The Batman

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0:00:03.8 Landry Ayres: Welcome to Pop & Locke. I’m Landry Ayres. Holy cinematic criticism! It may have been less than a decade since we saw him last, but the Batman has got a new haircut, a fresh coat of eyeshadow, and a lot of emotional baggage to unpack. Here with me are a trio of bat specialists who I know are up to the task, including returning guest and senior fellow at the Cato Institute, Julian Sanchez.

0:00:30.0 Julian Sanchez: Thanks, old chum.

0:00:31.4 Landry Ayres: Fellow at the Center for a Stateless Society and coming back to us again, Cory Massimino.

0:00:36.0 Cory Massimino: Hey there, thanks for having me on again.

0:00:37.9 Landry Ayres: And joining us for the first time here on Pop & Locke, we are excited to have Communications Director for Daily Kos, Carolyn Fiddler.

0:00:45.9 Carolyn Fiddler: Thanks for having me.

0:00:47.2 Landry Ayres: Now, I read a tweet recently that outlined the timeline of how many times Batman had been rebooted since the original film adaptation came out in 1960, so, ’89, 2005, 2016, 2022, and kind of proposed jokingly that given sufficient extrapolation, we will have a new Batman reboot every 15 micro seconds by the year 2050. So all of these superhero films these days are kind of divorced from their self-​contained messages, they are at least inevitably in conversation with one another. So what does this Batman, the sort of Matt Reeves Batman, have to say that is different than all of the others that had come before it, or what has he brought back to the forefront?

0:01:42.1 Julian Sanchez: Oh, so I think in a way, this is a kind of Batman that you could only do as a reboot, because it exists very much in dialogue with prior incarnations as the character in film, as well as in sort of the many different versions as appeared in the comics, which is to say, this movie kinda pulls a fast one. You look at the trailers and the beginning of the movie, and you think you’re gonna get maybe the grim darkest of the grim dark Batman, a kind of a viscerally brutal, savage guy in the vein of Zack Snyder’s sort of gleefully murderous Batfleck, despite all the smarty pants detective work he does. This is a guy who likes doing violence, and in a way the story of the movie, which is, maybe Cory will disagree, but I think this is one of the only film adaptations where really Batman has a clear character arc, he actually changes over the course of it and sees through something falsed he believed about himself and his motivations.

0:02:57.0 Julian Sanchez: And this is something we’ve seen a lot in the comics, Grant Morrison has done this to some extent in his runs on the character is, hey, the thing that was brilliant about ’80s comics like Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns wasn’t that they were brutal and cynical and dark and violent all the time. Doing a realistic and mature take on these comics characters doesn’t mean making them joyless bastards like Zack Snyder thinks, and hey, it’s okay to be a little Silver Age, maybe that doesn’t mean you’re flying around with shark repellent, bat spray and giant dinosaurs, having Batman visit the hollow earth or dress up in rainbow colored costumes every day, but he doesn’t just have to be this brooding jerk who is nothing but vengeance all the time. Batman should also be a protector and a symbol of hope, not just someone who scares criminals, but someone who makes ordinary people feel safe, and so in a lot of ways, it would have been great if this had been the first modern Batman movie, but it wouldn’t have landed really the same way. I think in a lot of ways, this Batman is a statement about how we have understood Batman and what it means to have a grounded and realistic and mature take on Batman.

0:04:25.9 Carolyn Fiddler: I would agree with pretty much all of that, but also this is the first Batman movie that really is a response to and incorporates elements of the comic universe in all its various aspects, in more than any other Batman movie that I’ve ever seen, even the very comic-​booky, Batman and Robin. This comic book, sorry, this movie owes more to the comic books than any other Batman movie aside from it existing. Really, the movie is mostly just a love letter to Jeph Loeb. [chuckle] But, it’s much easier to appreciate that after seeing all the movie iterations that came before, many of which were quite good. I’m a huge fan of the original Batman and of course, Dark Knight. Pretty great.

0:05:14.5 Cory Massimino: The message of this movie, I totally agree with Julian, and that was the most surprisingly pleasant part of this film, by the end, it’s absolutely a repudiation of what you thought it might be, of in many ways, previous iterations. The thematic emphasis on redemption I thought was just fantastic and it’s not what I expected necessarily from the first trailers, and especially like you said, it is in dialogue with the other Batman, the Tim Burton Batman, that whole world, everyone in that world has fallen, there’s no redemption for anyone, I don’t think with those characters, and then in Nolan, none of the villains are sympathetic. I felt like this movie actually got a lot of those elements that are in the comics a lot as well as something like the animated series and brought it to life finally.

0:06:02.9 Julian Sanchez: Just because I catalogued this, probably the ones I can think of and I’m sure others can think of more, it’s almost impressive how many recognizable beats in the movie are just very clearly borrowed from different great Batman story arcs. So this idea of a serial killer who’s targeting the Falcone crime family and corrupt public officials, that’s straight from as Carolyn knows Jeph Loeb’s Long Halloween, which no one actually borrows a bit from as well, Selina Kyle being Falcone’s daughter is from the sequel to Long Halloween Loeb’s Dark victory. Most of the rest of the portrait of Selena Kyle is from Frank Miller’s Year One, and in fact, some of the exterior shots through the window of her apartment seemed to me almost like a direct lift from frames of that comic. The Waynes being political figures and Alfred being not really so much a butler, but a kind of security chief for the Waynes, who was actually the one who trained Bruce, that’s from Geoff Johns’s Batman Earth One; the scene where there is a mugging victim who after Batman saves him is actually even more scared of Batman and he’s saying, “Please don’t hurt me,” is a straight lifting of a frame from Grant Morrison’s Gothic.

