La Ron S. Readus
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How The Batman Spreads Copaganda (VIDEO SCRIPT)
🕑 Added 2022-05-04 20:01:00 +0000 UTCReaders, I wanna make it absolutely clear that I LOVED The Batman
While I admit that I had no expectations going into it up until the first full trailer was released, The Batman was the Worlds Greatest Detective story I wanted to see from the character on screen since The Dark Knight thought that all that was needed was Bruce taking the ballistics from a single bullet.
/That’s not an exaggeration, either. All while watching the movie, I picked up hints of Seven, Chinatown and Zodiac as the main inspirations for the mystery that Batman and Jim Gordon had to solve./
And the way that they teased who the villain of the next movie could possibly be. Oh...my God.
Now as a ride or die Batman fan from pretty much the cradle, I have to acknowledge that I am DEFINITELY aware of a lot of the current criticisms people are making about the character
The most common one -- and the one that lots of people like to joke about -- is that Batman likes to beat the brakes off of someone before interrogating them
/As shown in his intro scene where he proceeds to beat the brakes off of the gang member that everyone on the internet thought was Nostalgia Critic/
Like, on one hand I was GLAD it wasn’t Doug because that meant he got paid for the gig. On the OTHER hand, I was disappointed for all the reasons you expect me to be disappointed.
And while I personally think that the film did a very good job addressing the second criticism lots of people recently have about Batman
/That being Bruce as a billionaire being capable of making an impact on crime and the cause of it with his wealth and influence way more than what he contributes as a masked vigilante.../
The main thing I wanted to see addressed as I’ve grown up as both a black man and as a Batman fan, is how The Batman handles the issue of law enforcement and its corruption as it’s implied in the go-to comics versus how its seen in reality. Especially considering how grounded in reality this first installment of the Matt-Verse Batman is.
And I asked this because as I’ve lived through and witnessed so many instances of racial and classist discrimination and brutality from the police -- especially for the last 10 years -- and have educated myself on the purpose the police ACTUALLY serve versus the one we initially think they serve thanks to media and bias...
Looking back at a lot of films and whatnot that highlight cops and american police like this, just told me that a lot of what we witnessed was basically propaganda to promote the privation of police, and Batman films for the past 20 years have been no different.
That’s why for today’s lesson, I wanna EXPLAIN what that purpose the police serve in real life is, how what’s been presented to us in media has impacted a lot of individuals perspectives of law enforcement, and the role that Batman films -- yes, even 2022’s The Batman -- played a part in the overall misconception.
The thing about The Batman however, is that the film had within it a way to avoid that trap altogether. Let’s begin.
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Hey, Readers. La’Ron here. Offering you analysis and perspective on your favorite bits of geek and pop culture media
If it wasn’t obvious from the intro, this video will in fact contain spoilers for DC and Warner Brothers’ The Batman. It’s currently available to stream on HBO Max, so give it a watch before continuing here if you haven’t seen it yet and don’t want me to spoil pivotal points of it for you in this video.
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That’s the syllabus. Now onto the lesson.
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So What IS The Purpose of Police?
Thanks to mainstream media’s depiction of it, a lot of those who don’t have first-hand experiences with the police think that they truly were formed with the intention of stopping crime. That, unfortunately, is not the case.
The police as we know them today were formed initially for managing individuals on behalf of systems of economic and political inequality, dating back all the way to 1829 by Sir Robert Peel who established the system when he was part of the British colonization of Ireland in order to suppress the growth of rioters, insurrectionists and political uprisings against Netflix’s The Crown.
This was adapted for the colonizers state-side 9 years later, but had to be adjusted in order for the suppression in question to fit the uproar of the working class thanks to immigration and industrialization.
This model spread from Boston to New York in 1844, to Chicago in 1855 with the election of Mayor Levi Boone and the creation of the first special police force in the nation...
And just like that, this intent for policing -- managing the poor, foreign, and nonwhite in the name of the ruling hierarchy that may threaten their power if left unregulated -- spread across the nation and has remained the core of it to this day.
