I
have never understood this view of Batman. To me, Batman is a
character who copes with the trauma of losing his family through
building a new family. An enormous family, at that:
Alfred
and Julia Pennyworth, Jim and Barbara Gordon, Dick, Jason, Tim,
Damian, Kate, Steph and Cass and all the characters who orbit around
each of those. He's created a family out of the lost and in turn
those lost souls follow his example and create families of their own:
Dick and the Titans, then the Outsiders; Jason and the Outlaws; Tim
and Young Justice; Babs and the Birds of Prey; and now Damian's forming his own Titans.
And
Batman isn't blind to it. Back when Geoff Johns was relaunching the
Teen Titans and Tim resisted joining because them because he didn't
need more training its Bruce who insists "No, but you do need to
see your friends" as Tim has been beating himself up trying to
process Omen's death on his own. During the Bruce Wayne: Murderer
storyline what breaks Bruce is when Dick and the other kids doubt his
innocence. These really are his kids for whom he has actual human
emotions, albeit often poorly expressed ones.
But
that wouldn't be as horrifically nihilistic and hopeless so that
isn't the Batman that turns up when an audience of millions sees him
on the big screen and that is genuinely sad. It genuinely seems that
the larger the audience Batman has, the worse he is at dealing with
his trauma. For years in the comics, basically since Damian was
introduced, he's basically come to terms with his parents' murder:
motivated by it but not constantly tormented. That's for an audience
of hundreds of thousands.
For
an audience of millions, his torment never ends or, if it does, its
the last minute of the last movie in that particular continuity. Not
that they haven't tried: Joel Schumacher tried to get Bruce to
evolve as a character in his two movies but it didn't take and the
DC-Warner rebooted the series under Christopher Nolan. There seems to
be a feeling that Batman can't exist for a general audience without
being constantly defined by his pain.
And,
I won't lie, that makes me sad.
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