0:07:28.7 Julian Sanchez: The idea of the villain, spoilers, but don’t listen to this. If you haven’t seen the movie yet, the villain was raised in a squalid orphanage where he’s resentful of the much more famous and rich orphan Bruce Wayne is straight from Scott Snyder’s City of Owls arc, which is sort of the sequel to The Court of Owls in that case with a villain who literally thinks he’s Bruce Wayne’s brother and might be. There’s like a head fake from the Hush comics, there’s a reporter whose death is indirectly attributable to the Waynes, whose last name is Elliot. I looked at my friends in the theater and said, “Oh, they’re setting this up, it’s not really Riddler, it’s Hush,” from the Hush comics who Hush is a villain named Thomas Eliot, so that was just an Easter egg to freak the fans out, the idea of Riddler flooding Gotham City is from Zack Snyder’s Zero Year. The sort of the thematic threat of the Bruce Wayne personality being kind of completely consumed by Batman it’s from Darwyn Cooke’s Ego. I’m sure there’s more than that. But just a lot more than most other Batman movies. As you’re kinda going through it, go, “Oh, that’s from… ” Not just the general Batman mythos, but this is from a specific story arc, so they really mind that. And it’s actually impressive, the movie feels as cohesive as it does, and not like just a kind of weird pastiche of influences.

0:09:00.6 Cory Massimino: I also love how it doesn’t just riff on these plot elements from classic Batman stories, but just the one thing I really appreciate it was like opening and closing the movie with that voice over of Batman talking to the audience and made it feel much more like the comics where you almost always have access to his inner voice and perspective, and I’m surprised none of the other Bat movies ever wanted to do something like that, and that was very effective here and made it feel more like the books as well.

0:09:25.4 Julian Sanchez: I think that’s the thing they kinda get away with, because this is such a noir film, and that’s kind of a noir convention. I think in general, in modern film, there’s a sense that voice overs are kind of a cheat and you’re probably not a very good filmmaker if you have to rely on a voice over to convey information that the audience needs. But here it works, I think pretty well. It also, I think certainly works as an interesting setup, because the very first shot of the movie is this kind of long lingering Hitchcockian pan across an apartment building, and you see a kid through the window and we’re kind of programmed by the previous movies to think, “Oh, this must be young Bruce Wayne,” but no it’s not. It’s like the family of the Riddler’s first victim, but so we’re seeing through the eyes of the Riddler, the absolute first shot of the movie. And then one of the first things we hear, the first voice we hear, well, it’s like a TV screen, but then Bruce Wayne’s voice over, and I think that sets up an interesting contrast. Bruce Wayne is at least started to be completely self-​obsessed and ruminating and keeping an emo journal about what a creature of the night he is.

0:10:46.0 Carolyn Fiddler: I had a very Black Casebook vibe, speaking of references and things that were… It was both.

0:10:50.6 Julian Sanchez: Oh, and Riddler is more outer directed. He’s the one who sees more, and in fact, there’s a parallel set up between the first time you see both characters, you see Riddler first, he’s got hidden in the dark in the background, and then a light, I think from the TV, so something illuminates him, but not at him, just his glasses. So the first time you see Riddler is, as a silhouette that becomes detectable as a light shines on his glasses and lights up, hey, this is a character who sees and in particular, sees more clearly than Bruce Wayne does. And then this is parallel like than the first time we see Batman directly mimics this as he is emerging from the shadow that criminals have been kind of gazing into constantly fearing that Batman is in one of them, and then it turns out he is finally in one of them.

0:11:42.5 Carolyn Fiddler: Well, also voice overs as in just sort of inner thoughts are another big comic book convention that he really successfully lifted for this, which as you mentioned, is really well-​done because of it is easy for that to kind of seem cheesy and cheap and not earned, but it worked really well here and yeah, the whole thing was, there are many things about the movie that I loved, a few things I really didn’t love, but mostly it was just such a love letter to comic book fans, especially Batman fans obviously, but comic book fans generally, while also being a really great movie at the same time, I am just super impressed that he pulled that off. [chuckle]

0:12:23.1 Julian Sanchez: What was the Black Casebook list you mentioned?

0:12:25.5 Carolyn Fiddler: Oh, just the nature of the journal, the way it looked, the kind of voice over while he’s writing in it, it’s a super damn guide.

0:12:32.8 Cory Massimino: I like to have the voice over, like I agree, the voice over can so often be lazy, so it was nice here, almost none of it was like mere exposition or delivering plot to the audience, it was for the purpose of characterization, the plot would have functioned perfectly fine, I think without what he says to the audience, but the fact that it deepens his character, deepens your emerging into him as a character, it helps too, because in prior Batman movies such a major complaint hasn’t even being outshined by the villains, so here are getting into his POV is very effective for that arc.

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0:13:06.2 Landry Ayres: Speaking of who we sort of conceive of as the villain in this movie, obviously, we can talk about the Riddler, all of his riddles and the sort of meaning behind them, but I think tied up in that is the sort of complicated relationship with who is really the villain in all of this, who is really at fault and what the Riddler is trying to expose and bring into the light is that the people in power, these hierarchies and specifically politicians and police, the people that enact certain policies and actions and violence upon people, that they are the ones who are the real enemies here. And Batman’s interactions with police in this movie are really, really interesting to me, especially compared to what we see in the Christopher Nolan stuff because as Julian had mentioned before, Batman is actually helping to solve crimes in this movie, he is not just coming out of the shadows and beating people up, he does plenty of that. And that might be sort of where he gets his kicks and really sorts through his emotional baggage and why we get this emo-​Batman.

