“A Few Bad Apples”: The Conservatism of The Batman
As Halloween crowds lurk through the prototypical gloom of Gotham City, in a thinly veiled model of Times Square, a series of masquerades, cartoonish distorted faces populate the screen and underlie the noir-ish monologue of the title character. The film poses a mystery to its viewer, presenting a thing to be unveiled if one is only to reach out and pull back the curtain.
The Batman is, at its core, about the struggle to reveal the concealed - to be able to mask and unmask. As the Riddler torments Gotham City with his attacks against allegedly “corrupt” public officials, Batman must take on two conflicts: unfolding both the identity of the Riddler and the misdeeds of Gotham city officials. As he follows the Riddler’s clues, Batman continues to fall further and further into Gotham’s den of corruption, unveiling the schemes of the wealthy Gotham elites.
A lone soldier on his quest against villainy, Batman purifies his city of the maleficent Riddler and governmental crime, acting as a pseudo-messianic neutralizer of chaos. However, are Batman’s deeds alone truly enough to rid a city of corruption? With the rampant crime across Gotham, it is difficult to imagine how the actions of one can affect such broad change. At the ex-mayor's funeral, a new mayoral candidate asks Bruce why he doesn't engage in greater philanthropy - the subject quickly dropped. This throwaway, however, asserts the film’s perspective on corruption. Rather than facing the threatening ambiguity of the corrupt, how its untraceable nature can be woven into the amorphous body of the system, corruption in The Batman is something that has a single solution, with the malevolent existing as a riddle to be unwoven, nothing more than a mystery to be unveiled.
In the film, corruption is an issue of the individual, a trait that attaches itself to the person rather than the system. As Batman pursues the Riddler’s clues, we descend deeper into the artificial complexity of corruption and discover the aesthetic of immorality in the film’s antagonists; Carmine Falcone, Penguin, and their lair, The Iceberg Lounge. In their Olive Garden Italian accents and with “mafioso” postures right out of a cartoon parody of The Godfather, Penguin and Falcone are glaringly obvious, their physicality and persona assuming a costume of villainy. A caricature of itself, the corrupt in The Batman screams to be recognized. Through its literalization, corruption no longer exists as a vague, insurmountable concept but is distilled into a visual. Personified, the corrupt grow easily identifiable, and consequently, the film grows conservative in its denial of the systemic nature of corruption.
The phrase “a few bad apples,” originating from the proverb “one bad apple spoils the whole barrel,” denotes that the wrong acts of one individual are not representative of the group. An ideology fully embraced by The Batman and its ethos of policing. Circumventing critique of the wider police system which allows corruption to flourish, the lens of The Batman assumes a timid, conventional perspective, highlighting corruption on both a local and governmental scale as an issue of a “few bad apples”. Thus, by avoiding the majority, the film focuses on the personal morality upheld by singular individuals within the system, while wholly failing to address the wider systemic issues which allows for things like police corruption. While the film takes on several cop antagonists, villainy is an issue of specificity. And, with such a positive representation, the Gotham police system is not the origin of corruption as the battle against evil functions not against its personal targets. The struggle of The Batman is that of any detective, to identify the “bad apples” rather than implement system-wide change.
When Batman and Gordon walk out of the Iceberg Lounge, having captured Falcone, the mobster protests the futility of their attempts to enact justice, telling them, “Don’t you know you boys in blue work for me?” However, the group emerges upon a sea of policemen ready to enact justice as Gordon replies “I guess we don’t all work for you.” The scene, played as a major analysis of human morality, seems unconscious of its contradiction- that of an aesthetic of complexity and grittiness faultily masking the infantile understandings of right and wrong.