Costume Drama

The ‘best Bond’ bar-room debate is beyond threadbare. But what about the ‘best Bruce Wayne/Batman’ conundrum? It is a perennial matter of dispute, no doubt, among the geekerati, but it deserves more unpacking by the rest of us, for the Caped Crusader’s movie adaptations offer versions whose brushstrokes are vastly more varied in size, shade and texture than those between iterations of Ian Fleming’s creation.

Tim Burton, attempting to bring some psychological gravitas to the role (with Michael Keaton donning the mask), went for an introverted recluse with a little too much of the Norman Bates about him for viewer comfort. Joel Schumacher’s version, played by Val Kilmer then George Clooney, steered back somewhat to the original comic-book’s debonair heartthrob — with eye-wateringly hammy results.

Zack Snyder’s sporadically Caped Crusader (Ben Affleck) was older — grizzled, disillusioned, with an unseemly whimsy of messiah complex — while the franchise beginning in 2022 drops the playboy guise altogether (for now, at least) and gives us a coming-of-age, socially withdrawn Wayne who won’t fear getting facial hair caught in his bat mask any time soon.

But the most arresting depiction of the only household-name superhero without an actual superpower* — who first appeared in print courtesy of the imaginations of DC Comics artist Bob Kane and writer Bill Finger in 1939 — is, by a very sinuous country mile, that executed by Christian Bale in Christopher Nolan’s trilogy, which ran from 2005 to 2012.

Other celluloid treatments turn comic books into movies. Nolan’s artful blend of realism and fantasy turns a jumble sale of interpretations into a coherent epic in which the audience is finally shown much of what hitherto we’ve merely been told. It starts with the origin story, Batman Begins, in which we see Wayne on a Tibetan mountainside trying to fuse Ra’s al Ghul’s mid-combat gnomic pontifications with his personal trauma between bouts of gruesome ninjutsu/aikido/iaido-fusion shit-kicking.

Then, as the rest unfolds, we feel, vicariously, the cruel dichotomy at the heart of the story. Nearly all adaptations depict a playboy billionaire’s shallow life of fecklessness and revelry being a front for a borderline kamikaze quest for justice, reform and moral vindication: here, the ignominy of trashing his family’s precious reputation and legacy in pursuit of an industrial-strength version of that same legacy is laid bare.

Grief and guilt making way for grit and guts? Straight from the Batman adaptation kickstart programme. Here, the emotional odyssey goes through pastures of hope, despair, resentment, depression, loneliness and, finally — in the now-iconic climb scene, a denouement brought to follicle-straightening life by Hans Zimmer’s Stravinskian score — rebirth, re-empowerment and redemption.

The fact that writers find room for humour among all this without its seeming shoehorned in is nothing short of miraculous (perhaps the strongest example being the alibi Alfred comes up with so that Bruce can abscond to Hong Kong on a kidnapping mission in The Dark Knight, as denoted by a newspaper headline: “Love Boat: Billionaire Absconds With Entire Russian Ballet”).

It helps that Nolan’s trilogy was made in the 21st century. The comic book universe is a bubbling cauldron of religious trauma, repressed anger, animalistic urges, dissociative identity disorder, and other psychological batshittery — so these stories are more relevant now, in an age in which we take such issues more seriously. So seriously, in fact, that while researching this article, I found academic treatises on Batman, including a University of Arizona paper in which a clinical psychologist calls him a “poster boy for post-traumatic growth” for channelling his “survivor’s guilt” into socially constructive behaviour**. Psychobabble? Possibly, but if any adaptation merits such weighty academic scrutiny, it’s Nolan’s.

His realignment of the myth with the zeitgeist is nothing short of masterful. Add to that the deftness and panache with which Bale carries off Wayne’s raffish persona — imagine the Gatsby-esque life had he and his parents never left that theatre early — and it’s hard to think of a fictional rake more deserving of our admiration.

* Some might include Tony Stark, but anyone who can engineer an exosuit with hydraulics, pneumatics, electric motors and a fusion reactor from a dismantled Ford Cortina isn’t doing so without some kind of paranormal intervention.

** ‘How far we’ve come!’ I thought, recalling watching Saturday morning re-runs of the late-sixties Batman T.V. series with a childhood friend, and his grandfather walking in and exclaiming, “Who are these bloody lunatics?!”