0:14:22.8 Landry Ayres: But they do, to his credit, make him more of a… It has a noir angle to it. It’s much more than that. He’s with Commissioner Gordon, not just on the rooftops of buildings, but he’s at crime scenes and he’s looking at evidence and then he’s taking it home and cracking ciphers with Alfred’s help. And doing all of these things and a little bit more of a gumshoe style, type hero than we’ve gotten in the sort of very heroic, swoop-​down-​from-​the-​dark, rich-​boy-​with-​a-​bunch-​of-​gadgets Batman, previously. And then you’ve got the arc of city-​wide corruption going on and this sort of weird cooperation with police in this movie jumped out at me most of all, when they’re arresting Falcone and bringing him out of the Iceberg Lounge and they think, “We’ve finally got him. He’s the rat.” And he’s like, “Well, you guys all work for me. Don’t you know that?” And they open the doors and Commissioner Gordon says, “Well, I guess we don’t all work for you.” And they’re all there shining their lights on him and I was like… It read so odd is a choice for me. And I was really curious what everyone else thought about that.

0:15:51.6 Landry Ayres: Because it was the one moment in the film where the reading of cheesy that came out of it was not done in a sort of critical or commentating way, like the great moment when he flies underneath the bridge and his parachute gets caught and he hits the top of a car. I laughed out loud, but I think that serves a kind of purpose to show what happens to his character. But that seemed weirdly, explicitly like blue lives matter-​ish. Like, “We’re not all corrupt.” What did everyone else think of that moment? Because I think that theme is really, really important to the rest of the film, and am I missing something by reading it that way? Is that just surface level message?

0:16:43.5 Carolyn Fiddler: It was weird. It was felt really out of place, because something that made a lot of sense to me through the rest of the movie, was the fact that the cops, both the corrupt ones and the ones that we are pretty sure might not be corrupt or whatever, they all hate him, everyone hates him except for Gordon. All the cops were like, “You’re a crazy person in a bat suit.” And Gordon’s like…

[vocalization]

0:17:04.9 Carolyn Fiddler: “For whatever reason.” And another interesting thing is we never get the backstory of why Gordon trusts him. I think Jeffrey Wright was able to pull that off in a way that not a lot of other actors could have, because it didn’t bug me too much. But it bugged me a little, because I’m like, “Okay, everyone else hates him but Gordon’s like, ‘I really trust this guy and I’m willing to take a punch in the face for him.’ ” [chuckle]

0:17:21.9 Landry Ayres: They do have a really, really great buddy-​cop dynamic to sort of lean into the noir aspects.

0:17:26.4 Carolyn Fiddler: Yeah.

0:17:26.7 Landry Ayres: I really liked their back and forth there. And when the Penguin calls them out at one point and is like, “Aren’t you two a pair?” It was beautiful. It was a great moment.

0:17:36.1 Carolyn Fiddler: It was. No, I completely agree. And although I really wish I knew why Gordon trusted him and no one else did. But, yeah, it made that bid at the end seem really, really weird. Agreed. Because there were so many, obviously, corrupt cops in Gotham, but where were all these other guys? [chuckle] Just hiding while their corrupt pals were doing things? I don’t know.

0:17:55.7 Cory Massimino: At least it wasn’t as bad as the end of The Dark Knight Rises.

0:17:58.0 Landry Ayres: Right.

0:17:58.3 Carolyn Fiddler: [chuckle] Right.

0:18:00.6 Cory Massimino: There’s only one police in this town.

0:18:01.2 Julian Sanchez: I was going to say, the corrupt cops, I think you do have to lean into if you want, any kind of quasi grounded feeling or realistic feeling take on Batman, just because you have sort of the obvious question, right? Like, “You’re a billionaire. Why do you think the best way to make the city safer is dressing up in a costume and beating up muggers instead of funding more police or funding better public institutions or whatever?” Actually in contrast to the comics, this Bruce Wayne has apparently stopped doing philanthropy. There’s a dialog at one point where another character says, “Well, the Wayne legacy was filled with all this philanthropy and you don’t seem to be doing anything.” If you sort of start from the… Actually, all these social institutions are completely corrupt, it starts to make, I don’t know, I wouldn’t say it makes sense. But it makes a little more sense that, “Okay, he’s got to do something radically different because pouring more funds into these institutions, which is what his father tried to do, you’re just feeding the corruption. It’s not gonna help.

0:19:16.0 Julian Sanchez: And in a certain sense you wonder then, well, so they’re suggesting I heard there is hope and Falcone’s out of the way now, does that mean if things have changed in a sense if you wanna keep having Batman stories to some extent, you kind of need to preserve the idea that that’s still not a solution. That’s a viable alternative.

0:19:40.8 Cory Massimino: Well, I think with this movie, if you’re telling a story of redemption and you have so much of the role defined by these corrupt institutions, then you want some sort of arc or some scenes in there to reflect almost an arc of the institutions being redeemed in some way and being improved to some extent by government’s actions. I think that is, I guess, the emotional purpose for something, like this element of the film, like this through line up until the grand scene. I guess it’s just unfortunate, this is the thing really with Batman comics forever, there’s that idea of wanting to redeem an institutional problem with the city’s legal system and the city’s police, but you kind of get kind of a dumb down version of what an institutional problem is, and it’s like, Oh, it just turns out drug lords are bribing the cops, and it’s like that’s not a very nuanced or sophisticated or complex take on what are the incentives that cause police brutality or police corruption there, things like that. So you get kind of a simplified arc there with as if you could just stop please corruption by like, Well no, now they’re not bribed.