What’s that? You wanna know why I called the American settlers colonizers instead of pilgrims? Because “fuck you,” that’s why.
So when we catch the police red-handed doing Hashtag just oppression things knowing these are the unchanged core functions they serve -- especially with everything we’ve currently seen regarding civil unrest via protests against brutality, systemic racism, and capitalistic intent -- things start making a bit more sense.
But what doesn’t make sense is how said hierarchy has been successful in painting the image of police in such a positive and necessary light for a lot of us after witnessing everything that we have these past few years; that they are also here to protect us from crime.
Because in actuality, felony arrests from cops and situations that promote officers to hero status are as rare as Shiny Pokemon. Those joining the force with the intention of protecting their communities under that same light are more than likely to spend the bulk of their career on actionless patrols, handling parking and driving violations, filing paperwork, and taking reports of crimes they’ll never solve if they’re detectives with the ones that are actually followed through making the show 48 hours; another show that promotes this misconception of the police by highlighting the rarities.
/As veteran police scholar David Bayley said, “The police do not prevent crime. This is one of the best kept secrets of modern life. Experts know it, the police know it, but the public does not know it. Yet the police pretend that they are society’s best defense against crime and continually argue that if they are given more resources, especially personnel, they will be able to protect communities against crime. This is a myth.”/
So why is it that we initially think this way about the police? Well, just like I mentioned earlier, that’s mostly due to the romanticization of police work in mainstream media.
The Law & Orders, the CSI’s, the Criminal Minds, the Lethal Weapons, the Dirty Harry’s. Because of the interesting conflict of the good guys versus the bad guys and the modern-day hero wanting to protect their family and community, focusing on the aspect that society glorifies about the police despite rarely doing efficiently, is a lot better than highlighting them as the private security for the Mall of America that they were initially created to be.
And, as you can imagine, when it comes to a lot of his modern-day films...
Batman Is No Different
One of the things I really appreciate nowadays looking back at my childhood is that the Batman movies I grew up with had a Gotham PD that never really illustrated to me that being a police officer was a necessary position.
Because I grew up with the likes of the Burton and Schumacher Batman films, the Christopher Reeve Superman films...
/And even the Ghostbuster films that always showed the police as the muscle for the government aiming to put the working class in their place once they got too busy-slash-popular/
Young La’Ron always looked at the police growing up and thought, “Man. If superheroes existed, would y’all be out of work?”
As a matter of fact, I remember asking that question to a couple of Detroit PD officers that came in to speak to my 3rd grade class for career day, and my white teacher chewed me out for it. Like, why are you booing me? I’m right!
But yeah, in the Richard Donner Superman movie and the other Christopher Reeve films that followed, the police were pretty much non-existent. It wasn’t until Man of Steel when I first saw a militarized response to Superman’s existence on screen.
The police in the 80’s to 90’s Batman era of films on the other hand, was pretty much my response to how I took the seriousness of the police as a child.
/They were unable to successfully arrest Jack Napier OR Batman on multiple occasions, had NO idea how to respond to Joker’s threats and acts of domestic terrorism, and the moment they realized Batman was better at doing their job for them they made the Bat-Signal to call him whenever they needed help, and were licking his boots more than how cop apologists are supposed to lick THEIRS!/ (Thanks for saving the day, Batman. I suspect the Red Triangle Gang is back!)
But then Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy happened, which was inspired by multiple comic book stories that featured the importance of both Batman and Gotham PD’s synergy thanks to the relationship between himself and commissioner Gordon. Stories including Batman: Year One, The Killing Joke, The Long Halloween, The Dark Knight Returns, Knightfall and No Man’s Land to name a few.
And while a lot of the stories in question have Batman rightfully going after the rich and powerful that reinforce the corruption within the Gotham Police that’s responsible for his distrust in the police force save Jim Gordon...
Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy handled the idea of the police in a very liberalistic Hollywood-friendly fantasy way that never really addressed those real-life influences for why policing is the way that it is.
Instead, it handles the situation in a way that does nothing but reinforce the pro-police propaganda regarding why they’re necessary through a romanticized white liberal lens.
