It also does that trope where it has the revolutionary "villain" fighting to expose the systemic corruption be/act so unhinged and do evil things as to give justification that their critiques are wrong. It's a really well made, entertaining movie, but it's themes are just such weak centrist bs that I couldn't ignore it.
I wrote about it more in-depth here if you're interested: https://letterboxd.com/peytobrock/film/the-batman/
EDIT: this is a write-up by a critic I really like that's even better than what I wrote: https://www.patreon.com/posts/63389248
I’ve noticed a trend in a lot of these comic book movies over the past decade that makes me feel like a tin foil weirdo. It seems like a lot of the villains end up aligned with populist/vaguely anti-capitalist ideas. It’s almost like they want us to think those ideas are bad :shocked-pikachu:
He doesn't literally, but there's a plot point about how he posts videos on some made up social media website where he has like a bunch of followers and supporters helping him with things like "detonator suggestions"
The first scene in the movie with Batman is him beating up a bunch of young hooligans playing the knockout game and recording themselves doing so, presumably to post online
I mean, idk if it's a literal reference to that story, but they are young goons, some of them POC, seemingly just going around and attacking people for fun/to imitate a new member, so that's where my mind immediately went to (probably because online left people like Felix joke about it)
It felt more reactionary aesthetics than "militant leftist" aesthetics tbh.
Riddler is basically the /pol/face meme in this movie but instead of crying over the gays and the minorities, he's crying that bruce wayne got a lollypop while rats were eating babies in his abandoned orphanage.
Nolan definitely does this, but Marvel villains rarely go beyond power hunger/jealousy motives except for killmonger and Thanos
It’s almost like they want us to think those ideas are bad
I've heard secondhand (i think they heard it) from the West Wing Thing that a lot of writers are somewhat leftist so they try to sneak their ideas in where they can, but that would be very stupid for that very reason... So, it's probably true.
traditionally when writing a history the author would represent both sides as having part of their political views and use the speeches to express them.
This is notably what Milton was doing with paradise lost
Manga writers tend to be pretty good at that, for better or worse.
Here is my villain Hiruto X Hans, he does a lengthy speech about Social Darwinism on a war altar of zombified salary men. Am I critiquing neoliberal "meritocracy" or am I celebrating fascism? Who can say, anyway, our hero Battle Suit Makoto refutes his speech by having more fighting spirit
Art in general trends left, but like everything else, capital subsumes and twists everything it can and overwhelms everything else
I know it's not great representation, but I can't help but love the gay villains lol
when all lesbians are doomed to tragedy because two girls are literally forbidden to have a happy ending, you may as well root for the badass lesbian girlboss villain who at least doesn't have to go through the pain of having her girlfriend murdered.
when all lesbians are doomed to tragedy because two girls are literally forbidden to have a happy ending
Counterpoint: Harley and Ivy
this is what all superhero movies these days
villain: I have good ideas
audience: damn, these ideas are good
villain: unrelated episode of sociopathic violence
audience: damn, i guess those ideas are bad
hero: first world free market rules-based world order with consent from the international community (US/EU/NATO only)
audience: damn i guess i'm a liberal capitalist now
The Levine Code: If you depict a Radical, they have to murder a child
Comic book stories have literally been this way since the Comic Book Code. Writers who wanted to introduce subversive ideas to their audience would cast them as villains. It's why all the 60s villains care about climate, civil rights, western imperialism, etc.
This was also the last fucking Batman movie. And the one before the one before that.
It feels like an ersatz Joker to me. I liked that they included some allusions that Batman's rich-boy background is a blindspot for Batman (Selina pointed it out, as did the moustache cop) and I liked the depiction of Gotham, but I was kinda...confused by Riddler?
Like I liked the movie overall but there was one line by the mayoral candidate Real that kind of irked me for its tone-deathness (especially now) where she promises to restore people's faith in institutions after the sheer shitshow of the events of the movie (we're talking zodiac killer weaponizing Hurricane Katrina levels of bad). I think Real was supposed to be like girlboss AOC/Kamala? Dunno her politics were left vague besides a general "we need to care" idea that the movie seems to deposit (See; Batman's change from pursuing vengeance to pursuing...helping in general?)
