Erstwhile comic book geek that I am, I am nevertheless not a huge fan of the Christopher Nolan Batman trilogy. Batman Begins bored me to tears; during the big Tumbler chase scene midway through, I got up and got a refill on my drink because I just didn’t care whether Batman and Rachel lived or died or paid their back taxes. I’ll admit to enjoying The Dark Knight much more: Maggie Gyllenhall was both a better actress and a hotter woman than Katie Holmes, and Heath Ledger was a more engaging villain than Liam Neeson; nonetheless there was no point during the movie in which Christian Bale’s Batman voice failed to make my skin crawl. The Dark Knight Rises was by far the worst of the three; in trying to bring the Caped Crusader down to earth, they just made him seem ludicrous, at least to me. Anne Hathaway could have been naked the entire time and I’d still have wanted my money back, and when it was revealed that Bruce Wayne had survived his heroic sacrifice I wanted to scream “Why, Athena, why? How have we offended thee? Was it too much to ask that he be vaporized by the nuke as his just reward for that ridiculous voice?”
But enough childish bitching. I have a question. As the above should make clear, I found parts one and three of the trilogy less than engaging. But watching TDKR while making dinner the other week, I noticed that it was clear that Commissioner Gordon was not supposed to know that Batman was the product of Alfred’s failure to get the eight-year-old Bruce Wayne appropriate therapy after his parents bought it. I found this surprising, as I could have sworn there was a scene in BB in which Gordon came to Wayne Manor after Bats got doused with Scarecrow’s fear venom and brought him up to date on all the crap that had happened while he was out of commission, a scene that made it clear that Gordon knew very well who was wearing the mask. I remembered liking that, as I’ve always been of the opinion that Gordon’s never been fooled; he simply pretends not to know so as to have plausible deniability when Bruce finally gets exposed as a fascist and sued out the wazoo.
Did I hallucinate the Gordon in Wayne Manor scene? I admit it’s possible; over-exposure to Katie Holmes has been known to cause precipitous drops in blood sugar. I’d watch the movie again to find out, but that would involve watching the movie again and I just can’t make myself.
More generally: does trying to present Batman in a more realistic fashion, as Nolan did, just highlight the fundamental ludicrousness of the character? I ask this as someone who has read and enjoyed approximately eleventy jillion Batman comics and who enjoyed both of Burton’s films. Somehow, their acknowledgement of the fantasy nature of the story was more engaging, less disruptive of suspension of disbelief, than the first or third of Nolan’s pictures. (The middle one, as I said, was excellent.)
It’s like Sampiro snuck onto your account and started posting (no, I am not stalking you today).
No, Gordon is pretty f’in clueless when it comes to Batman, whose identity is obvious to all with two brain cells to rub together. In Rises Gordon is surprised to when Batman tells him he was the 8 year old boy he helped. Dumbfounded in fact. Duh. Duh. Duh. Perhaps only know does Gordon begin to understand that he is King of the Idiots. Even Katie Holmes wasn’t that stupid.
Those batman movies nearly ruined batman for me. I have loved batman all my life but those movies really brought home the fact that batman is the 1%. Rich idiot who thinks he is supremely qualified to change the world because he was born to money.
The only thing I liked about any of those movies is heath ledger as joker, and batman should not be made “realistic”.
Gordon never comes to Wayne Manor in Batman Begins. You may be thinking of the scene where Lucius Fox comes to Wayne Manor to deliver the fear serum antidote, and while he says he doesn’t want to know anything about Bruce’s nocturnal activities, it’s pretty clear that he already knows.
I think that a realistic Batman is hard to pull off, but that the movies (at least 1 and 2, less so 3) managed it. Still, they took it about as far as they could go, and it’d be impossible to tie them in with anything else.
And if Gordon has ever known who Batman is, he hasn’t given any indication of it, not even to Batman himself. Nor would he. I gather that he considers the mask, the symbol, to be more important than the mortal man behind it.
In the comic Batman: Year One, an out-of-costume Bruce Wayne is forced to do some clearly Batman-style superheroics to rescue Gordon’s infant son from falling off a bridge. When he returns the kid to Gordon, Gordon makes a point of saying how he can’t see anything without his glasses (which he’d lost earlier) and so there’s no way he could possibly identify the person who just rescued his son. The way he belabors the point suggest that he knows exactly who he’s talking too, and is sending him a message that he won’t be trying too hard to “officially” identify him.
Also, in The Dark Knight Returns (also by Frank Miller), it’s clear that Gordon has known for years. And I can think of at least one post-Crisis comic in which Gordon, while reading Batman the riot for being an asshole, strongly implies that he knows. I think that Gordon knows but pretends not to, even to Batman, because he needs to keep the knowledge in his back pocket against the day ole pointy-ears finally sends a batarang through the Joker’s heart.
Okay, not the Joker. Make it some random mugger in Crime Alley who was robbing a husband, wife, & child, which is even more likely to send Bruce off. I’m pretty sure if Batman killed the Joker in front of the entire Gotham PD, everybody would claim Killer Croc did it.
For a look at how a non-realistic Batman would be, see the pre-Nolan movies. Some were good, some enjoyable, but even as I watched a bit of Batman Returns the other night, I couldn’t but help notice how silly things are such as Catwoman backflipping her way out of that alley after she helped that girl, or Devito’s hammy delivery of the Penguin.
