Batman:(Part 2) Why can’t Hollywood get him right?
This article is part two of the Batman series. Read part one here.
Who is Batman?
There seems to be misconception that Batman has no superpowers. I know what you’re thinking, “He doesn’t.” Actually, he does. Batman’s superpower is to look really really badass all the time. All the money, all the angsty whatever bullshit, all the martial arts training, gadgets, detective-ness, and costume have one purpose, and that is to give a plausible reason to why Batman can look so badass all the time. But the truth is, even if you had all those things, you still wouldn’t look that badass, which can only mean that Batman has been endowed with a character superhuman-ness to look badass all the time. That is his superpower.
Batman has the only superpower that is perfectly suited to the visual medium of comic books and cinema, he can look as badass as we can imagine. And yet, the film Batman Begins, despite the hundreds of millions of dollars poured into it, got it wrong. It didn’t capture the essence of what we all enjoy about Batman, that he’s badass and looks badass and can look badass at the most opportune moments. The only reason he’s even a detective in the first place is so that he can show up somewhere and look badass while fighting, otherwise he’d just constantly be sitting on the tops of buildings being emo.
How do you look badass in cinema?
Batman’s main form of looking badass is looking scary, closely followed by looking like a mad human demon. The easiest way to get both of these effects is to NOT show everyone every fucking crevice and detail on the suit and face all the time. Batman is the monster that’s stalking Bruce Wayne, and you need to keep the monster mysterious for most of the movie, this allows the audience to fill in all the implied badassness with really awesome badassness that only they can conjure.
Important Thing #1: Hide the betraying details, make the motion and imagery more abstract. The audience could even fear Batman, and they should, he’s the dark avenger about to get medieval on their asses without due process.
Important Thing #2: Batman is the Monster.
Batman is Bruce Wayne’s nemesis. When a super villain shows up, the danger isn’t that the villain will poison Gotham or make giant robots or whatever, the danger is that Batman will fucking murder that villain and rip his body in half while drinking his blood and smiling darkly with glowing demon eyes that are no longer human. Of course this shouldn’t actually happen, that’d make the story pretty boring, but the point it is not happening is why Bruce Wayne fights the demons inside him. This would be a gigantic conflict that Bruce Wayne would have to deal with, it’s the ultimate conflict, the “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”-esque conflict where we have enemies and darkness inside us that pours out and destroys the world.
The great drama that we love is that Batman is slowly subtly winning this battle against Bruce Wayne, constantly. Every night, Bruce Wayne dons the suit of Batman hoping he can hang on to his humanity. It’s a demon Bruce conquered once, but it’s slowly taking ground, moving higher and higher into the center of Bruce Wayne/Batman’s motives and actions. Vengeance, but not only Vengeance, also Wrath, Hatred, Moral Apathy, and Sadism.
It’s these very things that Bruce Wayne strikes out at, manifested in his external villains, because he projects himself on those very villains and sees the monster that lives inside him in their actions. Self-loathing and self-hatred are the facets present in Bruce’s everyday struggle. In his decadent life of plenty, donning the cloak of the “dark knight” is the only thing that gives his life meaning. Every time he’s victorious against a villain, he feels he’s one step closer to being victorious against the the darkness inside him. It’s a vicious circle, for in order to escape, Bruce must perceive himself as conquering all darkness in the world. Even then, what price will he pay in doing so?
Many perceive Batman’s ultimate success as being able to put away the mask and cape, and living a happy life as Bruce Wayne. But the reality would be a sobering opposite. Vengeance and wrath, and all actions taken in their name lead only to more vengeance and wrath. Sure, Bruce Wayne may spend months or years feeling like he’d won, but ultimately Batman would sit quiet in his cave, waiting for the moment that darkness rises again, and if it doesn’t, he’ll sit forever alone in the darkness of that cave.
Important Thing #3: Batman is the Monster and we are privy to the Monster’s Perspective.
A lot of people might interpret “Batman is the Monster” to mean that the camera should treat the villains as the victims, looking up and into the shadows for Batman as those villains/victims would. WRONG.
One of the coolest parts of Batman is that he’s the monster and looks badass all the time, AND we can see what he’s doing all the time, allowing for a maximum efficiency of badass awesomeness on the screen. When it comes down to it, the only reason Batman can be treated like the hero in a story is because he’s active, actively doing any manner of stuff. So in order to get a sense of that, we need to SEE HIM DOING STUFF. When there’s a warehouse of guys shooting up at the moving shadows afraid of Batman, it’s a classic Batman movie moment, but it’s also FUCKING BORING. We need to see Batman’s perspective, looking down, moving quickly through the shadows, creating decoys and shit to throw them off, then coming down swooping in with cape open looking like a giant bat. Then, for the one half-second before he caves a guy’s sternum in, we see the villain/victim POV.
Why are Important Things #1, #2 and #3 important?
When Christian Bale walks around looking serious in the Batman costume, it is literally one step from being fucking ridiculous. That step is taken the first time he opens his mouth with that faux-deep-serious bullshit. I laughed, as did many people I was watching the film with. Batman Begins treated Batman as a person in a suit posing for the camera. And that’s what it looked like too. And for everything that people said about the Tim Burton Batman looking like faggy gay-muscle-suit bullshit, the same can be said about this Batman Begins suit, except now he also has a fucking gigantic nose that the cinematographer doesn’t know how to light and an even stiffer neck.
Well the solution isn’t to redo the costume, it’s to redo the entire fucking concept. Batman isn’t a super soldier with a cape, he’s not supposed to look realistic or even Alex-Ross-realistic, he’s a fantasy we have of a dark avenger. This idea of “I want to make Batman like he would actually be, plausible,” is fine and dandy, but don’t fuck with Batman’s super power. Realism is about means and motivation, a character has a realistic motivation and must obtain the means to achieve those ends. It has nothing to do with making his costume look like a piece of metal with etched abs, then shooting him with lighting fit for television. Cinema has a hard time grasping onto this concept, but Sam Raimi with Spider-man got it pretty well. It’s not enough just to put the superhero in front of a background and film it, they need to be shot in the right way, creating an ambience, melding with their environment. And as much as Spider-man benefited from that and the blurring backgrounds that are indicative of Spidey’s iconic imagery, Batman absolutely demands this type of treatment, because, again, his super power is that he LOOKS badass all the time. Batman needs to be crouching and flying down at something in every other shot we see him in, doing things that Batman does like crouch to prepare to fight/jump or fight/jump.
I guess the trouble is, that Batman’s superpower isn’t easy to put on film, because he needs to look badass at 24 frames per second, that’s a whole lot of badass. It’s impossible for somebody to look badass all the time, that’s why we’re calling it a superpower. So we end up getting this wishy washy Batman Begins look, trying hard to do something, but ultimately falling far short of potential.
Ok, so enough whining, now it’s time to come up with ways to make Batman work on screen.
COMING SOON: Batman: (Part 3) 9 Things that Batman movies need and are horribly lacking.
August 23rd, 2007 at 12:08 am
[...] Batman:(Part 2) Why can’t Hollywood get him right? [...]
December 6th, 2011 at 4:44 am
Beautiful posts here. I’m basically happy. I will enlighten my mates.