Against a Realistic Batman

Enough time has passed since Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy that I think it’s safe for me to timidly step out of the shadows with this take. I love the psychological realism of Christian Bale’s Bruce Wayne in Batman Begins, deciding he must become a symbol to be effective. I love how The Joker’s facial scars and contradicting backstories in The Dark Knight make him more disturbing than showing him falling into a vat of acid. And I love how Anne Hathaway’s Catwoman in The Dark Knight Rises is a compelling adversary without the Batman Returns origin story involving Selina Kyle falling to her death and a swarm of alley cats…licking her back to life? Realism makes Batman a superhero we can take seriously. We don’t have to shut off our adult brains to give ourselves permission to be taken for a ride by a story about a man in a cape who punches bad guys.

But there's a problem with all of this. The realism eventually runs dry and fails to live up to its own promise. A completely realistic Batman is impossible. But even if it were, I don’t think we’d like the kind of Batman we’d end up with anyway.

Before I risk piling on Nolan too much, let me say this: I love that his movies exist, just the way they are. One of the things that makes comic book characters so interesting to me is that their portrayal isn’t defined by one author’s imagination. They aren’t fixed. Each comic book writer and filmmaker gets to explore and tease out different elements of what makes a superhero. And I love holding up different versions of Batman side by side and noticing the contrasts. Here’s Tim Burton, who doesn’t seem concerned with realism but nails the style and vibe of Gotham City. Here’s Christopher Nolan, who tones down the gothic vibes to make Batman and his world as relatable as possible. And here’s Zack Snyder, who, astonishingly, doesn’t seem to understand Batman at all. So even though Nolan isn’t my favorite Batman director, all of our imaginations about who Batman can be are richer because his movies are part of the pantheon of interpretations.

Evidence No. 1 that a completely realistic Batman is impossible: Batman does not exist IRL.

Yes, this is almost so obvious that it doesn’t need to be said. But there’s a good reason we don’t have billionaires moonlighting as vigilantes dressed up as rodents. Batman fails the one and only criterion of realism: existence itself. You can’t develop the kind of military technology you’d need to outperform and outrun law enforcement while keeping a low-enough profile that they can’t figure out who you are. You can’t maintain peak physical condition and mastery of every form of martial arts, and also put in the time to be prepared for every possible scenario before confronting a villain, while helming a company like Wayne Corp. You can’t dodge bullets, or you at least can’t wear enough armor to be impervious to them while also slinking in and out of the shadows like a ninja. And you’re definitely not going to be bulletproof with the bottom half of your face exposed.

Other things that founder against the rocks of realism:

• A Batbike that emerges from the parts of a totaled Batmobile and sports wheels that rotate on two different axes.
• An eighteen-wheeler that flips over a tripwire and faceplants on the asphalt like Wile E. Coyote.
• Nearly every major plot point of The Dark Knight Rises.

The last one seems like a victim of Nolan’s own success at realism. When the viewer is trained to notice and appreciate the realism of a given interpretation, their eye becomes more discriminating, and the inevitable exceptions to that realistic world stand out like a sore thumb. When you get to the climax of Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman, and The Joker shoots down the Batwing with a cartoon-length revolver, it’s possible you could say, “Yeah right, like that would work.” More likely, though, your mind might go somewhere like, “Man, he really is Batman’s perfect Achilles heel, isn’t he?” That’s because Tim Burton’s Batman never traded in realism, only style and theme.

But by the time you reach the climax of The Dark Knight Rises, you’ve already logged some seven hours of viewing time in Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, and that kind of disbelief is a little harder to suspend. Bruce Wayne rehabilitates a broken back with a punch to the spine and five months of push-ups, and then he proceeds to walk halfway around the world with nothing but the shirt on his back, and finally he somehow enters a sealed-off Gotham City fully equipped as Batman. For a lot of us, the annoying “yeah right how would that work” questions are hard to ignore, and they can get in the way of having a good time. 

That in itself is a perfectly reasonable justification to not care at all about realism: it kind of gets in the way of a good time. And that, to me, is not a worthwhile tradeoff. Picasso’s Les demoiselles d’Avignon is not realistic, and it’s better off for it. So are most movies.

But now for the main reason I think realism is a misplaced goal for Batman, which is also confirmed by the end of The Dark Knight Rises. Enough realism eventually ends up strengthening some of the most cynical takes about Batman: that he’s a paramilitary fascist who beats up poor people. Nothing could illustrate this point more vividly than the image of billionaire Batman standing with an army of cops, fighting revolutionaries whose general aesthetic oscillates between the French Revolution and Occupy Wall Street. I hate it when the Batman cynics are right, but I kind of have to hand it to them on that one.

