"I'm Vengeance": The Batman (2022) as Mood Piece

Matt Reeves’ The Batman is a vengeance fantasy mood piece. If that description alone is off-putting, then you won’t much like this movie. In any case, I believe the film’s success is how it captures something about the character of Batman as well as the mood of our current darkening age. Since Aren already provided an evaluative review, I thought I’d put together more of a mood essay to try to capture the film’s effect. 

Even though I’m a millennial, I think I can see the appeal of this Batman story to many zoomers (many of my students included), confined to their bedrooms and laptops for two years as they watched the incompetence and corruption of those managing the world. This isn’t to say that The Batman contains a clear message about how to fix a broken world. The film’s themes, conveyed by various characters’ actions and bits of dialogue, oscillate between total cynicism and a sense of hope in moving beyond personal vengeance to social restoration. Thus, when the new, young, progressive, black mayor, Bella Reál (Jayme Lawson) gives a speech about restoring faith in institutions near the end of the film, I think it’s fair for members of the audience to wonder if the final take of Selina Kyle (Zoë Kravitz) is more accurate. It’s going to get worse. You can’t fix the broken city. 

So what’s the point of Batman then? That’s something the film explores, and Matt Reeves comes up with more than a single answer. But they are far from definitive statements, both for the thematic oscillations contained within the text itself as well as for the fact that I don’t much like that descriptor (“definitive”) when discussing Batman. There can’t be a definitive Batman, since Batman is a modern myth, and if you include the necessary elements and events in the pattern, you have reconstructed the myth. Myth is, on some level, the mere repetition of narrative and character patterns. The pattern holds the meaning. 

That’s not to say you cannot conduct variations on the narrative and character patterns; it just means that if enough elements are left out, you might be telling a good story, but it won’t be that particular myth. And The Batman is a film—and a superhero movie—as notable for its variations as its repetitions. Even so, it achieves the Batman myth, in my view.

What is perhaps most striking about The Batman, however, particularly to aficionados of the Dark Knight is that Matt Reeves does not show us Bruce Wayne’s parents being killed, which is the originating moment for the Batman and provides the key to the character. Most of the origin story, that central vital event for Batman, is absent—at least visually. But the origin story leaves, in a sense, its negative presence in the film. This is perhaps the first new Batman movie to not show the origin story: Tim Burton, Joel Schumacher, Christopher Nolan, and Zack Snyder all include flashbacks to the shooting of the Waynes and/or their death and funeral and/or young Bruce’s vow to avenge them. In The Batman, we get no stick-up. No drawn gun. No pearl necklace breaking apart. No boy kneeling or standing at his parents’ grave. But characters still talk about the event, and so it leaves its mark on the characters and the film. The intertextuality of Batman supplies the necessary weight.

In The Batman, we meet a youngish Bruce Wayne, but one who has been established as the Batman for two years now. This isn’t an origin story superhero movie per se, such as Batman Begins (2005) or the first Spider-Man (2002). Thus, 2022’s The Batman is more similar to the relatively new but not exactly just starting out costumed vigilante played by Michael Keaton in Tim Burton’s Batman (1989). In Reeves’ opening sequence, Batman (played by Robert Pattinson), in true graphic novel voice-over narration, tells us about his mission in Gotham City. It’s perhaps the highlight of the movie, creating the mood and vibes and atmosphere that the movie is always at its best when it achieves, all underscored by Michael Giacchino’s hypnotic and repetitive Batman theme. 

The score operates as another pattern of repetition and variation in The Batman, being something of a variation, as others have noted before me, on the handful of notes that make up the “Imperial March (Darth Vader Theme)” by John Williams. The repetition sinks you into the dark mood of the movie. I’ve been listening to the score as I work since seeing the movie, and in ways it resembles atmospheric video-game music playlists dropped on YouTube: three hours of mind-focusing mood music, which is melodically simple yet stimulative of other cognitive functions. Moody, smudgy lighting obscures clear vision of most anything in the movie, and only adds to the ASMR-room-like quality of many scenes in The Batman. 

In terms of the film’s music, Reeves has also included the 1991 Nirvana song, “Something in the Way,” which featured in the film’s trailer and plays at least twice in the movie. The song selection not only reveals Reeves’ generational status (GenX), but also some of the common ground between GenX and GenZ. The film’s tapping into grunge signals its whole mood. Grunge was a musical expression of discontent with the world, turned not outward into social activism and cultural revolution like the counterculture of the 1960s, but inward into a jaded disposition and coded behavioral signals of mental resistance. Batman’s mindset is grunge in this movie, and while he works towards enacting outward justice, he feels the weight of impossibility within him. He is Sisyphus already, and it’s only been two years.  

Although The Batman notably does not show the origin story, the movie as a whole is keen on showing, looking, watching. The camera’s gaze is often foregrounded: it calls attention to itself as a view. For instance, the film opens through the eyes of a heavily-breathing Riddler watching a boy dressed as a ninja who we might suspect is a young Bruce Wayne. And in a way, he is. The heavy breathing recalls Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960), the original film serial killer stalker, as well as Michael Myers and slasher and serial killer movies ever since. 

