24: The Safdie Brothers & Batman
Gareth Higgins on THE BATMAN
I’m really excited by The Batman - the latest in an over eighty year history of telling and retelling the tale of a shadowy guy fighting even more shadowy ones in a city that may be the shadowiest thing in the whole enterprise. I think this new version, starring Robert Pattinson and guided by director and co-writer Matt Reeves is the most spiritually mature of all Batman iterations. It’s part of the wonderful recent crop of popular movies which have something meaningful to say about real life, and which don’t merely play out our unquestioned political assumptions about good versus evil albeit using more spectacular weapons. Wonder Woman 1984 remains the most accomplished, and the most joyful of these; The Batman is a kind of mirror image of WW84 - Bruce Wayne is bleak where Diana holds hope, Batman brutal where Wonder Woman seeks to restrain evil without harm. But both of them refuse to kill, and each film climaxes with a recognition that the story a hero tells is even more important than what they can do with their fists.
Batman has been part of my life for as long as I can remember - from the campy TV show I remember as a child to the red letter day for me in August 1989 when I stood in line for three hours to see the Tim Burton/Michael Keaton film. Burton’s sensibilities are also imbued with camp, and his Batman was exciting but now seems empty. That’s partly a function of my being fourteen at the time I remember being thrilled by it; partly one of how movies were less accessible then and therefore more of an event. I still love looking at Burton’s Batman and Batman Returns, but the look of surfaces is really all there is to them.
Come 2005 and Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy was both exciting and rich enough to warrant repeat viewings - there was a deeper exploration of the idea at the center of the myth: A vastly privileged, vastly traumatized young man seeks to answer his city’s problems with blunt force, frightening the would-be selfish takers into restraint. The substance of those three films is palpable - and the sheer heaviness too: you feel Bruce Wayne/Batman’s pain, are chilled by the sociopathy of the bad guys. You are racily captivated by the thunderous action so fluidly photographed and sequenced (a long truck flipped on its end, a thrilling bank robbery, a race against time to save a beloved); and Nolan has the courage to show that Batman can’t rescue us all. The most profound moment of the trilogy occurs when an easily scapegoated “thug” figure (a character called “Tattooed Prisoner”, played by Tommy Tiny Lister) refuses to play a zero sum game with the Joker, and instead of taking the path of redemptive violence offers his life to save a boatload of people, throwing a detonator overboard rather than using it to save himself. This is the lifeboat dilemma writ cinematically large, and a kind of heroism with which the audience can actually identify: we don’t have capes and supercharged vehicles, butlers or computer genius assistants, nor the few hundred million dollars it would take to pay for them. But we do have choices, including the option to not participate in the system that tells us when confronted by an oppressive force that we must fight, flee, or freeze. When goaded toward violence, we can choose self-giving love. This is one of the most truthful yet least spoken statements a human can make.
And the trilogy concludes with another truthful, somber note: Bruce Wayne has to leave town. His presence has apparently called forth an opposite response. It’s a bit like how hoarding gold is a bad idea because in the event of a zombie apocalypse a) we can’t be sure gold will be worth anything, and b) I might not want to be the person who everybody knows has all the gold. The presence of a bad guy who likes to beat up bad guys doesn’t frighten all the bad guys away - it might actually bring some out of the woodwork, so belligerent that they, in fact, want to fight; some so broken that they don’t mind killing themselves in the process.
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