Plus what was even Riddler's ideology? Like I get he's supposed to represent maligned and alienated white men (good on the movie on this take of Riddler), but besides a general anti-corruption message what was his ideology? And how isn't his end-of movie actions completely nullifying his point of anti-corruption by trying to take out the non-corrupt lady? I don't really get leftist vibes from him (there's no slapped on haves vs havenots narrative or revolutionary movement) nor really right wing besides like the aesthetics of weirdo online reactionaries.
spoiler
Still wish we could have a Poison Ivy main "villain", with like Gotham as a sweltering concrete hellhole (think Baltimore, Los Angeles and Pittburgh slammed together) in the late 1980s with a thick orange haze in the sky, a red sun, a summer heat wave. Poison Ivy as a grad student, trying to get a decent break in being a botanist while participating in minor ecological activism in Gotham, particularly the pollution of the Gotham River. Since Ivy is a feminist icon, touch into the sheer sexism in STEM fields and the difficulty of getting a good job as a person from a working class background (Ivy in some comics sold drugs to make tuition lol).
Shit happens, she gets fucking turned or whatever. She starts targeting major polluters with assassinations using increasingly more vile plant-related methods that force people to confront the damage they've done. Climax can be the entire goddamn Gotham river bursting into flames like the Cuyahoga river, to really drive home that Ivy was not only right, but justified to make these people pay. Make it an homage to Batman: Poison Ivy or something.
I managed to lathe of heaven a SAW like riddler, maybe we’ll get a poison ivy likes your next time.
It felt like they were going for a "left wing revolutionary" vibe with the riddler, but if they had only had him focus on going after corruption he would have been unambiguously in the right (other than maybe the fact that his murders were pretty gruesome). I feel like they HAD to make him go over the top evil at the end because otherwise the Riddler would have pretty much been a hero.
yes, this is how all left-insurrectionist villains are written under capitalist realism. there is no alternative, there mustn't be one, so anybody who does present an alternative has to be slandered as a twisted cycle path, or as an egomaniac drunk with power who doesn't actually care about their "lofty ideals" (see: Marco Inaros from The Expanse, also an example for how such characters are frequently coded as Latin, Middle Eastern, or other ethnicities from violently repressed parts of the periphery). This is purest ideology, planting the idea in people's heads that all radically left ideas are like this, inherently leading to evil and destruction, inherently authoritarian, always put forth by dubious and criminally minded individuals.
you couldn't make a movie about a hero shooting rich people if he wasn't also shown as a mentally ill loner :joker-troll: and even that guy is an absolute outlier in today's cinema who then got slandered in the press as being "an incel mass shooter" even though he was very clearly coded as not racist and not sexist, but as a guy who had been radicalized by squalid material conditions caused by reaganite annihilation campaigns against the poor.
now, there's also right wing villains. there's voldemort, for example. when these guys show up, it is obbviously easier to advocate against their ideas, although usually not much effort is taken and there's usually no thorough critique of their bigottry, particularly not the systemic causes of it or the complicity of majoritarian society in the subjugation of marginalized groups. but even when the defeat of these guys results in situations where the old order that paved the way for them could be overturned, we see a return to the just and benevolent status quo instead.
Even with Voldemort he supposedly gained support from marginalized groups like centaurs and goblins by promising them improved conditions under the new order. But that is the extreme lib brainworms of Rowling manifesting themselves, change is bad and if someone is promising improvements they are lying.
It is an object lesson in the UK lib mindset, and why they were so aghast at jam grandpa.
you already know it because we obviously both saw Shaun's new video yesterday, but i'd just like to mention that CW homophobia
spoiler
Rowling also intended the werewolves to be a metaphor for HIV and the leader of the werewolves systematically infects children with lycanthropy.
Oh, he finally released it. He has been discussing it a lot on streams, which is why I remember it.
it's good, too. as thorough a takedown of the book's ideology as you'd expect from skullboi.