I believe that most evils in the world are social. Poverty is a social evil, the consequence of a political and economic system that values profits over people. War is a social evil, a liturgy of violence that performs a state’s claims to legitimacy on the global stage. These two things are at the root of the vast majority of suffering in the world today, in my view. When we do see evil manifesting in an individual, there is almost always a story behind them, environmental factors that shaped the kind of person they became. And when there isn’t a strong social explanation for an individual’s evil actions, the best interventions for them remain social: restrictions on rights, rehabilitation in alternative communities and reparation for the harm they’ve caused others.

In a world like ours, the idea of a strong-willed individual who goes outside the law to fight against evildoers strikes me as a misunderstanding of the nature of evil. Social evils require social solutions. An individual punching up criminals outside of any system of accountability is both ineffectual and cruel, and it speaks to a pathological thirst for violence. In short: a Batman who exists in a realistic world of socially formed evil is a fascist fantasy.

Now suppose you’re in a world where a man with genius-level intellect and superhuman strength and size—thanks to a mask that feeds him a steady trickle of a drug called “venom”—emerges and sets out to destroy Gotham City. Or imagine that a chemical accident has resulted in a man with a semiliquid constitution who can shapeshift to impersonate anyone, or to become a hulking clay monster that’s impervious to any weapon in a police armory.

In this universe, evil is not primarily social. Individuals are capable of great evil and great power that outstrip even the best social policies. And in a world of individuals of extraordinary evil and power, extraordinary heroes are called for.

This is not a realistic universe. But it’s a universe with the aesthetic and moral logic necessary to make Batman a hero worth rooting for. I want Batman to be unconstrained by realism because I love watching how he wears the very night like a cloak as he comes in and out of view, terrifying goons who aren’t sure if he’s a man or something elemental, and I don’t want to kill the magic because I’m wondering about the mechanics of it all. But I mostly want him to be unconstrained by realism because I love seeing Batman as a hero. I want to see evil rearing its head in Gotham and think, “well of course Batman makes sense.”

There is one Batman story that illustrates everything I’ve said here beautifully, but without having to spell it out as I have. Sean Murphy’s Batman: White Knight graphic novel is a story about Joker deciding that the best way to defeat Batman is to take his prescriptions to restore his sanity, then use his intellectual prowess to work through the system and expose Batman as the real scourge on Gotham. Murphy takes all the ethical concerns about Batman seriously and tells this story like a thought experiment.  I won’t spoil anything here, but I will say that his story accomplishes the seemingly impossible task of destroying every justification for Batman and then somehow bringing you back around to love Batman all over again. It’s my favorite Batman story, in any medium, and this is why.

Realism in Batman is ultimately self-defeating. Enough of it spoils the fun, but the worst part is that it turns Batman from a hero into a reprehensible authoritarian fantasy. And he’s just too cool not to want him to be a hero.

POSTSCRIPT

I know what you’re thinking. How did he come all this way and never mention Matt Reeves’s The Batman? 

I think this most recent silver-screen iteration of the Caped Crusader is an interesting case study. In some ways, Reeves is even more rigorously realistic than Nolan, particularly in terms of the visceral physicality of the world he’s created. The batsuit has convincing texture and weight, and you almost feel exhausted just watching Robert Pattinson’s Batman fight. Gotham City is grimy and wet, and the outdoor scenes make you feel like you want to get inside, or get out of town altogether. The Batmobile is a straight-up muscle car with an engine that growls like a beast, and it absolutely rules.

Personally, I love his version of realism. I like a Batman with grime under his nails. But it still risks interfering with the suspension of disbelief. The wingsuit is incredible, a way less sci-fi interpretation than Nolan’s “memory cloth” cape-wings. But when he crashes out—another thing I love about Battinson: he makes lots of mistakes—the beating he takes might prompt distracting questions about how someone could survive it. It didn’t take me out of the experience, but again, it runs the risk of doing that for others.

Reeves is very much in conversation with ethical criticisms of Batman, so much so that Bruce’s character arc is a distinct thematic path from vengeance to hope. He addresses the critique of authoritarianism directly through the plot, and he seems to understand that realism requires reframing what is heroic about Batman. The climax doesn’t resolve with a fight scene but with Batman leading citizens out of a flooded stadium. A hero isn’t the one with the most physical dominance. A hero is the one who can be a light for those in the dark.

To me, Reeves pulls this off better than Nolan. However, I don’t know how many times he can keep pulling it off. Rumors continue to swirl about the next movie’s villain, and you can probably guess that I’m crossing my fingers for any choice that blows off realism like Poison Ivy or Mister Freeze. But I would be elated with a newer villain like the Court of Owls. If Reeves goes for another grounded, non-sci-fi villain, though, I may have to temper my expectations.