0:20:50.9 Landry Ayres: Which is really interesting considering… I don’t know if this has been done in the comics that it’s pulled from. But Selina Kyle, at one point, she makes it explicitly about race at one point when talking about the rich white boys that are in charge, which to me was really interesting, and I value that because while a few years ago, it might have sounded like somebody… I don’t know, kind of trying to pair it. What somebody sounds like, yeah, that is a talking point that comes up now and has a lot of validity to it, and that type of commentary is missing a lot from our superhero stories or was for many years. Now, we’re getting a lot more of that on the cinematic level, it was happening a lot in comic books, and there’s been a lot of great writers of color who have come out and published and redone these stories and retool them, but on a cinematic level, only in the past, maybe three, four, five years on a large scale, has that become part of the story that we are getting.

0:22:01.5 Landry Ayres: And it’s really interesting to me because as Julian has actually talked about on the show before, because of the sort of weird inherent fascism of super heroes, the fact that all of this corruption and things are so wrong with the world, but there is this small group of select special people who have just the precise number of skills and powers who we should all trust to take care of us and solve these things, especially in a world we live in today where police officers bear the punisher symbol to assert authority and put on an air of power, as ironic as using the punisher symbol would be.

0:22:51.1 Carolyn Fiddler: Right. Which totally misses the point. [laughter]

0:22:55.5 Landry Ayres: What does integrating that in Selina Kyle’s story when they talk about it there, but then they don’t talk about it all with the police there, what is missing, what is the sort of point and how could they have better done that? Carolyn, you talked about some of the things that you didn’t like that the film could do, maybe this is a better way to transition to the things that we thought the film could do better, what was missing and what could they have done to take those things that they might have tipped toed toward, but they didn’t jump into the pool?

0:23:30.2 Carolyn Fiddler: That’s right. You raise a really good point. And in terms of things that they tipped toes towards, even the comics, even with a Black Batman, I think that Batman in particular, and I follow the current arc more than any other superhero arc really out there right now. I usually go back and catch up on other things, but anyway, so there is an Else worlds sort of story called White Night that really addresses Batman, what if he’s actually the bad guy, in the movie as you mentioned, kind of tiptoe towards that and does bring up issues of race, which do come up in White Night, not very satisfyingly, I might note, [chuckle] but it does at least finally take them on a little bit. You’re right, it gets mentioned here and then kind of dropped, and yeah, certainly not really mentioned in regard to the police force at all, it’s brought up in the politics, we have a black candidate running for Mayor who is supposed to be sort of this savior figure, had some Obama flavor in there that I thought was a little over done, but whatever. But yeah, they were brought up, the race thing comes up in socio-​economic terms, but not in criminal justice term specifically, it’s just, Okay, here’s this rich white guy who’s very sad and has very floppy hair when he’s not being Batman and what about the rest of us who are just trying to live our damn lives.

0:25:04.6 Julian Sanchez: Certainly we’re talking about but… Nerves in my head as for the Batman BLM kind of story Bat Lives Matter where the premise is a little maybe crimped from White Knight a little bit, but the idea being okay at some point, as in the real word, it would be inevitable, if you’re someone’s a character like Batman is going around beating people up and dangling people off buildings for information, sooner or later, he is going to by accident, either seriously injure or kill someone who’s either innocent or guilty of fairly minor crimes. He’s gonna be chasing someone who stole an iPhone and hit them the wrong way, and they’re gonna crack their head on a wall and die or be paralyzed, it’s what would happen in the real world if someone was using violence as much as Batman is, however, well-​trained he is, and then, Hey, what would the reaction to that be, especially if the person injured is non-​White, and there’s a question of, ““Did he react to the threat in a way that was partly based on that?” And actually get some self-​examination about, “Well, God, how much violence am I deploying? Can I really justify this?” And I think the Reeve’s Batman movie is tiptoeing towards this in some interesting ways, because this Batman is a jerk, this is not like a nice or heroic character, certainly at the outset.

0:26:39.0 Julian Sanchez: There’s actually a kind of great little scene where he’s sending Selina Kyle in to do surveillance with this high tech camera, contact lenses, and she basically says, “You’re just using me, you don’t care about my safety.” And he kinda grabs her chin and you think he’s gonna like… Right? It’s a frame set up to like… Or you think he’s gonna say something reassuring like, “I wont let anything happen.” No, he just tilts her head up, he says, “Well, I just wanted to check your contacts.” ‘Cause she’s right, he doesn’t care, he’s using her. At the very beginning, when he’s beating those crooks up and the victim is scared of him as the crooks, he seems totally indifferent to this, right? He’s not a rescuer, he’s just, “Oh, feels so much better when he gets to beat criminals up.” Talking about… There’s a roommate and maybe girlfriend of Selina Kyle, who is just horribly murdered, basically because she was having sex with the Mayor, it’s implied she was a sex worker, and Batman essentially says, “Well, she had it coming.” But like, “Well, there are consequences to the bad choices she made.”

