There is something off about the Batman, a recognition of something darker that underlies the self-deprecating jab in Batman Begins about how “a guy who dresses up like a bat clearly has issues.” That gnawing tension runs through Matt Reeves’s new film, aptly titled, The Batman. It slowly walks out of the shadows in the opening sequence of the film as Batman demolishes a gang of skeleton themed people. The sequence as a whole carries on a long tradition of racial coding and criminality. This violence isn’t new, it’s not that far removed from the start of Batman (1989). The choreography and its editing aren’t overly stylized. What stands out is the sound design, the hits land harder than Sal Maroni’s compounding ankles in The Dark Knight. As a sequence it captures the strange cocktail of dread, veneration, and wonder contained in the word awe that is beginning to develop around the Batman two years into his war.
Awe is a spectatorial, audience, position and that is what Reeves turns the above back on the viewer. With a post-cinema scopophilia Matt Reeves, cinematographer Greg Fraiser, the host of VFX teams, and editors William Hoy and Tyler Nelson, reflect the terminal broken qualities of Batman, Riddler, and all of Gotham City back on to the viewer. It reframes the normative question of cinematic violence. The Batman is acutely aware that Batman bludgeoning people is bad, and asks the audience: why do you keep coming back to this figure? What is so broken that you turn to themed vigilantism for narrative justice? In this film Robert Pattinson’s Batman isn’t far removed his nemesis the Riddler, or Captain Carnage and Rorschach. Trapped by this knowledge of Batman’s corrosive qualities, The Batman searches for a means to justify its violence, the reasons we justify violence and allow ourselves to become incorporated into the myth of Batman. These justifications are not wholly satisfying, or novel (see: Batman Begins or Arrow) but it provides audiences a narrative they can hold on to and allow them to make jokes about how “clearly” Batman has issues.
Audiences are implicated in the first shots of the film lifted from Halloween (1978), in case it being set on October 31 was too obvious for you. It is the POV of the Riddler, a simultaneously horrifying and pitiful Paul Dano. We are planning his first murder, one of several that take place between October 31 and November 6. Audiences are made party to a similar kind of voyeurism later as Batman surveils Selina Kyle (Zoë Kravitz). The core of The Batman plot involves an investigation by Batman and Gordon of these murders and a wider conspiracy that ties the Mayor, DA, and Police Commissioner to the dark heart of Gotham. Matt Reeves and co-writer Peter Craig do take a more procedural posture in this film. The detecting elements of this film, however, are not that different from work the character has done in the past. What this structure affords the filmmakers is the ability to make a noir infused Batman film, and more importantly a film that doesn’t feel the need to move like a blockbuster. There are two major set pieces and roughly three fight sequences throughout the film. Unburdened by the need to just ‘go’ and be a 150-minute theme park ride, the film instead leans into the mood and affective potential of noir. Don’t focus on ‘how’ the puzzle fits together or the sudden leaps used to solve a riddle, but the mood each step in this chain evokes. That moodiness is why the gap between the ending imagery and narrative justifications they represent for Batman’s violence might stick out as poor containers.
Gotham City in The Batman is horrifyingly familiar and not in the ways it directly evokes New York City with spaces like Gotham Garden Arena or Square. Of the live action, cinematic Bat-films, Reeves and the art and production design departments make something that feels closer to the Gotham of Anton Furst and Tim Burton. In this newest Gotham, buildings look real enough, but the designers ran with the descriptor of “hell burst through the pavement and grew.” Two decades after the murder of the Waynes, hell kept growing. Buildings stack on top of one another threatening to trap the citizens below. This version is thematically trapped — bounded by a large sea wall. In this regard the film’s city feels closest to Joker, not due to a shared continuity, but from the extensive use of visual effects to digitally replace and add to the frame. Gotham has become the Los Angeles of Chinatown, a place that doesn’t exist but feels like it could.
Continued belowThe use of visual effects in this film, managed by Pierre Alexander and produced by four separate effects houses, is some of the best I’ve seen since Man of Steel. In Man of Steel, visual effects are employed and wedded to a larger cinematic apparatus to make the film’s version of the real feel real. The result is a film that emphasizes mood and how it feels to look, not if it looks real enough. Batman and Catwoman standing on a balcony overlooking the rising sun on Gotham’s skyline exists only because of computer output. The film’s use of color and effects work is painterly in the end, capturing the right mood. Catwoman attempts to seduce Batman away from this endeavor that will only get him hurt and killed, and his stoic denial. Kravitz is partly lit by this false sunlight, and Pattinson is rendered in sheer silhouette.
At the center of all this image and myth making is Robert Pattinson’s Batman. Unlike previous iterations, the film drops pretense of the conflict between personalities embodied by the leading actor. There are a total of three Bruce Wayne scenes in the entire film, maybe a little more than 10 minutes total. The rest of it is all in stages of Bat-dress. It creates an interesting experience as it affords plenty of time for Pattinson’s reserved, somewhat vacant, but charming presence to come through. It will be interesting to see reaction and engagement with Pattinson’s turn as Batman as it is one of the least emotive turns by a lead actor in the traditional sense. He doesn’t have Keaton’s eyes, but he has better body control in the suit. It isn’t the suit doing the acting but his working through the suit, and an awareness of how it is being captured. Take the above mentioned Catwoman scene, which would normally would be played as a rooftop tryst (once made queer parody by Schumacher in Forever.) Instead of emphasizing a failure of heterosexuality and facial reaction, Reeves and Pattinson let the suit do the talking and be the literal barrier between them. While Pattinson and Kravitz have good chemistry together, the film thankfully doesn’t try to shoehorn in a romantic angle between the two, instead emphasizing moments of mutual recognition between them.
Pattinson’s performance in the Batsuit and how it is presented is also the source of much of the tension in this film. While Reeves does turn the mirror onto the audience for their fascination, it also highlights their own preoccupation with rendering Batman in mythic proportions, from the upside down POV shot of Penguin to his first entrance from the shadows. These self-consciously iconic images, captured by Greg Fraiser and the rest of the team, stand out from the rest of the film, which plays with focus throughout, often causing images to blur on the fringe or suddenly shift. The later reinforces the subjective and mediated nature of experience. It also highlights how this Batman reinforces various racial and gendered tropes without unpacking or working through the way it attempts to do with cinematic violence.
As Multiversity writer Mark Tweedale said in a DM, “the film simultaneously wants to say, ‘What if Batman hitting people is bad?’ and ‘What if Batman hitting people is awesome?’” I’m not entirely sold on these questions being exclusory or that one cannot be (at least partly) answered by the other, but that basic framing is the tension that runs through the film. As it becomes increasingly clear, the separation between Batman and Riddler is more aesthetic than ethical. If anything, the PG-13 rating is what holds the spectacle of cinematic violence at bay from entering the realm of grotesque the way Burton did in Returns, or Zack Snyder did in Watchmen.
Overall The Batman is fine: you might be annoyed with some of its answers, or how it fails to fully deconstruct the iconography of the Batman as it tries to build a new myth of Batman. That tension also captures one of the qualities of The Batman I’ve come around to most, how it presents identity as always in process. Always being made and remade into something new and different, or maybe mostly the same. There is a promise in that somewhere. It’s not like this will be the last Bat-film anyway (he’s going to be in three films this year at least), so if you don’t like this one you have options.
