30.7.24

Get Lost in the POOLS: a Game Review & Discussion

With a premise rooted in open exploration rather than solving puzzles or confronting monsters and enemies, Tensori’s POOLS isn’t a game in the conventional sense. It’s important to know this going in, because expectations of having something to “do,” a character to roleplay, and even a story to engage with, will likely lead to disappointment. However, letting go of these expectations, if you even harbor them in the first place, will bring you into a sublime and complex expression of liminal spaces.

Though clearly and respectfully influenced by animators like Jared Pike, Kane Pixels and Matt Studios, whose seminal shorts on YouTube have deservedly drawn attention and praise, Tensori succeeds in offering their own singular vision of the Poolrooms, a subset of the broader Backrooms creepypasta in which environments are defined by pools as you would expect at an aquatics center as well as spaces that are only pools because they’ve been flooded. The result is a stunning work of art, perfect for casual gamers and/or anyone who has yearned for an interactive, rather than passive viewing, experience of the Poolrooms. 

 


The Architectural Wonderland

As the game starts, we are literally dropped into a white-tiled space, where we assume first-person control of an avatar with a camera. (Our perspective throughout the game is through the camera, but the first-person-point-of-view doesn’t draw attention to this.) The controls are simple and elegantly implemented, limited to moving/swimming and looking around. After noting that our point of entry is an inaccessible hole in the ceiling, gameplay continues with navigating the maze of rooms comprising an increasingly large complex of spaces. The first thing to note is how immersive the experience is. Tensori clearly have a solid grasp of architecture and the psychology of space, successfully creating environments that leverage structure, spatial volume, and light to express the tension of liminal spaces that are intelligible (that is, navigable) but without a clear purpose. Some are bright and expansive, others dark and claustrophic, and a few that are mind-bogglingly monumental. Even before we consider the oddities and fun references to Backrooms lore, Tensori’s consistently fascinating architectural design beautifully evokes a range of experiences, from calm to unsettling to WTF. It is, on its own terms, a joy to progress through each chapter and discover new elements and new space typologies as they are delivered with increasing surrealism. Add in outstanding sound design, which foregoes a musical score to focus entirely on sound effects and environmental sounds, and POOLS becomes all the more engaging. From the tapping of our footsteps and mechanical sounds of HVAC systems, to random bits of music and noises that are disturbingly weird and inexplicable, it’s astonishing how well Tensori integrate a sonic experience into the physicality of their environments.


 

Lost in Liminality

POOLS is no mere building tour, of course, and this is where Tensori’s other strength comes into force: their understanding of liminal spaces. Where I have a quibble with the Backrooms and the many videos on YouTube, however well done, it’s with the loose conception of liminality, which is related to but not identical to the mysterious. To explain what I mean, consider that liminality has more than one aspect. In the physical sense, liminal spaces are transitional spaces. These could be rooms like foyers, where people transition between exteriors and interiors, or thresholds like doorways. The Backrooms are liminal in the sense that they our conceptually outside our lived experience and consist of spaces that seem more algorithmically generated than actually designed. The maze-like environments are much like a sentence in which the grammar and vocabulary are correct, but the word choices don’t add up to anything meaningful. As pots say, kettles garden in orbit, but only when the moon frets in the calendar’s dreams.

It's the conceptual sense of liminality, however, that is to me the most evocative, and here I refer to semantic ambiguity – that is, the unclear meaning of a space (e.g. its intended purpose). Conceptual liminality isn’t just about ambiguity but irresolvable ambiguity, the impossibility to definitely assign any kind of meaning to a space. Just as the physical condition of being in a liminal space implies a perpetual sense of transition, the mental perception of a liminal space implies an inability to understand it in a teleological sense. We simply can’t explain why any given space is how it is. Worse, we can’t even be sure that there is an explanation. It’s precisely the irreconcilable tension between meaning and meaningless that gives liminality its power, particularly in comparison to the mysterious which implies meaning through a definite question even if the answer is out of reach.

With this understanding of liminality in mind, the most successful liminal spaces to me are therefore those spaces that never offer a resolution to our perceptions of environments that don’t make sense in their whole, leaving us at the mercy of whatever fears and wonders our minds can conjure. When someone introduces a monster, however, or starts populating spaces with all manners of entities, the liminality is lost and we are left with the merely mysterious: undeniably weird places whose meaning is fixed on surviving horror even as the origin of that horror is unknown.

