≤br>by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night at 9 my husband Charles and I watched The Batman, latest in the Warner Bros. cycle of Bat-movies they’ve made since 1989, when Tim Burton’s masterpiece was loosed on the world featuring Michael Keaton as Batman and Jack Nicholson’s incandescent performance as the Joker. (Ironically, the two actors who’ve played the Joker since – Heath Ledger and Joaquin Phoenix – both won Academy Awards for doing so, but to my mind Nicholson out-classed them both.) There’d been other Batman movies before, including the 1943 Batman serial from Columbia with Lewis Wilson (still one of the best Caped Crusaders on screen); the 1948 sequel Batman and Robin, also from Columbia, with Robert Lowery; and the 1966 film with the TV cast, Adam West as Batman and Burt Ward as Robin, which followed the campy approach of the series. The first Tim Burton Batman kicked off a cycle of four, though only the first and second films were directed by Burton, and they featured Keaton as Batman in the first two, Val Kilmer in the third and George Clooney in the fourth. (Clooney has since said that making a Batman movie was the worst mistake of his career.) Then in the 2000’s came the three films in the “Dark Knight” sequence – Batman Begins ini 2005, The Dark Knight in 2008 and The Dark Knight Rises in 2012 – all of them directed by Christopher Nolan and starring Christian Bale as Batman. It was the second of these films, The Dark Knight, that featured Heath Ledger as the Joker, and though he won an Academy Award (for his last completed movie, though he started one more, The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, which had to be finished by other actors after his untimely death at age 28) I still thought he was abysmally miscast. Ledger’s strong suit was playing tortured introverts, which he did superbly in Monster’s Ball and Brokeback Mountain, but he was as wrong for the Joker as Nicholson was right.
Then the Caped Crusader lay fallow for another decade until this film, which featured Robert Pattinson as Batman, Zoë Kravitz as Selina Kyle (true Bat-buffs will recognize that as the non-villain name of the Catwoman, but though there are hints in that direction in this movie, including her skin-tight leather attire and her multiple house cats, she’s not the Catwoman this time out) and Andy Serkis in Alan Napier’s and Michael Caine’s old role as Alfred Pennyworth, Bruce Wayne’s butler and the only person who knows Bruce Wayne is Batman. (It’s odd, to say the least, to see Serkis in his normal human appearance instead of tricked out with CGI and motion capture to play Gollum a.k.a. Smeagle in The Lord of the Rings cycle, Caesar the ape leader in the rebout of the Planet of the Apes franchise, and King Kong in Peter Jackson’s 190-minute remake.) The Batman was directed by Matt Reeves and co-written by him and Peter Craig, and it continued the trend set by the “Dark Knight” reboot first in the Batman comics and then in the Nolan films of making the entire movie both literally and figuratively dark. Indeed, watching The Batman is an oddly mephitic experience in which the physical darkness of the film – it’s not until the very last scene that we actually see an exterior scene set in daytime – becomes a metaphor for the spiritual darkness of the characters and the story. It’s one of those modern movies reflecting the Zeitgeist of the Trump era – and, let’s face it, we’re still very much living in Donald Trump’s America even though he’s been forced at least temporarily to relinquish the presidency in favor of Joe Biden – and though Charles saw some odd parallels between it and older movies like The Poseidon Adventure and The Blues Brothers, to me it was a throwback to even earlier films than that.
Through much of the first hour it reminded me of the films Fritz Lang made in Germany in the 1920’s, particularly the two Dr. Mabuse movies and the 1928 film Spies (which Alfred Hitchcock ripped off quite extensively in his early British career in the 1930’s), in which Lang caught both the moral corruption and economic convolutions of the Weimar Republic and the world-shattering evil of the Nazi regime to come. It also reminded me of the recent NBC-TV miniseries The Endgame, in which a Russian master criminal named Elena Fedorova (Morena Baccarin) devotes herself to exposing and either killing or disgracing people who have posed as moral exemplars but are deeply corrupt underneath – including the President of the United States, who Fedorova exposes as in the pocket of a super-corrupt Ukrainian crime boss for whom he has literally looted the U.S. gold reserve. Reeves’ and Craig’s script for The Batman follows the same idea: the “Gotham” of this film (the original locale of the Batman comics as well, though there it was called “Gotham City” and it was quite obviously supposed to be New York) is depicted as so hopelessly corrupt the city’s mayor, its police chief and its district attorney, along with just about the rest of the city government, are all owned outright by mobster Carmine Falcone (John Turturro – who else?).