/Batman Begins reinforced the popular ideal of there being a few bad apples in the bunch; that all that’s necessary for the police to regain their legitimacy from corruption and the like is to remove the officers like Detective Flass motivated by outside criminal institutions, racism and power abuse, and replace them with individuals the likes of Jim Gordon and his team from The Dark Knight and Robin John Blake from The Dark Knight Rises, in order to better establish the naive yet commendable goals of them being better trained, held accountable for their action and less brutal and racist. Not taking into consideration or even acknowledging that law enforcement as we know it was never created with the intention of public safety or crime control./ (I’m no rat)
The Dark Knight played around with this fantasy further, by entertaining what would happen if you purge the problematic cops in order to build a department the way society expects them to behave without changing the way policing is at its core.
/So because Chris Nolan, Jonathan Nolan and David Shitbag Goyer used Batman Begins as a way to bring legitimacy back to Gotham PD as is the goal when trying to defend its necessity whenever defunding or abolition is brought up, the majority of the narrative for The Dark Knight in retrospect became nothing but a Blue Lives Matter jerkfest./ (No more dead cops! You killed six of my men. 5 dead? 2 of them cops?)
And if I can be real here for a second -- since I’m looking at the three films from this perspective -- all The Dark Knight Rises does is try and discredit mass movements and public expressions of rage thanks to the likes of systemic oppression, capitalistic greed and lack of wealth distribution as a motivator brought about by Bane and Talia Al Ghul, the two antagonists of the movie, in order to drive Gotham to chaos before destroying it.
/Such a real life attempt at a modern-day coup would disrupt the real life social order that both white liberals and those who benefit from it are used to, so the movie uses said antagonized example of disruption to justify the overfunding of police forces in order to keep the fabrication of western society in place when the funds can be easily applied in places where they’ll do some actual good./ (Laws are threats made by the dominant socioeconomic-ethic group in a given nation. It’s just the promise of violence that’s enacted and the police are basically an occupying army. You know what I mean?)
Just like real life white liberalism, the movies and tv shows like The Dark Knight trilogy like to show that the institution being widely criticized is necessary for society of all kinds under its umbrella to thrive, if we just focus on fixing the surface level problems that are present on the power cable instead of addressing the power source feeding into it.
For western society, that power source in question is white supremacy. And to admit that this institution of law enforcement -- this power cable -- draws its power straight from this source, would start a process in not only finding ANOTHER power source that’s more beneficial for EVERYONE, but also allow them to see that the power cable in question is unnecessary.
And that’s hella inconvenient for the people who may not agree with where they get said power but have no problem siphoning from it.
So instead of admitting that both the source is just as corrupt as the cord, they draw your eyes on things we can do to better repair the cord like it did with Batman Begins. Things like making sure the exposed wire is covered with electric tape, and making sure the outlets are still good.
Then, after making sure the “changes” have been made, we’re made sure that we understand the necessity of the cord going forward like in The Dark Knight, and even given a Brothers Grimm like fairy tale regarding what would happen if we ever do away with the cord or the source of power ala The Dark Knight Rises, for those who come too close to the truth of what the power source actually is.
So does 2022’s The Batman fall under the same trap? Unfortunately, yes. But the kicker here is that it almost wasn’t.
Not only did it have an opportunity to address what actually needs to change about policing via the corruption of Gotham PD, but it had the perfect character in the movie’s roster to draw proper attention to it until the movie decided to do what it did instead.
And that character is none other...
Than Selina Kyle.
Selina Kyle in The Batman is a Libertarian Socialist, otherwise known as an anarcho socialist.
They overall reject the concept of the state, and believe that the only true path to freedom and justice is to abolish the social systems that control means of production, and then redistribute that power once held by elites to those that they once governed over. The poor, the foreign, and the nonwhite, which basically sums up the working class; everyone that the modern-day system of law enforcement are supposed to manage and keep in line for the dominant socioeconomic-ethic group in question.
