Nothing is certain in life, except death, taxes and moody Batman films. The latest offering – The Batman, a title that reminds me of when well-meaning heterosexuals refer to Drag Race as “the drag race” – hits theatres today.
Now, it’s Robert Pattinson’s turn to play the tortured hero. Hollywood’s most unintentionally memeable actor has assured us that his version of Bruce Wayne is a “weirdo” (as if a guy who cosplays as a bat every night could be anything else?) and that it’s a “sad movie”. He’s not wrong: “Thee” Batman (as it should be known) is a dark and bleak spectacle. Bruce Wayne has eyeliner and has been described as an “emo hero”. Most disturbingly, the film is almost three hours long.
This is the seventh Batman film since 2005 (eighth if we include The Joker, which doesn’t actually feature Batman, but is very much part of the canon). These films are overwhelmingly marketed towards men and it seems like there's a special male love for Batman. It’s easy to see why a billionaire playboy-turned-hero – with beta male sidekick Robin and a cool car – was popular when Batman first appeared in DC Comics in 1939. In the midst of World War Two, the idea of a man who didn’t have a “superpower”, but still took it upon himself to make Gotham a better place, was appealing. In the American sense, Batman actually did have superpowers: wealth, masculinity and celebrity status.
So what’s the allure of Batman today? Perhaps it’s (vague) realism: after all, it’s difficult to imagine oneself as Superman’s Clark Kent (an immortal alien from another planet) or Spiderman’s Peter Parker (part twink, part spider). But when it comes to Bruce Wayne, or even Iron Man (billionaire genius Tony Stark, who notably kicked off the MCU in 2008), there’s a tiny, microscopic chance that men could actually be him. “Marvel movies are fantasy features, really,” film writer Douglas Greenwood tells GQ. “Whereas the Batman universe, specifically when you compare it to other DC properties like Wonder Woman and Aquaman, is almost entirely probable.”
There’s a similar “real world” allure to James Bond, particularly among older men who hate veganism and Meghan Markle. Piers Morgan is borderline obsessed with Bond: he’s participated in TV debates about the franchise, tweeted about Bond over 100 times and written columns about who should and should not be allowed to play him. (Bond can be Black, but never gay or a woman, apparently). Morgan even (jokingly, I hope) floated the idea of himself being the next Bond. He seems to view the character, much like himself, as part of the final resistance against “wokeness”. Tom Hiddleston’s seaside frolics with Taylor Swift put him firmly out of the running to play Bond (because that’s not what “real men” do, not that Bond is real). Morgan hated Daniel Craig wearing a pink blazer and carrying his child in a papoose (that was “emasculating”). “There's a fascination that Morgan projects towards an emblem of a certain sort of masculinity,” says film critic Caspar Salmon. “A lot of what Morgan does is trolling, but his devotion to ‘Bond’ seems to be totally sincere.”
But even James Bond pales in comparison to Batman in terms of male admiration. We saw this play out in an episode of Friends – the one-time touchstone of modern metropolitan masculinity – in 2001, when Chandler and Ross fought over who could loan the coolest tuxedo. Chandler found a tux worn by Pierce Brosnan and insists that he has to "get married in James Bond's tux”, but upon learning that Ross has borrowed what he thought was a tux worn by Val Kilmer in Batman Forever, he becomes despondent. “Batman is so much cooler than James Bond!” Chandler insisted.
Batman has changed a lot since 2001. The films have positioned themselves as more “artistic” since the hugely successful Nolan trilogy – Batman Begins (2005), The Dark Knight (2008) and The Dark Knight Rises (2012). There was a posthumous Best Actor Oscar win for Heath Ledger in 2009, followed by Joaquin Phoenix for The Joker in 2020. The films being seen as higher quality coincides with a descent into darkness: Batman is more isolated, tortured and his enemies have more overtly political aims (in The Batman, for example, Paul Dano's The Riddler is a quasi-incel). The films present a more cynical view of a society that feels incurably corrupt.
What’s driving this shift? “I think a lot of the Nolan-driven ‘darkness’ of comic book movies can be attributed to the intense cynicism and disillusionment of post-9/11 American cinema,” says Clarisse Loughrey, The Independent’s film critic. “That sense of political awareness and self-interrogation is a reaction to the world we live in now.”
Greenwood thinks Nolan’s move away from fantasy initiated Batman’s descent into darkness. “The superhero genre has been riffing on crime noir for a long time, but there was an injection of colour that Nolan sapped out completely with his films,” he says. As for the Batman films being perceived as “more credible”, grittier protagonists are definitely more appealing for “esteemed” actors in search of awards. Still, the ever-so-slightly-mortifying Ben Affleck Batman movies prove that darkness doesn’t always make a good film: “Affleck’s Batman films looked and felt largely similar [to Nolan’s], but bombed, because they had little thought behind them.”
I wonder if the Batman franchise has become an allegory for straight white maleness in crisis. After all, few men represent that more than Affleck, a walking midlife crisis who is stuck in a constant post-divorce comeback loop. And it doesn’t feel coincidental that Batman has become gradually more tortured and unhappy, in a time when expectations on men are changing. Particularly in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash, billionaires like Wayne are now much more likely to be viewed as oppressors, than liberators.
This might be why, unlike other heroes from the MCU or James Bond, there isn’t even the faintest debate about making Batman gay, Black, or any other more diverse identity. Rhys, a self-described comic book obsessive who has followed Batman for years, tells GQ that the Batman comics are slightly more diverse than the films, but still more straight and white than most comics. “Batman comics seem to be the least triggering to the right-wing media in terms of ‘woke’ stuff,” he says. “In the comics, Superman’s son has recently come out as bi, which was a big ‘culture war’ issue. But apart from some tertiary characters, who are POC and bisexual, Batman is still mostly straight and white.”
Why is Rhys, a gay man, such a huge fan of a comic he admits lags behind in terms of diversity? “One of the big draws for me is the ‘found family’ aspect of comic book Batman, which is sort of missing from the films,” he says. “Filmmakers are so scared of trying to portray Robin after the 1997 movie. They tend to focus on the early days of Batman and never really move him on from his trauma.” Narrative-wise, The Batman avoids rehashing the origin story we’ve seen too many times. But Pattinson still cuts an isolated, lonely and unhappy figure.
As Batman enters a new chapter, its politics remain confusing and messy. Maybe that’s inevitable: he’s a rich guy who turns himself into a vigilante bat super-cop, instead of doing literally anything else, all because he – and he alone – can restore order to his city. “It still feels like no one knows how to address the fact that, morally, Batman is just inherently problematic and is often willing to resort to unethical actions for ‘the greater good’,” Loughrey says. “Looking even wider, there’s always going to be a tension between the films being, essentially, products created by a giant corporation, and the ways different filmmakers are trying to interrogate Bruce Wayne.”
That’s the allure of Batman. Gotham is a world where the maddening contradictions of male aspiration, ego and insecurity are laid bare. Unlike James Bond, which is a defence of an increasingly irrelevant male fantasy, the post-Nolan Batman films feel rooted in the present. For now, Pattinson’s Batman reflects a white masculinity that feels persecuted and privileged. His misery is part of a wider male struggle to reconcile those narratives – and clearly that still strikes a chord.
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