A Short Note About The Batman, The Trailers & The Aesthetics (Patreon)

A few precursors.

1. I don’t think I’ve talked about it in awhile, but I pretty much don’t watch trailers. I feel like it’s less of an issue these days, but a decade ago it felt like this fight for relative sanity in a trailer-obsessed world. As part of the fury, news-hungry film sites were always having to rabidly analyze the footage for every detail and put together deep-dive posts ON WHAT COULD IT ALL MEAN. But it was the continual act of putting the cart before the horse. Because the truth is that trailers are just that: ads designed to sell a movie, not accurately represent a movie, and often sell to the lowest common denominator. This insane time also created what felt like this whole nightmare era where people went to the cinemas because they wanted to see the two-hour version of the trailer.

Personally speaking, the big problem was that I tended to have a good visual memory (but I’m getting older and that’s fading quick!) and watching a trailer meant that I would just keep this running inventory of shots I haven’t seen in the movie yet and it was distracting as all hell. More over, I just found so much more happiness not knowing anything and going in blind. But I acknowledge there’s a dangerous side to this approach, which is where people get so insanely spoiler-phobic that GOD FORBID YOU SEE ONE THING. But all this hysteria has lessened with time. And I’ve developed this personal state of movie-going nirvana where I get excited about NOHING coming up and it just makes me even MORE excited about the great movies I just saw. So yeah, I don’t watch trailers… except when I sometimes watch trailers out of morbid curiosity. Which just happened with The Batman.

2. Like most people, I’m tired of talking about Batman. Because there’s something about the character that invites intensity, whether it’s toxicity or just good old fashioned passion. But either way I feel like I’ve been in this intense thirty year nerd war and now I don’t have any real strong opinions one way or the other. But they’re going to keep making these movies, god bless em! So I keep finding that the subject jumps back into my line of vision and lo and behold, opinions helplessly form. To be clear, there isn’t anything I “want” from Batman” movies at this point. I feel like I’ve read every kind of variant on the stories. So I just want a good movie. But then I saw that trailer and it tapped into something I think is worth discussing.

3. Because I really want to talk about aesthetics.

Of all the arenas in criticism, I have a hardest time talking about aesthetics. Mostly because there’s a level of subjectivity involved that goes far beyond actual cinematic function. It’s not like I’m arguing “this shot is communicating the wrong thing on a construction level” it’s more “my eyeballs think this is ugly.” But even that last statement is misleading, because it’s not just about pretty shots and pleasing the eye - sometimes you want to do the opposite! And within aesthetics, there’s all these bits of micro-function that get wrapped up in there, too. They’re just more pedantic. But they can have a surprisingly big impact, for they imbue both mood and feeling. And when it comes to the relative brightness of a film, it effects whether things feel safe or unsafe. Which is critical to certain genre function!

Unfortunately. I feel like I spent the middle years of the digital revolution slowly sighing because there wasn’t properly crushed black in sight. There was lots to blame. The slow learning curve, the hosts of people getting too attached to the milky “LogC,” and the good old fashioned lack of effort. But I feel like it poisoned the proverbial well for a lot of work. Even now, I hate the muddy DI of the Marvel movies, but the studio argues they do it for a reason, and it’s not just to create uniformity and show up on televisions. This anecdote could be apocryphal, but an old director buddy was talking to them about a project and they talked about their philosophy of doing as many fight scenes as they could during day because they “test better” and same goes for not putting up anything too dark on screen. The audience just won’t like it as much!

That all feels like misleading test questions, but hey what do I know?

All I know is when I look at a night shot I want it to look like night. I want that balance of contrast, something that backs up that belief that the dark could just go forever. But I don’t just want harsh colored lighting to strike against it. I want to show the way light can fill the night with a glow, a warmth, some soft bits of particles that give way to atmosphere and depth. Which is exactly why I watched the trailer for The Batman and went “ooooh!” It’s got all that stuff to spare. 

Put simply: I really, really like how it looks. Just go back and look at the lighting in particular, from the reflections on the ground, to the way you can feel the atmosphere, what with the soft lights spilling into the corners. It’s the kind of night photography that isn’t obvious in its striking, noir harshness. It hits the gray scales of color, but still remains deeply effecting. It’s not only the kind of stuff Fincher is aces at, but the same thing Reeves often did in the Apes films.

Please understand, none of this is a slam on either Nolan or Snyder’s previous approaches with Batman. I mean, I’ve defended both their work / sense of cinematic function a great deal, it’s just the aesthetics have historically been something I’ve rubbed against just a bit. Nolan has this fixation on sterile perpendicularity, utility, and bright shining normalcy. And with Snyder, I’ve always adored his framing, but there’s this kind of broad shoulder, day glow intensity to his design that couples with sickly sweat and neon, pock marked illumination of the image. I get the effect of both! Really! And understand why some people like those looks. But perhaps it’s worth talking about the way that different aesthetics really can play into the conversation of tone.

And yes, “tone” is another one of those evasive words people misuse ad nauseam. But even when using the term correctly, it’s still evasive and hard to argue about. It just uses to many different internal frames of reference. So I guess what I really want to talk about is how the The Batman trailer (I’m not going to stop doing that) plays into the ongoing conversation of “grim dark,” which has always been a loaded one. 

Because for what feels like forever, there’s been this urge for storytellers to take the things they liked as kids and “adultify” them. But a lot of times that has just been part of a juvenile fear from young men who didn’t want to be seen as being into “kid stuff,” so they try to justify their liking something by making it super dark and fucked up as proof. I mean, even Snyder recently tried to argue his treatment of the DC characters was “for grown ups” and I think what really what it means is “not for kids.” Because there’s a huge difference.

Again, let me just qualify this because talking about Snyder is always a loaded conversation and I’m not looking to pick fights here. I think that Snyder SHOULD make films for young boys / his fans and whoever else is interesting in that kinda hyper intense beefcake 80’s bent fun. The WHOLE problem is when this conversations gets into the defensive space. When it’s supposedly about comic films that are SERIOUS versus HAVING FUN - which also gets into the whole inability to make fun of oneself, while still finding merit. Because with real maturity you don’t have to worry about masculine posturing or even really care about being thought of as “grown up” at all. You don’t have to relish in your ADULTNESS, just as you realize it’s also fine for people to indulge themselves. Ultimately, “grown up” movie watching just accepting maturity is can swing a lot of ways and you don’t have to defend it.

It’s a push-pull which brings us right into the discussion of the The Batman trailer, because it's already hitting on lots of notes. The first is how easy it was to make jokes about emo batman or Nirvana batman or talk about the translation of Pattinson's heart-throb-ness to Young Mr. Wayne. These things are funny! And I can make fun of them and still take the movie competely seriously. There isn’t a conflict of interest here. Especially given that I was also genuinely unsettled by some of what was on display (in a good way). Likewise when it comes to the other Batman films, one kind of dark doesn’t inherently have to be “better” or “worse” than another dark, just different. To that, when I saw a few people throwing around the word “grim dark” to describe this particular trailer, it didn’t quite seem what the look was after to me. It sounds like a silly argument of semantics to say that the aesthetics struck me more as: “Night Horror,” but they did. And it really felt like something I was into for a nice little change.

But in the end, it’s just more projection. Maybe the final version will be muddied! For all my words, the problem of talking about trailers is you fall into the same trap I described the beginning of putting the cart before the horse. I should just say: “I like the way that was shot and designed and color corrected. I have no idea if any of that will add up into a good movie.”

And that’s been trailer talk! Bye!

<3HULK