/And it is because she is poor and nonwhite in The Batman, along with having her backstory reflect the same struggles one would endure from said society, this aspect is better reflected in her character in ways than any other iteration has ever displayed on film./
Now one could argue that these were always aspects of Selina’s character; both in previous movie series and in the comics. I see where one could gather that opinion in retrospect, but I’m inclined to point out a few differences up until her more recent transition from villain to anti-hero in both.
In the original Bob Kane comics, Catwoman was pretty much a common cat burglar in a costume. She never stole for any reason associated with socialistic Robin Hood ethics like we know her for now thanks to her reimaginings during the late 80’s and early 90’s; she did it for the thrill.
/Though using her femininity as a weapon against straight cisgendered men who regularly think with the wrong head is something that thankfully carried over throughout her existence./ (Always confusing your pistols with your privates)
As you can imagine thanks to the times, part of Bruce-slash-Batman’s interest in Selina back in the day was seeing her reform. Whether that’s because the character could actually see her being a force for good instead of a thief since this is Batman after all, or this being a sly subliminal way of trying to comment on women challenging the patriarchy in the 1940’s remains for debate and is a subject in a video essay in its own right. Maybe Scott Niswander or Princess Weekes will make it if I don’t immediately get to it.
The next time we’d see Selina reimagined would be in Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One in 1987, in which we see her during this “definitive” Batman origin story as a prostitute -- because that’s the only way Frank can write women -- who donned the Catwoman persona due to the combo of being inspired by Batman to take up a persona in the first place, and not appreciating being labeled as his partner when the two had to work together one time and the Gotham press caught wind of it.
Aspects of this story would carry over to other definitive stories that are used to help establish Batman’s early mythos that are in turn shown in a lot of the movies we’ve received in the last 20+ years, such as outed racist Jeph Loeb’s trilogy consisting of Batman: The Long Halloween, Batman: Dark Victory and Catwoman: When In Rome.
But when Selina Kyle made her big screen appearance in 1992’s Batman Returns -- since it’s unclear whether or not the caucasian Catwoman that appeared in the Batman live-action television show or Batman: The Movie was, in fact, Selina Kyle -- we didn’t get the cat burglar that was in it just for the thrill. We got a woman scorned.
/One who, thanks to a near-death experience from the hand of a high-ranking man in Gotham, goes on a journey of revenge and reclamation of self in a way that establishes a refusal to fit the mold of what a patriarchal society wants of women for the character from then on out. Including other women who had no problem staying in the lane that men initially told them to drive in./ (You think you have it so easy, don’t you? Always waiting for some BATMAN to save you...)
This is an aspect of Selina that survived in one way or another in every iteration of the character going forward.
From Batman: The Animated Series that found a way of successfully fusing the take and look from Batman Returns to a more family-friendly approach to her background by making her a socialite that cared about wildcats, which eventually fed the fire of a more socialist reworking of her character upon DC’s decision to take her in more of an anti-hero direction...
To Zoe Kravitz’s take in the 2022 film The Batman that found a way of tastefully using Miller’s revitalization on the character and Loeb’s comic trilogy backstory that better reinforced the spirit of Pfeiffer’s anti-patriarchal portrayal.
While Selina Kyle’s lineage was displayed in The Batman according to the source material used for the movie via Jeph Loeb, making her mother a black sex worker instead of herself like in Frank Miller’s “Batman: Year One” greatly affects her motivations and influence for the commentary the movie makes. Not only because of her approach to anarcho socialism, but feminism as well.
/Yes, thanks to the anti-patriarchal nature embedded in the character thanks to Michelle Pfeiffer’s portrayal, Selina’s vendetta against her father is personal -- even before learning of the role he played in Annika’s death. But it was ALSO in her own experiences growing up and how Annika mirrored that of her mother’s experiences as a sex worker that gives her the perception regarding those in Gotham with power, and who they choose to keep the disenfranchised under control that mirror how we’ve known her to be in the comics./
And while some would like to argue Anne Hathaway’s portrayal of Selina Kyle in The Dark Knight Rises is in the same socialistic vein, her depiction of Selina in the movie actually does less than what Zoe’s does in The Batman despite also showing accuracies in character portrayal...