0:27:46.8 Julian Sanchez: He has the same attitude about the death of Gordon’s former partner, who was a corrupt guy, he crossed the line, he was a… So you’ve got this Batman with this very kind of Old Testament morality, and this very cartoon-​ish, it’s a comic-​bookie, picture of the world where there are perfect saints like his parents, who were horribly wronged, and then, right? Sinners who deserve limitless violence in repayment for these wrongs. And so if you’re not one of the perfect people then, ” Well, you deserve whatever you get.” Even to Alfred, he’s kind of a jerk, right? In one point in the same scene, he says to Alfred, “Well, you’re not my father.” Alfred is visibly kind of wounded by this, then he offers Bruce his cufflinks, and Bruce kinda scoffs, you know? ‘Cause they have the Wayne, W, on them. He goes, “Huh! You’re a Wayne now? Huh!” And both times, right? He’s talking to the guy who raised him since he was 12. The guy is obviously kind of hurt by these remarks, because he does sort of think himself as Bruce’s family. And Wayne says he doesn’t care, “You’re not really a Wayne. You’re not really my dad.” He really is…

0:29:10.3 Carolyn Fiddler: I feel like that would have been settled a long time ago. If you’re being raised as an orphan, wouldn’t you be like, when you roll out that, “You’re not my dad.” Thing a lot as a teenager, or I feel like that should have been settled. [laughter]

0:29:18.7 Julian Sanchez: Yeah, yeah, you have to assume Alfred had heard this a lot of gray. You feel for Andy, it’s like, “This is Alfred here.” But this is not a nice guy, and he’s finally kinda called out on this by Selina at one point when he says this kind of awful thing about her girlfriend. Well, her murder, her horrible murder, “Well, she made choices and they had consequences.” Yeah, this is someone who is detached, maybe from the real world, has this very simplistic sense of morality. And he’s kind of rationalizing what he’s doing, kind of all these violence he’s dealing out, and hey, maybe he’s kind of doing this as a very hands-​on kind of therapy that doesn’t have a whole lot to do with really trying to make the world a better place, or even the city a better place. It’s just, “I feel a lot better when I get to re-​enact the night my parents were killed, except the criminals get it instead.” And less to do with, “Well, what do people need? What does this city need?”

0:30:33.2 Julian Sanchez: And we see, actually, I think a lot of the trouble he has solving this case, come from a lack of perspective taking, right? Because There’s a part where the Riddler releases photos from the Iceberg Lounge, that have this important plot effect, and Batman notices these minute clues in the photo like, “Oh, the victim was wearing these boots, and then Selina Kyle is wearing the same boots, and he knows that they’re connected.” Right? He doesn’t stop to think, “What’s the perspective these photos were taken from? Who shot these photos? From what vantage point?” Well, the vantage point is, Edward Nashton’s apartment, the Riddler’s apartment, right? So if he’d gone on Trace the line here, “that’s Riddler’s apartment.” Movie is over very quickly. And I think one of the key clues involves There’s a working-​class cop, who looks at the murder weapon, the very first murder, looks at the murder weapon and says, “Oh, that’s just carpeting tool.” And then he knows, he looks under the carpet Riddler’s apartment, and sees the big map of Riddler’s master plan, the clue he didn’t recognize earlier, what this was, and then it might be an additional clue.

0:31:45.6 Julian Sanchez: So there’s a couple of points where he’s this very good detective, he knows all about corpse decomposition, in another end, cryptography and things that help him solve the case, but in some sense, he’s not good at perspective-​taking, he doesn’t know a whole lot about being a blue-​collar laborer, and it’s that kind of those end up being the clues he misses, that in a sense, caused him to fail, right? They catch the Riddler, but they do fail. They don’t stop his plan, that Gotham City gets flooded. So again, kind of Batman’s akin-​ness is about recognizing, “Hey, maybe I’ve been not doing this for the right reasons.” But also, “Hey, maybe I need to come down from my bat perch a little bit.”

[laughter]

0:32:38.5 Carolyn Fiddler: You Know, it occurs to me that the only Batman movie in which we’ve gotten him going into therapy is Batman Forever, that’s the only time that happened. Whereas kid Bruce Wayne should have been in a lot of therapy. We never learn anything about that. The closest we get to that is we learn in the rebirth continuity that he attempted suicide as a teenager. That’s all we get. [laughter] And maybe he had some therapy as a result of that or not. We don’t know, but Bruce Wayne needed a therapy and it seems like he never got [0:33:13.0] ____.

0:33:13.1 Julian Sanchez: The problem is in the comics usually his therapist turns out to be Hugo Strange. [laughter] Or what’s his name? Thomas Hurt.

0:33:20.2 Carolyn Fiddler: Right.

0:33:20.4 Julian Sanchez: Is it Thomas, Simon Hurt? Who is maybe Thomas Wayne, anyway, yeah, so yeah. In the comics every time Bruce tries to go into therapy, it’s a super villain. Maybe not a great message for the kids.

0:33:35.9 Cory Massimino: I really love the points Julian’s making about, I mean, this movie is so different in casting that wealth and privilege, of Batman as source of weakness really. Obviously, the history of Batman, that’s been a source of power ever since. It’s been kind of uneasy. Ever since he was created, you have his briefing on, he was created purely to imitate Superman. Following that success in Superman’s more of a 20th century from a working class family. The Kent’s. That kind of working class vibe for the Superman stories. Batman is going back to a 19th century hero from the aristocracy. More like, let’s call it pimpernel. And there’s been this uneasy tension, and I absolutely love the way this movie casts these things as actually his source of weakness ’cause it’s like this epistemic limitation to what he can even see what vantage points… I love how one of the funniest moments, and one of his biggest failures was just, he doesn’t no Spanish. If he just knew Spanish accurately, he would have avoided so much of the film. [laughter] And so I love they recast his privilege and his power. He’s been up in the tower. In this version he didn’t grow up in the manor. He grew up in the tower up detached from the city, like Julian was saying. I love that he has to get on the nitty-​gritty and he kind of fucks up along the way.

