standing next to the person they’re “yelling” at with their keyboards and internet slang. And perhaps, we judge others far too often and too harshly based on the third mask alone.
Then again, I’ve been wrong before. Perhaps I’m over-thinking it, but at least a part of me thinks this is a topic worthy of discussion.
