'The Batman' and the Exhausting Self-Awareness of Modern Films
'The Batman' is the latest addition in the modern trend of filmmakers choosing to signal quality over actual quality.
The truth is this: it has become increasingly easy to make a ‘good’ film or a TV show. A film that passes the baseline requirement in each of its essential components: writing, performing, filming, cutting and sound. This change is self-evident. Put on any show on Netflix and you will see these boxes ticked, and ticked well. It is becoming rarer to find sentimental dialogue, over-the-top background music, garish art design or sloppy editing in our films and shows. One reason for this apparent progress is organic: every craft becomes better with time. The other reason is that we, the global audiences, have accepted and lapped up the stylistic tropes of modern filmmaking. This acceptance is secular - across geographies, formats and genres - and therefore it’s easy for filmmakers to hit those tropes to create a ‘bare-minimum’ experience. Today, one would almost wince at seeing Bergman’s usage of the Dissolve in cutting between scenes, or Hitchcock’s usage of dramatic background scores, or the Special Effects that Spielberg employed in his early science fiction films.
However, the thing that remains difficult to achieve, or has become even more difficult to achieve is choosing subjects, themes and ideas that go against the grain of our modern obsessions and narratives. We have reached that despicable end of the post-modern thought where creators and filmmakers are exhaustingly aware of how their films will be seen by critics and the liberal film-watching audience. This has led to ideological check-boxing, a phenomenon where filmmakers will tick the boxes of certain subjects, themes and ideas so as not to be antagonistic to modern narratives.
To illustrate, let’s compare two very similar films: Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) and Todd Phillips’s Joker (2019). Both films, on the surface, are about a lower-middle-class man losing his grip over reality and going progressively insane due to the forces of society he finds himself in the center of. Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle is an unflinching portrait of what a real-life Travis Bickle might have been in 1976 New York City: sexist, racist and most probably right-wing. There’s no overt mention of his mental health, or how it could be deteriorating amidst the madness that surrounds him. Instead the audience is expected to understand and interpret his mental health struggles on its own. And yet, even today, the modern film-watching audience finds itself sympathizing with this fringe element. On the other hand, Joker’s Arthur Fleck is kept completely insulated from these cultural undertones, on purpose. As a matter of fact, Todd Phillips goes the extra-mile to ensure that Arthur doesn’t come across as politically unlikeable because, clearly, he wants us to feel sympathy for him, for the film to work. So Arthur has a therapist, his problems are very clearly a result of his mental health issues, a black woman is his love interest, most of his adversaries - Thomas Wayne, Murray Franklin - are rich, powerful, elite and white. The film ends with a spectacularly filmed scene with a suggestion of an ensuing class-warfare in Gotham city. Joker, for all the appreciation it received for being brave, courageous and ‘dark’, actually plays safely within the boundaries of our modern obsessions: romanticization of mental illness, identity politics and class-warfare. The result is self-evident: ‘Taxi Driver’ is celebrated to this day, almost half-a-century later, shocking modern sensibilities, whereas ‘Joker’, most probably, will be forgotten as another drop in the ocean of faux brave films that aren’t really brave.
The newest addition to this list is Matt Reeves’s ‘The Batman’. The film is a technical masterpiece. The writing (barring the last act) is slick, the cinematography is beautiful (that shot of an inverted batman as seen from Penguin’s perspective, a dark shadowy figure with fire-orange background is awe-inspiring), the music is haunting (if you loved it, do check out the music of Under The Skin), Gotham looks like an actual, crumbling, lived-in city, and Robert Pattinson’s performance is top-notch. And yet, I hated the film from the very core of my being. In ‘The Batman’, Reeves has chosen to pander to another one of our modern obsessions: the celebration of weakness over strength. The film sketches Batman as a troubled, disturbed, fearful and vulnerable super-hero, more so than his predecessors, which in and of itself is not wrong. As a matter of fact, most praise that the film has received has focused on this aspect of Batman’s character. But that’s all there is to this Batman. Reeves’s Batman is devoid of the number one, most essential thing that we know Batman for: transcendence. Apart from beating up goons and scheming ways to double-guess his nemesis, this Batman remains boringly ordinary and rarely transcends into anything truly heroic. The new Batman is a picture of trauma and a prisoner of his own demons. The audience prefers to see Batman wallow in it than find ways to break it. To our sensibilities, the optimism, the transcendence, the heroism is vulgar at best, toxic at worst. And the filmmaker is very well aware of this. I left the theatre, not with hope, but with a certain sense of nausea, as though an ill-tasting thing that I had gotten bored of eating had been, yet again, shoved in my mouth, and I was expected to enjoy it. The film provides no redemption, no overcoming but drills down the age-old banal platitude: the world is fucked.
To put in contrast, let’s consider another Batman film, Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Dark Knight’. Nolan’s Batman is everything Reeves’s Batman is - troubled, complex and vulnerable - but he is a lot more. In the film, he transcends his demons and makes a real, heroic sacrifice when he takes the wrongful blame of murder to inspire hope in Gotham city. The final shot of the film with the Batman disappearing into the darkness on his Batmobile is etched forever in our memories. Ask yourself: did the scene feel sentimental? Or it aroused a deep sense of transcendence? In ‘The Dark Knight Rises’, Batman overcomes his own fear of death to escape the metaphorical, bottomless well. In Reeves’ defence, such transcendence may be saved for later films in the franchise. But the fact that he (and Warner Bros.) felt confident about making a 200 million dollar film devoid of any sense of overcoming speaks volumes about the expectations of modern film-going audiences: we are content with seeing films packed with wry irony and dread. Not only content but perversely joyful at seeing a crumbling world without any hope of deliverance.
To reiterate, there is nothing immoral in creating such films. We want our cinema to reflect the ills that surround us but that’s not its sole purpose. Truly culture-shifting films challenge the vicious loops of thinking that we seem to be stuck in, at the risk of offending our pre-conceived notions. This is not a problem with cinema only. It is an all-pervading problem in our culture. Fiction is just its latest victim. Modern fiction, like tenets of post-modernism, is great at diagnosing the disease but fails terribly at inspiring a cure. The problem is that we have started to love the disease.