How Christopher Nolan Altered How We See Batman…For The Worse

I’m not exactly silent on my issues with Christopher Nolan’s “Dark Knight Trilogy”, an attempt to create a more grounded Batman. Points for some of the clever ways he did so, and two of the three movies are loved by fans, including Batman fans. I just happen to not be one of them. Batman Begins has the least amount of notes from me, The Dark Knight gets a lot more, and the more I hear about The Dark Knight Rises the less incentive I have to ever see it.

I’m also not silent on the current state of Batman adaptations as well as the comics themselves. Batman has gotten too dark, too violent, and that’s on top of a few other “too”s I could mention. Grimdark “I don’t work with others despite being on two or three teams at the same time” broody boy Batman gets on my nerves. Far too often I feel like I’m alone in both areas, especially given the reactions to Absolute Batman and the Matt Reeves continuity of The Batman and The Penguin, two versions I’ve seen just enough of to know I don’t want see any more. That’s not a comment on the quality. Longtime readers know that quality is only one part of any one person’s enjoyment or lack of same of any given story, franchise, or genre. They don’t feel like Batman too me any more than the Nolan movies do. But is Nolan responsible for the current state of Batman in media?

Video essayer Anthony Gramuglia seems to think so, but I don’t think the problems start there. While we agree on many points, we also disagree. The video is about an hour, and reading my responses probably less so, but it is a topic worth exploring.

Someone else hates the Tumbler “Battank”? Yay! Except the Burton Batmobile was just a sleeker tank with big guns. I call it a racing tank. Schumacher’s was just ugly, but more on the Batgear in a moment. I want to start when Anthony ended…on Batman himself.

Batman’s no-kill rule is something even the Absolute Batman comics get right. You know, the one where Batman has a gun that fires little Batarangs (allegedly, I’ll come back to that) and chops guys’ arms off with his chest axe that’s supposedly a bat shape. And yet despite being the Darkseid-style universe he does not kill. I don’t care if Burton didn’t establish a no killing rule. He’s doing Batman and as Anthony himself goes over, Batman has kept from killing in most other continuities because that’s part of Batman’s core, a belief in the sanctity of human life, that has been with him almost from the start. Almost, but early Batman stories took inspiration from the pulp heroes and it was when National Comics realized how much kids liked this character that he became less willing to end a life. Establishing this in Batman Begins doesn’t stop Bruce from letting Ra’s die. “I won’t kill you, but I don’t have to save you.” Bull! You’re Batman. You do have to save him! That’s what Batman does! He saves people. It’s just some people he can save the life of, but not their soul…despite in the comics doing this with Clayface until his recent death, and the Riddler when he opted to go straight, plus his relationship with Catwoman that would have gone to marriage if not for a dumbass writer Bane’s manipulations. That’s one of Zack Snyder’s issues. He didn’t just not establish the rule, he outright rejects that Batman would have one because he’s a cynical twat.

As for Batman’s gear: the set-up he used to stop the Joker was a one-time thing, shutting it down and erasing all the software (or rather letting Lucius do so) to keep from being tempted to use something intended for one moment of desperation. The movie, through Lucius, even calls him out on it. We both agree that Batman shouldn’t be using a tank. It lacks in stealth and Batman is supposed to be stealthy, not walking down a hallway while half of the crazy bunch fires all the bullets in Gotham at him.

Batman is a sore loser.

What Anthony fails to mention is that Nolan is also responsible for ruining the Batarang, Batman’s signature weapon for decades. Nolan replaced them with bat shaped throwing “stars”, which everyone started calling batarangs and falsely so. Even Gaijin Goombah, in his examination of whether or not Batman is a ninja, made that mistake and it wasn’t that far off from the error that research should have shown him otherwise. They’re boomerangs, used to stun without long-term injury. The advantage is that how they curve makes them hard to predict and thus hard to avoid or hit. It’s an Australian weapon he turned into the shape of a bat because Bruce Wayne understands branding. He even used them to secure his swinging line before Burton broke out the grapple gun that’s become part of his arsenal ever since.