0:34:51.7 Cory Massimino: And I love how he really is, like you guys said, he is a dick to everyone. He’s a really a huge jerk to Alfred. And I love how you both were saying, anyways, the villain is Batman. He’s a dick even to Bruce. Bruce’s life is a mess because of this persona of Batman in many ways it draws on, like Julian said earlier, one of my favorite books, “Batman: Ego”, this monster Batman is standing in the way of progress more than anyone in the movie.

0:35:16.7 Landry Ayres: Would you say there’s something in the way?

0:35:17.9 Cory Massimino: Shut it down.

0:35:18.2 Landry Ayres: Shut it down. Shut it down.

[laughter]

0:35:20.6 Julian Sanchez: Stop before we get copyright struck. Sorry. [laughter]

0:35:23.0 Carolyn Fiddler: But this is the first movie. And in the comics, this is almost never becomes a liability, but his wealth is not a super power here. The way it usually is. Obviously gives him fancy bat computers and things like that, but it’s not really deployed to the extent that it is in other movies and in many comic book arts.

[music]

0:35:45.4 Landry Ayres: The confusion about who the Winged Rat is and what metaphor they’re trying to use coming up. There’s four different leads they chase down that the Winged Rat could be. Whether it’s a stool pigeon, it’s a falcon, it’s a bat. I was like: No one sat down and made a list…

0:36:06.6 Carolyn Fiddler: I was like shouting at the screen. I’m like, “Come on.” [laughter]

0:36:08.8 Landry Ayres: I took this long for something like stool pigeon, [laughter] I mean, I guess people would say: I don’t know, I don’t know. Maybe you see a lot of pigeons if you’re up in your tower all the time, or you see a falcon or something. But it’s like have some self reflection here.

0:36:23.6 Carolyn Fiddler: I’m with you with that one.

0:36:26.0 Landry Ayres: And I guess maybe that was the part of it, was that as much as he’s looking inward at himself, he doesn’t have an accurate picture of what he is or something like that. I just couldn’t understand the whole time. Very rarely do I feel the need to shout at the screen, but that was one of them. [laughter] Especially when early on, Alfred’s like: “Well, he has pretty bad Spanish.”, but they plant it so firmly in the beginning that I’m like, Even Bruce. I know you’re in the movie, but can’t you see? Yeah.

0:37:03.6 Carolyn Fiddler: [laughter] Even with my high school Spanish it bothered me quite a lot. [laughter]

0:37:07.1 Julian Sanchez: I was so relieved that turned out to be a plot point because I was like, “Oh God, really, come on. You couldn’t find one Spanish speaker to correct this for you. So I was relieved that was an actual plot point, not just sloppiness. Although I’ll say to you that ambiguity is in there partly because the Riddler messages to Batman all work on a bunch of different levels. On one level it’s classic Riddler, these are taunting clues. Come catch me. Come solve the mystery I’m laying out. And then later we realize, oh, the Riddler thinks Batman is like his ally and his partner, and he’s giving directions. He’s feeding Batman information. He’s making sure Batman learns the picture of the city and the corruption that Batman has, and then gets the message, “I need you to bring Falcone out into the light so I can shoot him.” But beyond the plot level, they also work as kind of therapeutic messages to Batman. If you think about, like, okay, the riddles to the DA, “I can be cruel, poetic or blind, but when I’m ignored, it’s violence you may find. Batman knows justice.” Is the answer. But what is Batman doing? He’s running around beating up muggers in a really brutal way. He doesn’t seem to be out protecting people. It’s not about justice, it’s about violence. Since you’re justice…

0:38:36.4 Carolyn Fiddler: You are right. They’re constantly in vengeance.

[overlapping conversation]

0:38:40.5 Julian Sanchez: They call him vengeance in this movie more than they call him Batman. And then the riddle is, “If you’re justice please do not lie. What is the price for your blind eye?” This is at the plot level about the corruption, the DA is taking bribes, but it’s also “Hey, Bruce, what is the cost for your inability to apparently see what you’re actually doing and what your motives are?” And then, “Since your justice is so select, who is the vermin?” This is the reference back to the winged rat you’re paid to protect. So this needs to be both a reference to the stool pigeon, the vermin that these corrupt officials are protecting. But also, “Hey, who is it that you’ve paid this price to protect? Who are you protecting, Bruce? Is it the city or is it the winged rat? Is it yourself?” And in a sense, the movie is about Batman kinda coming to see that that’s what he’s involved in, and then the solution is Riddler’s last riddle, which ends in, “Bring him into the light and you’ll find where I’m at.” Hey, what’s the solution? It’s time for Batman to maybe not skulk in the shadows all the time. You need to bring him out into the light and be a symbol of hope and inspiration and not just this kind of figure of violence and terror that criminals are scared of, but something that makes people feel protected.

0:40:01.5 Julian Sanchez: So in a lot of ways, what’s going on here is the partnership the Riddler imagines at the plot level, but also in a way, a real partnership where this dialogue of riddles is kind of the therapy Bruce needs. And like you said, it was all the villain the whole time.

0:40:21.4 Cory Massimino: Yeah, I thought that was a stroke of genius, the partnership.

0:40:26.4 Carolyn Fiddler: I agree, but I enjoy that aspect of the clues, but I confess my favourite part of those little riddles was really superficial. They were all Easter eggs for other Batman villains. One of the cards had the Mad Scientists on it with the shiny glasses. That was obviously strange. Oh, one of them was a red-​headed girl surrounded by plants.

0:40:49.9 Landry Ayres: Oh! Wow!

0:40:52.2 Carolyn Fiddler: Yeah. Now, I’m trying to remember the rest of them, but they were all very kind of obvious illusions to other Batman villains.