This Batman is also a watcher. In a neat variation on the hero’s gadgets, Reeves has Batman wear video-camera contact lens when he goes out at night, so he can record everything in red night vision. When he gets home, Batman tells us in voiceover, he makes himself rewatch the night’s proceedings, to remember everything. As is increasingly the case in our smartphone-saturated world, mediation is necessary for memory. But this Batman also keeps detailed handwritten notebooks (using a calligraphy pen and ink), linking Reeves’ detective with the Gothic “past” architecture the film favours, and with Paul Dano’s version of the Riddler, who is also a copious notetaker and watcher.

Later, Bruce watches Selina Kyle change into her Catwoman costume. Young male fans in the audience, likely eager to see the beautiful Zoë Kravitz get changed, are aligned with Batman in this viewing, making our Caped Crusader into something of a Jimmy Stewart voyeur from Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) or Vertigo (1958). In one scene, Batman dresses Selina up in specific attire for an undercover job. He intently stares at her: is this the beginning of romantic intrigue or simply the keen eye of the obsessive investigator? Like in Vertigo, Bruce will discover that Selina is not who she seems to be, but this film resists half his efforts to control her. 

There’s a lot of attention to, and for, eyes in The Batman. To the Riddler’s thick-rim glasses over his mask. To the Batman’s eyeliner and heavy shadow around the eyes (ostensibly to cloak the exposed skin beneath the mask, but also functioning as a meta-joke about the prominent eye make-up all modern Batmans have worn). To Bruce’s long bangs that always hang down his forehead across the eyes (Pattinson’s hair and eye shadow seem to be an allusion to the look of the famous sleepwalker in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari [1920]). 

To viral videos posted online. To the videos the TV news shows us with warnings that we shouldn’t watch the filth and depravity they are about to show. To a red neon light bulb turning on in the rainy city. To Selina Kyle driving off in the rear view mirror of Batman’s motorbike. We watch him watch her, and the movie ends with us watching his face in profile as he looks forward, off camera left.

This is the Batman of a generation saturated in visual imagery, a generation of experience filtered through visual mediation. A Batman who watches and sees and knows the crimes of the city, like a confessor, carrying knowledge of the many sins. And sometimes helping. And sometimes punishing. 

These visual emphases in The Batman contribute to the pastiche nature of the film. It’s Seven (1995). It’s Zodiac (2007). It’s The Long Halloween (1996–97). It’s Hush (2002–3). It’s Year One (1987). Year Two (1987).

It’s red title on black: “The Batman.” A red wig on Selina Kyle, the Catwoman. Red flames in the Penguin’s rear view, and someone exploding through the hellfire. Red blood on the floor, providing a clue that even Batman, the world’s greatest detective, only deciphers too late, one step behind the bad guy.

The villain and his Pizzagate-style vigilantes (note: their evil actions are motivated by their knowledge of evil actions by those who run the city) eventually wreak havoc with bullets from above on a political leader on an election night in a stadium, recalling not only the political assassination at the climax of The Manchurian Candidate (1964), but also the original mass shooting, the Texas Tower Sniper in 1966, its film incarnation in Targets (1968), as well as the Las Vegas shooting massacre of 2017. 

Recall that Batman Begins is a fantasy of self-actualization through dedication to a meta-narrative, to a symbol of something greater than oneself. The Batman lacks Nolan’s profound yet foregrounded thinking-through of the themes related to Batman. It lacks the clear symbol and its construction throughout the narrative. It lacks the legend. Mr. Wayne’s vengeance doesn’t become a legend, except maybe by the end.

But as The Batman settles deep into its mood and atmosphere it sets off some dark and resonant vibrations. This Batman feels, and becomes a feeling. I see and feel that things aren’t right. I feel I should act. How? That is the question all three protagonists—the Bat, the Cat, and the Question Mark—all ask, and answer, in different ways.

Vengeance is all consuming, so it cannot be one’s purpose, since it will only lead to self-consuming destruction. Hope, leading people out of their individual cells of darkness, is the only path forward. Batman leads the victims of flood and bullets across the dark waters in the red light of his flare, like a Prometheus.

Nolan made his Dark Knight pay a price, sacrificing himself in various ways for the sins of the city, taking upon his innocent personhood the guilt of the scapegoat. 

Here, at the end, when Pattinson’s Bruce Wayne/Batman parts from Selina Kyle as they leave the cemetery, driving off in different directions, he parts not only from the potential of their relationship but also from her cynical-slash-zealous Robin-Hood mission, and perhaps also from his all-consuming origin story—which has often been visualized heretofore with the boy by the grave—but here is never shown. Only hinted at. Discussed. Intuited. Felt. The Batman’s mission is now beyond personal vengeance. His path will be harder but truer. He will keep suffering as the witness to the night.

The Batman (2022, USA)

Directed by Matt Reeves; written by Matt Reeves and Peter Craig, based on the character created by Bob Kane and Bill Finger; starring Robert Pattinson, Zoë Kravitz, Paul Dano, Jeffrey Wright, John Turturro, Peter Sarsgaard, Andy Serkis, Colin Farrell.

RELATED POSTS