With the last “full-stop” Batman movie coming out in 2012, it seems only correct that, after a decade, Warner Bros. and DC should decide to take the plunge on rebooting it yet again. Except that it’s not a reboot, per se… at least not in the same way that Christopher Nolan’s previous trilogy was as a means to cleanse the franchise of what Joel Schumacher (RIP) did to it in the mid-90s. No, instead, Matt Reeves’ The Batman is meant to lend some “sign o’ the times,” decade-appropriate grit to a new generation of Batman films (though not quite the same level of grit that Todd Phillips provided with Joker).
Ironically, this “next generation” Batman is very obviously a product of one that came before him: Gen X. Reeves’ take on a Batman for an evermore soulless, hopeless world therefore borrows inspiration from the Gen X icon, Kurt Cobain (complete with Robert Pattinson’s hairstyle and Pisces-esque moods)—thus, such an emphasis on playing Nevermind’s “Something in the Way” in the film (more than once, to boot). Co-written by Peter Craig (a.k.a. Sally Field’s son), a fellow Gen Xer, the angst-ridden nature of Pattinson’s Bruce Wayne/Batman is a notable product of a generation that remains consistently short-changed (most markedly for its saturating pop cultural contributions in the present). And one that has seen its fair share of disappointments and false bills of goods sold well before millennials and “post-millennials” (read: Gen Z) declared themselves as “the most put upon.”
Though some have argued that it was to Gen X’s advantage not to have been disenchanted by existence when the internet was fully running the world (by way of running public perception), maybe it would have been to said generation’s benefit to have access to a less concentrated manipulation of reality via the dawn of such 90s phenomena as “reality TV” and twenty-four-hour news networks. But then, their jadedness wouldn’t have been so uniquely pure, so obviously unmanufactured (well, until Gap got its hands on the flannel trend and Cobain’s entire essence was commodified). The way one can see it is now, all performative and studied from other pop culture sources, especially 90s ones.
That performativeness is just as overt in Pattinson, whose voiceover narrations of “captain’s logs” are meant to imbue The Batman with a certain noirish quality, yet end up solidifying Pattinson as the most “emo” Batman of all as he reads from these scrawled, lamenting “little musings” in his journals (if he were a girl, of course, they would be further demeaned as “diaries”). He is, in effect, a millennial-styled Batman hopelessly traceable to a Gen X sensibility. Not just in the smeared eye makeup and long hair (à la 00s “indie” gods My Chemical Romance), but in his very inability to form words eloquently beyond the page. Particularly when it comes to interactions with Selina Kyle (Zoë Kravitz), the requisite “smokin’ hot” Catwoman (though no one can hold a candle to Michelle Pfeiffer’s campy interpretation of the role), who also furnishes something like an alternate reality version of Pattinson’s relationship with FKA Twigs.
This time around, she happens to be a more “approachable” form of damaged goods. Less “hostile,” and more “vulnerable” (undercuttingly, for the purposes of making a Black Catwoman “palatable” to the type of die-hard Batman dweebos/incels in the audience that Paul Dano’s Riddler ends up trolling). Sure, she’s “tough” and often states, “I can take care of myself,” but that doesn’t seem to be the case when Batman comes to her rescue at various moments throughout the film. Even as she herself is trying to come to the aid of her friend and co-worker, Annika Koslov (Hana Hrzic), Selina’s attempt to help her by leaving her alone in the apartment to go retrieve her passport from the now-dead mayor’s safe only causes Annika to get kidnapped in Selina’s absence.
When Batman follows her to Mayor Don Mitchell’s (Rupert Penry-Jones) house, now nothing more than a crime scene, he corners Catwoman to insist upon accompanying her back to her apartment to talk to Annika. Alas, Annika is gone and Selina’s dwelling is turned upside down save for the cats still milling around. When Batman comments on how many cats she has, she replies with knowing seduction, “I have a thing for strays.” One supposes it’s better than her making some kind of comment on loving pussy (for there is a tinge of the lesbian element between her and Annika that gets reined in once she disappears and Batman becomes the lead romantic prospect).
As the two get in bed together, metaphorically speaking, to take down the underworld syndicate responsible for Annika’s disappearance (a plotline that, in many ways, reminds one of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang), the thread that begins to unravel the entire sordid cloth that is Gotham shocks even “the Bat and the Cat.” Along with Detective James Gordon (Jeffrey Wright, fresh from killin’ it in The French Dispatch), Batman’s sole ally in the corrupt, rotten-to-the-core GCPD (a regular Serpico kind of police department). For he, too, learns about Gotham’s DA, Gil Colson (Peter Sarsgaard), being part of the vast conspiracy to keep the drugs (called simply “drops”) flowing through Gotham despite the supposed “largest narcotics bust” in the city’s history. One that specifically targeted Salvatore Maroni’s operation, while, as we later see, somehow miraculously sparing Penguin’s (Colin Farrell, in the kind of prosthetic look Jared Leto was going for in House of Gucci). Except it ain’t really Penguin’s, now is it? No, he’s just the front for another, far more powerful and dangerous man.
