THE BATMAN - A RESPONSE

So the movie does what the movies always do, at this point; they send Riddler totally over the deep end into BatShit (sure, why not, pun intended) terrorist/Jim Jones mode,

Spoilers for 2022 movie The Batman.


So. I caught up with The Batman over the Christmas break.


I’d wanted to see it since I heard about Pattinson’s casting, and given that, made a point of avoiding the trailers, clips, and critical response. Via Twitter, I’d ascertained that they were going for a Zodiac vibe for The Riddler, Batman's principle antagonist for the film, and I’ll admit to a somewhat ambivalent response to the news. The pre-release semi-hot take had it that this was all of a piece with DC’s commitment to ‘grim and gritty uber alles’ to distinguish themselves from Marvel’s ‘actually fun’ aesthetic, and I probably rolled my eyes a bit in sympathy with this take.


Because, dig it; The Riddler’s always been one of the camper characters in the Batman Rogues Gallery. There’s quite a lot of things wrong with Schumacher's Batman Forever, but you can’t really claim with a straight face that the Carey Riddler wasn’t pretty true to form when it comes to his comic book equivalent. He was always the villain most suited to the 60’s TV Show incarnation of Batman, to the extent that all the other villains copied his M.O., for crying out loud. And I can see the fan argument; why (oh why) pick the campest villain in the canon and ‘grimdark’ him up? Bad enough that Joker’s lost any sense of the whimsy that made The Laughing Fish such an iconic story (though admittedly, the last movie to feature the character was a stone cold banger, as well as a cautionary tale when it comes to Judging A Movie By It’s Trailer).


As someone who genuinely thinks that the Lego Batman movie is the best Batman movie of all time, I’m not entirely unsympathetic to this either, to be clear; on the other hand, the last live movie outing for The Bat that went for balls out camp was Batman And Robin. So. You know.


Anyhow. I went in essentially blind, aside from the above, which is just my preferred way of doing things, and I had a really good time.


I guess I’ll start with Pattinson, because I think he does an excellent job. My usual line about Batman in movies is that you’re never really casting Batman, you’re casting Bruce Wayne, because The Bat is the costume, and, let’s face it, most of the stuff he’s gonna do that sells you on him being Batman in that costume is going to be done by a stuntman in any case. But Pattinson really challenges that read. I always found Bale’s Wayne a bit of a weak link in the Nolan movies, because I thought his performance as Wayne was unconvincing; he never looked like he was having fun as Wayne. And I know that was the point, but it was also a bum note, for me, because if you’re concealing the fact that you’re a vigilante by acting like a billionaire playboy, and you spend your entire time pretending to be drunk looking like you’ve been slapped and didn’t enjoy it, how exactly is that going to convince the world you are what you pretend to be? Bale should be convincing as Wayne, the script and story acts as though he is, but I’m never sold; and that’s a performance/directorial decision, obviously, just one that’s never sat quite right with me. A big part of the plot of that trilogy hinges on Bruce Wayne ostensibly wanting to put Batman out of business, and for me, a significant flaw with that is that he clearly doesn’t like being Bruce Wayne at all


Whereas in The Batman, it’s clear in both the writing and performance that Bruce Wayne barely exists; the world sees him as a recluse, and Pattinson makes no pretence at not being a haunted and deeply broken human. Even in the scenes where he’s taken the cowl off and he’s hanging with Alfred in the Batcave, the black eye makeup he wears under the mask casts a literal shadow over his face, emphasising (as the Joker says in Grant Morrison’s  Arkham Asylum) that the mask is his real face. In this movie, it’s crystal clear that Wayne is the mask, and one that honestly barely fits in any meaningful way. It’s an important choice, because it frees the movie from the obsessions with duality that infuse so many Bat-narratives (even, to a degree, my beloved Lego Batman Movie).


