How The Batman Makes the Dark Knight More Interesting Than His Villains

The Batman starts out with Robert Pattinson doing his best Rorschach, seething in the voice of our new Caped Crusader. We hear this and see Gotham City, that metropolis of urban ruin we’ve come to know after all its decades onscreen. Always different but always the same. If this isn’t your first Dark Knight rodeo, a sort of muscle memory starts to kick in. We’ve got that growling voice reminding us of the morally gray war on these streets, and we get haunting little glimpses of that war already unfolding, already in progress, on Halloween no less. We consciously know why we’re here — it’s right there in the title — but on some other level our excitement starts to rise not because of how very cool our hero is or isn’t going to be: we want to see the insane heights his villains might reach this go around. What twisted philosophies they might espouse, what real-world Halloween costumes they will inspire for the next several decades, and which actors — perhaps underestimated — will let themselves be transformed by the criminal darkness of their roles.

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For most other superhero franchises, this sort of excitement is left at the door along with any outside food or beverages. For every gift the Marvel Cinematic Universe has given fans of comics and movies, the one gift they have not been able to consistently give themselves is iconic, three-dimensional villains. They’ve got a few though! How could they not? Loki, Winter Soldier, and Thanos are generous creations in their ability to donate some charismatic antagonism to movies that might have otherwise lacked it. But many of the MCU’s most impressive bad guys — Hela, Killmonger, and arguably Ultron — are thus-far single-serving thorns in the sides of protagonists who quickly dispatch them. Villains are often written with surface-level “character” only, the depth implied by the great actors playing them.

Tom Hiddleston as Loki standing in a desert in the TV series, Loki — Image via IMDB

My point is this is not something Batman ever has to worry about. He joins Spider-Man and the X-Men as members of a very exclusive club. The Iconic Rogues’ Gallery Club. For these properties, you have to go out of your way to find villains who are not compelling, who do not have backstories that could fill their own films. As a result of this, cinematic adaptations tend to cede a good portion of character-building runtime to the dramatization of their villains’ arcs. To the audience’s benefit! Batman (1989), Batman Returns (1992), Mask of the Phantasm (1993), The Dark Knight (2008), The Dark Knight Rises (2012); these are films where the presence of Batman is an inherent understanding, and so the thing that needs to be explained is against whom he will now fight, and how they got to be the way they are.

The result is that Batman films are rich with villains who’ve got complex psyches and complicated motivations. They are outcasts who are sensitive, reactive, sick of turning their anger and sadness inward and instead unleash it upon a city already accustomed to criminal abuse. In Batman Returns, Catwoman’s descent into criminal insanity is a spiral from which we’d like the Dark Knight to save her; by joining The Penguin in hurting others, she is hurting herself. Toward the end of the film, when The Penguin’s back is to the wall and the PR-spun adoration he’d spent the film manipulating has been lost — and he is reduced to once again acknowledging his loneliness and his habitation in a dank sewer — it is sad when he chooses to go down fighting and killing. The poor guy never stood a chance, we might be thinking.

In The Dark Knight, when Joker visits Two-Face at the hospital and murmurs anarchist poison into his ear, we know that Bruce Wayne has officially lost a friend and that Harvey Dent has lost himself. The tragedies in Gotham City aren’t just the civilians, collaterally damaged in this unending war of self-harming depravity, but the damaged people that Batman must save from themselves, lest they become the monsters threatening to consume them. It adds the weight behind the pulled punch of his unwillingness to kill. They live out their days in a hospital, not a prison.

Entering The Batman’s new rendition of Gotham, we are accustomed to a certain level of nemesis psychoanalysis and we’re ready for it. To this end, we are not disappointed (or, technically, surprised). Zoë Kravitz’s thieving, loner Selena Kyle once again tugs at Bruce Wayne’s savior complex — as he tugs at hers. Paul Dano’s slasher-movie portrayal of Riddler gets a lively acting showcase toward the end, sans mask, and the actor does conjure hints of sympathy in the full-madman gumbo he is serving.

But that misunderstood, Edward Scissorhands-energy is not bestowed unto him; it is reserved for our hero. The cinema language of villainy that fixes an audience in their seats — fraught violins of impending doom; bombastic, Darth Vader horns; ghostly choirs; the absence of light. It’s a language historically employed to get pulses quickening as, say, Jack Nicholson’s Joker slowly has his bandages removed, Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman loses the last of her sanity in her neon-lit apartment, or Tom Hardy’s Bane prepares to break our hero’s back.

robert pattinson as bruce wayne in the batman

In Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, the dreadful agent of chaos that comes striding out of the shadows toward a gathering of outlaws is Heath Ledger’s Joker. In Matt Reeves’ The Batman, that creature is Pattinson’s cowled detective, ready to unleash his dark side on a group of punks who could very well be in high school. As Batman administers this two-fisted justice, the look in his eyes is not smirky, superhero knowing, or a stoic’s deep concentration, but the self-antagonistic resentment of a rock star who isn’t sure he likes himself, or the songs he sings, or his audience. He’s got a cool suit, pithy lines, and an awesome car, and we like him for it. But he’s punching himself toward an early grave and there’s nothing we can do but watch.

This is a tension Bruce Timm’s Batman: The Animated Series brewed on a regular basis with its episodic presentation of the rogues’ gallery. Mr. Freeze, Two-Face, Clayface, and more became the violent, heartbroken leads in their own tragedies, with a masked vigilante as their supporting player. Pattinson and Reeves shift this energy to the Caped Crusader himself. It’s the most human this character has looked onscreen in a long time, maybe ever. Every skull cracked by this guy seems to be done against his wishes, more in service to his oath of vengeance than any desire or joy he is willing to admit to deriving from the fight. Never has Batman so clearly needed a hug. In Christian Bale’s hands (and the hands of most others), the character often seemed a collection of compartmentalized façades; a showy grin with the affections of a prima ballerina, or the keys to an urban war machine.

Pattinson’s Bruce Wayne hides behind his hair and combat makeup when not hiding behind his literal mask. The film wants you to know that he is present for all the pain in the room and that he’s perhaps the owner of it. Bruce and Selena’s chemistry makes Batman’s love interest finally feel like something that might be good for him, not toxic. The passion — buried deep, unlike his anxieties — reaches a boil when they are near each other. So it is genuinely sad when she rides off for safer burgling opportunities, leaving him to steward this broken city on his own.

This hero doesn’t even realize he is one until the closing moments of the movie. He never really gets his hug, but the audience gets their first defender of Gotham who is seeped under their skin the way his villains usually are. This isn’t done by giving him uninteresting villains to spar with and overshadow, but with a powerful mix of tragic and unnerving that makes the storytelling in Batman’s universe so often compelling. For creatives to take this long to turn their eye toward the man in its title is surprising, but welcome. And it’s hopefully just the beginning of that exploration.