In point of fact, the way drugs and their crime associations are portrayed in The Batman sustain a loyal allegiance to how they would be in the 70s and 80s, at the height of the “War on Drugs.” Further, Gen X references to a childhood spent in the 70s are manifest in Reeves alluding to Watergate scandal fixtures John N. Mitchell and Charles Colson, whose last names are repurposed for the mayor and the DA of Gotham. Whereas a more modern view of drug use might look something like Euphoria, The Batman opts to maintain a certain “1970s in NYC” vibe when it comes to drug-related crime depiction. Granted, The Iceberg Lounge is something more out of the late 90s/early 00s as we see an epic scene of Wayne in his Batman getup entering the space amid lighting that only intensifies his indelible silhouette.
Although it’s “The Iceberg Lounge” to those not in the know, as Selina informs Batman, The 44 Below is “the real club,”—and one that feels like it would be that nightclub secretly tucked away in some Financial District watering hole. It’s there that Selina uses Batman’s “recording contact lenses” to show him what she’s seeing and hearing as Colson confesses (while under the influence of drops) to all the city’s bigwigs being in on the proverbial scheme. Something that, again, smacks of Watergate—an early imprinting Gen X moment for distrust in institutions. Even ones as theoretically “simple” as the subway system, which provides the backdrop for Batman’s first heroic act in the movie, well-timed to mirror the recent rash of crime on NY’s subways in the wake of Eric Adams (who Jeffrey Wright claims to have based his performance on) trying to crack down on vagrancy.
As Batman follows an Asian man being targeted by a group of black-and-white face-painted men on Halloween, he emerges from the shadows (in a manner reminiscent of Michael Keaton in 1989’s Batman). At first, the impression he makes evokes mockery rather than fear—until he lays the smackdown. “Who are you?” one of the horrified “hoodlums” consequently asks Batman. “Vengeance,” he replies, in his best imitation of Christian Bale’s parody-able “Batman voice.” Later on, when Riddler declares that’s who (and what) he is, Batman realizes his motivation for vigilante justice has prompted him to teeter way too closely to being on the same side of the coin as his nemesis. Like Bill Clinton ultimately being, in select respects, as diabolical as his mid-90s adversary, Newt Gingrich.
By the time that whole battle (that led to two government shutdowns) was raging, Kurt Cobain had already punched his own ticket. Out of this life and out of being a Gen X “symbol.” Or, at least, he no longer had to be conscious of that continued responsibility… one that has transmuted with a new century into something as mainstream as a Batman movie.
In a 2019 article for The National Post by Andrew Potter, Cobain’s enduring appeal to subsequent generations that would get their glimpse of him as part of band tees sold at H&M is explained as follows: “Kurt Cobain has been called the last ‘authentic’ musician, in the sense that he was the last one of any influence for whom authenticity mattered. The authenticity question died out right around the heyday of that gang of trust fund hipsters, The Strokes, who were (not incidentally) probably the last band that Generation X could lay claim to as theirs. But that quest for authenticity and the relentless fear of selling out came at a steep price…”
It comes at a steep price for Batman, too. For his decision to “not sell out” by taking the easy route and leaving a flooded Gotham City behind in favor of riding off into the sunset (or, rather, into the darkness) with Catwoman means he’s made his choice: Gotham is the only “person” he can commit himself to (apart from Alfred). There’s no room in his life for such quaint human notions as “happiness” or “love.” Gotham is all.
As for the dichotomy of his wealth when pitted against his unquenchable desire to do good for “the less fortunate,” it seems to be an even greater allegory, in this case, for millennial hipsters (a.k.a. trust fund babies who moved to New York) grafting what they want from a particular “scene” and “laying claim” to it. Yet, as Potter also saliently remarks, “The members of a generation define themselves by what and who they claim as authentically their own, as part of their scene.” Millennials and (especially) Gen Z, can’t authentically lay claim to much of anything—ergo this increased penchant for retromania, for further commodifying someone like Cobain.
Conversely, one of the most standout qualities of Gen X was how, as Potter phrases it, “a big part of what defines a generation are the battles it chooses to fight. For the boomers, it was one long-running countercultural campaign against The System, a.k.a. The Man or The Patriarchy, while the millennials have decided to mine the deepest and darkest recesses of identity politics. Generation X was uniquely preoccupied with the problem of authenticity and the fear of being caught between the frying pan of co-optation and the fire of selling out.”
In the end, their determination to remain authentic at a time when corporate globalization was finally permitted to go “whole hog” (what with the fall of the Berlin Wall and, with it, the communistic ideologies that kept McDonald’s out of places like the Czech Republic) turned out to be to no avail. Because, for the first time in modern history, commodification of a generation’s “interests” were deeply rooted in every facet of capitalistic culture. Which Batman, through Bruce Wayne, is an emblem of.
His congenital wealth, in Riddler’s—and many others’—eyes is what makes him nothing more than another poseur, a faux grunge-goth with the luxury to “experiment” and “dabble” in such things as “darkness” and “angst” without really understanding it. This being spelled out to Batman by the Riddler in Arkham when he breaks down the difference between his authentic version of being an orphan versus Batman’s silver-spooned, ivory tower version. The meta irony of it all being that “authenticity”—especially of the variety modeled after a Gen X hero—can’t ever be real again. To put it plainly: “Where did the scene go? It went the way of all things, as everything that was once an organic whole becomes reworked as irony and pastiche. And this is how we come to divide ourselves into generations.”
Yet what made Gen X the most anomalous generation of all was that it not only bridged the gap between what would become the commonplace millennial practice of “having it worse” (a.k.a. not acquiring more wealth) than your parents, but that it was arguably the last generation to truly have its own stand-apart identity. One that has, yet again, been co-opted for the sake of creating a millennial-ready Batman.
