“It’s worse than a war zone around here,” a police captain says. With crime at record levels, the need to be tougher on criminals is ever more important.
Whoops, I got distracted there. I was reading the Official RNC commentary that Ketanji Brown Jackson is “soft on crime,” and a linked Axios article about record homicide levels this year. My mistake; I’m here to write about Batman. Here goes:
In the opening of the new movie The Batman, we see a montage of violence: a murderer breaks into a home and hammers someone to death (well, it’s not a hammer, but that’s an important plot point for later on), while ordinary criminals engage in robberies and assaults, and all the while Robert Pattinson’s gravelly Batman voice tells us that “Fear is a tool. They think I’m hiding in the shadows. But I am the shadows.” We see some criminals, in the midst of their petty crimes, looking into these aforementioned shadows, wondering if The Batman is lurking there, until finally a group of mixed-race thugs, harassing an Asian man on the subway, are in fact accosted by the real thing, and much like their counterparts in the opening scene of Tim Burton’s Batman (1989), they get their butts kicked by the Caped Crusader. Run, criminals! Vengeance is coming for you!
Disclaimer: I enjoy comic book movies, and Star Wars, and other diversions geared towards kids. Kids’ media often has a villain — and sometimes, the villain even declares himself “Evil,” so we know that even in his own mind, he’s the Badguy. It’s wonderfully comforting, isn’t it? One never has any qualms about beating up or killing someone like Darth Vader or Cobra Commander or Doctor Doom or Sauron. That’s one of the reasons these movies are so much fun, and why it’s quite entertaining to go and watch Good triumph over Evil by means of punching.
But Matt Reeves’s The Batman wants to be more than that. It wants to be a gritty crime drama, a dark (literally) film, grounded in realism, with few unfathomable stunts or plot-twists, borrowing archetypes from classic noir. Zoe Kravitz’s Catwoman has even been compared to Marlene Dietrich in style. And the rules of this fantasy universe are, save for Batman’s infinitely-bulletproof-vest (even, like, a shotgun at close range, or a bomb going off inches from his face, apparently), entirely grounded in realism. It’s not a comic book movie; it’s a crime drama (about a guy who dresses up as an animal, although presumably he’s not a furry), and it begs to be taken seriously as such.
Doing so, though, raises a number of problems. First of all, there is this opening scene, wherein Batman punches a bunch of thugs on the subway, thus fighting crime literally. Now, I’m not generally known as a right-wing reactionary, so it will probably surprise no one that I don’t ascribe to the theory that crime is best solved by punching, or that “criminals” are some unredeemable caste that is fundamentally different from the rest of us. Unlike our esteemed GOP Senators who seem to think that the problem with America is that we don’t have enough people in prison for long enough (despite us having, literally, more people in prison, per capita, than any nation on Earth¹), I think that crime is a symptom of broader social problems. I think this is a fairly widely-held liberal opinion, but I’ll expand on it anyway just for clarity:
No one wants to be a thief or a gang member; generally speaking, in a community where there are better options, youths pursue them. In a world in which people have access to good jobs, they pursue those opportunities instead of lives of crime. There is no moral failing among those who commit crimes, and the most significant difference between criminals and noncriminals has to do with whether or not you got caught. Practically speaking, the rhetorical argument I’ve always used to make this point is as follows: Do the safest neighborhoods tend to have the most cops in them? Obviously not. The safest of all places to live are really affluent, with high property values, and where the police presence is minimal, often entirely invisible; meanwhile, urban areas with high crime rates are crawling with visible police, the best-armed and most trigger-happy of all the color-coordinated street gangs (their color is, obviously, blue), and yet crime still remains high. Evidently, increasing the size of the police force does not correlate to lowering crime, just as increasing the size of your military doesn’t bring world peace any closer. Rather, safety is better defined as a situation in which a vanishingly small number of sane people near you have any desire to commit crimes (or, in the case of international security, the desire to engage in war). This objective is achieved best through raising the affluence and economic opportunities of one’s whole society. It has never, to my knowledge, been effectively achieved by more cops, more aggressive policing, tougher sentencing, or more punching.
In fairness, there are ways in which The Batman acknowledges this. In that same opening monologue, Batman admits: “I wish I could say I’m making a difference, but I don’t know. Murder, robberies, assault — 2 years later, they’re all up.” (Duh, didn’t he just read my above paragraph?). And at the close of the movie, he acknowledges further: “I have had an effect here, but not the one I intended. Vengeance won’t change the past — mine, or anyone else’s. I have to become more. People need hope.” Nevertheless, the events of the movie contain a problematic conception of crime, one which I realize pervades all incarnations of Batman, let alone America.
