“It is precisely because we all break our rules that we enjoy this story about this man who never breaks his rules. The knight in shining armor, or in this case the Dark Knight, is the hope that there is someone who can remain good no matter what.”
Crime boss Carmine Falcone sits in his limousine at the Gotham city docks at night. He has paid off the cops, and his men are unloading his latest drug shipment. But then it all starts to go wrong. Falcone hears a quick flapping, screams, gunshots, and thuds from among the maze of shipping containers. He grabs a shotgun. He loads the shotgun. He looks out into the dark. He searches every shadow for whoever, whatever, is stalking him. He grits his teeth and hisses out into the dark: “What the Hell are you?” It lands atop the car’s roof. Its hands break through the skylight. It tears Falcone out of his seat and up through the shattered skylight and stares the gangster in the face. “I’m Batman,” it says.
But who is Batman? Bruce Wayne? Yes, but that is not all. “Batman isn’t a man. He’s an ideal. He can’t die,” one version of the character (who is not Bruce Wayne) said in the animated television show Batman: The Brave and the Bold. That idea that Batman cannot die is a source of some great dramatic lines. “People need dramatic examples to shake them out of apathy and I can’t do that as Bruce Wayne,” Christian Bale says in the film Batman Begins. “As a man, I’m flesh and blood. I can be ignored or destroyed but as a symbol—as a symbol I can be incorruptible, everlasting.”
What he says may very well become true. Batman debuted 85 years ago in Detective Comics #27 on March 30, 1939. The 1930s was when superheroes began. Pulp comic writers and artists—like Batman’s creators Bob Kane and Bill Finger—started the mold for all superheroes that would follow in the 20th century. These heroes fought villains and saved innocent damsels just like the old gallant knights, but unlike Sir Lancelot and Robin Hood they did it dressed in capes, tights, and masks and with fantastic powers or amazing gadgets. Yet Batman is one of the few who has endured. Others like the Shadow, the Spider, and the Phantom can still be found in reprints and reboots if you know they exist. With Batman there is no if. It is hard not to know he exists.
My grandfather was 17 when Batman debuted. My father watched Adam West play Batman on television from 1966 to 1968 when he was a child. He was an adult when Tim Burton’s films Batman and Batman Returns were released in 1989 and 1992, respectively. Growing up, I watched The Brave and the Bold and Bruce Timm’s animated Batman from the 1990s thanks to reruns and iTunes. As I have grown up, I have seen five more incarnations of Batman (The Batman television show, Beware the Batman, Bale in The Dark Knight Trilogy, Ben Affleck in Zack Snyder’s Justice League and Robert Pattinson in The Batman) and I have witnessed the coming of a sixth this year as Timm returns to the character with Batman: Caped Crusader. Batman has appeared again and again for each new generation for the 85 years since his debut. He looks like he has got a good chance of becoming eternal.
It is true that Batman has not been around as long as other characters. He is not as old as Achilles, Hamlet, or Frankenstein. They also did not have corporate giants like DC Comics and Warner Bros putting them on everything from television screens to coffee mugs. Batman’s consistent visibility over the past eight decades has been partly due to his owners continuously rebooting the character to revive Batman as a money-maker, but it is not the only reason. You can reboot a character a thousand times. It will not make the character stick in popular culture for 85 years. Batman has stuck “because the world needs a Batman,” as one character said in Timm’s Justice League animated series. There are threads running through the character that make Batman someone whose story people want to hear again and again. Different artists have brought out these different threads in different ways and Batman shares these threads with many other characters and literary traditions that have also stuck in popular culture.
His 85th anniversary offers a chance to define what it is about him that has made him stick in our popular culture. What is it about Batman that the world needs? That chance should be taken up not just to understand Batman but also to preserve him. In 2035, Batman will enter the public domain. Warner Bros and DC Comics will lose their monopoly on Batman’s mythology. He will pass from being a figure of capitalist mythology, where corporations own and control what stories are told for profit, to become like the characters of pre-copyright folklore. Anyone will be able to tell his stories just as how in Ancient Greece anyone could tell stories about Hercules, Perseus, and Jason at supper or around a campfire and create varying and sometimes contradictory versions of the same characters’ stories.
