Matt Reeves’ The Batman has arrives in cinemas just as the buoyant Spider-Man: No Way Home has become the sixth highest-grossing film of all time.
The colourful, bright, funny Marvel hit is still steamrollering on and, on the face of it, a gloomy, three-hour neo-noir about a serial killer might not be exactly what cinemagoers are after - and yet, on its opening weekend it has raked in $128.5 million (about £97.2 million), more than any other film so far this year. Apparently, there’s something about The Batman.
Robert Pattinson’s Batman – Rob Patman, if you like – is absolutely sick of Gotham. He’s sick of everything. It’s not an accident that he looks like both Robert Smith from the Cure and Placebo’s Brian Molko. He keeps a very emo diary.
Bruce Wayne is, Pattinson says, usually a mixture of a few different faces: the billionaire playboy, the mourning orphan, the driven avenger.
“But this one, he’s kind of let Bruce wither. His character, since his parents’ death, is just withered away. He hasn’t worked on himself at all, apart from in this obscure way where the only way he can survive is by creating this alter ego which he wants to live in more and more and more and more.”
This Batman is exactly as chipper as he sounds. But despite that, the film has one thing in common with Christopher Nolan and Tim Burton’s massively successful visions of Bruce Wayne and of Gotham City: fortuitous timing.
Sometimes, seeing one extremely jacked guy beating up bad guys feels extremely reassuring. When things are uncertain and stressful, when it feels like institutions and the rule of law are corrupt and dysfunctional, Batman works.
Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy was so explicitly post-9/11 that he had Christian Bale fighting terrorists before ruminating in smoking ruins and rubble at the end of its second film. Batman was then the human embodiment of extraordinary rendition, and the film itself backed him to the hilt.
When other vigilantes started dressing like Batman to clean the city streets, the problem wasn’t vigilantism per se; it was that they didn’t have Bruce Wayne’s billions, demons and personal Himalayan bootcamp with Liam Neeson to call on. In Nolan’s Gotham, only the super-rich and super-aggrieved are allowed to jump the queue for justice.
Burton’s Batman was less gritty and more gothic, but its sprawling, Metropolis-like Gotham City chimed with a sense that Ronald Reagan’s 1980s had seen income inequality grow and grow. At the same time the Soviet Union was beginning to crumble.
Batmen thrive on uncertainty. Joel Schumacher’s day-glo confections in the mid-nineties had a lot of problems, but one was that Batman wasn’t really fighting for anything particularly interesting anymore. Ben Affleck’s dusty, bulky Batman was in films so wrapped up in their own mythos they didn’t look out at the real world. (They were also very bad.)
Like Nolan, Reeves’ new Batman is an extrajudicial sledgehammer as well as being a sleuth. Pattinson’s Batman doesn’t even do the “I’m Batman” line early doors; rather, he introduces himself as “vengeance”.
That gets at Batman’s complicated political heart. He makes the idea of chopping out due process feel both seductive and natural. To believe in him, you have to believe that the rule of law and justice system are not doing what they promise to do, and the only way to sort things out in a corrupt and dysfunctional society is to let Dirty Harry go nuts with his personal tank and some mad gadgets.
The Avengers, by contrast, are bound by international law and have an internal pecking order. Batman’s more of a ‘fracture your eye socket first, do the paperwork later’ kind of guy. He answers only to himself, to justice, and occasionally to Michael Caine.
Jim Gordon, the hard-bitten detective who always plays it straight but trusts Batman when nobody else does, is the mirror image to the wayward vigilante: he works within the justice system and trusts it despite its flaws. He’s played by Jeffrey Wright in Reeves’ film.
“I think Gordon represents a certain idea, or ideal about integrity and optimism and, you know, in the midst of everything falling apart, a kind of rectitude,” says Wright.
That doesn’t mean that he’s a company man though. “I don’t think his is an allegiance to institutions,” says Wright. “I think his is an allegiance to the possibility of the integrity of institutions. But it’s more about this idea that, in a simple way, you know, we can do better than this.
“And it’s not for an individual’s sake, it’s for the sake of the collective, and I think that’s what makes him an attractive figure in the midst of all the other things that are happening: the corruption and decay of Gotham.”
Gotham City Police Department hits hitherto unimagined levels of sleaze and corruption in The Batman and both here and in America, trust in the police as an institution has tanked in the last two years.
If Gordon thinks we can be better than all of this, Batman definitely doesn’t – and right now, audiences will be more sceptical of Gordon.
But Reeves’ Batman does move these same ideas along too. Nolan mirrored Batman with the anarchist Joker; without getting too spoiler-y, at its conclusion The Batman acknowledges that an ultraviolent lone wolf taking liberties rarely remains a lone wolf for long, and that righteous vengeance can be taken up by angry, lost, hateful souls as well as the virtuous.
The thrill of seeing Batman mete out immediate and occasionally subjective justice is a dark and disturbing compulsion. In his case it nearly always results in a lot of collateral damage, and a city which accepts one man as judge, jury and chief beater-upper – especially one as deeply cynical as Bruce Wayne can be – is one that’s way too comfortable with fascism.
Two years into the pandemic, there’s a lot of anger around. There’s anger at the real hypocrisies of politicians who flouted their own rules, and there’s anger at the imagined crimes of shadowy elites. We’re furious at Vladimir Putin invading Ukraine; at the senseless loss of life, at our own country’s complacent cosiness with Russian money since the turn of the millennium.
The left, the right and the conspiratorial fringes are all frustrated at how glacially justice seems to move, so it makes sense that handing over responsibility to a dark avenger who moves fast and breaks things might appeal.
These are exactly the angry, insecure times in which Batman films thrive. But if Batman is, as the saying goes, the hero that we deserve but not the one we need right now, it’s worth thinking about why we think we deserve him at all.