For one, the idea of criminals as some sort of distinct species is a huge fallacy in American culture, one which is exacerbated by the fact that so much of our “crime” is tied to drug use. The criminals in this movie, too, are primarily engaged in selling drugs. Beyond all the well-voiced objections to the current prosecution of drug crimes as part of the “War on Drugs” and its somewhat cynical, racist origins, there’s the secondary issue that, speaking at least for myself, I’m a patron of drug dealers — that’s, like, where I buy my drugs. I would presume that Matt Reeves and Robert Pattinson, too, buy their drugs from drug dealers, and quite possibly many of you, as well. If the worst thing The Penguin is accused of, in this movie, is selling drugs that I might want to buy while the government prevents me from doing so, am I really supposed be invested in his capture?
Admittedly, the above may well be a digression, and fodder for another article about drug use and drug “crime” in general. The real problem with this movie, and its message, and America, has to do with its relationship not to only crime, but to the crimes of the rich and powerful, and the imbalance of justice and vengeance to be meted out. The simple plot of the movie (spoilers!) is that The Riddler, a deranged serial killer, targets the corrupt power brokers of Gotham, killing one after another the following people: A corrupt mayor who was on the payroll of the mob boss Carmine Falcone; a corrupt police commissioner who was on the payroll of the mob boss Carmine Falcone; a corrupt DA who was on the payroll of the mob boss Carmine Falcone; and, finally, Carmine Falcone. Having killed these four people, all of whom were also deeply involved in the seedy underbelly of the drugs and prostitution in the city, he then proceeds to do what all movie badguys do, which is: hatch a plan to literally drown everyone in the entire city, because he must be a crazy person to want to bring down corruption, right?
The Riddler is not the first Batman villain to target the powerful and corrupt. The Dark Knight’s (2008) Joker also went after corrupt cops and mob bosses, as did his predecessor in 1989, while Batman Returns’s (1992) Catwoman took aim at the evil businessman who had murdered her earlier in the movie when she discovered his nefarious plans. Even more interestingly, I can’t think of a single time that Batman actually confronts a corrupt cop or political figure or organized crime leader. Throughout Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, many of Batman’s allies — his mentor Ra’s al Ghul, his girlfriend Rachel Dawes, his “white knight” counterpart Harvey Dent, his friend Jim Gordon — constantly bemoan the depth of Gotham corruption, and we, the viewers, see plenty of policemen taking bribes and working directly for the Badguys, yet Batman contents himself largely with punching low-level crooks. In The Dark Knight, he flies all the way to China to kidnap a mob accountant and bring him back to Gotham so that he can be forced to testify against the mob — but he won’t go into a police station and confront officers that he knows to be on the mob payroll? Not even once? So Batman’s jurisdiction supersedes that of the FBI, but doesn’t rise as high as that of Internal Affairs?
Like many in the audience, I found The Riddler’s plan to be entirely ethical and positive, even if the brutal killings were a bit over-the-top. So I was disappointed when the writers decided that he should suddenly switch gears towards a maniacal plan to murder everyone in the city. This kind of character assassination isn’t new to comic book movie villains. In Avengers: Infinity War, many found Thanos’s focus on resource allocation reasonable; as such, in the sequel, Avengers: Endgame, he declared that his new motivation was to murder everyone in the entire universe, thus making it easier for us to approve of killing him. Elsewhere in the Marvel universe, the villain Killmonger from Black Panther was widely considered the most reasonable villain of the Marvel movies, because his main gripe was that Wakanda, an African nation of unsurpassed technological and military prowess, had refused for centuries to help Black people being oppressed around the globe. However, the movie writers again made sure that viewers weren’t going to side with Killmonger for long (as if his name isn’t a big enough clue!), revealing that his real plan was some sort of revenge against Wakandans for having murdered his father, and so now he was evil and had to be stopped. It’s convenient, then, for the morally-simple audience, that those villains who have noble goals that they are pursuing through extralegal means are quickly revealed to actually have genocidal goals. The implication is clear: Anyone who pursues extralegal means (besides, you know, Batman) is predestined to be genocidally evil.
The notion that a vigilante like The Riddler, or really any criminal or mobster, no matter how violent, is somehow close to committing genocide is, frankly, preposterous. Who are these criminals who harbor secret fantasies of blowing up entire cities? Even terrorists don’t generally do this: they attack a single target, meaning to spread fear and panic in furtherance of exerting political pressure on their enemies. The bloodthirsty desire to blow up an entire city is, in the real world, reserved for real-life supervillains such as Ariel Sharon or Vladimir Putin or Donald Rumsfeld or, you know, Harry Truman, the only supervillain who actually did something in real life akin to the crime Grand Moff Tarkin commits in Star Wars².