This is not necessarily a moment to look forward to. Mythology is created by what stories are made and consumed. It is the economy of tales. What type of Batman tales will be made when anyone can write them and create his mythology? Winnie the Pooh entered the public domain in 2022, and the film Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey followed the next year. I have not seen the film, and I do not want to. It is about how when Christopher Robin leaves for university, Winnie and Piglet turn feral and become serial killers. The lovable, silly old bear has been turned into a monster.
Rhys Frake-Waterfield, the director and writer of Blood and Honey, plans to perform the same surgery on Peter Pan and Bambi. He has planned an entire cinematic universe filled with children’s characters in the public domain turned into junkies and killers. A similar fate may await Batman. He cannot die, but his canon can be diluted. Stories like those that have made Batman immortal can be lost amid a junk heap—but only if enough junk is produced and consumed. In the economy of tales, storytellers make a bid to consumers to listen, read, and watch their stories again and again and, thus, make them part of a character’s mythology. After 2035, Batman’s consumers will be responsible for preserving those essential threads of his mythology.
Think of this essay as a consumer guide to Batman. I put forward what makes Batman who he is: his gadgets, city, origin, and will. With this, it is the responsibility of consumers to preserve him by choosing to consume what Batman stories are produced.
His Gadgets
“Quick Robin, to the Bat-Cave.” Adam West and Burt Ward slide down the Bat-poles to the Bat-cave and then zoom off in the Batmobile. So begins another Bat-adventure on the same Bat-time and the same Bat-channel where Batman fights evildoers like Joker, Penguin, and Catwoman with his Bat-laser, Bat-shield, and even Bat-shark repellent. I would not blame one for thinking that the 1960s Batman television show was made by a Madison Avenue ad man. “Bat” is slapped on everything like a corporate logo.
The 1960s Batman television show was campy by design, film critic Gary Collinson writes in Holy Franchise Batman! Its creators sought to push the cartoonish and absurd features of the comics to extremes, like how Batman has a Bat-gadget for everything. This camp was stripped away in the following decades by Frank Miller in his comic series The Dark Knight Returns and Burton in his two Batman films. Miller and Burton knocked Adam West’s boy scout grin off Batman’s face and gave him the dark and smoldering visage that he continues to wear to this day. Even in the Batman television shows I watched growing up, Batman was animated but he was never a cartoon like he was in the 1960s.
Despite its camp, there is one feature of the 1960s show that is part of Batman’s essential DNA: the abundance of gadgets. Like James Bond and other spies of 20th century popular literature, Batman uses man-made tools to fight his enemies. The spy show The Man from U.N.C.L.E. influenced the 1960s show and Christopher Nolan told film critic Tom Shone how the Bond films inspired him when he made The Dark Knight trilogy. That inspiration speaks clearest in Nolan’s films through Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman). In Shone’s The Nolan Variations, Nolan rightly described Fox as Batman’s Q. He’s the engineer who makes and explains all the gadgets. The Bat-grapple gun is a “gas-powered magnetic grapple gun,” the Bat-suit is an armored suit with “Kevlar by-weave [and] reinforced joints” and Batman’s cape is “Regularly flexible, but put a current through it, molecules realign, it becomes rigid” and it turns into wings. Batman is a tool-user. He does not have super-powers but deploys the cutting edge of science and engineering to fight for justice. James Bond is not the only hero he shares this with. He also has another, far older antecedent who has also been called the world’s greatest detective.
Dr. Watson first meets Sherlock Holmes in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1887 novel A Study in Scarlet. Holmes has just discovered “an infallible test for blood stains.” He explains:
“I add this small quantity of blood to a liter of water. You perceive that the resulting mixture has the appearance of pure water. The proportion of blood cannot be more than one in a million.”
Watson observes that:
“As he spoke, he threw into the vessel a few white crystals, and then added some drops of a transparent fluid. In an instant the contents assumed a dull mahogany color, and a brownish dust precipitated to the bottom of the glass jar.”
“Criminal cases are continually hinging upon that one point,” Holmes says.
“A man is suspected of a crime months perhaps after it has been committed. His linen or clothes are examined and brownish stains discovered upon them. Are they blood stains, or mud stains, or rust stains, or fruit stains, or what are they? That is a question which has puzzled many an expert, and why? Because there was no reliable test. Now we have the Sherlock Holmes test.”
