Excisions: 7 (Holy memes, Batman)

I mentioned in a couple of previous posts that I decided to excise a number of the memes that were going to be part of my book. It was sufficient for a meme to be excluded that I did not envisage being able to write anything of interest (to me) in the commentary on it. I have now set myself the goal of posting the excised memes here, in an occasional series, and trying to write something of interest (to me) about them, thus proving my decision to exclude them mistaken! Also, in this parergonal space around the book, I will write about the memes without the pretense that their maker is someone other than myself. I am curious to see how this affects the nature of my writing about the memes.

This meme appeared only in Evnine’s Batman Memes: The Movie where it can be seen  behind the title, as the theme music to the 1960s Batman TV show blares. (Here’s the movie, where you can encounter the meme in its natural habitat. Be sure to have sound on, if you watch.)

There are actually quite a few interesting things to say about the meme. The title of a work is one of its acknowledged parerga (Gérard Genette devotes a chapter to titles in his book Paratexts) so this meme, functioning as a kind of ironic comment on the movie’s title, is a parergon of a parergon of the movie. And the movie is part of the parerga of the Batman Meme Project. No other meme approaches this degree of controlled distance from the first-order memes of my book.

The visual style of the meme is a deliberate throwback to the earliest memes of the Batman Meme Project and, hence, to the vast majority of Batman memes. Impact font, black outlines to the letters, font shadow, and all caps are the signature marks of the Batman slapping Robin meme (as of many others, too). Only the orange coloring is non-standard. I’m not sure why I chose that, but I think it works well here.

The meme’s language clearly picks up on the speech patterns of the 60s TV show, a fact that works in synergy with the use of the music from that show to accompany it. Significantly, it is the only meme considered for inclusion in the book in which Robin’s catchphrase “Holy [ ],” one of the most recognizable features of the 60s TV show, occurs. Batman’s response, with its somewhat pompous use of “fear,” is also distinctive. Finally, it is surely a feature of the TV show that the characters use each other’s names (“Batman” and “Robin” as well as “Bruce” and “Dick”) far more than is typical in conversation between friends. Here, both parties use the other’s name.

In all of these respects, the meme should be compared with the meme that appears, analogously, behind the title of my second Batman meme movie, Gone!:

This was, naturally, done in deliberate imitation of “Holy Memes, Batman.” Here, the use of “mimesis,” to imply (incorrectly, as it happens) that the second movie is just an imitation of the first, also allows the use of a word etymologically related to “meme.” (Unlike “Holy Memes, Batman,” “Holy Mimesis, Batman” was never destined for inclusion in the book, and hence it does not count as an excised meme and will not show up for its own entry in this on-going series. Very likely, this is the only acknowledgement this meme will ever receive.)

Once again, I have succeeded in making myself regret the excision of this meme from the book. I’m especially sorry not to have any left that use the “Holy [ ]” form. (It crops up, significantly, in the commentary on another meme.) The parergon of a parergon of a parergon thing is also kind of metal.