The Wins, Losses, and Lessons of THE BATMAN [Spoilers] (Patreon)

“Nobody trusts anybody now… and we’re all very tired.”

This is, of course, a quote from John Carpenter’s The Thing, but it applies to many things, including The Batman’s headspace in the The Batman. But it also highlights how I feel about writing about Mr. Batman after the last 12 years. There’s been so much argumentation, blowback, ugliness, and just plain weirdness that I’ve felt more exhausted with the property than anything else. Batman Fatigue is real. But right in the middle of it, something weird happened. I saw some of the trailers for this film and… I kind of liked what I was seeing? And as the film neared and we all heard good things I actually started getting excited? In the end, it was perhaps unfounded. But only in the sense that I have a lot of mixed bag thoughts about a movie that does so many things well, along with a few deeply frustrating problems of approach, but in the end, delves into some core existential questions it fails to wrestle with.

But since these movies are so unwieldy and filled with so many moving parts that people want to discuss, let us again take it piece by piece and use the “winner / loser” system I used with No Way Home, which is 1) reductive language and I really don’t mean winners and losers it’s just 2) the best way to sort of characterize what works and doesn’t within the film. Cool? Cool.

Again, major spoilers throughout the essay.

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Big Winner - Zoe Kravitz - Catwoman is almost always a plum role to get. You get to turn on the femme fatale energy to 11. You get to look cool as hell. You get to play equal parts graceful and hot and menacing and wounded and all the stuff that makes for good characterization. But best of all? You get to play all that against that big fuddy duddy AKA Batman, which means you get to have all the fun in the dynamic. Which is all to say I’m happy that Zoe Kravitz gets to have all the fun. She’s great in this film. And she’s the one who gets to get out of the movie not just unscathed, but with unqualified resounding success. So even though she’s already been doing great work in a lot of roles, I hope she gets to roll on from this film and gets cast in whatever she wants to do. Also… I still have KIMI queued up and I need to watch it… I guess I’m now just inserting reminders into essays? Anyway…

Big Winner - “The Look” AKA Greg Frasier / James Chinlund - There are so many things about Batman that matter, but an inescapable part of it for me is always “the look.” Because one of Batman’s greatest attributes is that both he, and his world, look cool as shit. This is not to be undervalued. There’s always been this lovely aesthetic influence of gothic styling, darkness, and most of all? Noir, baby! For these reasons, the animated series is probably still my favorite version of Batman, something that both captures the jet black art deco sensibility along with the more playful nature of the villainy. Which is all part of why I probably haven’t truly liked the look of a Batman movie since Mask of the Phantasm? To be clear, I was also a big fan of the look of Burton entries, which reveled in gothic playfulness. But the subsequent Schumacher felt like garish neon wax figures brought to life. Which is part of the reason that Nolan’s whole thing was grounding the series back in realism, but aesthetically speaking they were steeped in this blocky pragmatism that had all the “gothic allure” of a german brutalist-styled butt plug (still love The Dark Knight though). Then the Snyder versions turned away from that and went more comic-booky, the problem is they were the 80’s and early 90’s styles, which meant the impossibility of Liefeld-esque stature and scuzzy testerone-soaked grime. I understand you may feel otherwise, but none of the last 30 years of “the look” has really played for me.

But I really liked the look of this one! Director Matt Reeves and production designer James Chinlund have crafted a suit and other bat stuff that somehow splits that line of practical, but stylish. It also feels dusty, but striking. Where Burton took the gothic elements and turned them up to a jillion, this takes the ornate details of a gothic world and grounds them, It feels cluttered yet organic. Noisy, but muted. Barely lit and hazy. And so, so much rain. For the gothic nature of this world is resting more in the mood than extravagance. But all of these observations bring us to DP Greg Frasier’s fantastic work. For everyone coming in and wanting the moody detective story in terms of look and tone? You sure got it. But at it’s best, The Batman is also offering some of the most arresting images I’ve seen in one of these ding dang comic movies in a long, long time (the flare in the water, the sunset conversation, the jump, etc). Say what you will about anything in this movie, it is always compelling to look at. And that matters.