Fox’s detailed discussions of Batman’s gadgets in Nolan’s films echo this deep forensic explanation of Sherlock’s discovery by Doyle. Both Holmes and Batman fight crime with a utility belt (literally and figuratively) of reason, science, and engineering.
Doyle was a doctor. Batman’s father Thomas Wayne is often portrayed as a doctor. Both Batman and Holmes are the progeny of doctors. They similarly apply the scientific method to crime, and doctors do the same with illnesses of course. As Camille Paglia wrote of Athena in her 1990 work Sexual Personae, they are idols of techne: the practical application of rationally acquired knowledge. Batman sends us the same message as Holmes, the Apollo astronauts, and Thomas Edison: Ingenuity is our superpower with which we can defeat any challenge.
His City
The honest cop (and Batman’s ally), Jim Gordon (Ben McKenzie), arrives at the scene of a crime to find all the evidence cleared away in an episode of the television show Gotham. His partner Harvey Bullock hovers in the doorway with his hands in his pockets. Bullock’s eyes glaze over the scene like he has seen it a million times before. Because he has. “This is Gotham,” he tells Gordon.
“Across this nation, the name Gotham City is synonymous with crime,” the mayor of Gotham tells the press in Burton’s Batman. Decades later in Batman Begins, Gary Oldman’s Jim Gordon says to his corrupt cop partner: “I’m not a rat. Anyway, in this town, who is there to rat to?” Batman’s city is as monolithic as the Caped Crusader himself, but it is a filthy monolith. It has forever been the Id’s playground.
Burton brought this out better than any other artist who has visited Gotham. Collinson provides a warts and all story of how Burton brought Batman to the screen in Holy Franchise Batman! By Burton’s own admission, his first trip there was a nightmare. Batman sat in pre-production so long Burton had time to make Beetlejuice. Fans wailed about Michael Keaton playing Batman, a spoiler-hungry press stole footage, and producer Jon Peters made several edits to the script during shooting without Burton’s knowledge. One such edit made it necessary to add a 35-feet tall cathedral to the set. Jack Nicholson once confronted the producers in his full Joker makeup. He screamed at them “This film will never see the light of day!”
The nightmare was worth it. Burton and production designer Anton Furst built Gotham as an “island of big, tall cartoon buildings” that was “New York caricatured with a mix of styles squashed together.” They sewed together Bob Kane’s original drawings of Gotham, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, the 2019 Los Angeles of Blade Runner, and Burton’s own Gothic sensibility into a metropolitan Frankenstein’s monster. There has never been a better Gotham. Buildings of stone and steel, 19th century and 20th century, classical, brutalist, and Art Deco, grim and glitzy, rise to the sky on every corner and every street higher than Burton’s camera can take in and they overshadow the streets below that are polluted with pimps and prostitutes.
White steam clouds, industrial putrescent fog, rise from the streets. Burton’s Gotham is a festering industrial glory vine with concrete stems and steel thorns that run wild without the planned boundaries imposed by a pruning gardener. “You’re not exactly normal, are you?” reporter Vicki Vale says to Michael Keaton’s Batman. “It’s not a normal world,” he tells her. It really is not. This is Modernity’s metropolis-sized madhouse. In Gotham, men can turn into bats, women can turn into cats, penguin men can rise from the sewers, and clowns can be serial killers.
Batman is a part of this world even as he fights against it. Batman wore flashy blue and gray tights before Burton. Burton and costume designer Bob Ringwood created the modern image of Batman encased in a full-body black suit. Nolan continued it in the 2000s. Batman’s suit covers all of him like a knight’s armor but it is not hard and metallic in Burton’s films. That would come in 2008 in Nolan’s The Dark Knight and further entrench Batman’s status as a techne idol. Burton’s Batman’s suit is leathery, like his whole body is wrapped in a bat’s wings. He looks almost demonic. “What are you?” a terrified mugger squeals at him. He does not ask who but what, even though Batman speaks to him with a man’s voice.
Like Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, Batman straddles the natural barriers between man and beast. He is a freak not unlike his enemies. Batman may fight with reason and science but he does it dressed as a “giant, menacing, supernatural form” as Detective Eckhardt describes him in Batman. He is Sherlock Holmes in Dracula’s clothing.
