you don’t even know how good it feels to watch a batman movie and not feel like you’re getting “and in the role of bruce wayne today is [X actor].” to feel like you’re watching bruce wayne, not just some crowd-sourced idea of what a millionaire vigilante would probably act like but bruce wayne, bruce wayne with night terrors, bruce wayne hiding things from alfred, bruce wayne taking care of his employees, bruce wayne missing the obvious and internalizing it until it burns him up, bruce wayne contemplating his legacy and turning the image of his parents dead in the gutter over and over again in his mind, bruce wayne with triggers, bruce wayne in a decrepit wayne manor feeling the full weight of the architecture of gotham and the blood that went into building it, bruce wayne slipping out of the Bruce Wayne mask and wearing his despair everywhere he goes, bruce wayne coiled like a livewire and grieving for everyone he can’t save and comforting those left behind. it feels so good to see the character in every detail of the film, not just bits of comic lore thrown in here or there but like every part was built with a deep understanding of not only exactly who this character is but what he stands for and what he struggles with. the big picture of bruce wayne, the fight to rise above hopelessness while he feels it eating away at him every single day. and we get to see him embroiled in that mid-career, not growing into the batman we know but already there.
we are so lucky. :’)
I’ve said before (and I’ll say again) that the reason we haven’t seen this Batman on the big screen before – a Batman torn apart by grief, by protectiveness, by anxiety, by shame, by his drive to nurture, by his fierce love – is that so many of those qualities are feminized in media. Part of me is wondering if the reason for the poor critical reception of this movie (and yes, I know the editing’s shit, I understand all those arguments) is this: we are finally seeing the totality of Bruce, and that totality does NOT fit into the neat box of dudebro-targeted superhero franchising. It’s because the movie is so damn accurate to who he is, that so many people hate it. BUT THIS IS WHO HE IS, so suck a bag of dicks, misogynistic bastards.