Winner - Robert Pattinson - After all the online hubbub, all the bat bros freaking out they cast Mr. Twilight, all the outrage he wasn’t working out, all the people considering that the “one job” of playing Batman for some reason, all the oddball pandemic interviews, and all the “piccolini cuscino" he had to microwave, there was something important we had to remember: Pattinson is a very good actor who brings commitment to the screen. Watching him, I was reminded how much an innate sense of “boyishness” actually makes sense for a young Bruce Wayne. For all the jokes about him reading too “emo batman,” the character is pretty darn emo to begin with. And it works not just because all of that reads clearly, but how much we understand that his character is genuinely trying to figure it all out. There’s real command to how Pattinson goes in and out of the posturing and withdrawn awkwardness. When Riddler points out that Batman’s clearly more comfortable in the suit, it’s not just a line, it’s something that’s clearly been established by the performance. And in the middle, Pattinson gives us a few genuine moments of vulnerability that do a whole hell of a lot for his arc. I mean, the sunset scene with him and Catwoman? We haven’t had a batman who could do that convincingly in a long, long time. Wait, do you mean have a batman that says sorry? In a way, yes. Because that sorry represents a lot now, doesn’t it?

Winner - The Jump - So my favorite singular moment of the film is just a little beat. It comes in the moment where Batman has to run the fuck out from all the cops (which is a great image on its own, really). But he gets to the top of the tower and realizes that he is up crazy fucking high…. and he’s scared. It’s partly the sudden surprise of the moment. But that one damn look of fear? It means a lot to get that in a Batman movie, where everyone usually wants to make him Mr. Unflappable Cool. But knowing this height is a big deal to him sets the stakes. It’s confirming to us: yes, this should be TERRIFYING for any human being. And then it does one better and actually makes good on the threat. Two swoops are way too close and then with the parachute catches and he fucking biffs it hard, crumbling to the ground and hurt… I realized I’ve been wanting to see something physically vulnerable like this with batman for a long fucking time. And it sort of represents a lot of what I like in this movie and that’s how there are a litany of good moments in and of themselves.

But how do those moments all fit together? Well, we’ll get to that in a bit.

Winner - Paul Dano - The Riddler is an interesting character because he automatically game-ifies your plot. You create a tete e tete of games and investigation, but as we all know in a post mystery box landscape, the success of your story is ultimately going to depend on how things go once you get to the “answers” of said game. In other words, what happens when you get Riddler out of the mask? To that, the one-on-one scene in Arkham is, perhaps, the closest the film comes to a truly electric moment. Because Dano isn’t just getting to do “Weird Paul Dano Things” in his performance, he’s cluing into a really interesting plot and thematic idea about how they effectively did all this together to “clean up” the city. It really is a nice little “aha” moment of specificity. I mean, we talk about the twinning of villains and heroes so often, but this is one of the few times where it doesn’t feel like vague allusion and is instead 100% solidified by the story that has just been told. Moreover, it’s the understanding that all good villains have a real point behind their intentions. But there’s also something that gets lost in the fallout of this scene… but like I said above, we’ll get to that in a bit.

Win / Loss - Colin Farrell - I adore this man as an actor and do not misunderstand my “win loss” designation. He’s great in this. He’s having fun. And there isn’t a molecule of scenery he doesn’t chew. The problem is that it is yet another thing in modern brand based storytelling where I’m like “huh, ultimately feels a little skimpy on his import in the overall story” and then I learn that’s because he has a tie-in TV series that’s coming and I’m like “ohhhhhhh, dammit.” My kingdom for a character inclusions that feels like a complete part of a story, please.