Batman made over $250 million at the box office, and Warner Bros wanted a sequel, but the situation had changed. Burton was a young director when he made Batman. By 1990, he was the director of Batman, Beetlejuice, and Edward Scissorhands. To get him back to Gotham, Warner Bros had to give him free reign. Burton took full advantage of his freedom. He turned the black magic he had used to conjure Gotham onto two of Batman’s oldest foes and transformed them into model citizens of his Gothic metropolis.
Gotham is not just the buildings. It is the people. A mad house is not a madhouse without the lunatics sending chilling cackles down its halls. Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale were correct to call their Batman comic series The Long Halloween. Gotham is trapped in a never-ending Halloween night. It would not be Gotham without the other costumed freaks whom Batman fights. In Batman, it was Jack Nicholson’s Joker. In Batman Returns, it was the Penguin played by Danny DeVito and Catwoman played by Michelle Pfeiffer. All three actors underwent extensive transformations in makeup and wardrobe for these roles. Nicholson’s white skin, green hair, and red grin took hours to apply. DeVito wore a rotund full body suit and used colored water to make his saliva look black like a penguin’s. Pfeiffer was vacuum sealed inside her leather Cat-suit and could only perform for a short time before she was in danger of passing out. It was necessary. To be true Gothamites, they could not just put on pink suits, top hats, and cat’s ears like their 1960s television counterparts. They had to be bent, twisted, and deformed until they no longer looked human and became…something else.
The best villain of the three is not Jack Nicholson’s Joker despite critical opinion. Nicholson’s Joker is just a man who fell into a vat of chemicals, changed color, went nuts, and began a reign of terror. DeVito’s Penguin and Pfeiffer’s Catwoman are the most upstanding Gothamites. They are pure representatives of its twisted heart. DeVito’s Penguin is the deformed child of wealthy parents. He is born with three-fingered, clawed flippers instead of hands, and eats the family cat before he can talk. His parents throw him into the sewers where he grows up into a swollen blob that waddles on stubby legs, has sickly pale skin, eyes that are sunken black pits, and oozes inky-black goo from his mouth that turns his speech into guttural and vicious squawks. Businessman Max Shreck tries to make him mayor, but the scheme fails. The top hat Schreck puts on the Penguin’s head looks as garish as it would on an animal. The Penguin is unable to become a member of human society. He bites a man’s nose off, slobbers coarse sexual innuendos on every woman he meets, and is ultimately exposed and must flee back to the sewer he came from. “I am not a human being,” he screeches. “I am an animal.” He is a man turned into a beast.
Pfeiffer’s Catwoman is another freak entirely. Beneath her mask, Catwoman is often a gorgeous reporter, socialite, or sex worker. Pfeiffer is Schreck’s spinster-in-waiting secretary Selina Kyle. Shreck shoves her out a window. She somehow survives. She lays sprawled on the street as Danny Elfman’s creepy score washes over her. The music sounds like the strings on a violin slowly being pulled apart. It is a fair warning of what the fall has done to Selina’s mind. She returns to her apartment, destroys her answering machine that just holds calls from her mother, smashes her family pictures, and stuffs her plush toys down the garbage disposal, and then she assembles the mask that will give her a new identity. Like Batman’s, her suit encases her entire body. It is skin-tight but not skin. It is pure black leather assembled from the cut up remains of a leather jacket she pulls from her closet. You can see the lines where she has sown it together. Catwoman is stitched together from the splintered remains of Selina’s psyche. “Who do you think you are?” Bruce Wayne asks her. “I don’t know anymore,” she says.
Insanity is a Gotham City residency requirement. It is a mad world. Deformed creatures, neither man nor beast, natural or artificial, haunt the city’s people, and the only one to protect Gotham’s innocents is as scary as the freaks he battles. Like the film noir hero, Batman is the one bright light in a black sea. He promises that even when the world is at its darkest, there will be a hero, even if he is a winged creature of the night.