/Due to her whiteness and privilege within Rises playing into how the trilogy spreads the propagandic falsehood that the police are worth keeping and that any revolution from this form of supremacy -- ESPECIALLY if it's socialistic in nature -- is wrong./ (This was someone's home. Now it’s EVERYONE’S home. There’s a storm coming. This is what you wanted, remember?)
By making her a mixed minority in The Batman however, that socialist voice DC gave her is further amplified and given more value.
Before then it was just socialism under the lens of white feminism, which inherently doesn’t really factor in the struggles of nonwhite women in the fight against oppression thanks to a natural reflex the movement tends to have that regularly prioritizes whiteness over womanhood.
/Now it’s feminism as it was initially intended, along with combating systemic racism and elitism for everyone suffering from them thanks to the story the movie is initially trying to tell./ (You have a lot of cats. I have a thing for strays)
This is a Selina Kyle who knows what it’s like to be discriminated against, knows that the cops can’t be trusted more than likely from experience alone as both a woman and a person of color, has seen what power and corruption does, is both the victim and RESULT of said power and corruption...
/And isn’t afraid of personally redistributing the wealth of those who CAN do something about everything she’s experienced in the city but chooses not to, because the plight of those suffering doesn’t affect them personally./ (Whoever you are under there, you definitely grew up rich)
And as someone who has witnessed the transition of Selina’s character in this direction over the years, and as a minority who has experienced a lot of what this version of her character represents in The Batman...
/I gathered all of this about her character after the reveal of her parentage from this line alone:/ (All anyone ever cares about in this place are these white, privileged assholes.)
With the shift that The Batman made in Selina’s POV with making her a POC jaded by the aforementioned systemic issues in Gotham to better reflect the philosophies and opinions we know her for, she better reflects what those of US who are jaded by the systemic issues in America undergo.
She, like a good amount of us know about law enforcement in the United States, knows that the police in Gotham are basically only REALLY about managing the poor, foreign and nonwhite, in which Selina and her late partner Annika are both respectively 2 of the 3; her being poor and nonwhite, and Annika being poor and foreign.
Because of that -- and, y’know, being a cop is a choice -- she has no moral setbacks when she’s violently interrogating the one that had a hand in Annika’s death before Batman and Gordon arrive.
If this version of Selina were her traditionally white self that grew up with the privilege necessary to not have to factor in this viewpoint with the police...
/Similarly to how Anne Hathaway portrayed her in The Dark Knight trilogy when she constantly utilized her whiteness to evade multiple situations with the police that would’ve gotten her arrested otherwise, there would’ve been absolutely clear differences in how that version of the interrogation would’ve gone about./
So when I say that Zoe Kravitz’s portrayal of Selina Kyle could’ve been the saving grace regarding how The Batman handled the romantic promotion of police in films past, that wasn’t exaggeration.
It definitely helped that we had a Batman that wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty with the cops. Even with this film focuses on him learning that he falls under the select individuals that benefit from the system that uses the police to keep the masses Selina’s part of in line as Bruce Wayne, and that the good he could do with his privilege as a Wayne considering what his father did in the past, is just as beneficial as shifting his focus from vengeance to hope as Batman.
/But if it weren’t for Selina and Bruce’s attraction to her making him aware of the classism, or being aware enough of how the roots of Gotham PD mirrors the way real-world policing is rooted in colonization and control of the masses based on experiencing who they REALLY “Serve and Protect” firsthand, he wouldn’t have learned that as quickly as he did./
Instead, the woman scorned angle of the character is amplified in a way that not only gives Batman the need to save Selina from herself by stopping her from killing Falcone once all is revealed about how much control he gained over Gotham after Thomas Wayne’s murder via the renewal fund -- despite being absolutely justified in doing so...