Win / Loss - Wright’s Commissioner Gordon - I feel like the world’s been taking Jeffrey Wright for granted for a while now and giving him pedestrian, one-note roles (his incredible performance in The French Dispatch may be a reminder not to do that). But there’s something that reads so immediately clearly and comfortably about him in the role of Jim Gordon. You’re meant to walk into this film and just be like “Ah, yes, that’s Gordon. Right where he’s always been!” Which is a good thing for a movie that wants to hit the ground running like this. The ultimate problem is that they spent sooooooooo much time together in this film (and even have a few good moments like the “pulled” punch) that there really needs to be some kind of story or arc between them? Am I crazy? Just something that not only elevates it a notch above the expected, but gives them a real arc to play, especially with the rising tension they face together. I know the whole point is that they trust each other, but I think some more things about that trust needed a back and forth, no?

Win / Loss - Alfred - I feel bad that I started watching this film and was like “wait, who is playing his Alfred in this one? Is it Ralph Feinnes or Jerermy Irons? I feel like I’ve seen those imag- Oh, right they’re the other ones, it’s Andy Serkis now.” Who, don’t get me wrong, I’m glad is getting out from behind the mo-cap suit for Reeves. But the thing that’s kind of interesting is the film actually gets to play with the little idea of a story arc here. Bruce starts by trying to pull the “You’re not my dad” routine with him, but then when Alfred almost dies, there’s the real moment of reconciliation. The problem is that that emotional moment gets buried under a loooooot of information dumping. So while the hand hold hits, I just feel like it’s a note or two off from really working like gangbusters. And moreover, we want this reconciliation to have an impact on the story that comes after… But it sort of just falls away. Which brings us to some big problems. And now that I’ve gone through the main cast, I can really get into the core storytelling aspects

Win / Loss - Detective stories - Overall, I’m really happy we got a genuine Batman detective story because it’s sort of my favorite thing about the character. There’s something about actually seeing him skulking around, thinking, and playing it carefully that makes Batman feel like a real antithesis to the “hit first and ask questions later” versions of the character that make my skin crawl. I keep mentioning it, but the animated series was really, really good at this (though they perhaps did this a lot because it was cheaper to animate). But this movie, at least tonally, is good at it too. There’s so much dialogue of them figuring stuff out that I would have loved if Batman just at one point turned over to Gordon and said: “Yeah, I’m like, so good at riddles.” Again, the movie really nails the pastiche of investigation. But here’s the thing…

Writing detective mystery stories is haaaaaaaaard. Like, super hard. For one, you need to find a really good balance of keeping the propulsion of the detective doing the investigation and feeling like you’re truly figuring it out - and yet, you then need to be hit with a sense of being put on your heels by the killer. And The Batman spends wayyyyy too much time putting Batman behind the 8 ball of Riddler’s games. Look, I get that he’s the dang Riddler, but you really need that way of finding balance and the film never gets there. Which leaves Batman in a highly reactive state for most of the movie. Which grinds the sense of pace.

The other reason writing mysteries is hard is because the audience is constantly rewriting “the story” in our heads, based on new information. So, as the writer, you essentially have to give the audience a lot of possible stories, each more viable than the last, all en route to the ecstatic truth. But when it comes to the overall turns in the various “stories” being presented here? It sort of just dulls and repeats the same kind of beats. We have too many police / DA figures up front. And when you get to the big bait and switch where “the rat with wings” instead of Penguin, it’s Falcone? We sort of don’t care because it’s just two different mobsters who are already in league with each other (and it also had something to do with a third mobster who's already dead). Besides, The Penguin is already a bigger meta deal to us, so the switch kinda falls flat. I get that they’re trying to lend a lot of history to the Falcone stuff, but again, we spend so much of our time learning that history on our heels instead of up front, so we don’t get hit with “aha” moment when it matters. This is all core writing stuff, but… well that’s where we come to the Reeves of it all…