Batman Returns was Burton’s last trip to Gotham. Parents thought the film had too much sex and violence and launched a campaign against it. McDonald’s pulled its Happy Meal promotion for the film. The sequel failed to meet the first film’s box office success. Warner Bros’ studio execs had given Burton free reign and for their trouble they had gotten bad publicity and a sequel that failed to make more money than the original. Their solution was to twist the franchise’s trajectory away from Burton’s Gothic darkness back to the lighter camp of Adam West. They fired Burton and hired Joel Schumacher to make the next two films Batman Forever and Batman and Robin. The last film by all accounts killed the franchise. To this day, the film’s crew and cast are still apologizing for wrecking Batman. It would be another decade before Batman’s next appearance when another filmmaker tapped into another essential strain of Batman’s DNA.
His Origin
“Why do we fall, Bruce?” Bruce Wayne’s father says in Nolan’s 2005 film Batman Begins. “So we can learn to pick ourselves back up.” A friend of mine thinks that Nolan’s Gotham does not actually look like Gotham, unlike Burton’s. He is right. It does not, but that is beside the point. Burton’s films are about Gotham. Nolan’s films are about Batman.
Gotham is always a part of Batman’s story, but there is another character who is also always there. He comes under different names: Joe Chill, Matches Malone, and sometimes he is even the Joker himself, but he always comes to a dark alley late at night and kills a husband and wife in front of their son. He is the man who murders Bruce Wayne’s parents. Because of him, Bruce Wayne swears to avenge his parents by spending the rest of his life warring on all criminals. He is the reason Bruce Wayne becomes Batman.
This is Batman’s origin story. Bruce Wayne is a rich kid who grows up in a mansion. He has everything a child could want but what he loves most, his parents, is blown away before his eyes in a senseless and random act of violence. The happy, privileged little boy becomes an orphan in an instant and for no reason. It is a great peripeteia, dramatic reversal of fortune, but so is Bruce Wayne’s response to this tragedy. “He had love and they took it from him,” Superman says during Tom King’s run writing the Batman comics. “He should be a killer. He should want to tear the world apart for what it did,” but that is not what happens. Bruce Wayne does not become a monster. “He’ll fight to stop what happened to him from happening to other people,” Nolan told Empire in 2005. “That’s the essence of what distinguishes Batman from a psychopath.” Bruce Wayne uses his great tragedy to become a force for good. “He took that pain, that shock of death, and he turned it into hope,” Superman says in King’s comic. Bruce Wayne falls but he picks himself back up.
Nolan brought this part of Batman to the foreground in Batman Begins. “What I felt is that I’d never seen the film of Batman that I figured someone would have done back in 1978 to ’79, after Dick Donnor made that great Superman film,” Nolan told Empire. “They’d never shown you how Bruce Wayne becomes Batman.” In Batman Begins, Bruce does not straight up choose to become Batman. He spends years wandering the world studying criminals and training himself before discovering just how he will avenge his parents’ deaths. Nolan follows Bruce on his odyssey. He pans slowly across mountain-sized glaciers that Bruce climbs in Tibet to reach the secret order, the League of Shadows, who will teach him the skills he needs to become Batman. Hans Zimmer’s score also accompanies him. The horns that lead the score roar upward, and the sound unfurls. It is the sound of something mighty rising from the deepest cave up into the air to spread its wings across the sky. The score fills the sky above Gotham when Bruce returns to the city, becomes Batman, catches Falcone, and stands atop a skyscraper looking down at the city. He was once a boy at the mercy of a mugger. Now he has struck terror into the heart of Gotham’s most powerful crime lord. The frightened little boy in the alley has become his city’s guardian angel.
“It’s a lot like the Count of Monte Crito,” Nolan told Tom Shone of Bruce Wayne’s transformation. He is not wrong. Like Bruce Wayne, Edmund Dantes had everything he loved taken away from him. In Alexandre Dumas’ 1846 novel The Count of Monte Cristo, Dantes is arrested on his wedding night on false charges and sent to an impenetrable prison for over ten years. He learns mathematics, languages, and science from his fellow prisoner the Abbé Faria, escapes, and travels to the island of Monte Cristo, where he finds a fortune in hidden treasure. With the treasure, Dantes transforms himself into the Count of Monte Cristo and glides back into his homeland under his new identity, like a wraith to punish those who wronged him.
It is a common tale. Odysseus, Robin Hood, and Iron Man all travel the same trajectory from a great high to the lowest low only then to climb back up to the top of an even higher peak than before. It is the story of the phoenix reborn from the ashes, and we have been telling it and listening to it for centuries. Bruce Wayne’s transformation into Batman is another story of hope. He shows us that no matter how far we fall, we can pick ourselves back up.