So, to summarize: The Batman, like many comic book movies but especially like all versions of Batman, reinforces an extremely frustrating, false, and radically-right-wing delusion that:
- Criminal, extralegal behavior is fundamentally different from decent, law-abiding behavior;
- Criminals want to do crime because they’re evil, not because of socioeconomic factors forcing them into extralegal activity;
- The worst criminals are street thugs who should be beaten and/or cowed by fear;
- Corrupt politicians and mobsters are a problem, yes, but hey, what are you gonna do about it?³
- Being Tough On Crime is the best way to Fight Crime.
It occurred to me, watching this movie, that this character is billionaire Bruce Wayne, and that if he really wanted to fight crime, maybe he should be using his billions of dollars to revitalize the city? (Turns out, according to this movie, his dad tried that, and corruption ruined it, so I guess there’s no point in trying again). Maybe Bruce Wayne could do more good than Batman? I actually thought the movie was leaning in this direction, but as it turned out, instead we get teased for the inevitable sequel with The Joker, whom I assume will be revealed to be an unstable genocidal maniac who must be fought by dressing up in a costume and punching. In his Dark Knight iteration, we’re told that The Joker has no real motivation for money or power, and “just wants to watch the world burn.” This, conveniently, justifies any and all means that would be used to stop him, and also makes him unlike pretty much any real person in the real world.
As I thought a little more about this, I realized that there is one superhero who is known for fighting someone actually powerful, in a way that is realistically evil: Superman, whose chief antagonist is the greedy businessman (sorry, is that redundant?) Lex Luthor. Despite all of the conservative, vanilla language around Superman (i.e., “Truth, Justice, and the American Way”), at least he spends some time fighting actual villainy, and not just punching purse-snatchers and foiling bank robbers. So it isn’t like fighting corruption is completely outside the realm of the superhero landscape. Unquestionably, though, even in this realistic-dark-and-gritty version, it has no place in the world of Batman, even though corruption itself is regularly a major plot point in Batman stories.
What is the point of all this? Just to complain about a movie? Well, in part. It wasn’t a good movie and it’s had a number of insipidly positive reviews. But the real point is that, in a world in which GOP Senators are attacking Judge Jacskon for being “soft on crime,” in a world in which a real-life teenaged vigilante was allowed to go to Wisconsin and kill some people because he suspected them of criminal behavior, in a world still suffering from obscene inequities in prosecution and sentencing across both racial and socioeconomic lines, in a world in which actual evil billionaires in various nations continue to wreak havoc, directly and indirectly, on our ability as ordinary people to just live our lives in peace — in such a world, maybe a new version of Batman had a greater responsibility than just using an absurdly high f-stop. Maybe, if someone wants to make a serious film based on these superhero characters, it would be nice to convey the lesson that criminals aren’t inherently evil, or that it is noble to take on the rich and powerful and not just the weak, or that punching is not the best solution to crime.
In the movie Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987), which you probably haven’t seen because it’s truly one of the worst movies ever made, Superman angers all sides of the Cold War by hijacking a bunch of nuclear weapons and throwing them into the sun. It’s the kind of radical terrorism that Klaatu, another alien visitor (from The Day The Earth Stood Still), performs when he sees the depravity of late-20th-Century humankind. So there are models for actual heroism, even in the world of comics and kids’ movies. To whoever next decides to make a “realistic” take on a superhero: let’s go for a realistic take on a supervillain, too. Let’s make Harry Truman the villain. Then, maybe, we can have an interesting play on judgment, retribution, and maybe even vengeance.
¹ This fact is honestly insufficiently quoted, even if it’s widely known. America has 2 million prisoners. We have 300,000 more people in prison right now than China, which has four times our population, and which we label as an “oppressive” country. This is literally the least “free” place in the world. If you add up all the people in prison under the regimes of North Korea and the Taliban and Putin, you do not even get half as many prisoners as are currently locked up, right now, today, in this psychotic right-wing dystopia of retributive punishment.
² Translation for non-nerds: he orders the destruction of the planet Alderaan by means of The Death Star. But, I mean, Truman did it twice, so, Tarkin still falls short.
³ I’m sympathetic to this idea, except that in the comic book universe, the whole point is that Batman is doing something. In an actually good crime drama, Chinatown, we have the same hopelessness, as Noah Cross walks away and we’re told “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.” If this or any other Batman movie wanted to make such a depressing point, I’d be fascinated, but that is not the comment they’re making at all.