What do we get in place of that? We get a pretty straight-up noir crime thriller. I’m not sure Gotham has ever looked as grim or as hopeless as in this film (except, maybe, in Joker); a gloomy, perpetually rain-soaked combination of the worst neighbourhoods of New York and Chicago smashed together, and left to smoulder like the smoky fires the city's homeless huddle around. As with both of those cities at different moments in history, this is a city of rampant, endemic corruption; the mob runs everything and everyone. This creates an interesting environment for Pattinson's Bat; he’s been under the cowl for two years by this point, so his reputation and budding relationship with Lt. Jim Gordon is there (yes, in this movie we’re mercifully spared both the on-camera murder of Ma and Pa Wayne and the unveiling of the Bat-signal). At the same time, he’s still hopelessly outnumbered and outgunned by a city that ‘likes being dirty’.


This created what were, for me, as a long time Batfan, a lot of really cool moments. There’s the wary and grudging deference the cops show him as he strides about the crime scenes, finding clues The Riddler has left on the bodies (and, yes, absolutely, the influence of Se7en is felt clearly in these moments, in both the grim elaboration of the murders and the relentlessly grungy lighting), and the inevitable row over chain of command between Gordon and other officers; it’s clear The Bat is hated by a large section of the force, both for the fact of his vigilantism, and, in some cases almost certainly their own corruption, and it’s often not clear which element is motivating the hostility in any given moment. Or take the scene where Batman roughs up Penguin (here redrawn as ‘Oz’, a scarred mob enforcer, played by an unrecognisable Colin Farrell). It crackles with an energy that’s surprising given it’s stock nature, but that energy comes from all the elements we’ve talked about; the fact that The Bat is a quantity both known and unknown, the fact that Penguin has a shrewd idea the Bat isn't likely to kill hum… but not quite a certainty, and Pattinson’s Bat awareness of his own precariarity - he simply cannot take all of them down, all at once, and he knows it. He has to pick which battles to fight and which to let go. For all the purported ‘gritty realism’ of the Nolan movies (and, again, I do love them, flaws and all), the model of organised crime presented in those movies is simplistic almost unto abstraction; not so here, where I got a sense of a city not just under siege but in a state of perpetual low level warfare between various factions.


Add in a version of Catwoman that finally didn’t make my wife want to throw something at the screen, and we’re really cooking with gas here, in terms of making a Batman movie that’s a) good and b) hasn’t been done a million times.


And on that, we should get to Paul Dano’s Riddler.


So, yeah, sure, as mentioned above, there's an element of Zodiac in the costume ,and Se7en in his MO, and if you think originality should consist of a little more than grafting on characteristics that haven’t been attached to a character before, I’m not going to argue. And, again, I respect those who bemoan the ‘grimdarking’ of one of the most straightforwardly camp villains in the BatCanon. Bigger BatHeads will be able to offer something definite on this, but my memory of Riddler is he’s rarely if ever been homicidal in his crimes, except for trying to kill The Bat. So, yeah, having him as a serial killer is a departure, and not necessarily a welcome one, and if you don’t dig it, I dig it.


But I do dig it.


Two main reasons. The first is Paul Dano. I think he’s an actor capable of delivering creepy intensity at a level few can manage, and none that come to mind exceed. I’ve loved him ever since There Will Be Blood; kid may never get the romantic lead, but whenever he’s on camera, the odds of something genuinely stunning happening are pretty high. And he gets right inside this psychotic, hyper intelligent loner; you can feel the contours of his pathology, and I got a genuine sense of unease at not knowing what he was planning, even as the film showed us more and more of what he was capable of. And for me, that’s a sales job, and for it to work, you have to believe the guy playing Ridler, and Paul Dano made me believe.


But the second is more complicated and gets heavily into spoilers. Because this Riddler isn’t the camp, amoral trickster of the comics, but he’s not the faux-religious lunatic of Se7en, either.


He’s actually a vigilante, closer to The Unabomber than any of the other comparison points.


And it sneaks up on you - or, at least, it snuck up on me. Yes, sure, his victims are corrupt people in power, but, you know, it’s Gotham, swing a cat, etc. And the movie throws a clever curveball around the halfway mark by having him target Bruce Wayne (admittedly leading to my least favourite subplot where Alfred almost gets blown up, because, erm, chaps, we have rather done that one before once or twice now). So the moment when Riddler confesses to Batman was a genuine thrill for me, as he articulates what I really should have realised; that Riddler is trying to clean up the town, and sees The Bat as his willing accomplice.


