The Warner Bros. reboot turns comic-book fare into sheer cynicism.
As a cultural event, The Batman proves how comic books evolved from marginal adolescent fare into the dominant strain of the modern ethos. As a movie, The Batman shows Hollywood’s craven manipulation of its easily susceptible audience. The Batman reboots the Warners’ superhero franchise so that it falls back in line with the depraved Christopher Nolan Batman films from which Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel, Batman v Superman, and Justice League director’s cut had redeemed the entire comic-book enterprise.
This is a slap in the face to Snyder, who brought moral and artistic potential to the franchise. But it’s also — undeniably — a business decision, capitulating to the sure-fire formulaic basis of comic-book culture that Nolan had pompously elaborated and that the Marvel movies had turned into a juggernaut of childishness.
Enter director-writer Matt Reeves, the TV hand skilled at pop rubbish (Cloverfield, The Battle for the Planet of the Apes) of the J. J. Abrams school, but essentially anti-cinematic. Reeves rejiggers The Batman so that it follows second-rate police-procedural and true-crime genres. Self-made millionaire vigilante Bruce Wayne (now played by Robert Pattinson) is super-grim as he encounters a retinue of super-grim adversaries — including Riddler (Paul Dano), Penguin (Colin Farrell), and Catwoman (Zoë Kravitz) — laying waste to Gotham City’s elected officials.
It’s a three-hour TV pilot (overlong in the HBO/Netflix tradition) functioning as a from-the-headlines miniseries so that the naïve will mistake its importance. Reeves reprises the anarchy of Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker — now a contemporary touchstone — while determinedly eschewing Snyder’s morality, which Warner Bros. execs found exasperating and commercially disappointing.
True to The Batman’s corporate genesis, the concept of hero-vs.-villain is gone. Reeves refashions the Nolan-Joker miasma that adolescents instantly recognize and perhaps prefer (Snyder’s unique vision, typified by his still-unsurpassed Watchman, appealed to adult sensibilities). Bruce Wayne’s personal conflicts lack the soulfulness that Snyder surprisingly elicited from Ben Affleck’s Batman. Pattinson, not so enigmatic as Christian Bale, is practiced at anomie. He makes the line “I am vengeance” work as self-loathing. He relates to his havoc-wreaking opponents as rivals in a nihilist sweepstakes — a.k.a, the Heath Ledger marathon.
We’re back to the moral underworlds of Saw, Seven, and Zodiac, back to the beginning of when adolescent consumers were first trained into grateful compliance with only a soupçon of cynicism. Cynicism was smartness. Now cynicism is all. The Batman can declare “Fear is a tool” and have the full support of Warner Bros. media behind it. (No coincidence that society’s politically progressive “stakeholders” act as proprietary as corporate stockholders.)
This is political decadence more than anything else. Coming exactly 100 years after F. W. Murnau’s still-disturbing Nosferatu, The Batman doesn’t earn being called artistic decadence. Its depiction of social horror isn’t fully imagined; it never gets to the core of spiritual repulsion that Murnau touched. The mythology of good and evil, so important for Murnau and Snyder, has no resonance for Reeves. One is merely offended by Reeves’s obvious political allegories that are too vague and trite to take seriously. Given the moody photography and action set-pieces staged at J. J. Abrams’s level, The Batman hits no deeper than Dick Tracy and his cartoon foes as conceived by a depressive.
Most of The Batman’s photography was shot from January 2020 to March 2021, obviously absorbing the social dissipation of that period when vigilantism and protest, tyranny and anarchy were conflated. It’s not art that reflects our despair; it’s just superficial exploitation similar to the health department’s unending Covid-vaccine commercials. (“Fear is a tool.”) Reeves’s attempt at being dark is Harry Potter Dark — a pacifier for the age of dumbed-down obedience. It’s striking that the klieg-light Bat Signal makes Pattinson’s Bruce Wayne point out this state of alarm: “When that light hits the sky, it’s not just a call, it’s a warning.” Warners’ box-office ledger won’t disguise that the warning is also a cry for help.
