Why you've never seen an actual Batman film
Author: Liam Padmore
Hi, my name is Liam. I like rock music, chocolate pudding, and long walks along the beach.
I also sometimes write for the internet. When I have the opportunity to write for a site under my own name, I traditionally like to write my inaugural piece about Batman.
This is because I used to be a huge Batman fan. Now I’m going to write about him because I’m not a huge Batman fan anymore.
So, what changed?
The obvious answer is that I grew up. That’s also the wrong answer, because comics aren’t just for kids – and never have been. In fact, comics first became popular because they were being read by soldiers serving overseas during World War II.
The actual answer is simple, if layered: Over the last 30 years, Batman somehow went from being the World’s Greatest Detective to being The World’s Geekiest Ninja. Geeks and Ninjas are cool and all, but I vibed hard with Detective Batman.
The Batman whose stories I read had more in common with Edgar Allan Poe than Michael Bay.
Michael Bay is great at what he does - I really do mean that - but can you imagine him making The Raven into a movie?
That’s how modern Batman hits me: Bay’s Raven.
I was writing for a pop culture website during the COVID pandemic. DC had an online event called the Hyperdome, which I was tasked with covering.
Jim Lee, the head honcho over at DC (and founder of Image comics), was being interviewed about Batman. He stated that Batman was ‘the ultimate underdog’.
The richest and most powerful man in Gotham, Bruce Wayne - is ‘the ultimate underdog’?
Why is Batman ‘the ultimate underdog’, and Penguin – who is in the exact same situation as Batman (lost his parents, inherited their wealth) – isn’t?
If we’re giving the benefit of the doubt to Mr Lee, one might assume that he’s talking about superheroes and not supervillains.
But Huntress – a B-list vigilante and satellite member of the Batfamily – does everything that Batman does without being financed and without the regular help of, say, Alfred or Robin. She’s also a teacher by day and (as you’ve probably guessed already) a woman.
I would expect Jim Lee – who belongs to a minority group and isn’t afraid to talk about it – to understand how the concept of ‘privilege’ can affect things like ‘being able to afford cool stuff’.
Batman, like so many comic characters of his era, is an accidental psychological study of the world that spawned him. A world of tough times and even tougher heroes.
Refusing to accept help when you need it doesn’t just make you a tough guy, it also makes you a self-centred egomaniac.
And that’s what Batman is supposed to be a study of: The pain and joy of both solitude and family.
Every single ‘classic’ Batman story revolves around the fact that Bruce Wayne himself never really grew beyond being a lost and scared little kid because nobody ever told him ‘no’ when he really needed to hear it.
Do you think a mentally healthy person would travel the globe learning martial arts from war criminals in order to become the most efficiently-violent furry in the world?
Batman isn’t a power fantasy - in the exact same way that Frankenstein isn’t a medical treatise.
Joker represents the power fantasy, not Batman.
So - what’s the problem with Batman movies, then?
It’s probably safe to assume we’ve all seen the Batman origin story at least three times by now, but did you ever wonder why it always starts with that night they went to the movies? Ostensibly it’s because ‘that’s when Batman was born’, but that wasn’t what formed Batman.
Although he’s no longer the World’s Greatest Detective, he’s still the Dark Knight. For some reason, the films (including my favourite, Batman ‘89) only use the Dark part and forgo the Knight part.
What’s a knight?
I think we can agree that a knight is a well-equipped warrior, traditionally from a rich and/or powerful family, who fights on behalf of someone or something.
Thomas Wayne (Bruce’s father) was a surgeon who operated on the rich and poor alike. The poor often couldn’t pay him, but he kept doing it because he believed that Gotham, frankly, needed the help.
Free healthcare in America? Sounds to me like Thomas was the true superhero, but I digress.
When his parents died, Bruce realised he couldn’t count on the police due to corruption. And he realised that Gotham, frankly, needed the help.
Batman wasn’t born in the moment Bruce’s parents died, or when a bat flew through a window, or even from the childhood trauma caused by Bruce being trapped in a cave full of bats.
The part of Bruce that would become ‘Batman’ had been slowly forming as Bruce was learning the importance of the social contract from his father, just as Spider-Man would learn similar ideals from his uncle Ben.
It could be argued that Batman makes things worse for Gotham, but nobody can accuse him of turning his back on the city.
This Dark Knight is a well-equipped warrior, from a rich and powerful family, who fights on behalf of the very idea of Gotham itself - and by extension all its citizens.
This also neatly answers many questions regarding his refusal to kill Joker: If Batman kills one Gothamite - no matter the justification - what’s to stop him killing another? At what point does he become worse than the criminals he protects the city from?
I don’t know about you, but I’d sure love to see a movie about all of these ideas.
Or maybe that’s what the Pattinson film was about - I just heard he was a bat in it and assumed it was a Twilight thing.
See you all next month!