And I’ll need to do a rewatch to see if it actually holds up in terms of what we see on camera, but wow, it was a thrilling moment, in the moment. More, it found a brilliant way to hold up a mirror to Batman’s own pathology; vigilante to vigilante, ‘we’re trying to clean this town up together!’. And the moment when Riddler realises The Bat hadn’t been playing along… his crushing disappointment is palpable, and his fury at entirely misreading the intellect and motivation of his opposite number could melt steel.


(Brief aside here, but; it’s so cool how this version of The Bat is a legit detective, and also completely out of his intellectual depth next to The Riddler. So fucking cool)


And it’s great because it drives at my favourite element of The Bat’s pathology, the thing that I think makes him a far more interesting character than, say, The Punisher (who I also love for different reasons, to be clear, but); because a murder set Batman down the path of vigilantism, he will not kill. Not for moral reasons, but because he actually can’t, no matter what; he can never risk inflicting the trauma that made him upon anyone else, no matter how deserving his opponent might be. It's one of those decisions that’s brilliant both in terms of character psychology and story terms, because it creates an environment where no matter how monstrous the villain, The Bat will bring them in alive, again and again. Because he has to. Because he has no choice.


And, suddenly, The Riddler - the fucking Riddler, people - becomes The Bat’s mirror darkly, asking with a sweaty grin of rage ‘why not just kill them?’. Even better, he thinks they have a shared goal, believes The Bat is his accomplice; and the look of mounting horror on Pattinson’s face, eyes widening behind the mask as he realises what’s really been going on this whole time, what he’s helped enable, is one of the most dramatically thrilling and satisfying moments I’ve ever experienced watching a Batman movie.


And it really created some problems for me in the final act.


Because at this point, I gotta be honest, I’m finding The Riddler pretty sympathetic. Gotham is hopelessly corrupt, the people he’s been murdering are evil, if the word has any meaning. Sure, he targeted Bruce Wayne, but even there, he had his reasons (we’ve not gotten into the hand grenade bit of background lore that has Martha, Bruce’s mom, part of the Arkham family, and I don’t know if that’s an idea that came in sometime after I stopped being a regulat BatReader, but holy fucking shit what a dynamite idea). It turns out that the regeneration fund Wayne’s dad set up might not have been squeaky clean; and, in a nice echo of how this Bat has to negotiate the crime families, it looks like Wayne senior got too close to one of those families, with murderous results. It’s fascinating to me how recent rounds of BatFiction have had a more and more fraught and anxious tone around Wayne’s obscene wealth (gee, it’s almost as though, in real life, billionaires all turn out to be cartoon comic book villains, or something). Obviously, ground zero for this was 2019’s Joker, which, as I apparently can’t stop discussing at considerable length, did, amongst many other astonishing things, a real number on the Wayne founding mythology in general and Pa Thomas in particular; setting him up almost as a Liberal tinged Trump figure (and yes, I’m fully aware there here, as in so many other places, Joker was working as a Rorschach for the viewer’s own prejudices, don’t @ me unless it’s with a serious offer to write a book). But it’s fascinating to see that anxiety playing out in a movie where The Batman is ostensibly the hero, and it gave proceedings just the vaguest whiff of nihilism that I found absolutely exhilarating.
​
So the movie does what the movies always do, at this point; they send Riddler totally over the deep end into BatShit (sure, why not, pun intended) terrorist/Jim Jones mode, complete with bombs taking out the sea wall, and a gang of armed to the teeth masked online loners who are going to assassinate the Mayor-elect and also massacre a bunch of people, and I know, I know, the movie’s gotta have a big setpiece finale and The Riddler’s gotta be The Bad Guy and The Bat has to win, but…


Well, let’s just say, while I absolutely didn’t hate the end at all (and certainly didn’t feel the movie outstayed its welcome, despite the 3 hour run time), it certainly felt like a vaguely frustrating return to mean after what had, to that point, been a very different BatCinematic experience.


I’m really glad this team have a trilogy. I want more of this Gotham, I want their take on Joker, and I definitely want lots more Battinson.


But I think they’re really going to have to go some to beat the creeping horror of the scene in Arkham when the Bat looks through the glass at the Riddler and sees his own reflection.


That was, as I believe the kids still say, The Good Shit.


More please.


KP
16/1/23

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