Win / Loss - Matt Reeves - Reeves is a guy who has such an interesting place on the spectrum of direction. To wit, on one end of that spectrum you have the absolute masters of cinema (pick your faves). And on one end of that spectrum there’s this insult I use only in conversation and only when I’m feeling kinda punchy. It happens when people ask what I think about some up and coming hotshit indie dude director and my honest response is “they’re a photographer.” To be clear, I don’t really mean it. nor anything that blunt ever. Especially because filmmaking is way too hard and has way too many moving parts for me not to have empathy. Even photography is really hard. I’m just trying to get at an idea. Because what I mean is that they have a good eye and can make a movie look pretty, but they don’t actually seem to understand cinematic storytelling. We’re talking about the communication of Mise en Scene and making something that actually cuts together in compelling fashion. Which is to say nothing of all the theater-kid stuff that’s critical, like reigning in actors and performance. To be clear, Matt Reeves is NOT a photographer. He’s a real fucking filmmaker. One who not only can cut stuff together seamlessly, but he has an organic sense of space and mood and motivated camera movement. Plus, he’s also great with actors and can really bring you into the INTIMACY of a given performance. These are insanely great skills that should be putting him in the upper echelon, right?

But he doesn't seem like a “killer story sense” guy. Don’t get me wrong. He has inclinations. He knows that he has to find conflict in a scene. He especially has a great radar for what plays too maudlin and / or on the nose. But he doesn’t seem to have that “tight dramatist on the page” sense that really allows for a given film to hit hard when it needs to, especially when it all adds up to ecstatic endings. As good as he is at crafting certain moments, this just always seemed like the weakest part of his overall work (and, to be frank, something I’ve heard time and time again from collaborators). I just think he needs to find the person who brings that part out of him. I mean, folks like Scorsese and Soderbergh and Cronenberg rarely write their own stuff, but they have that keen sense and collaborators who best force it.

And nowhere does this “cutting story sense” thing hit Reeves harder than with The Batman. I mean, there’s a reason this thing is three hours when it literally has no reason to be. So often he lets the actors dictate the entire pace of the scene. So often he uses three shots when one will communicate the same thing. So often he repeats beats and has a whole extra Riddler game it doesn’t need near the top. They say writing is all about killing your darlings, but it honestly doesn’t feel like he killed a single darling in this fucker. It’s all kind of funny when you compare it to Nolan’s attitude with The Dark Knight, where everything was paced 1000 miles an hour, as if he was on set saying “we gotta keep this fucker moving! Who cares HOW the joker did that! Just go go go!” But this is where it all comes back to the writing part. Because the difference between the two films isn’t just the pace of direction and editing. It’s…

Big Loser - Basic “Therefore / But” Storytelling - If there’s any one single thing I hope I have helped popularize in the last 12 years it’s Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s speech about “therefore / but” storytelling. The whole simple idea is that when you line up the beats of your story you want to go “this happens therefore this happens, but this happens, therefore that happens” and have it work very cleanly and with direct transitional purpose. It’s the therefore of cause and effect. And the buts of obstacles which change trajectory. And basically, if it ever feels like you are going from beat to beat and saying “and then this happens” you’re in trouble… and boy howdy is there a loooooooot of “and then this happens” in The Batman. Don’t get me wrong. A lot of times you’ll figure out the point of a scene when you’re in it. But it’s constantly starting and stopping. It’s constantly repeating. And it’s constantly exiting a scene and starting you over, which just keeps killing the energy of every scene transition. I could feel it so succinctly in the audience last night. Every scene starts and they’d squirm in seats, get restless, even sometimes even leaning forward as if trying to concentrate better or find the energy on screen. Because whatever was built up, would always seem to come down again and again and again.

