This writer’s epiphanic Batman moment didn’t come in a book at all. It came in a movie. The movie was the first of the last-gen Batman movies; Christian Bale and Christopher Nolan are well within their rights to think of their 2005 movie Batman Begins as the first of its generation.
R. Sukumar
The second, featuring the late great Heath Ledger as The Joker, is out on 18 July.
Directed by Tim Burton, the first of the last-gen Batman movies starred Michael Keaton. The year was 1989. Just the previous year, the two had collaborated in the zany Beetleuice. This writer can’t put a finger on it (and maybe it was just a Beetlejuice hangover), but Keaton’s portrayal of Bruce Wayne came with a dash of madness.
Keaton’s Batman was fine, but his Wayne was, clearly, not all there.
In that movie, the costume didn’t just define Wayne’s character—it almost made him normal.
That sums up Batman.
It is easy to see why sub-teen men of all ages like Batman: He fights crime, he has really cool toys, including the Batarang and the Batmobile, and he actually lives in the Batcave. And his alter ego is a rich playboy. The comics, much like others dedicated to costumed heroes, also feature plenty of women in tight costumes—Catwoman, Huntress, Tarantula, Onyx, Batwoman, and Talia.
It isn’t as easy to understand why others—older and wiser (ahem!)—like him.
The answer to that riddle (and we may well need Mr Nigma to help with that before we are through) may well explain Batman’s resilience. Not too many superheroes would have been able to survive being part of a campy television series popular with baby boomers in the US (the tune is still a hit ringtone) or several bad movies, including at least one in which the Batsuit ended up looking like a nipplesuit and another which actually thought George Clooney would look better in a mask.
One possible explanation may be that Batman isn’t an earnest do-gooder like Superman, but a hard-working detective (in fact, one of the Batman villains, Ra’s al Ghul, always calls him this), who isn’t above getting his back broken by someone who is just so much stronger than he is (Bane, another of Batman’s villains).
Another reason may be that his character has as many shades of grey as his costume.
There’s no denying the fact that Batman is good, but he is this in a psychologically complex way—one that may have encouraged writers through the years to come up with a unique and extraordinary group of villains (Ra’s al Ghul, Killer Croc, Scarecrow, The Joker, The Penguin, Two-Face, Scarface, Poison Ivy, Riddler and Mr Freeze, to name just a handful). Batman’s “goodness” and his “ordinariness” are relative.
You won’t, for instance, find him rescuing cats caught in trees.