Sorry for the weird question, but I’m struggling to put this into words/explain to my friends. What do you think makes DCEU Batman so compelling and intriguing to those of us who love that iteration? Even without a super bat lens on it, I struggle to find the “The Dark Knight” movies half as interesting. That Bruce almost feels…flat? To me? I don’t know if this is something you experience as well, but would love your thoughts on this!
That’s a really good question. I thought about this one for some time, and I think the conclusion for me personally is that the connection between Bruce Wayne and Batman as personas is complete. Neither one feels like a mask to him, he slides into one and out of the other. The moments where he’s briefly holding both (like in the Cave with Alfred, stealing the drive, etc) is closer to his true self than a lot of other depictions get.
His motivation is much clearer in the DCEU as well. His ongoing trauma doesn’t stem solely from his parents’ death and is wrapped up in decades of crime fighting and losing his one and only Robin. He is so clearly grieving, but he has made it into an art form. Without Lex’s meddling, he likely would’ve gone on until someone killed him.
Physically I think Affleck is also more compelling. He was the first Bruce I saw in live action who married a lot of discrete qualities: being intimidating, having an almost delicate face with high cheekbones etc, and the acting chops to pull off the many different subtle expressions needed for a Bruce in crisis.
I think his focus on hope came naturally, even with the Martha debacle. He was terrifying! But then when he set his mind toward redemption, I believed it whole heartedly. He was achingly kind to victims of the Metropolis attack (Black Zero) and was burning money trying to help. He was always hopeful, in a way. That people could still be okay. Eventually.
He’s also very alone. Not necessarily always by choice. Robin is gone. He’s close enough with Alfred to make him tea and joke about being the servant instead of the other way around. He sleeps with people and then wakes up and takes his meds with a swig of priceless wine. He’s isolated himself in the lake house and left Wayne Manor to ruins. But he still returns to the mausoleum with flowers (at least, he does in his dreams).
He is very grim without being entirely hopeless. He’s hurt and grieving. He helps in both masks but hates that he can’t do more. He goes through the motions because Alfred asks him to. He is, despite being totally unrelatable, very relatable.
I think it’s also very poetic that when Bruce falls into darkness, Clark is the one in the light, carrying hope. And when Clark loses faith in himself after his death and questions his place in the world and as the last Kryptonian, Bruce is the one to lead him forward with the Justice League.
It’s very them. And maybe that’s what we like most, other than the pretty GIFs and gorgeous shots from Snyder…that even a grim version of Bruce like this can dance along the edge of hope anyway.
“My parents taught me a different lesson…dying in the gutter for nothing at all. They taught me the world only makes sense when you force it to.”
Since Bruce delivers that line while KOing Superman, it loses some of its depth, but it’s still a gunshot of a line. And it’s not only about darkness! It could go either way — that he can create hope and change for others by forcing it with all of his strength and resources, and the impossibility of ever fully achieving that, or that making sense of his own grief and tragedy comes down to wanting to control the things he absolutely cannot control, and that his track record in Gotham has made that very, very true. He can’t control them. He can’t control what happened to him, or to Robin. But he will die trying to.
I liked Bale and I thought he was decent, but he doesn’t have the magnetism Affleck has in my eyes. He was a good Bruce Wayne but never fully bridged over into Batman without discomfort. And when he did, Batman was “real” and Bruce Wayne was the “mask.” We see Alfred try to convince him of the opposite, but he doesn’t listen. So to me, he’s not as fully realized as Affleck is after decades of fighting. He doesn’t have that slip-slide-truth between Batman and Bruce Wayne. He is a desperate, broken Bruce Wayne clinging to Batman like a life raft.
And that’s okay! It’s still an enjoyable set of movies with a good through line. The Batman was also great, but didn’t scratch the same itch as Batfleck for me for the same reason. Neither Bale nor Pattinson has fully accepted themselves and the personas they use. They haven’t found the balancing point that is B, in the field, or Bruce, in Clark’s voice.
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