Like a real storytelling 101 moment is how in the heck they go from that electrifying Riddler versus Batman scene in Arkham to putting him back in quiet investigation mode, when that scene 100 percent should be hurdling us into the fireworks of the finale. You gotta do the set-up work beforehand, so that when Riddler says something that makes Batman realize X, it can just GO. Instead it grinds to a halt. Again, this ain’t pace of direction. This is dramatic writing on the page. And, for better or worse, it’s everything I ever gave a shit about and try to get us to use in popular storytelling… which makes it so sad when a movie just never seems to register a simple notion like “therefore / but” at all. But the truth is that even this oversight would be forgiving if they were able to take all these great moments and have them tie a neat bow of thematic resonance… Yeah, about that…

Loser - Thematic Stamps - There are two things that I can’t believe aren’t covered in the final denouement of The Batman. The first is logical. For all the talk about Riddler also being an orphan, left to languish by the false Wayne legacy of charity, there is somewhat blatant implication that the unnamed reporter who was murdered was The Riddler’s dad. I’m of a couple minds about it. For one, I don’t like that all storytelling now is about closed loops of lineage and everyone has a dad who knows someone's dad and it’s kinda just a problem in general these days - but that thread is still introduced here, has everyone thinking about it, and then just… goes nowhere. I mean, I guess it’s still implied? But it’s less about the logic of this and more the fact it could have been an integral part of Batman’s arc. Which is that Batman essentially has to “apologize” to this person, or at least make good with changing his approach with life. I mean, that’s what’s clearly being set up, right? Bruce ignored what was happening with the corruption of Renewal. By not caring about the “Bruce Wayne” part of his life, he let down the other part of the system that is critical to his complete function and social contract. This is CLEARLY being set up in the opening. And The Riddler fell through the cracks. But the ending doesn’t mention any of this, nor does it cover his fixing of Renewal in any form whatsoever. It all feels downright bizarre to me to drop this crucial part of the character arc. It fails to create his understanding of their “twinning” moment earlier, and also fails to have some kind of point to his resolution with Alfred and the way this understanding plays into his growth and change.

So as Bruce is doing final voice over journal and it’s covering one part of his arc about no longer being vengeance and instead hope, specifically as he stands as a “Batman in daylight” and helping an injured survivor evacuate … I was hit with the emotion of the image, but not the completeness that was needed with his story. Instead? It can’t help but feel like him ignoring something so crucial, practically killing the point of the movie. And it gets at the core problems with this film that I cannot shake…

Winner - The Status Quo - There’s a reason this film wants to go after Bruce Wayne’s dad in the first place. And it’s because we live in a modern world, full of corruption, where no one with that much money is a boy scout. But after the whole story, Alfred’s speech just fails to wrestle with it in a meaningful way. Whatever well he meant in defending Thomas Wayne, there’s so much to unpack there about wealth, influence, criminality, and even mental health… and it doesn’t get touched. Which means the film wants the texture of real complication, but not the responsibilities of actually depicting it.

The same goes for everything about The Riddler. He’s an outsider who has clearly been through hell and he’s working with people on the fringe. But what’s it saying, directly? What’s the real philosophy here? Is it incels? Anarchism? Racism? Political ideology? Nolan’s Joker at least had a point. But if you look at architecture of what Riddler’s after, it’s the horrors of modern institutions and the failed promises of democratic party, but nothing gets codified as fringe left, partly because it doesn’t actually agree with that (because hey, those people don’t go ahead and do a terrorism, huh?). The reason it’s being unspecific because it can’t ACTUALLY get into it. Because it’s not the DSA asking “when can we start shooting politicians?” it’s fucking B*n Sh*piro’s cronies. So lets not fucking fuck around with this. Things mean things. Images mean things. They tie to actual ideologies and contexts. And to be resonant, you have to actually tap into what you’re tapping into. And if you start playing vague with a lot of competing iconographies, then you are just flirting. In this film, The Riddler represents every fringe of good policy, bad policy, communist, libertarian, incel, or whatever else. That’s because all he’s really meant to be is a threat to the status quo. And Batman? He’s ever the rich boy who loves his “good” cops and loves his “good” politicians is ultimately just a protector of the status quo. And god it’s so hard for me to stomach these days because we are just drowning in the status quo. After years of trying to get the importance of “defund the police” to click, we got a president still saying “that’s clearly not what you mean!” right as we’ve gotten dragged into the fascism of this country over the last 30 years. And as much as it would be nice to have a gothic escape, everything about The Batman ties into the problems of this. Not just in what it depicts, it’s everything it skips over, everything it brings up and doesn’t solve, and everything it outright ignores are all part of the un-ignorable issues in the country.