I think the realistic Nolan version successfully masks a lot of the inherent silliness of not just Batman, but how all comic characters are when we shine a light on them. That’s why they’ve mostly worked only in comic form and require drastic changes when brought to life. Nobody, superhero or villain, would ever wear spandex tights or their underwear on the outside of their pants and not look like a doofus, see any wrestler, pro or amateur, for how real people look like in tights.
If it didn’t work for you, that’s fine, but I don’t think its a mistake to try. Any completely serious version of a comic character would be such a drastic change that it might as well not be called Batman or something anymore.
Take…that…back. Or I will do something cruel to–well, not you, I love you too much–to David Tennant.
Batman’s frequently an asshole, but even Nolan’s Batman isn’t part of the 1%–not in his heart. His sympathies are with poor people. That’s why he tolerates Catwoman. Even apart from the fact that he wants to bone her, even apart from the fact that she’s been known to stop in the middle of a robbery to rescue some innocent who needed saving, she only robs rich people. If you woke Bruce up in the middle of of [del]night[/del] afternoon, told him that Catwoman had cleaned out Donald Trump’s private jewelry collection and slashed the Donald’s face for no special reason, he’d probaly grunt & say, “Good. I hate that fucker, and he deserves it.”
Bruce is more of a noblesse oblige guy. He doesn’t think he’s entitled to rule the world. He thinks his combination of wealth, genius, and physical skill obligates him to help people.
You are very wise.
I mentioned them in the OP. I love Burton’s two-- Batman Returns especially. By not pretending that Batman is any more realistic than Superman, Burton was able to get the psychology right, I think. Plus they were simply fun, in a way none of Nolan’s were. (The Dark Knight was enjoyable and engrossing, but not fun.)
Bruce Wayne is [del]effed[/del] fucked in the head in both Burton and Nolan. The difference is that Burton’s Bruce KNOWS he’s fucked. There’s the beautiful bit in BATMAN RETURNS when Bruce & Selina are at the masquerade ball, neither wearing a costume because they’re both freaking tired of masks, and they suddenly realize who the other is. And by the end of the movie, Bruce/Bats is willing to toss everything away for the chance to bring Selina back from the brink, and she doesn’t let him because she knows (or rather believes) she’s irredeemable.
I’ve had the same feelings about the Nolan Batman films. The Dark Knight is by far the best, partly because of Heath Ledger, partly because his Joker is one of the few intelligent villains in superhero movies (one of the many flaws in Rises was that Bane was as clever as a dodo), but mostly because it believed that the Joker was the aberration, and that people are basically decent.
I don’t think anything about the trilogy was “realistic” though. Batman was just as stylized as the Adam West version – just in a different style. He wouldn’t stand ten seconds of actual scrutiny. The entire trilogy is a stylized “reality” where EEEEE-Villlllll is on every streetcorner. While it does work in Nolan’s created world, it has nothing to do with how the world really is.
Batman’s weird. On the one hand, he needs to be more realistic than, say, Superman, because he fights the common criminals and the weird ones. On the other hand, no one wants to see 100% realistic Batman where he crunches painkillers every morning and maintains a playboy reputation by banging three supermodels a night. So…85% realistic, to cover the toys and costume?
To my mind, Batman is less realistic than Superman. Martha & Jon’s little boy at least has magic to explain away his impossible feats. Martha & Tom’s kid is supposed to be a regular dude who doesn’t even [del]have[/del] use Stark-type powered armor, and yet he still walks away from fights with Sinestro and Gorilla Grodd.
The Nolan movies really don’t work for me (though I admit I haven’t seen the last one yet). In my opinion, trying to make Batman “real,” Nolan wound up just putting some generic action hero in black armor up on screen and missed the nuance of Batman being a hero, detective, scientist, and fighter-for-what’s-right. Even lampshading some of it by acknowledging that he can’t turn his head in the armor served to pull me further out of the story instead of explaining it. Perhaps he shouldn’t have Adam West’s distended Batgut but being so encumbered by his outfit that story-necessary actions like punching, kicking, and turning his head become clunky or impossible doesn’t serve the character very well either.
I’m always a bit amused when people talk about how Batman is “realistic.” How realistic is it that, by the age of maybe 30 or so, he has become an absolute master of half a dozen different styles of martial arts, while simultaneously gaining Ph.D.-level knowledge of criminology, chemistry, psychology, electronics, espionage, escapology, and nearly every other discipline known to man, not to mention having the acrobatic skills of an Olympic athlete and speaking several languages as fluently as a native?
In Miller’s continuity, he had done all that at TWENTY-FIVE, and only started his training at 18 or so. At least in Pre-Crisis he spent his entire childhood training too.
zamboniracer, you appear to have confused Skald the Rhymer for an IRS agent.
And the thing with Batman is, nothing he does is impossible. Or at least, no individual thing he does. But what is impossible is for the same single person to do all of them.
I’ve occasionally pondered a “superhero” who was actually an entire team: You’d have a hacking whiz, and a cat burglar, and a parkour expert, and masters of two or three different martial arts, and an actor, and so on. They all take turns wearing the suit (or more likely, one of several different suits, which also have a variety of different capabilities built in), which doesn’t show any skin, so the populace thinks it’s a lone vigilante who can do all of these different things. You might also have a separate team member behind the scenes who (almost) never wears the suit, but who built all of the gadgets in it, and/or one who brought the team together to begin with.
