More notes on The Batman

Vengeance comes for the Penguin in The Batman

I haven’t gotten to see The Batman a second time yet, but it’s stuck with me. It’s among the best movies I’ve seen in the last few years, and so I’ve been thinking about it a lot since. And while I’ve mostly stayed out of online discussions surrounding the film, I have come across a few interesting and thought-provoking items like these.

So, for those of y’all who have seen The Batman and/or read my review, here are some further notes that I think can enrich your discussion or understanding in the form of a disputation and a meditation:

Ready… fight!

Jack Butler of National Review is one of my favorite young conservative writers, not least because he takes the arts and storytelling seriously and has generally excellent taste. His writing on Dune and Denis Villeneuve’s film adaptation are good reading, as are his posts about his hopes and worries for Amazon’s Rings of Power series. And don’t miss his takedown of Ross Douthat’s lockdown-induced Stockholm Syndrome for the Star Wars prequels.

But Butler’s take on The Batman was one of his rare bad takes. A very bad take. He writes that the movie is “far too long” and that while “the film sells itself as an authentic detective story . . . most of the clues are figured out without any real sense of how Batman arrived at the conclusion.” It was long because it was filled with scenes of Batman examining evidence, laboriously following leads, patiently staking out crime scenes and observing suspects, and interrogating people. You know—detective work. I could easily understand someone complaining that there’s too much gumshoeing in The Batman, but claiming the movie doesn’t explain how Batman figures things out? Bizarre.

Butler also questions Batman’s motivations, describing Pattinson’s Batman/Bruce Wayne as “largely a cipher,” dings Colin Farrell’s Penguin as “pointlessly unrecognizable,” and calls Riddler’s online following “odd” since “the Riddler is, well, correct about the corruption of Gotham that he seeks to expose,” as if Batman villains have no history of kind of having a valid point.

And there is also typical internet nitpicking, as when Butler writes that Batman “survives an explosion and multiple volleys of various kinds of gunfire—including a shotgun blast to the chest—without much effect on him.” While Batman’s body armor kept that shotgun blast from killing him, the concussion nearly incapacitates him (realistically, since body armor stops bullets by redistributing their force across a broad area, meaning you might not “get shot” but it’ll look and feel like you’ve been worked over with a baseball bat). The movie goes out of its way to show this, leaving one wondering how much Butler was even paying attention.

But like Butler’s earlier contretemps with Douthat over the Star Wars prequels (in which, again, Butler was 100% correct), there is pushback from within National Review—this time in the form of Kyle Smith, a professional film critic I mostly like. Smith’s initial review of The Batman was positive, and he sticks up for the film in a solid response to Butler. Responding to an offhand comment from Butler that The Batman brings unwarranted gravity and complexity to kiddie stories, Smith writes:

We have plenty of movies for kids. Most of the other studio pictures these days amount to a birthday party for middle-schoolers: Yay, here’s the piñata and let’s have some cake. Birthday parties are fine with me. Spider-Man: No Way Home is such a movie done poorly; Spider-Man: Homecoming was such a movie done brilliantly. However, there is a place for grownup movies.

And, that’s what The Batman is: “a different type of movie: the kind made for grownups.” Which is precisely what I thought, with a sigh of relief, as I watched an intricate, careful, slow-moving story develop. It doesn’t dumb things down, it doesn’t overexplain, it doesn’t think the audience can’t follow what’s happening, and it doesn’t preach.

Ultimately, Smith writes, “we rate a film based on how well it does whatever it’s trying to do, not whether it’s the movie you imagined seeing when you bought your ticket, or whether it’s the movie promised in the trailers, or whether it’s like previous movies featuring the same characters.” This is essentially a rephrasing of the late Roger Ebert’s basic rule for reviewing movies—review the movie the filmmakers made, not the one you wish they’d made—and while Rog sometimes failed to live up to his own rule, it’s nonetheless a worthy ideal.

Read Smith’s first review here, Butler’s post here, and Smith’s rebuttal here. And, if you’re a National Review completist and need to perform penance for something, you can read Armond White’s typically perverse and pretentious review here.

More than vengeance

That’s the dispute, now for the meditation. In what is probably the best thing I’ve read on The Batman thus far, Alexi Sargeant elaborates on some themes I discerned but had only partially thought through and concisely lays out some of what I could only gesture toward in my review last week. He also, indirectly, answers the worst of Butler’s criticisms.

After noting the role played by tainted legacies in all of the characters’ storylines and the importance of shouldering responsibility, which is what sets Batman apart, Sargeant looks at one of the film’s most intriguing and unsettling plot developments—the way the Riddler has been inspired by Batman: “He’s also reacting to corruption, but in the extreme manner of those maddened by ideology. His murders are baroque, but the underlying schema is like Batman’s, sans moral compunctions.” He “doesn’t view himself as Batman’s opposite, but rather considers the Dark Knight a kindred spirit.”

So far so Joker, right? Sargeant continues:

[W]hile many films use some hero-villain parallel as a trope, fewer have the hero explicitly choose to change for the better after recognizing a disturbing kinship with his foe. It’s when one of the Riddler’s own radicalized acolytes claims the mantle of “Vengeance” that Batman commits to a different path. In the end, it’s better to light a Bat-flare than to curse (or embrace) the darkness. In some of the movie’s final scenes, we see Batman as a torchbearer for a battered Gotham rising out of the deluge of its sins. He steps out of the shadows and can be seen by his fellow Gothamites for what he is: a wounded man trying to do right by them. By losing his persona as an inhuman minister of retribution, he becomes a more genuinely inspiring hero.

I was surprised, watching The Batman, how early in the proceedings Batman uttered his “I’m vengeance” line from the trailers. That’s the kind of thing filmmakers usually build up to, as in a famous episode of “Batman: The Animated Series.” But Reeves’s film takes this as Batman’s immature starting point and tests him, confronting him with more sinister versions of similarly motivated people, and forces him to grow past it: “beyond vengeance,” as Sargeant’s piece is titled.

An excellent essay, and a good sample of how rich this particular movie is. Read the whole thing here.