At the end of Matt Reeves’ The Batman (2022), our “hero” says, “Our scars can destroy us even after the physical wounds have healed. But if we survive them, they can transform us. They can give us the power to endure and the strength to fight.” Such a summation reflects the psychological journey Batman has undergone in the preceding three hours. It would be wrong to conceive of this iteration of Batman in heroic terms as he is more of a wounded abuser than has ever been depicted in any other cinematic adaptation (including Nolan’s).
The film opens in Alfred Hitchcock fashion, with the audience viewing Gotham through the Batman’s binoculars. In a style reminiscent of Rear Window, we see a scene play out in an apartment that at first seems to be real violence but then turns out to be a pretend stabbing between a boy and his mayoral father. However, in keeping with the doubling themes of the movie, the scene also serves to foreshadow the real violence that is to come. The binoculars through which we see the early events of the movie situate us in Batman’s point of view and establish an ocular imagery that will recur throughout the narrative. Like the circle of those binoculars or the recording contact lens through which Batman sees the corruption of Gotham, our protagonist perceives life as a cycle of violence and vengeance, which he is imprisoned by and only knows to exorcise by perpetuating violence and vengeance on others. Like many trauma victims, he retraces the places of his past hurt. Life is rinse and repeat and the past is a spinning film reel, replaying the same frame over and over.
Throughout Reeves’ work, the film noir elements elevate the mystery nature of the movie, which accentuates the notion of suffering as an enigma. There is the voice over narration, the moral ambiguity, the red herring, the femme fatale (Catwoman; portrayed powerfully by Zoe Kravitz), and the labyrinthine plot. Above all, it rains and the rain is evidenced in Bruce’s running eyeshadow. Paradoxically, rain is both judgment and cleansing on Gotham for its lies, which will parallel the way the Wayne renewal fund is also a source of corruption. Walking in the drizzled streets, Batman records the past nights as a way of both preserving and purging them. Such is the contradictory nature of Year Two Batman that he can’t let go of the past but he also wants it to be expunged.
His desire to rewrite the past would extend beyond just the murder of his parents and to even his parents’ philanthropy. “What of your parents’ legacy?” Alfred asks Batman at the beginning. An obsessed, insomniac Caped Crusader, crouching over images of the previous night’s crime, answers, “This is my parents’ legacy.”
Bruce is misguided though, informed by his own false narrative that pain is healed through punishment, whether that is the punishment he is inflicting on others or the punishment he is unwittingly inflicting on himself. As the Nirvana needle drop of his nocturnal investigation indicates, “Something in the Way” and for Batman that something is himself. The imagery of doubling throughout the film develops the idea of false lives. While Batman might valorize his declaration of, “I am vengeance” as a noble way of giving Gotham’s criminals their comeuppance, the audience sees he is recapitulating violence for his own self-soothing. Of course, Batman is not the only double as Catwoman, the false narratives of the Waynes, Arkhams, and Mitchells, gangsters moonlighting as cops, binoculars, and even contact lens serve to further the doppelganger imagery. Most prominent among the doubles is the film’s antagonist, the Riddler himself (who, like his opposite, sees the world through double vision–that of his glasses). The Riddler (Paul Dano) sends Batman arcane clues and a maze that he must escape, a metaphor for the trauma he must navigate. Nowhere is this clearer than a late scene in the film where Batman is searching the Riddler’s apartment and finds a bat locked in a cage.
Trauma confines us. Trauma captures us. However, trauma also confuses us. I can recall during my worst bouts of depression that I felt like I was ensnared in a ball of yarn that could not be untangled. Similarly, I remember pacing the halls of the hospital, feeling that the answer to my anxiety-inducing obsessions was some puzzle that I had to piece together with my own tortured mind. Just as violence and vengeance is a cycle, trauma is one too. Batman implies as much when speaking to Alfred about one of the first clues from his nemesis. “Life is not a partial riddle,” he says. For Batman, life is trauma and that trauma is a riddle.
Just after my oldest daughter was diagnosed with a terminal illness called Krabbe, I remember trying to make meaning from it. If I just knew the right theology, if I just had more faith, if I just prayed more, then I would be able to unlock the mystery behind my daughter’s illness. While my cycle was not a cycle of vengeance on others, it was a cycle of self-vengeance and often in the form of religiosity. But, like Alfred not knowing definitively who killed the Waynes (though he suspects Carmine Falcone), many of life’s riddles, life’s traumas go unsolved.
In the movie’s third act, the Riddler foments a group of incels through social media that contains a clear subtext of the conspiracy-driven Qanon-led quarters of the dark web of late 2020. And, in an assault on Gotham Square Garden, which represents a rare institution of democracy for the city, there is an eerie parallel to the January 6th insurrection, as shotgun wielding insurgents inflict terror and trigger the Riddler’s bombs on the surrounding levees. The Biblical flood that ensues leaves the city a literal and figurative sewer.
Similar to how the earlier rain is both judgment and cleansing, the flood contains dual meanings: it is both punishment and salvation. After Batman topples one of The Riddler’s fanatics, he hears the brainwashed man say, “I am vengeance.” Confronted with his own complicity in the Riddler’s violence, Batman cuts a sparking wire in a scene that evokes both birthing and sacrificial imagery. Falling into the water below, he re-emerges reborn and repentant, the polluting waters having become his baptism. Wading towards the light, Batman, for the first time in the film, is seeking not to exercise retribution on his foes but to attempt a rescue of innocents. Extending a hand into a circle of victims, it is telling that his aid goes first not to the newly elected mayor but to the grieving boy of the recently murdered incumbent. Leading the boy out to safety and out of the circle, Batman is healing the inner child.
We ourselves must be mended before we can heal our institutions.
Matt Reeves’ cinematic work extends beyond just an exploration of trauma and the perpetuation of violence. To reduce the experience to that interpretation would be to limit what the director has accomplished. The Batman is a dense, cerebral film noir that processes our post-pandemic cultural anxiety by exploring themes of fear as a tool, political and police corruption, concealing and unmasking, doppelgangers, orphans, privilege, and tainted legacies. Like the Batman’s own night beacon, the movie signals both a warning of abusing power and a call to rebuild faith in our institutions. It is quite the praise to say that Matt Reeves’ work is not only the best Batman film to date but an artistic accomplishment as a piece of cinema separate from any reference to the source material.
More importantly than any of that I would argue is that the film gives voice to those who have suffered through the self-containing nature of trauma and the torture of having to rehearse and relive it. Batman’s rebirth and escape from the cycle came from exposure–when he turned and faced his own shadow in the face of one of the Riddler’s followers.
May we also find healing by stepping out of our own shadow and into the light.
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