Yeah i had huge Joker vibes from the Riddler (i mean Joaquin Phoenix' Joker). I liked the subtext of "men will literally become a masked avenger instead of going to therapy" though.
spoiler
Now that i slept on it i feel like the acting carried it a LOT. Like i couldn't really point out anyone who did a bad job. The story itself suffers from the thing you mentioned (though i don't think it says electoral action is good, until the end i also waited for the "vote dems" bullshit, but when Selina tells him to ditch Gotham cause it won't change and he basically says "yeah i know" negates this imo) and it's kinda pointlessly long.
I fucking love batman I just wish he didn't wear pants and our gut it seems like 99.9% of the knee jerk isnt very often charmed by a good opsec
:cyber-lenin:
I AM A BOT. If I did good, please reply with "I WILL KILL THE PRESIDENT". If I did bad, please reply with "I LOVE NATO"Most movies since forever are pretty much about that. It is either how any radical change is bad, or how the return to the status quo is good. Comic book movies are particularly bad at this. I think this is a semi-conscious decision and does teach people that whatever they have now is better than some evil "change". So you know , they become horrified from the things that can actuallly help them.
I feel like the traditional narrative structure of superhero comics basically came out of an episodic format where:
- you have to more-or-less return to the status quo by the end of the storyline, unless otherwise mandated (to make it less nightmarish for both writers and readers to keep up with a continuity, especially in a shared universe), and
- the hero basically always wins (because it's a superhero comic and for kids)
and 'there-is-a-bad-change-and-I-must-stop-it' is sort of a natural extension of these constraints. Obviously this is no excuse and the same pattern ALSO shows up in a ton of standalone media, but I'm not surprised it's particularly bad there.
Yeah, but also the ‘there-is-a-bad-change-and-I-must-stop-it’ thing has been consciously used to bash any kind of radical change. It is not just about the return to the status quo, although this is a part of it (and we can have a return to the status quo of a socialist world hero, where the world is mostly just and good). The movie/comic book thrope is more about lumping things that are obviously good together with something bad and making them look bad and scare. It is also making the current liberal free-market rule-based whatever it is world be the one that seems just and good and everything that isnt incremental snail paced change a horrible evil. And you can see this is really internalized by people, because it then manifests not just in politics, but also in personal life, work, etc. People love to talk about changing things, but never really want to do the big changes, exactly because of this conditioning.
thanks for letting me know this in advance so I don't go into it blind and ruin the experience for anyone else by yelling at the screen
Political critiques aside, does it in any way need to be three goddamn hours long?
No, it doesn't. The author of the review not by me that I linked mentions how in writing, especially screenwriting where story economy and brevity are important, you're told to "kill your darlings" and it feels like Reeves didn't kill any darlings with this script (which I agree with). Like he left everything in, even though some of it feels repetitive and unnecessary. It's almost like while the scenes are individually good, the larger story cohesion is kinda loose and bloated in places. I think it could have ideally be cut down to closer to 2:30 or even closer to 2 hours long.
lean 90 minutes, think of all the collective lifetime you would un-waste
There were so many moments where I was like, "All right already, let's move this along, please." They crammed so much stuff into this movie, they could've easily trimmed at least an hour off of it.
I just got back from seeing The Batman five minutes ago. It was pretty good, but I fell asleep a couple times because it's ridiculously long and ill-paced.
There was a moment where people are on the streets holding up signs, protesting, and chanting "No More Lies!" in agreement with the Riddler's catchphrase. My son was like, "What? Those people agree with the Riddler?!" and I said to him, "I'll be honest, I agree with him too." lmao
Winter Soldier is the worst example you could pick since that movie is all about how the modern MIC is an echo of Nazi Germany and needs to be thoroughly dismantled. Unless you mean Falcon and the Winter Soldier? Cuz that shit sucked
yeah the one where there's a revolution of people, and when they finally rise up they get shut down by the new captain america guy, because revolution is apparently evil or something. just sit there and take it seemed to be the theme.
edit: it was the show, not the movie
