“It’s a big city. I can’t be everywhere. And they don’t know where I am.”
In his opening monologue in The Batman when Bruce Wayne is reading from his Batman diary, he is saying that the bad guys go into fear mode because they think he is waiting in the shadows when in reality he IS the shadows. This is an assertion that has its basis not in the Batman mystique, but in criminal law enforcement theory. This opening is a direct commentary on the failure of law enforcement as a system and, furthermore, it is incredibly significant that Bruce makes this commentary before Batman even makes his first fully costumed appearance in the story.
That statement is also made by Bruce to foreshadow how his whole Batman concept is, after two years of implementation, a failure to transform vision into practice. It is also not just foreshadowing, but retrospective analysis. The Batman is failing as a concept because Bruce is basing his implementation upon standard policing techniques. The prediction of the failure of his own experiment is simultaneously a harsh critique of the entire history of the law enforcement system.
Bruce’s description of the one element of Batman crime fighting technique that has proven successful thereby serves to illuminate that there is just single element of criminal law enforcement that is successful. The police—just like the Batman—is really only useful before any crime has been committed. The actual physical presence of police or the perception of their presence in the shadows unquestionably works as a deterrence to criminal intentions before any crime is actually committed. But once a crime has been committed, all techniques of policing are basically useless. Unless or until, that is, at some random point along the way during the investigative process, they simply get lucky.
When applying this perspective to what proceeds to play out over the course of the narrative of The Batman, it seems almost beyond question that at some level the decision to make Bruce’s diary account the film’s introduction to Batman is a critique upon both the philosophical and the systemic failure of law enforcement in America. It is still after all these years operating in a way in which its usefulness is really only applied to preventing crime from happening rather than stopping crime from being “necessary.” Batman ultimately has to learn that whether he is in the shadows or IS the shadows is only going to be useful to an extremely limited degree. This is a lesson the police are still waiting to be taught.
“We have a signal now. For when I’m needed. But when that light hits the sky, it’s not just a call. It’s a warning. To them. Fear…is a tool.”
The Bat Signal for the criminals of Gotham is the equivalent of suddenly seeing flashing blue lights in the rearview mirror for everyone. Even if you know you haven’t done anything wrong, those flashing lights in the mirror gets the adrenaline pumping. Especially if you are a young black man, of course, but even lawyers and guys driving their Tuesday Maserati are subject to at least a moment or two of anxiety. If you happen to have a body in the trunk of the car or are a wanted fugitive stupid enough to have stolen a car with a broken brake light, the almost magical appearance of those blue lights behind you that weren’t there a second ago has definitely got to be akin to seeing the Bat Signal suddenly flashing into existence directly above you as you are about to commit a felony on the mean streets of Gotham.
There is a connection being made here in the specific choice of language. We don’t say “police.” We say “the police.” Yes, of course, titling the move “The Batman” differentiates it from previous films while still signifying it is a movie about the caped crusader. But the title also seems to serve a secondary purpose connected to a much larger thematic intent. The decision to make this a detective story about how law enforcement operates—and how much it is dependent upon pure luck—and, ultimately, how often law enforcement fails leads to the conclusion that this isn’t really a story about the Batman as much as it is a story about “The Police.”
The thematic focus is on how Bruce is slowly but concertedly moving toward becoming Batman specifically through his rejection of the entire system of law enforcement upon which he has based his operating system. Realizing that the system is philosophically untenable and therefore systemically beyond repair because it originated in a broken state, he is pushed—through his unwelcome identification with the Riddler’s and his thugs—toward engaging a new ideology which rather than bringing him closer to the cops actually makes him even more of an undesirable outcast. By rejecting vigilante justice, he is illustrating that vigilantism is exactly the foundational premise upon which the system operates. More to the point: it is exactly why the system itself is so morally corrupt that a comprehensive philosophical overhaul is required. He realizes that you cannot repair a problem caused by the operating system when the operating system itself is the problem. Of course, cops are naturally resistant to trying anything even remotely new and this rejection of change serves to solidify the very corruption that has poisoned even the merest possibility of the slightest reform. Thus, everything about the law enforcement system has to be burned to the ground so that it can start against from scratch.
The Batman’s willingness to sacrifice his aura of shadowy vigilante in order to reinvent himself as a protector and savior of Gotham’s citizens is the film’s most iconic moment when viewed through the lens of this perspective. It is an action which police have so far been unwilling to make. They are too eager to cling to authority and project themselves as figures to be feared rather than trusted. And yet they then complain about the public not trusting them. What the Batman does when he falls to the flooded floor of the arena proved to be almost grotesquely prescient. By a mere matter of weeks, the Batman’s decision to sacrifice his standing as a figure of terror to become a figure of hope was ironically perverted when 375 law enforcement officers occupying school grounds in a small town in Texas made the exact opposite decision. The tragedy of Uvalde unintentionally highlighted the message of The Batman by revealing in previously unimaginable stark terms that even the one single thing that is effective about law enforcement—deterrence—stands on the precipice of disappearing forever in a horrific portrait of a dystopic America where every criminal is armed with an AR-15, fearing nothing and no one.
Collar the Jive: A Prodigiously Incomplete Sampling of the Writings of Timothy Sexton 