After the Batmania bubble popped, DC gave the comic book a hard reboot, aimed at older readers. Writer Denny O’Neil dispatched Robin to college, made Gotham City a gothic hellhole and repositioned the villains as lethal chaos agents rather than crooks with wacky gimmicks. Neal Adams’s cinematic artwork redefined Batman as a brooding spectre who perched on gargoyles, wrapped in an improbably vast cape. “If the script called for a daytime scene, I would simply change it in the artwork to a night-time scene,” Adams said.
Years later, as editor of all the Batman titles, O’Neil drew up the “Bat-Bible” for writers. “The basic story is that he is an obsessed loner,” he explained. “Not crazy, not psychotic… Batman knows who he is and knows what drives him and he chooses not to fight it. He permits his obsession to be the meaning of his life.” Gotham City should feel like New York, specifically “Manhattan below Fourteenth Street at 3 am, November 28 in a cold year”. One challenge to Batman’s pretensions to realism today is that Gotham has never really outgrown the dirty, dangerous New York of Abe Beame and Travis Bickle. “Batman works best in a society that’s gone to hell,” says Frank Miller in the anthology Many More Lives of the Batman. “That’s the only way he’s ever worked.”
Miller arrived in New York from rural Vermont in 1977. Being mugged at knifepoint (twice) gave him a personal incentive to depict vigilantes beating the crap out of criminals in alleyways, and that talent earned him the job of reviving Batman yet again in 1986. In Batman: Year One, a young Bruce Wayne swings into action in a city that’s corrupt to its core. In The Dark Knight Returns, a bitter fifty-something Batman comes out of retirement to become a militarised “god of vengeance” at the helm of a vigilante army. “Is Batman a Fascist?” asked the Village Voice. Miller’s implied answer was: Probably, so what?
Miller was still slamming the Sixties TV show (“For me, Batman was never funny”) but he was kicking a corpse. Two more landmark graphic novels — The Killing Joke by Alan Moore and Brian Bolland, and Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth by Grant Morrison and Dave McKean — cemented Batman as an ultraviolent nocturnal avenger, tormented from within and without. The fans loved it. As Glen Weldon puts it in The Caped Crusade: “Sure, Batman may have been created for children, but Frank Miller and Alan Moore had brought him into the real world, a place of bloody violence and stark sexuality, and now, finally, everybody would see him for the badass the fans had always known him to be.”
Tim Burton brought the gist of this new kitsch-killing Batman to a mainstream audience with his 1989 movie. I’m not sure that Joel Schumacher’s contributions to the franchise, Batman Forever and Batman and Robin, amount to a pendulum swing. He aspired to make “a living comic book”, but the bright, boisterous comics of his childhood memories bore no resemblance to the prevailing Nineties mood of bone-breaking, gun-toting, kick-ass nihilism. A funnier, freakier Batman might have worked but it certainly didn’t in Schumacher’s hands.
After that, Christopher Nolan’s beloved Dark Knight trilogy wasn’t so much a revolution as a restoration, returning Batman to the stygian Gotham of Miller and O’Neil. It is, as Zack Snyder already proved with Batman vs Superman, as hard to follow Nolan as it was easy to improve on Schumacher. The Lego Batman Movie’s brilliant parody of the grim-and-gritty approach now reads as a pre-emptive strike on The Batman: “I don’t talk about feelings, Alfred. I don’t have any, I’ve never seen one. I’m a night-stalking, crime-fighting vigilante, and a heavy metal rapping machine. I don’t feel anything emotionally, except for rage. 24/7, 365, at a million per cent.”
Reeves’s movie feels like a doleful remix of The Dark Knight, incorporating the rain-sodden urban hell of Se7en and the husky, noir voiceover of Rorschach from Watchmen. Pattinson’s Batman says things like, “They think I’m hiding in the shadows — I am the shadows” and, “The city’s angry, scared — like me.” His Bruce Wayne, glum, reclusive and clearly a Nine Inch Nails fan, is no playboy. Nor is he much of a detective, having somehow failed to notice that Gotham’s crooked officials routinely hang out at the nightclub run by the mobsters they’re taking money from.
For all the promotional talk of making this Batman an emo “weirdo”, inspired by Kurt Cobain, the only difference is a matter of degree: he is more withdrawn, more unhappy, more obsessed. Given that his formative psychic wound is the same as it was in 1940, it seems futile to ask again why he is like this. The movie’s politics, such as they are, are as incoherent as Nolan’s in The Dark Knight Rises. Once again, we have an aggrieved underclass whose legitimate gripes with Gotham’s self-serving elite are undermined by all the serial killing and terrorism. So what’s new? What speaks to our particular 2020s anxieties?
There are routes to making Batman interesting again. One would be an off-its-rocker horror movie with an 18 certificate. Another would have a discernible sense of humour and warmth, probably involving Robin. You could even tap into the wild fantasies of DC’s Elseworlds series: Victorian Batman, sci-fi Batman, Twenties Batman, whatever you like this side of Bat-Baby. Just shake the kaleidoscope.
For the 2005 reprint of Batman: Year One, David Mazzuchelli produced a short comic strip about the history of the character and his own role in it. “With Year One, we sought to craft a credible Batman, grounded in a world we recognise,” he wrote. “But, did we go too far? Once a depiction veers toward realism, each new detail releases a torrent of questions that exposes the absurdity at the heart of the genre. The more ‘realistic’ superheroes become, the less believable they are.” Grant Morrison, the writer of Arkham Asylum, recently made a similar point: “Using kids’ adventure heroes to make hackneyed observations about typical human behaviour that does not in fact apply to made up comic book characters strikes me as — I don’t know — whimsical? Dilettantish? A squandering of energy and creativity?”
That memo has yet to reach Hollywood, where poor, sad Bruce remains stuck in a cul-de-sac of scowling trauma and urban decay. If we must have more Batman (and we surely must), then next time let’s make him unreal.
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