Because of this, you lose on two fronts…

Second Biggest Loser: Cinemascore, Probably - Cinemascore isn’t really important, nor a determination of quality, it is a flawed metric like so many metrics around movies. You just have to look at it in a certain way. Like how Rotten Tomatoes the barometer of accessibility. And Cinemascore is a measure of “1. Was this the movie that was sold to us? And 2. Does it end on a note that makes you excited?” Meaning Cinemascore is largely about pleasing the target crowd. Again, it doesn’t really matter. I liked The Batman. And there are some “Fs” that are my favorite movies. But comic book movies tend to do pretty well in general because they’re crowd-pleasers . Almost every MCU movie I’ve seen opening week has gotten rounds of claps and so have DC efforts like Wonder Woman, etc. But The Batman had such an interesting final reaction. There were like all these awkward murmurs of people who were just ready to start talking / run to the bathroom and then sooooo many conversations about how it felt way too long (to compare, The Dark Knight was getting standing ovations). It didn’t matter how many great moments were IN the movie, it just didn’t all add up right. It didn’t hit that key moment of catharsis that sent people into the space of elation. And worse, it ended on a couple of things that invoke all the core problems of why I was so cynical about this movie’s existence in the first place…

Biggest Loser: The Evolutionary Possibility of Batman - You gotta justify it.

That’s the whole thing, right? Why a new Batman film? Why have a new take? After the not at all controversial or back and forth troubles with the Snyder drama, you understood the goal of WB trying to move past all this. To create something new and vital to bring it into the future. So they hired a great aesthetic director. They hired the younger millennial king of Pattinson. They looked for what they hadn’t done yet and made a detective story. And in the end, they made a film that was, at times, alive with the possibility of reinvention. And they created great images that could help sell it. In that, they even questioned so much about the structures that held this character in place… and they just fumbled contextualizing the answer. And, like the character himself, they left us by falling back on two moments of the status quo.

Sure, let’s shove a joker in there in a way that basically grinds the ending to a halt and shows us why we typically have this kind of stuff  post-credits scenes (even though I basically am exhausted by them). But the second the audience realized who was talking? They snickered. Yup. This Batman loving audience actually snickered. We’ve had so so so much Joker and yet, they couldn’t help but go back to the well again, could they?  You could feel the air leave the room. But even more so with the scene that follows. Because Batman’s goodbye with Catwoman has a great line, but not only repeats things we’ve seen already, it makes such a huge mistake by texturally evoking the ending of The Dark Knight. Looking back, it doesn’t matter if Gordon’s speech was a little clunky, the high of that title slam and the audience eruption is something few people forget. But this time? We get these awkward shots of them on bikes and, in an unfortunate habit for this film, a few repeated beats that do the same metaphorical thing (like, you get to show them going in different directions OR him looking in the review, not both). The lack of choice-making just kills these moments. You can feel how much it’s all just come back to the status quo. But it’s not that Batman’s stuck in a cycle. It’s that WE’RE stuck in a cycle. It’s more jokers, and cutting to black on bat-bikes, and the diminishing returns of the same thing we’ve already cheered for.

This is the crux. I am so tired of writing about superheroes not because I don’t think they’re interesting, nor provocative, nor capable of diving into interesting parts of psychology and society. I’m tired because we keep getting the retreads of what should be the new highlights of our changing time. You have to justify it. And if you don’t? It doesn’t matter if I finally like “the look,” or moments, or performances, or even get the first bat-detective story in years…

Not if you’re going to miss the part that matters most.

<3HULK