As box office records shatter, and as fanboys cheer and cry in almost equal numbers, it’s becoming quickly apparent that Batman v Superman may or may not be a good movie, but it’s definitely one we’ll all be talking about for a while.
For today, though, I’m going to focus on one particular area of outrage, so, be warned, there may be some spoilers ahead, but I will try to keep them mild. Also, my intent here isn’t to prove anyone right or wrong, it’s just to add some background information.
While there’s a lot of stuff that’s pissing off folks about this movie, Batman and his evolving (devolving?) status on his moral code seems to be a big one. In the movie, depending on who you ask, Batman is either done giving a damn about collateral damage and letting bad guys get themselves killed, or he’s straight-up murdering them. Personally, I saw more of the former and just a couple of the latter. And for a character that has been depicted as saying all life is sacred, and going to incredible extremes to save the lives of even the most degenerate enemies, I completely understand why that wouldn’t sit well with a lot of viewers.
So is this new “take fewer prisoners” Batman a creation of Zach Snyder? Not really. In fact, as many Fwooshers have already pointed out, Batman was a 1911-toting and “occasionally killing” vigilante in his early years. “A fitting end for his kind” and all that. Batman had little issue dispatching monsters and the like, but did express some regret at having to gun-down some low-ranking thug, necessary as it might have been.
Since then, especially after the 1950s, the personal code against killing has become much more a standard part of the character, and even an essential one, first to keep him in publishing, and then to differentiate him from many other non-powered vigilantes that followed him (and even some that preceded.)
But this movie Batman is probably not that directly inspired by his pulp hero roots. No, this one comes much more directly from The Dark Knight Returns, in which Batman is decidedly more brutal in his older years.
Even there, though, Batman still holds on to some of his code. He doesn’t let Harvey fall to his death or blast the Mutant Leader off the face of the earth, though his narrative sounds like he very much wants to. When the penultimate showdown with the Joker ends, Batman stops just short of killing his old foe, much to his delight. There are moments where there are definitely collateral deaths, though: Batman doesn’t give much concern to Harvey’s other thugs and their bomb-laden helicopter. He definitely let more than a few mutants blow themselves up, bouncing rockets and grenades off the Batmobile’s hull. And in one of the most contested scenes in comics, he rattled off a round from a M60 into a mutant holding a hostage. The movie makes this obviously a wound, but the comic, and the reality of a 7.62 round at that range, make for a more critical prognosis.
There is a little bit of that wavering code to be found in the source material, but that Batman is practically an “Elseworlds” title, right? Same could be said for Tim Burton’s Batman movies and even the Nolan movies. Regular, modern comic Batman is the truest essence of the character, and he will do whatever it takes to preserve his moral imperative.
Well . . . maybe not “always.”
During the mid-1980s, Batman was easily one of the best-written books going, and it had some of the best writers in the field taking turns. Max Allan Collins and Jim Starlin are probably the two I associate the most with that time frame, and a case could be made for they, along with Marv Wolfman and Alan Grant, being responsible for a lot of what defines Batman in the modern era. But there were definitely times when this Batman weighed his operating code a little differently:
Here, Jason directly points out that Batman has killed before. And Batman makes no denial of it; he only justifies it as self defense. A little later in this run, Jason takes the law into his own hands, letting a diplomatically immune scumbag drop from a building. Batman is not pleased because it can’t be justified. When that same scumbag’s brother blows into town looking for revenge, Batman heads to a wrecking yard to face them and recover the captured Commissioner.
During this fight, Batman does some (admittedly) awesome stuff. Chucking car batteries, using punks as human shields, tricking them into shooting each other, and dropping a pile of car salvage on top of one. After all of it, Batman then chides Jason again on the unintended consequences of his act of murder — and he feels none-too-badly about the negligent homicides covering the scrap yard.
That’s a fairly specific example, and Jim Starlin’s run is probably an easier place to find them than most, like in The Cult, or ironically how Batman’s initial run in with Anatoli Knyazev came to a close. But using those examples as, well, examples, think of how often in comics Batman does similar things.
The truth is, in comics, it’s easier to frame scenarios for Batman to skirt around killing bad guys. Whether it’s by deliberately plotting these encounters to allow Batman not to kill, or it’s just by willful admission, like when a bad guy gets blown up and thown off the panel — we don’t see him land, so I’m sure he’s fine. In a movie, with giant action movie sequences and pyrotechnics and tons and tons of guns, RPGs, and the like, it becomes much harder. Do you slow the high-octane to a crawl to allow Batman to elaborately grapple-gun the bad guys out of their exploding machine gun post? Or do you just count on the movie magic to let him shake off that explosion a minute later? Either way, you have to go out of your way to show that “oh no, he’s okay, just massively concussed” to maintain that no-kill count. And you have to do it often. And each time, it becomes more patronizing.
So, instead, you end up with a Batman who doesn’t give a damn about the guy who shot a RPG at the Batmobile and got crushed in the process. Indeed, this Batman would probably tell you if he didn’t want to get killed, he should’ve dropped his RPG and given up. Hell, Max Allan Collins’s Batman would probably tell you that killing a guy shooting at you with an RPG is self defense, and I’d probably have to agree there.
Is this right? That part is not for me to tell you. For me, I actually think Nolan’s Batman had the best answer to this question when he told Ra’s Al Ghul that he wasn’t going to kill him, but he didn’t have to save him either. And so, yeah, I feel like some of this current movie Batman’s actions were a little questionable.
But what I can tell you is if you’re pissed off at this movie for tarnishing Batman’s code, you’re a bit late, either by 30 or 70 years.