His Will
“Tonight, I am law,” Batman yells. He sits astride a horse amid a crowd of street thugs in Gotham’s dump. The city is covered in a nuclear winter and is falling into anarchy. Batman rallies the thugs into his own army to restore order and justice to Gotham. This is the beginning of the end of the comic series that led Batman out of the campy closet of the Adam West era: Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns. “I am the law,” sounds more like Caesar, Robespierre, or Hitler, but it is more in character for Batman than many might think.
“The main image people have of superheroes is Adam West playing Batman on the old TV show,” Miller said in 1987. “That’s what had to be overcome.” Miller wanted to take Batman back to “the substance” of the idea of the original superheroes in the 1930s. “Superman began as a common man against the forces of evil in the world, largely forces of authority, and…Batman was a vigilante who carried a gun on his hip.” Miller was right. Batman is a vigilante. It is not a clean word but that is what he is. A vigilante takes the law into his own hands. He uses his own standards to decide who is a criminal, what punishment is just, and then dishes out that punishment with his own guns or fists in Batman’s case. Vigilantes like Batman usurp the role of the law and all the police, judges, and politicians who make and enforce it. Some have called Batman a defender of the status quo, but a vigilante can never be an endorsement of the status quo. His very existence challenges the rule of law. The vigilante says to the law: “You can’t do the job so I’m going to do it myself.” He is saying “I am the law.”
Batman looks much more frightening when you focus on the true nature of what he does. He takes up the job, judge, jury and executioner, that in liberal and democratic societies we only give to elected officials. We also never give all three jobs to one person for good reason. “Who appointed the Batman?” Bruce Wayne quips over a fancy dinner in The Dark Knight. His friend Harvey Dent replies: “When their enemies were at the gates, the Romans would suspend democracy and appoint one man to protect the city.” Dent’s girlfriend points out to him that the last man the Romans appointed was Caesar and he never gave his power back. In The Dark Knight Returns, an aged Bruce Wayne looks at what Gotham has become since he retired his mask and cape. He calls Gotham “This city I’m learning to hate, the city that’s given up, like the whole world seems to have.” Wayne returns to the spot where his parents were murdered. “It’s older, dirtier,” he thinks, “but it could have happened yesterday. It could be happening right now. They could be lying at your feet, twitching, bleeding…” Miller’s writing style is tough and sharp. In his short sentences and violent word choice, I can hear Bruce’s pain, revulsion, and anger pressing into his gut like knives. I can understand why he decides to put the mask and cape back on. Batman is a rebel fighting to save his city from drowning in its own blood and sewerage, but by doing so he runs a great risk. Albert Camus warned that the rebel:
“attacks a shattered world to make it whole. He confronts the injustice at large in the world with his own principles of justice. Thus all he originally wants is to…establish a reign of justice, if he can, or of injustice if he is driven to the end of his tether.”
The one who says “I am the law” is always in danger of becoming a tyrant and monster. Batman has come close. He cripples at least three criminals in The Dark Knight Returns. “He’s young. He’ll probably walk again. But you’ll stay scared-won’t you punk,” he says after the first crippling. In The Dark Knight, Nolan’s Batman turns every phone in Gotham into a microphone and camera to find and stop the Joker. He can hear and see what everyone everywhere says and does. “This is too much power for one person,” Fox says. “I’ve got to find this man Lucius,” Batman tells him. Fox says: “At what cost?” The cost here is becoming something a lot like the Gestapo, KGB, and the all-knowing Thought Police of Orwell’s 1984.
Miller said that actors Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson were “a right-wing version” of what superheroes like Batman were in the 30s. Eastwood played LA cop Dirty Harry who tortured a criminal to find out where the criminal had hidden a kidnapped girl. In Death Wish, Bronson played architect Paul Kersey who begins killing muggers after his wife is killed in a home invasion and he is dubbed “the Vigilante.” Nolan was asked by Empire how Batman is different from Bronson. “To me, Batman can never be Charles Bronson in Death Wish,” Nolan said. “He doesn’t kill, he doesn’t use guns.”