0:41:01.0 Landry Ayres: Now, I feel foolish. [laughter] Oh. If only they maybe peeled some plastic off one of the cards lips or something, I would have been like, “Oh, I get it. I know that one.”

0:41:12.7 Carolyn Fiddler: Well, there was a Mad Hatter one. There was that one. Well, since the first crime was on Halloween, the first one might have, I can’t remember, but it was probably a scarecrow one, but I honestly don’t recall. ‘Cause I didn’t pick up on it until the second card. I was like, “Oh, wait.” [chuckle]

0:41:27.6 Cory Massimino: The layer, the layers’ meaning with the cards is so genius, like Julian was saying, they applied to Batman, but well, they applied just much to Riddler because Riddler is inspired by Batman. He also has his little self-​awareness as Bruce about what he’s doing. It was such a genius use of Riddler to have it. He thinks he’s working with Batman, Batman thinks he’s working against Riddler, and they’re both sort of wrong. And I loved that. I just loved how they were foiled like that. And also, not just them, but Selina into the mix. I mean, that’s why I like that moment, Carolyn, when you mentioned where like the “You’re not my real dad” moment. I did like that because I’ve always thought of Batman as… He’s fundamentally in a state of arrested development. He hasn’t been able to grow up since his parents were killed, and so all the characters in this movie, Selina, the Riddler, and the Batman were orphans in the state of arrested development. They’re dressing up to cope with their trauma. That was a fantastic use of the characters. I loved it.

0:42:20.8 Julian Sanchez: I looked it up, actually, and Carolyn, the first card is an owl.

0:42:24.6 Carolyn Fiddler: Right. Yes, that was it. Yes.

0:42:29.5 Julian Sanchez: Two potential Batman villains there, or Owlman even, which I guess the Court of Owls ends up creating a new version of.

[chuckle]

0:42:40.1 Carolyn Fiddler: I saw when I was like… My friend and I were the only people in the theater, so when I yelled at the screen, it was fine.

[laughter]

0:42:46.4 Cory Massimino: There’s like three de facto Adam West Easter eggs. One, this is the only Batman movie with those four villains, Penguin, Riddler, Catwoman, and Joker since the ’66 Adam West movie. And then two, there was that awesome shot of Batman running down a building, which was really cool of an action shop, but also invoked obviously Adam West and Burt Ward crawling up the buildings. And then third, if you notice in the scene where Riddler mails the bomb and then Alfred gets hurt, there’s the Shakespeare bust in his room, which is how they opened the Buckhaven, the Adam West show. I think Matt Reeves, he said he grew up with Adam West Batman. So I love that he peppered in Easter eggs, even though such a different version.

0:43:25.2 Carolyn Fiddler: There was another one, and it’s such a dumbly deep cut by…

0:43:29.1 Cory Massimino: Oh, I’m excited.

0:43:29.5 Carolyn Fiddler: I’m a little hesitant I mentioned it, but here I am. [chuckle]

0:43:31.1 Cory Massimino: No, tell us.

0:43:33.1 Carolyn Fiddler: The name of the commissioner who got murdered, Savage? Peter Savage? He is from an episode of the ’66, where Egghead, he’s actually sort of to go back to Hush, he’s like another rich person who’s kidnapped by Egghead, and that’s a long time ago.

0:43:53.2 Cory Massimino: Oh, that’s great. I didn’t catch that. Maybe that means Egghead will be the villain in the sequel.

[laughter]

0:44:00.6 Carolyn Fiddler: But then the Riddler gets involved and Batman has to tell the Riddler, they’re like, “Oh, you’re the smartest villain in Gotham. It’s not really Egghead,” but he’s like, “Egghead, you’re the smartest.” Anyway. But it’s a long journey from rich guy who gets kidnapped to police commissioner.

[music]

0:44:17.2 Carolyn Fiddler: But just clearly, Matt Reeves just loves Batman so much. [chuckle] It just blew my mind multiple points in that movie, and it was really cool to see someone who also loves Batman. I’m convinced Batfleck was created by someone who was not a huge Batman fan. What’s his name? Doesn’t hate Batman as much as he clearly hates Superman, Zack Snyder. I mean, he clearly hates Superman, but that’s…

[overlapping conversation]

0:44:40.6 Cory Massimino: That’s what we wanna do now, we’re on the Zack Snyder reverse?

[laughter]

0:44:43.9 Landry Ayres: Let’s get started, everybody. We’ll tape.

[laughter]

0:44:47.2 Carolyn Fiddler: But this is a love letter the way that the Dark Knight trilogy was not. The Tim Burton original Batman, the first two were very much love letters kind of in this vein, but not as specific.

0:45:00.6 Julian Sanchez: Zack Snyder does like Batman more than he likes Superman, but he likes him like an angsty teenager, and he thinks like, “Oh, you know, Frank Miller’s Batman was cool ’cause he kills people, and that’s awesome.”

[chuckle]

0:45:12.8 Carolyn Fiddler: Right. Yeah. [chuckle] I like him bitter and angry.

0:45:16.2 Cory Massimino: It’s very similar to a lot of fictional characters that people take the wrong lesson from or don’t realise how much the work is endorsing or condemning them. This movie itself, the beginning of the voice… To go back to the voice over, I got strong Rorschach vibes. And even that is riffing on Taxi Driver with Travis Bickle, and both… So getting that sense of Batman’s, okay, and this is more like those characters and he has to obviously grow out of that, like you said, he has such a retribution morality and drain that for retentive morality by the end.

0:45:44.2 Carolyn Fiddler: Yeah. Yeah. I really could have done without the last chunk of the movie, as much as I enjoy the callback to Zero Year and No Man’s Land and all that, the flooding of the city, like the whole last bit just felt that could have been in any Batman superhero movie. It felt a little out of place to me in the rest of the film, but I’m pretty sure he shot his leg full of venom, so at least we got that.

