Fun fact: I didn't grow up reading comic books. I was born in 1976, and other than feeling fucking old of late, one of the big things about my generation is that we didn't have Disney films growing up like other generations. Those of us born in that era were in that sweet spot where home video was growing but not ubiquitous, while Disney animation itself was on a slow decline for over twenty years before they figured out how to make animated films again, and I was way more likely in 1988 to watch BIG BUSINESS or OUTRAGEOUS FORTUNE (Disney/Touchstone films) than, say, OLIVER AND COMPANY . The first animated film that brought them back came out when I was thirteen. And though I may still have been watching DUCK TALES, I wasn't exactly going to go to the theater or rent a video for THE LITTLE MERMAID. Subsequently, I didn't see much of the Disney relaunch at the time. Teen boys weren't running to see THE LION KING or MULAN in the nineties. I saw reissues like BAMBI and new stuff like THE BLACK CAULDRON, but was driven more towards stuff like E.T. and GREMLINS as a pre-teen and was on to ALIENS and ROBOCOP by the time I was hitting double digits. But basically, I don't like being resold my youth. I hate it. I want to be an adult.
Maybe because I was also front and center for the world of Grunge. And though there is a lot of pick through with that whole movement, the idea that corporate art sucks is something that has always been with me. Not that a corporation can't make great art, but it is never in their interest; they would rather be able to sell something marketable, and marketable and good are not always the same. But we are now at a point where most of the major art that can be made in a studio setting isn't new. It has to be IP, and it suggests that film - as it currently exists - will be dead in the next ten, at best twenty years? Like, who do you get to direct the next Marvel movie if indie directors are coming from under million dollar budgets and isn't that basically TV people, so the big difference between theatrical and home viewing will become how much it cost to make, but only event films will then be theatrical? Disney are such fucking assholes for not making non-Disney movies when they own Fox at this point. They have no interest in the future of cinema, and will likely destroy it as it currently exists.
The problem is that movie fandom has been taken over, upended as it were, by comic book movies. They do not function like normal films, and going by Marvel and DC's more recent output, they sometimes barely function as films. They are often very successful, sometimes insanely so. But we are getting to a point where it must be said, whatever the appeal of these movies taps into isn't about cinema. That's not to say comic book movie fans don't love movies, but there's an entire audience of movie goers that either doesn't understand or care about craft. But then also, that gets weird too. Respected critics gave Zack Snyder's JUSTICE LEAGUE: THE ASSEMBLY CUT glowing marks and it's hard to tell if they liked it, or are afraid of the violence prone dweebs who like to threaten critics for not genuflecting to lord Marvel and God Snyder, which is a legitimate reason to hand wave it off. That said, I think people may legitimately love ZSJL, but it isn't a movie. Whatever it is isn't as intended even as it tells you it is as intended which is the lie that you have to swallow. And a lot of modern fandom requires swallowing things. As there have been so many sea change moments, none sticks with me more than knowing people hated the Ewoks because of how crass and commercial they seemed. Forty years later and Baby Yoda is fucking everywhere. SELL OUT/THEY LIVE/CONSUME it says. The audience seems to say "yes, yes, take my money." We are culturally at a point where adults know what being pandered to is, and want it more than going to movies that don't. "Please, don't challenge me in any way!"
One of the things that's been happening is that as the Comic Book Movie Universe grows, we've seen that structure and cohesion no longer matter, and that narratives have no economy. It's all about the saturated fats, it's all about bloated runtimes to make you feel satisfied that you got a full meal, even if there's no great story or action, why complain if you get so much of it? Third acts that basically have no stakes because they have no alternate conclusions. A lot of this started with the prequels, which famously had a sword fight take twenty minutes that could have been over in thirty seconds. That there is a rabid fanbase for the prequels who think everyone was wrong asks the question about some childhood favorite and if they have ruined people's tastes.
I saw THE BATMAN. There's a point maybe when you're with a friend and they are being hit on by someone else and you tell your friend "that person is trying to take pictures of you having sex while you're dressed as a clown and if you don't walk away they probably will." And you know it's bad news, and you know your friend may be plied with flattery and substances that might take a hard no to a soft yes, but you know it's not your place to parent your friend, so you're also left asking yourself "should I have done more, did they want it, or did they get talked into it?" as they try on clown shoes "as a goof."
