The Batman Finally Understands the Dark Knight's Golden Age Roots
The Batman has been in theaters for a little over a week now, breaking records and shattering fans' expectations along the way. The film has brought to life a whole new interpretation of Batman's mythos, with director Matt Reeves and company creating a take that stands on its own from any previous live-action DC canon. As those who have seen the film know, that has led to some thrilling creative results, with a take on the character and his world that is unlike any film version that came before it. While there are a lot of reasons to love The Batman's approach to DC Comics, one element rings particularly true — its unique approach to the way its titular character began in the Golden Age of Comics.
Created by Bill Finger and Bob Kane in 1939's Detective Comics #27, Batman was one of many various plays on the tropes of pulp fiction heroes, which were arguably a dime a dozen in media during that era. While he played directly into the tropes of the likes of Zorro and The Shadow by being a profoundly capable and precise sleuth who preferred to fight crime from the shadows, he also benefitted from the bedrock that had begun to be established within superhero comics. By that point, Superman had debuted in the comics almost a full year prior, and readers had just started to become accustomed to the tropes of the action-packed whimsy that could exist within superhero books. Enter Batman — a character whose origin story and civilian persona (which weren't revealed until months after his debut) were steeped in darkness, but whose actions as a vigilante could still get extravagant.
That resulted in a blend that was essentially unprecedented on a mainstream level — a character who could straddle the line between the grave seriousness and the whimsical goofiness that would eventually become the bread and butter of the genre. This approach to the cliches of the genre only got stronger as Batman's world began to be further established, between the anachronistic aesthetic of Gotham City, the terrifying but goofy villains like The Joker and The Penguin, and the complex noir dame of Catwoman. When the Batman comics appeared to gear towards a younger audience with the addition of Dick Grayson / Robin, it was still in an emotionally dark place, as Batman was helping his young ward process the trauma of his parents' recent murder. But even as Batman stories enticed readers with dark concepts and character beats, they still remained unironically silly, with Batman getting into fights on comically-large typewriters and saying the words "be quiet, or papa spank" to Catwoman. While this was only a fraction of the absurdity that would be in store for the character, with his rainbow-hued and cosmic adventures of the Silver Age on the horizon, the Golden Age stories set a distinct precedent, so much so that "Golden Age Batman" has become his own character within subsequent years of DC canon, with a wildly different romantic and family life from his modern counterpart.
Reeves' take on The Batman is undoubtedly modern, between the horror movies of the 90s and 00s that inspired the project, the technology its characters use, a number of aesthetic and narrative flourishes, and some of the more recent comics it directly draws from. But at the same time, it's the live-action Batman movie that has best captured that balance from the Golden Age — directly walking the line between serious and campy. The plot of the film is dark at its core, as Bruce Wayne / Batman (Robert Pattinson) uncovers the dark government conspiracy that has led Edward Nashton / The Riddler (Paul Dano) to commit a string of heinous and gruesome murders. But that darkness is balanced by an unironic sense of levity, one that is reflected in the surprising number of puns and jokes in the film's script, and in Bruce's larger arc of realizing that he needs to be a hopeful symbol for the people of Gotham. The somewhat-controversial fact that Pattinson's caped crusader sees his "Bruce Wayne" persona as an afterthought, and spends the majority of the film under the cowl, also plays into the way that readers in the Golden Age were initially introduced to the character.
Yes, some moments in The Batman can border on cliche, whether they be predictable lines of dialogue or the tropes of film noir — but the film executes those cliches in an unabashed way, without having to undercut them or admit that they could be uncool. Those cliches are then used to set up something truly unexpected and entertaining, whether it be an intense character interaction or a wrinkle in Riddler's latest puzzle. And as grounded as the film's Gotham City is, it still allows for storytelling moments that absolutely suspend disbelief — not to the point of creating a plot hole, but to the point of keeping the momentum constantly rolling. It harkens back to Grant Morrison's quote about why we shouldn't care "who pumps the Batmobile's tires", where as long as the (fictional) story is entertaining audiences, the specifics and the grasp on reality should not matter.
It's a tone that feels unique within the landscape of superhero movies, which have mostly resorted to quippy one-liners or a "world outside your window" grounding in order to draw audiences in. Even within the lineup of existing Batman movies, it feels unprecedented, as the previous incarnations either tried to unflinchingly ground themselves in a deathly-serious reality (Christian Bale's and Ben Affleck's Batmen) or provide a neon-hued evolution of Adam West's campier take on the character from the 60s television show (essentially every Batman from Michael Keaton to George Clooney). Those previous versions were successful in their own ways, but not wholly on the level of capturing the lightness and darkness of the character's earliest days.
The Batman recognizes that, as one of over a dozen live-action portrayals of the character since the 1940s, its very title is enough to put butts in seats. It then uses that familiarity to get dark, complicated, and genuinely weird, to a degree that has never quite been balanced in the caped crusader's onscreen tenure. Sure, The Batman makes some creative choices that might feel unprecedented or jarring, but they fit the character's long shelf life in so many ways.
The Batman is now playing exclusively in theaters.