0:46:09.4 Landry Ayres: Yes. Okay. That makes a lot of sense now. Now, that you say it. Because I was like, that wasn’t just adrenaline shot. I know, he didn’t have a peanut allergy reaction at that moment. Okay, that was interesting. Yes absolutely.

0:46:24.0 Carolyn Fiddler: No, it was [0:46:24.5] ____.

0:46:24.7 Landry Ayres: Well, the thing about that scene that bugged me, just like a weird nit-​picky thing is, there’s all of this scaffolding falling and water is rushing in and it’s full everywhere. And they see this one electrical box that the cable is torn and falling, and, you know, he cuts it and falls, and they’re like, oh great, not everyone’s going to get electrocuted. There is so much electrical equipment on that stage. So many more people would have died by the diseases from the flood water and the getting shocked to death from all of the amplification systems and the PA from that one box. I was like no one is, “Zzzzz… ” And shaking down in the water there and yet, gosh, it was the one thing that… I feel bad. I hate to be one of those people that points at stuff and is like, that wouldn’t actually happen. I’m like, it’s a movie get over it. But that I was like, we did all this work.

0:47:24.7 Carolyn Fiddler: Yeah. That’s part of why it felt out of place. The rest felt really lived in and normal-​ish, I mean, for a comic book world, and that was just like, what are you doing? And then, I really also disliked the end with the cutesy motorcycle chase. That was stupid and garbage. I just think they had that last dialogue bit at the end just to mention Bludhaven. I think they just wanted to introduce that and make people squeal if they recognize it. I don’t know. It was still there.

0:47:50.3 Julian Sanchez: This is a movie that, even after the [0:47:53.7] ____ in the Madison Square Garden space, this movie does suffer… This is, I think, the best Batman movie, maybe tied with the Dark Knight, but it does suffer a little bit from return of the king syndrome, where, yeah, it’s over. Oh no, okay there’s another scene. Okay. Alright, now it’s over. No, there’s another scene? Okay. There’s that weird exchange between Riddler and presumably Joker that seems like they made a mid-​credit scene and then decided to actually stick it in the movie instead.

0:48:29.9 Carolyn Fiddler: Yeah, put it in the actual movie.

0:48:31.5 Julian Sanchez: Weird, it just breaks the flow of the film, and it really does feel like they shot an end credit scene and then pasted it in somewhere. And then, all the stuff at the end, it…

0:48:45.9 Carolyn Fiddler: I did read that the director didn’t want to include that as part of the main movie, but the audience reaction or the sample audience, whatever, reaction was so positive, he was like, “Eh, F it, I’ll put it in.” But that would have definitely worked better in the credit scene. I could not agree more.

0:49:01.7 Cory Massimino: I thought it was weird towards the end here, I mean, there was that whole big sequence where Batman is saving all of these innocent people. That was weird. I don’t tend to see that in saving innocent people, I’ve rarely seen Batman do that in the films, and barely any superhero movies do that. So that was a bit jarring to see a superhero saving people.

0:49:21.4 Carolyn Fiddler: I mean, it was just a really hit-​you-​over-​the-​head with a, hey, he’s a better guy now. He’s helping instead of vengeance.

0:49:26.4 Cory Massimino: Oh, if it’s not clear, I love that scene. I hate that superhero movies do not show them saving innocent people.

[laughter]

0:49:34.3 Julian Sanchez: The ne plus ultra of this is, in Snyder’s Man of Steel, there’s a scene where Congress or something has been bombed and everything is in flames and people are screaming and running. And Superman is there and he’s just sort of hovering and scowling. Not flying around, who can I help? So, yeah, I really like that [0:50:00.9] ____. Even visually, right? I feel like the movie visually changes around this point. And I said, it had the kind of sensation of, you’re reading a Frank Miller book and then suddenly a splash shot from a late silver age Steve Englehart story gets dropped into it. And you’re like, oh this is, I’m suddenly reading a different era and take on Batman.

0:50:31.8 Carolyn Fiddler: Well, that actually reminds me that this movie is like the complete inverse of Man of Steel. This gets Batman right in many ways in which Man of Steel got Superman totally wrong.

[laughter]

0:50:45.2 Cory Massimino: Another way it’s the opposite of Man of Steel. I owe this insight to my wife who made it after we saw the movie, and she pointed out how for years so many superhero movies trade in 9/11 imagery. And so much with Snyder. And this one eschews that, and this at the end, for all the flaws it may have, the end still worked for me a lot. And it really invokes more something like Katrina. More like a natural disaster that you have to rescue people from, not some terrorist attack that could be solved by just bonking the terrorist. So, it’s a totally different kind of situation, and it feels like a real divergence from, like 20 years of superhero movies going off the same tragedy and trauma. That was a nice difference.

0:51:20.6 Carolyn Fiddler: I love that point. Yeah. That’s really well-​done.

0:51:23.3 Julian Sanchez: Batman is no longer George Bush using the patriot act to catch the Joker.

[music]

0:51:30.5 Landry Ayres: Thanks for listening. As always, the best way to get more Pop & Locke content is to follow us on Twitter. You can find us at the handle @popnlockepod. That’s pop, the letter “n”, locke with an “e” like the philosopher, pod. Make sure to follow us on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen, and please rate and review us if you like the show. We look forward to unravelling your favorite show or movie next time. Pop & Locke is a project of lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org and is produced by me, Landry Ayres. To learn more visit us on the web at lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org.

[music]