Another thing we agree on is the Bat-Family. We don’t see enough of them, and when we do they haven’t been right since the 1960s, at least in live-action. Writers either try to keep them out of it, or keep Batman separate from the others, and comics are also guilty of this. There’s a mistaken belief that Batman should be alone, and yet somehow he keeps drifting to incarnations of the Justice League, while his family tend to come back to him and form a unit. I like seeing Bruce happy now and then. The idea that he’s so obsessed with his “war on crime” that he pushes others away is ludicrous. It was one part of Batman Beyond I didn’t like, even though it was necessary to make the series happen. Return Of The Joker does come full circle with Tim and Barbara, making reconciliations, but we still never learn what happened to Nightwing and I’m not counting that DC non-tie-in comic as my answer. It’s not in the DCAU and I don’t like it to begin with. I would like to see a better Robin and Batgirl than Schumacher gave us. I’m hoping that in the Gunniverse we do finally get to see the family in action.

(I’m also hoping for the blue and grey costume, which we’ve only seen on Adam West and various cartoons, but I’m not playing odds on that one. Black and grey, symbolic of the darker Batman, seems to be the norm everywhere else, and all black in live-action outside of the 1940s serials. The Nolan costume has a turning head for the first time in live-action and that’s all it has going for it.)

I also reject Nolan’s Joker. Yes, Heath Ledger put on a good show, but it’s not speaking ill of the dead when the problem isn’t the actor, it’s the writer. The idea that the Joker is some putz in makeup rather than a loon in chemical-bleached skin, or that he’s trying to “send a message”, something that can also be blamed on The Killing Joke as that’s what Joker was trying to do about “one bad day”, is not the Joker. He’s a great villain, but he’s no more the Joker than Arthur Fleck. Frankly, grounding in reality ruins most of Batman’s regular villains outside of the mobsters. I hate what Matt Reeves did to the Riddler, my favorite Batman villain, because he isn’t some nutcase out to “expose the truth”, he’s a trivia and game enthusiast seeking a “real challenge” and finds it in matching wits with Batman and the other Gotham guardians. That’s what makes him fun.

Gunn seems more willing to embrace the more far-out aspects of the superhero universe, or at least is claiming to. It’s why he’s doing some stories in animation, though trying to put the animated and live-action worlds together is probably going to be his biggest challenge since you can get away with more in animation due to its unreality compared to live-action resembling our world so much even if you do a Kung-Pow or Police Squad style comedy. Seeing some of Batman’s best villains relegated to supporting cast, like Scarecrow, is a mistake.

Batman weaponizes cute kids.

This leads into the last problem that Anthony got close to but never quite got past the line: every story, not just every Joker story, needs to be larger than life now, whether it’s a movie or a comic. The only Batman series with Batman is Batwheels, the show about Batman’s car secretly coming to life with his other vehicles to help fight crime. By nature, they can tell smaller stories instead of “the city is doomed” stories that every Batman movie can only be about because even in comics right now they can’t write a story that isn’t for all the stakes, be it the city or the unity of the Bat-Family, or the future of Batman, or whatever else they come up with. They also get, within the limits of being a show for preschoolers, a better handle on the villains they use and their motivations than any live-action production for adult (because modern writers hate kids) in years. It gets boring after a while and it does feel like Batman and company only show up with everything is threatened, while some of my favorite stories have been one-issue smaller adventures like saving homeless people or exploring a one story villain with one story worth of motivations. Smaller stories help us better connect to the characters so when the big ones hit they carry more weight and interest. “Oh, Gotham is dealing with a nuke again. Big deal.”

Nobody is saying you can’t enjoy the Nolan movies, but these are my problems with them, though some of them can be traced back to the comics. Frank Miller (in The Dark Knight Returns, where that nickname comes from, was one of Zack Snyder’s influences in Batman V. Superman) and Alan Moore (writer of The Killing Joke) were worse influences, as their stories are the ones that led to Nolan, Snyder, and Reeve’s takes on Batman. In the 1970s, as the Bronze Age hit, Batman went serious but not as dark as those books and much like Watchmen were intended to be the exception, Instead it became the rule, and we shouldn’t ignore the unintended consequence of those comics on modern Batman or even other superheroes. It was the Nolan movies that convinced Warner Brothers making the Snyderverse was a good idea, but it wasn’t his influence in his deconstruction and devastation of the DC Universe. I don’t know that we’d agree on a lot of things, but at least we agree the Nolan movies are not as awesome as everyone else seems to think they are.