The Batman: A Dark Knight For Gen Z's Broken World

Every generation gets its own Batman and now with ''The Batman'' the zoomers have theirs, not counting the Ben Affleck abortion. The Generation X Batman started out as Tim Burton's Gothic fairy tale and as the franchise progressed, descended into self-parody and drowned in its own irony, as was the Gen X way. The post-9/11 world gifted the more po-faced millennials with Christopher Nolan's masterful but stern and self-important Dark Knight trilogy which many would argue is the greatest superhero series ever made.

Matt Reeves of the Planet of the Apes reboot fame directs The Batman with Robert Pattinson donning the cowl while Paul Dano plays The Riddler and Colin Farrell is unrecognizable as the Penguin. Reeves handles his diversity quotas with some tact aside from one egregious clunker which we shall come to shortly, but all in all The Batman was not as offensively ''woke'' as I expected it to be and was no more diverse than Nolan's series. Geoffrey Wright is good enough as commissioner Gordon, but the other diversity box-tick, Zoe Kravitz, is boring, bland and not in the least bit sexy.

Within a few minutes of The Batman opening I knew that when I checked the Wikipedia entry for the movie I'd find a sizable list of gritty 70's movies from which Reeves took inspiration. This is the Gotham of grime and steam coming out of vents, of gloomy alleys we can easily imagine reek of dead dogs and urine which we saw in 2019's Joker. Nolan's Gotham was crisp and clean, steel skyscrapers, glass and neon lights inspired by Michael Mann's Heat. Reeve's Gotham reminded me of Gene Hackman in The French Connection stamping his feet to keep warm while garbage blew down the street.

Furthermore, this incarnation of Batman is definitively not the grandiose and theatrical hero of Nolan, this Bats is back to his roots by setting him as a detective in a noirish horror that has more in-common with Se7en or even Saw than a typical superhero caper.

Just to emphasize how ''dark'' The Batman is once again, imagine Taxi Driver, Se7en, The French Connection and Goodfellas being thrown into a blender together. The resultant product would pretty much be The Batman.

Pattinson severely lacks the physical presence of Christian Bale but it made sense within the wider plot and arc which is being set-out for this Generation Z incarnation of the character. Pattinson's Batman exists in a broken world, a metropolis without soul or spirit in which the murderous and dishonest prevail over the innocent, where lies dominate truth despite Batman working constantly for two years to try and stem the tide of filth and decay.

The rather intricate plot revolves around Batman following clues and leads left by The Riddler at the scene of each of his murders. The murdered are not innocents either, nobody is, but by killing the powerful and corrupt Riddler brings in to question Batman's own legitimacy, after all, isn't the only difference the degrees of violence deployed?

As Batman puts the pieces of the puzzle together it becomes clear that the true centre of this mystery is Batman himself, hinted at early on with the rat in a maze scene. The Riddler cryptically alludes to a rat with wings, but the question is who is it? The Penguin's Al Capone style gangster, Falcone, another gangster, or Batman himself?

Still more unnerving for fans of Batman lore is that Bruce Wayne's father and inspiration is revealed to have been involved with the crime syndicates responsible for the current misery of Gotham, and his mother was rumored to be insane.

Batman and Riddler are creations of this fallen world, they were ''born in it, molded by it'' and now as young men they have to confront it. The Batman seeks vengeance and justice, the Riddler to torture and kill those responsible. 2019's Joker traveled a similar path and both, in my opinion, raise the question of what the liberal mainstream is to do with all these disillusioned young white men who've had their identities deconstructed and all meaning removed from their lives.

The Riddler in particular is the very embodiment of liberal anxiety, a super-intelligent but wrathful young white man who live-streams himself torturing and killing those he deems responsible for the shattering of his world. This is the stuff of a thousand publications and think-pieces in the liberal mainstream. Furthermore, it turns out that live-streaming the murders of the powerful and corrupt is highly popular and Riddler has ''radicalized'' a small army of recruits eager to do his bidding.

Unfortunately Matt Reeves isn't our guy. In one scene Catwoman describes the scummy ruling class of Gotham as ''white privileged assholes'' a line I found so jarring that I had to pause for a few moments and considered turning the movie off. In that moment you're no longer watching a work of fiction but politicized content. Even within the context of the main narrative it makes no sense because the central character, Batman himself, is a rich white man who's also the biggest victim of the evil, and it is corruption and evil, not Marxist power dynamics.

The random introduction of anti-white politics into the narrative is why The Batman reflects the tragic and confused age of the Zoomer generation as well as the liberal schizophrenia which brought it about. On the one hand the narrative wants us to sympathize with these angry and disillusioned young white men who've grown up in a broken world which hates them, at the same time we're expected to accept seriously one of the central characters peddling critical race theory. Which is it? Bruce Wayne is in many regards the epitome of white privilege, he cannot simultaneously be both the victim and the oppressor.

The problem with injecting critical race theory talking points into the script is that it undermines the character arcs which have so far been created. How is the audience supposed to view the actions of the Riddler if he is disallowed from claiming that society is against him or that he is a creation of that society, that, in essence, the Riddler is a nemesis long in the making? We know the answer, it's to pathologize him, just as modern liberalism does to all of the inconvenient collateral damage it leaves in its wake. Suddenly the arguments that we are creations of our societies get shelved when its inconvenient and the angry young man raging against modernity and the life that's been handed to him is written off as a loser and lunatic.

In theory The Batman is directed toward a specific demographic, namely, young men. The injection of critical race theory politics into the narrative puts, as the Nirvana soundtrack explains to us ''Something in the way''.

I began this essay by playing around with Generational Theory, if the Gen X Batman was whimsy and fairy tale descending into irony and parody, the Millennials had humorlessness and a rigidity in Nolan's sombre Dark Knight trilogy. What then does The Batman reveal about Generation Z?

Thematically The Batman looks as if it came out of the 1970's, Batman/Bruce Wayne is based on Kurt Cobain while the Penguin draws from Al Capone and often De Niro in gangster mode. The Riddler is an amalgamation of various serial killers and his acts of violence evoke David Finch's Seven and the Zodiac killer. Batman's car is more Ford Mustang than a usual bat-mobile. In Scorsese's Taxi Driver Travis Bickle's famous line of a real rain coming to wash away all the filth off the streets is made real in the climax of The Batman by Riddler bombing breakwaters which results in the city being flooded, interestingly the focus is on a political conference featuring a black woman giving a speech.

As if to complement this retro feel and look even the technology and Batman's gadgets have been dialed back substantially than in previous outings, though facial recognition technology makes an appearance. The question, then, is what is there about this world which is quintessentially of the present moment, of Generation Z?

And the answer is...not much. Their present moment is expressed through memes, through the cherry-picked cultural forms of previous eras which leave their own barren and lacking authenticity. Whether intended or not, this nowhere-land, a ''city without a soul'' is replicated in Matt Reeves' bleak version of Gotham.

The Batman and Riddler have an affinity and kinship by virtue of existing in their fallen world and wanting vengeance, and this is something which separates the Zoomer Batman from other incarnations of the character: the sheer visceral rage and seething resentment on display, that, at least, is all theirs...