We watched the Batman last night and for the first time since Watchmen I feel like the grimdarkery of DC Comics had a PURPOSE.
Overall, I’m very, very back and forth as to whether or not I liked the movie, but it DID feel like it had more purpose, more message than almost any previous DC Comics (or maybe superhero) movie. Whereas I feel Marvel’s sort of “gotten it” for quite some time – not just that their movies have an inherent sense of JOY to them – but that their “heroes” are… well… HEROES! e.g. People who may be conflicted and who make mistakes but sans the huge moral grey area that DC’s characters seem to revel in.
I know plenty of people who claim that “good guys” are boring – but I do sort of think that authors of fiction have a responsibility for what they’re putting out into the world, and just as – yes – negative, misleading, clickbait sells better – yes – I think negative, misogynist, revenge fantasies ALSO probably sell better. But aren’t we responsible for what we spew into the universe? The messages we espouse?
Anywho – I feel that the revenge fantasy, the Batman who didn’t pull his punches, who revelled in his violence sans moral consequence, exploded into the scene with Christian Bale and Christopher Nolan in the early 2000s. Before that Robocop and Darkman had certainly enjoyed their cold, uberbrutal heroes, but they were intelligent meta-commentaries not just on their means and methods but on the media itself. The Crow and the Matrix made it beautiful and consequence-free to shoot everything and everyone in sight as part of the hero’s journey and Blade sort of pulled those threads all together – but it was really Batman Begins and Sin City that seemed to say “no, really, sex and violence – THAT’S what we really want our heroes to be!” Less: heroes that inspire us to be better than ourselves, more: “what would ‘normal’ people do if they had superpowers” in the name of reality? Oh, what a horrible reality.
That says a good deal more about who these directors and movie execs are than who “normal” people are. It’s the Trumpian glorification valuing someone who doesn’t have a filter over someone who has a moral sense of their own responsibilities in the world. We no longer have to feel guilt over our negative traits, much less control them…
Ha – actually this quote from flightstightsandmovienights.com pretty well sums it up “… He’s basically what most people would really become if they were given superpowers. He’s drunk most of the time, anything he needs or wants he just takes”. [they have a great list of ‘every superhero movie’, this is from their write up on Hancock]
I’d argue if that’s how we see ourselves – well – we NEED our heroes more than ever!!!
The last gasp of positive role-model from DC was Superman Returns, which I actually Loved because it DID depart from the grimdark – as appropriate for Superman – but DC Comics learned their lesson and quickly fell further and further into the hole of desaturation and darkness, almost comically so, with a gun-toting Batman and a murder / mayhem Superman…
Zack Snyder was great for Watchmen, though many would argue he missed the point, making beautiful set piece cinematic violence is what he was BORN to do – but he has a LOT to answer for when it comes to how we conceptualize HEROS.
Sigh. Here I am, not having really written in the Journal substantively for months, and you’re getting a treatise on the Batman without every quite getting to the Batman… (but I cry MY JOURNAL!!! and go on doing what I want!)
So – the Batman of 2022 goes even FURTHER down the desaturation and darkness hole to the point that the majority of the film is lost in a murk of dingy reds and black obscurity – but as I said at the beginning of this rant – it feels like it has a PURPOSE.
By the end of the film, Batman recognizes that his own trauma, his own darkness and burgeoning sadism, has weaponized the madness of his enemy. If you believe that Matt Reeves and Robert Pattinson are capable of such meta-messaging, I’d LOVE to say they’re self-aware to say “look at what we’ve done to our heroes, and then look at the world around us – is it any surprise that if mass media holds THIS up as the ideal then the masses consuming that media do THAT [insert January 6th, regularly accepted mass shootings, violent insurrection as response to public health measures, personal freedom trumps personal responsibility]”.
I’m probably reading into it all. I certainly wish that if this IS the message of the Batman, they’d been a little more clear about it. Subtletly is fine for fine art, but with a superhero blockbuster, subtlety isn’t usually part of the palette. I WANT to give them more credit for the META – but I fear that they REALLY thought that the moment of message was Zoe Kravitz in a skin-tight costume delivering the SHOCKING MESSAGE “let’s go take down powerful white CEOs together” before moving right along.
In any case – as I think about it more, I think I might be in danger of really, really liking this take on the Batman. The roaring car, the brutal scowl, the cartoony contrast in physicality between the hulking Robert Pattinson and the miniscule, wasp-waisted Zoe Kravitz. The plastic, strangeness of the Riddler’s face when he’s finally revealed. The turnabout, the mystery, the horror-movie pacing and terrifying theme of FEAR as a weapon, actually fermenting and bubbling over in a way that no other Batman has perfected.
I AM beginning to think that rifles pointed down at crowds, IEDs in vans, reasonably accomplished mass-murder plots seem almost irresponsible to place in movies nowadays. I am kinda shocked we don’t have more copy-cat efforts (remember when people were Livestreaming beating random people on the subway? wasn’t that cool? let’s remember to do that peeps! it’s waaaay easier than emulating the ‘hero’ with all that training and fancy gear).
OH – my one really real complaint?
Squirrel suit?
Really?
slap
Oh.2 – the whole Nirvana / Kurt Cobain thing? If you’re going to play that out I’m not sure that the whole double-barreled shotgun thing at the end was in best taste. But I guess that’s overcome with drugs and a little help from his friends so… no… a little too much “joke” in my in-joke maybe…
PS (oh.3) : here’s a flick with murdered women, brutal beatings, violence and serial killings and torture and then there’s this trivia bit from IMDB : “Colin Farrell pitched the idea of chomping on cigars in some of his scenes, (as seen with other iterations of the Penguin). However, the studio turned down this idea; citing that children would potentially be watching the movie.”
Yeah, them cigars tho. S’like EMAILS!!!