The film also takes a page from classic noir novels like Dashiell Hammett’s The Glass Key and James M. Cain’s Love’s Lovely Counterfeit, both of which feature so-called “reform” tickets run for office in a deeply corrupted city who are actually just as corrupt as the establishment they are trying to unseat. (The Glass Key has been filmed twice, in 1935 with George Raft and in 1942 with Alan Ladd, but neither did justice to the depth and richness of Hammett’s original. Love’s Lovely Counterfeit was filmed in 1956 by producer Benedict Bogeaus and director Allan Dwan as Slightly Scarlet, and though it made some regrettable changes in Cain’s novel it’s remarkable for the skill of cinematographer John Alton for doing the classic noir look in color.) While The Endgame was going on I quoted Robert Penn Warren’s famous lines in his book All the King’s Men about the universality of human sin in which the villain, Willie Stark, tells the hero, Carter Burden, to get the goods on a seemingly honest judge: “Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something.” This ultra-dark view of human nature seems to have inspired Matt Reeves and Peter Craig as well, though there’s one remarkable exception in which Batman (Robert Pattinson) and police lieutenant James Gordon (Jeffrey Wright) are in a room full of cops denouncing most of the police force as corrupt, and a lot of the cops in the room stand up to indicate, “No, we are not.”
The plot of the film deals with a master criminal called The Riddler – who briefly appeared in the comics as a super-villain psychologically forced to leave a riddle as a cloe to whatever crime he was about to commit, and who was played by impressionist Frank Gorshin on the first episode of the Batman TV series in 1966 and by Jim Carrey in the second Tim Burton Bat-movie, Batman Returns. Here he’s dressed not ini the familiar light-green one-piece emblazoned with question marks as he was in the comics and his previous film appearances, but in a Darth Vader-like hood that conceals his true identity as a nerdy young man played by Paul Dano. It’s a mystery why this actor, whose combination of cutish good looks and formidable acting chops, hasn’t had more of a star career than he has and has allowed himself to get stuck in one TV mini-series after another. He outright kills the mayor (who’s running for re-election against a Black woman activist in the opening scene, set on Hallowe’en, in which he’s at home watching a recording of their debate when the Riddler comes in from the skylight and offs him with a carpet-lifter) and police commissioner, then threatens the D.A. by kidnapping him, locking a bomb around his neck, and saying he’ll give him the combination to defuse the bomb if the man can answer all three of the Riddler’s riddles correctly. For a moment I was thinking Reeves and Craig were going in the Turandot direction and were going to have the Riddler’s own name be the last answer, but instead the Riddler demands the name of Carmine Falcone’s enforcer – and the D.A. knows the name but won’t give it because if he lets the Riddler’s bomb destroy him only he will die, while if he gives up the gangster’s name Falcone will have his wife and kids killed as well.
On one level I quite liked The Batman – I haven’t always cared for superhero movies that try to make Great Statements about the human condition, but this one pulls it off quite well even though the Great Statement this film makes is that humans are inherently corrupt and there’s nothing we can do about it – but it was a physically hard slog. Even the spectacular action scenes are set in such darkness and gloom they’re not much fun to watch – though I think the relentless darkness of this movie, both physically and thematically, is part of Reeves’ and Craig’s artistic intent. When the film came out, and even before that when there were leaks of its content, Reeves was criticized for having Batman commit murder, and he replied, “Batman kills people. Get used to it.” Actually in some ways the “Dark Knight” reboot of the Bat-franchise was a return to the very first Batman comics from 1937 to 1939, when he was an outright vigilante with moral ambiguity to spare. In one early strip he knocked off a villain named Dr. Karl Hellfern, nicknamed “Dr. Death,” by forcing him to breathe in his own poison. The mealy-mouthed moralism that got introduced into the Batman comics started in 1940, when Robin the Boy Wonder was introduced and Batman was softened and made an actual officer in the Gotham Police Department.
The Batman is a marvelously evocative movie, yet somehow I haven’t decided whether or not I like it; certainly Reeves and Craig deserve kudos for the relentlessness with which they present their ultra-dark vision of the world we live in, but she sheer weight of the carnage they unleash in the last reel, where The Riddler’s bombs desttoy the seawall that keeps the Atlantic Ocean frol flooding Manhattan, play quite differently in the post-Buffalo, post-Uvalde era than they must have when the film was in theatres (and remember that one of America’s most notorious mass shootings, in Aurora, Colorado in 2012, was committed at a showing of the film The Dark Knight Rises by a gunman dressed as the Joker – so it was clear the Batman mythos was part of his madness and he didn’t just pick that movie because it was obviously going to be a blockbuster so it would be a target-rich environment).