This is why Batman does not become like Paul Kersey, Dirty Harry, Caesar, Robespierre, Hitler, or the Thought Police. He does not become a thug, killer, or tyrant because he has rules. In Batman Begins, Bruce Wayne is told to execute a man to complete his training with the League of Shadows. “I’m no executioner,” he says. “This man is a murderer,” his teacher—played by Liam Neeson—says. Neeson’s voice is sharp and snakelike. It is the voice of the demon on Bruce’s shoulder, on all our shoulders, hissing in our ear. But Bruce does not listen to it. Batman never does. He has rules that he sticks to. Those rules are what keep him from falling off the thin tightrope he walks between good and evil. Again, he is like the film noir hero. His rules are his way to stay good in the shattered world he lives in. “When a man’s partner is killed, he’s supposed to do something about it,” Humphrey Bogart’s Sam Spade says in The Maltese Falcon. He is about to turn the woman he loves over to the police for killing his partner. “It doesn’t matter what you thought of him. He was your partner and you’re supposed to do something about it.” Batman is just as inflexible. “We will never kill with any weapons of any kind,” he said in Batman #4 in 1940. Batman has held to that rule for over 80 years. He may appoint himself judge and jury, but he never becomes an executioner.
We all have rules. We think we will go to the grave never breaking them, but we do when the day runs us over badly enough or the temptation looks too sexy. Everyone breaks their rules except Batman. Even Adam West’s Batman was incorruptible, but in a manner so campy that it was not exceeded until Christopher Reeve played Superman in 1978. What makes Batman incorruptible? In the end of The Dark Knight, he takes the fall for a murder he did not commit to protect Harvey Dent’s memory and the hope Dent inspires in Gotham’s people. Gordon’s son asks his father why Batman does this as the two watch Batman flee Gordon and the police, now a fugitive in the eyes of the city he protects. “Because he can take it,” Gordon says. Batman can take anything. He can be alone, unarmed, and without hope of victory or salvation and still do what is right. His unbreakable will is why he never breaks his rules, why he is unstoppable and what makes him something so many people want to see. It is precisely because we all break our rules that we enjoy this story about this man who never breaks his rules. The knight in shining armor, or in this case the Dark Knight, is the hope that there is someone who can remain good no matter what.
His Future
Matt Reeves’ 2022 film The Batman was the greatest failure in the Batman canon. It was a kind of reverse unmasking of Batman. The mask stayed on, but what was beneath was ripped out. Robert Pattinson’s Batman wears a hulking suit of armor, drives an equally clunky Batmobile, and instead of a cape that becomes wings, he uses a gliding suit that looks like a onesie. His technology is an over-sized sledgehammer rather than a doctor’s scalpel. Bruce Wayne’s fall is belittled. The Riddler (Paul Dano) says he is not a real orphan because he grew up in a mansion and Catwoman (Zoë Kravitz) calls him just another rich, privileged, white asshole. Those are her words not mine.
Bruce Wayne’s wealth is irrelevant. All it does is pay for the Bat-Cave. His story is tragic not because he loses everything he has, but everything he cares about. He does not care about the money. He does care about his parents. Batman also ultimately fails to thwart the Riddler’s plan and discovers that he has inspired the mass shooters the Riddler has enlisted to take revenge on Gotham’s 1%. He does not inspire hope. He inspires mass murder. Timm’s Batman was once captured by his enemies and put on trial. They argued he was the reason they became monsters. Now, this argument of Batman’s enemies has become the theme of a Batman film.
This was made with the approval of those who guard Batman’s image. Now imagine a world of similar artistic incompetents set upon Batman once the wall of IP protection falls away from around him. I see an ocean of rubbish, as bad as The Batman and far worse, and The Dark Knight Returns, Burton’s Batman films, Nolan’s The Dark Knight Trilogy and every other great chapter in the Batman canon reduced to just a drop in this uncorked sewer. The face of Batman may be plastered in mud.
Those who consume his legend can stop that. After 2035, they can stop it just as they can stop shoe making companies from profiting from slave labor: through what they buy. The Batman stories we all consume after 2035 will decide what he becomes.
William J. Barker is a fiction writer, film critic, journalist, and poet, and he is currently writing his first novel. He is an editorial assistant at Quillette, a volunteer at Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR) in the Arts, and founder, editor, and staff writer of the literary magazine Brave the Castle, as well as the film criticism magazine Into the Screen.