I guess from my perspective, making a grounded three hour movie about Batman chasing down The Riddler is where you end up, and maybe it seems like a good idea at the time, but from where I'm sitting, GROSS. I don't think it's where anyone started their night, and I think if you don't think about the start, you don't maybe think about how each iteration keeps getting more and more boxed in to one version of the character. And it's not that the film is bad, far from it, it's totally watchable, exciting in parts, but it only exists because fandom craves seeing Batman, but Batman in a very fetish-specific way. And I've got nothing against fetishes, it's just so much effort for so little, and this seems like the moment where the world is pot committed to this nonsense in ways that mean movies will be even less artistic.
Batman is the story of a rich orphan who beats up criminals. Now, say, eighty years ago when people like Al Capone and the like were part of the fabric of pop culture, the idea of super villains made a lot more sense. But here we are. This is more disconcerting with the DC movies because they want to traffic in the real (Marvel movies are lame at times, but they don't try to suggest anything is practical or realistic any more, so you don't really have to think about the real world), and so the question becomes, why are people jerking off to a rich guy beating the crap out of criminals that don't exist? Look, as often as these characters can bring in some "of the moment" devices, The Riddler is modeled on The Zodiac. Who killed people fifty plus years ago.
So again, is this what you really wanted? You want a realistic portrait of a crime fighter, but then also he goes up against criminal masterminds that are more cinematic invention than reality, while Batman also spends some time around The Penguin and lets him get away with criminal acts. Literally does crime in front of Batman. The important part is that Batman punches good? I don't get it.
For the record: I think the Adam West film is great, and the TV show is a blast because it isn't serious. It's kids stuff. I think Burton found the camp he wanted, and with the German expressionist visuals, he created something that exists clearly as fetishistic and weird and cartoony, mixing film noir with pop art. I find both his movies uneven, very horny and fascinating, though I don't think most of the characters are in the same movie. Schumacher saw the whole thing as camp, and that gave the game away somewhat. Homophobes don't like being told their homoerotic art is gay, it seems. That said, Schumacher seems vaguely indifferent as a filmmaker, so I can't hold his two in high regard, even if that reveals how much he feels like the whole thing is beneath him, which it might be. Nolan going more realistic was refreshing at the time, it worked and was its own thing (It also happened 15 years ago, before a lot of the Marvel/Wall Street crash/housing bubble/Trump, etc). If the wheels came off that run by the final movie, a lot of that has to do with Heath Ledger dying. But also Nolan had his own vision of the character that was nothing like what was done previous. The Snyder Batman is interesting, because Affleck is inspired and he does good work in dogshit movies, though I don't really think of those as Batman movies, or really movies. Van Art? But also, that's not a practical Batman, because he's dealing with space aliens and Amazons. Snyder would have been the absolute worst choice to do a solo Batman movie (especially after Rorschach-ing WATCHMEN, a film I like), but he doesn't desecrate the character too much (other than that futureworld sequence where Affleck basically threatens to kill Leto's Joker using an F word that feels like the actor smiling while he says it) like he does Superman, so there’s that
Robert Pattinson is great as Batman. It's just, he's playing a variant of Bale's version. I mean, I'm sure people will make a case that it's totally different, except there's nothing really to latch on to with any iteration of Batman. He's not an interesting character as a superhero or human being, and basically all Batman cinematic narratives come to that conclusion. The main reason he had love interests in the Burton run is because that's what you did then (and also to de-gay all the leather, because, honey). There's some stuff about his parents maybe being POSs that's interesting, but it's 2022. Rich people fucking suck. We know this. What is Batman a fantasy of and who's it for? Why are we now accepting three hour runtimes from popcorn movies that should be 105 minutes? I guess I can understand if it becomes a hyper-stylized essay on good and evil or a fun phantasmagoria type situation. And I totally get having a take on these movies. I don't think JOKER is a great movie, but it is a movie and it does have ideas. This feels like a variant on everything that's been done before, just enough different that it isn't 100% Nolan-y, but just Nolan enough to make those fans happy. Im trying to think of a singular insight the film has in to human behavior, crime, violence, etc I don’t think it has one. So why is there a new Batman? Because the market is there, and the audience is rabid
The film uses Kurt Cobain - who famously wore a "Corporate Magazines Still Suck" shirt to a Rolling Stone photo shoot - and the song "Something in the Way" to be a Batman theme. The lyrics go like this:
Tarp has sprung a leak
And the animals I've trapped
Have all become my pets
And I'm living off of grass
And the drippings from my ceiling
It's okay to eat fish
Cause they don't have any feelings"
Sounds like a portrait of a homeless man losing his mind. The antithesis of a rich kid who beats up bad guys and fights crime for catharsis. My guess is Batman and the filmmakers, like the audience Cobain decried, knows not what it means. Knows not what it means, and I say yeah.
