The Batman (2022)

I'd sound very cynical if I said this, so I will go ahead and say it. I know a person who makes her living behind a camera, working contract jobs, TV, movies, sports events, etc. That person, one of the anonymous "crew", a union job, hears the actual bosses who tell her where to point the camera, in their discussions. She's heard a lot of these "let's throw this Easter Egg at them and see what they make out of it" conversations. Most movies are not meant to be high-concept, just entertainment with some hooks thrown at the audience to make them think that there's a puzzle to be solved.

Moore himself is on record several times equating fascism with superhero mythos. Perhaps he didn't know what he was saying with Watchmen? *Shrugs*

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Hey, Elon Musk bought Twitter!

Sir this is a Batman thread.

nonsense.

Whoever thought a rich guy like him would ever dress up in a Halloween costume at night and go out and beat up muggers?

I can't say I agree, but I love the way you put it here. Funny AF.

I wish I could join this conversation... but I haven't seen the movie yet.

It's longish and serious. It's like they're trying to out-Nolan Nolan. I am so burnt out on superheroes and Batman at this point that I can't even say if it is good or not. The general response here seems to indicate that it is, at least, worth a look.

As a nay-sayer, I'd suggest that it's worth seeing, at least for your cinematic literacy. All the technical virtues are there and, for a couple hours, it's better than wandering the streets in the rain and won't cost as much as a good restaurant meal. As for advancing the corpus of human art, I think not. The Dark Knight may have done that, but since then, they're all been do-overs of the Serious Batman genre.

I haven't watched the movie but its sad that today people have transformed the word "fascist" into a label for something that basically means "old-school conservative". Youtube has the audiobook of Mussolini's The Doctrine of Fascism, that doctrine is very well defined there, and pretty much nothing that today gets called "fascist' is actually fascist.

I read Watchmen and watched the movie. I think he was saying that if superheroes actually existed their existence would have major geopolitical impact.

The word has largely been hollowed to be meaningless synonym for "Y'er Bad!"



Batman, however, does represent a centralized source of power which only answers to itself (Batman will not let you arrest him today, officer) and which uses forcible suppression of that which he opposes (and this is consistent with contemporary dictionary definitions). The word is a good enough fit, IMO, because of the concerning aspects of Batman's extra-judicial violence.

I'm much more on-board with Batman as a vigilante than a facist. He doesn't dictate anything, doesn't have hoards of marching followers or even take public political stands. All Batman does is to locate someone he sees as a bad guy and take direct action. Being a movie character, he's always right. Being rich means that he has a lot of resources, but he does not have an organized cadre of followers. As a vigilante, he definitely becomes police, judge jury and executioner, but it's his own action. Personally, I prefer the whole legal process and all of its messy complications, but in the movie realm it's an emotional release to have a vigilante who always gets the right bad guy.

I agree, and you can add Nazi etc. as words that have been diluted in modern day discourse.

To be fair, I see all superhero fantasies as involving a sort of fascist impulse to directly suppress an opposition unilaterally. The word "fascist" is freighted enough that we might simply call him a vigilante, or a criminal. Batman refers to all superheroes as criminal (as recollected by Superman) in Miller's Dark Knight Returns and in Dawn of Justice.



There is something dangerously infantile about constantly daydreaming about punching problems into submission. This is Anakin Skywalker levels of stupid

At bottom, these are infantile power fantasies.

I caught up to this one over the weekend and, man, there’s just so little to recommend here. A handsome-enough looking movie, but it gives into every worst impulse the franchise has ever had (grimdark seriousness, juvenile edginess, aping the style of better films / filmmakers in such ways that it can’t help but draw negative comparisons to them). I appreciated the near-deconstructionist take on the material that Reeves kept circling around (Batman inspiring criminals rather than scaring them away), but it never really committed to bit nor explored it any further than its most surface level.

There was a great pregnant pause when Batman and Gordon were talking about a corrupt cop, which went:

Gordon: “You make it sound like he had it coming.”
Batman: “He was a cop. / Crossed a line.”

I honestly wish that they’d cut out that last sentence entirely because, my God, a Batman that suits up every night in the name of his murdered parents because he doesn’t trust the cops to be competent / incorruptible enough to effectively do their jobs is, if nothing else, one Hell of an interesting take.

Economically fascism is pro big corporations and against small and medium business. It's not for the people like many parties today try to present themselves. I think it's fair to call such nationalist parties fascist. National Rally in France; Alternative for Germany in Germany; Lega in Italy. Even UK Conservatives and USA Republicans are treading the line of fascism.

My take on Batman and other "super heroes" is that they are not anything like fascists, which carries the baggage of propaganda, speechifying, mass movements and law enforcement that's subverted to a purely political purpose. Batman does none of that. If anything, he's the 20th century urban version of the old western lawman, freed from the usual behaviors that we now expect from law enforcement. He goes out in search of the bad guy, mainly following his own impulses and generally ends the search with some form of violence, often involving individual deadly retribution. In the western, the good guy shoots the bad buy, in Batman, he disposes the gangster by whatever means are necessary, but there's no trial and no gang of fascist thugs, just a courageous guy with a mask and a bat car.

There is, at least, a debate to be had about it

https://www.salon.com/2013/11/30/sup...h_of_fascists/

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertai...ascist/281985/

https://www.menshealth.com/entertain...n-superheroes/

https://www.thealabamian.com/are-sup...aging-fascism/

https://aclashofheroes.wordpress.com...ing-that-word/

https://medium.com/@danseitz/superhe...m-2ef19bdecb3b

The debate, however, will prove fruitless as "Fascism" is a hopelessly vague term. As Orwell comments,

“The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies "something not desirable"...In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning.”

So, forget the word fascist.

Batman is a criminal. He owns as much in DKR and Dawn of Justice.

Batman is above the law. He follows his own code (e.g., not killing), but that code does NOT answer to the laws of Gotham or the United States. Batman does not submit to being arrested. Batman refuses all scrutiny by keeping his identity hidden. He does as he damned well pleases.

Batman uses violence to solve problems. He uses his power, because he has his power, which implies might-making-right, something people who merely wear hockey-pads lack. He throws around bat-a-rangs willy-nilly. He drives like an absolute maniac. He breaks bones. He dangles people off of rooftops. He beats answers out of people.