/But takes away the aspects about her character being one of the only positive ones in the Reeves-verse so far that knows Gotham PD’s rottenness is something that can’t be treated but only REMOVED for the city to actually start catering to those that have suffered like she did, to where it’s now merely the stepping stone to show that all it took for Gotham PD to end years of corruption in solidarity is for a vigilante and one brave yet naive cop to arrest the “one man” responsible for it./
Once again reinforcing the well-intentioned myth that the problem with policing is in the “bad apples” that need be thrown away in order for law enforcement to get its groove back to distract from the systemic issues rooted in its initial conception.
/It’s not an entire lifetime of systemic control and oppression of people via the white supremacy of colonization that’s the main cause of why cops are the way they are, but that it can be one man trying to take advantage of a power vacuum within a single city. As if nearly every Gotham City Police officer is waiting for The Wiz’s Evilline -- the Wicked Witch of the West -- to melt from hydration, so that they can finally take off their sweatsuits of corruption and finally feel the waters of a “Brand New Day” hit their skin./
/Only in this instance, the waters are actually coming from the levis that Riddler blew up to flood the city soon after he killed Falcone./
Conclusion
Now do I think that there’s still a possibility that future Batman movies from Matt Reeves can right this pretty wrong implication? Of course I do.
I’m absolutely sure he knows this by now -- mostly because the internet has been promoting it since the initial release of the film -- but if he plans on making this franchise a trilogy and uses the Court of Owls as the primary antagonist for the third film, they can easily stand in as the allegory for the ruling hierarchy of a conquered nation that utilize law enforcement as one of the many ways to keep the poor, foregin and nonwhite in line.
Considering that how they handled Selina’s acknowledgement of the systemic problems within Gotham that caused her to have the attitude toward authority and hierarchy that she does in The Batman was intentional and not just an improvisation on Zoe Kravitz’s part...
I know that both he and his writing partner Peter Craig are capable of pulling this off in their storytelling, despite them both being in the same pool of privilege that keeps them from having experiencing these aspects a lot of us experience growing up in a similar society.
/If not however, then it’ll be incredibly obvious that in the case of using fiction to ACTUALLY “unmask the truth,” something’s in the way.../
(Pauses, looks around nervously) Ooooooh~
It just wouldn’t have felt complete if I didn’t like...add that part of the song into the reference, y’know?
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So as some of you who follow me on social media know, I had EVERY intention for this video to be one of my full-fledged video essays
Unfortunately, I had to tone it down to one of my more traditional analysis videos. And that’s because there was a segment I wanted to include that would’ve allowed me to qualify it as a video essay that I just couldn’t find a way to naturally include in the overall presentation.
/The segment in question was actually in regards to the casting of Jeffrey Wright as James Gordon, and how casting a black actor to play a traditionally white cop under the same lens of The Batman playing a role in police propaganda could be looked at when compared to other officers of color who join the force under the same false pretenses as the propaganda that promotes its necessity./
I’m REALLY proud of the segment I wrote for it however, and I still want to present it as if it were a video. So starting with this visual commentary I have on Wright’s Gordon in The Batman, I’ll be providing smaller videos of what didn’t make it in the final cut of what goes live on YouTube, 100% exclusive to my Patrons who contribute $10 a month or more.
That includes bits I couldn’t include in my analysis videos, any retrospectives I make, my visual opinion pieces and even my video essays. Whether it was for time restrictions or because I couldn’t make it naturally fit in the transition or the topic I was focusing on.
I can’t promise that they’ll be frequent, but they’ll definitely be available. So if you want to join or adjust your contribution in order to have access to them, feel free to do so and thank you so much for your support; it truly does mean the world to me!
So with that being said Readers, your homework assignment for the day!
Write in the comment section down below what YOU thought of The Batman if you’ve seen it.
Or if you feel like sharing with the rest of the class a film or television series that you’ve seen that actually DID acknowledge the truth about police and law enforcement, and didn’t just go with the narrative that all it needs is a good weeding in order to be a necessary service to society.
Whichever you decide to answer, I’d love to know your thoughts.
/A HUGE shoutout to my Patrons both big and small for helping make this channel possible.
Make sure you check out the card at the end of the video to see if you want to join, or click the link to it or any of my affiliates in the description box below.
Until next time, this is Readus 101. Class dismissed./