POOLS is a beautiful demonstration of this physical and conceptual liminality. And in their world-building, Tensori demonstrate great skill and restraint in when and how new elements are introduced, whether these are incongruous artefacts or adjustments to the laws of physics. This drives their ability to gradually ratchet the suspense throughout the game and, without a narrative framework or monsters to chase us, makes the complex of maze-like environments delightfully resistant to explanation and rational understanding. Even the strangest, most surprising scenes in the game are presented without any means to discern their purpose, adding to an atmosphere that straddles curiosity and dread. If you want a literary comparison, here’s one: the entirety of the complex is rather like Stanislaw Lem’s inscrutable ocean in Solaris, which produces entirely human doppelgangers of people taken from the memories of a space station’s crew. Why the ocean does this is unclear, just as it isn’t clear whether there is any intentionality underlying its actions. And like Lem’s protagonist, we end having to confront the possibility that it may be impossible to figure anything out.

Tensori does push beyond the strict ambiguity of liminality, however, and does so purposefully. This is most overt in Chapter 6, when statues of the kind previously seen in static poses throughout the game begin to act like the Weeping Angels from Doctor Who. Appearing in spaces behind us after we look away, they serve to shepherd us forward by blocking our way back. Even before that, however, in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment, the statues appear to open light panels lining a corridor, staring at us with glowing eyes. (You might want to freeze-frame the moment in the full Walkthrough on YouTube.) Although the statues aren’t exactly chasing us, and they certainly don’t act in any specifically dangerous manner, the unsettling effect nonetheless emphasizes some intentional presence within the complex. Questions about POOLS’ liminality actually occur even earlier than that, as early as Chapter 1, when a detour in a flooded corridor leads to a submerged hole and ladder – and a pair of hands that helpfully point in the right direction to the exit. Although none of these signs of activity by themselves add up to a narrative, let alone an explanation of what the POOLS complex is and what, if any, purpose it might serve, they nevertheless materialize what could otherwise be dismissed as tricks of the mind. We’re not alone in the POOLS, and that’s a different experience than not being able to know whether we are alone or not.

 


 

Ambiguity Resolved by … Mystery?

The game’s ending calls everything into question. Sort of. It’s enigmatic to the point that revealing it doesn’t really spoil anything about the game unless you view knowing anything about it as a spoiler. In essence, once we reach the final room, we’re confronted with only one exit: a door held open by a figure of whom we can only see an arm and head in silhouette. Curiously, the game removes our agency as a player and we can only watch as our invisible Explorer-Self sets the camera down on a partially submerged table, leaving only behind the sound of treading water or swimming as the scene continues … on an old TV set on a desk. The final scene is of someone ejecting VHS marked “POOLS” from a VCR.

Personally, I would have been perfectly happy without any of the activity or the meta-ending. POOLS could have concluded as non-narratively as it began, with an exit to the “real” world as abrupt and devoid of explanation as our entry into that first room. The experience Tensori create through architectural and sound design really is just that good on its own. But I have to give them credit for crafting a thought-provoking ending that doesn’t ruin the experience and is even very clever in how it subverts the idea of an ending. Thinking about what the ending means, it’s tempting to start with the fate of our Explorer-Self. Is it a happy ending in which we escape? Alas, we don’t see ourselves leaving through the open door, which actually closes as the scene pulls away to the office TV. Does that mean a tragic or horrifying ending? As we don’t hear any screaming or other sounds of distress, nor has anything in the game threatened us with anything other than being creepy, it’s not clear that anything bad actually happens to our Explorer-Self either. For unexplained reasons, our Explorer-Self simply goes against our natural inclination and sets down the camera instead of heading toward the door. The office scene offers no insights here. It’s tempting, perhaps, to interpret the realization that our game experience was, meta-contextually, the recording of a VHS tape and, from there, find a comparison to the Blair Witch. Although there are no counter-factuals per se to disprove this interpretation, studying the details of the desk scene strongly suggests another interpretation, which is where the subversion of endings comes into play. So what do actually see?

  • The ejected VHS tape only says POOLS, the title of the game. There is no date or other informational markings; nothing to me that suggests the tape is footage obtained from a particular time and place.
  • In the VHS tapes lying on the desk, while there is one labeled “Found Footage” there is also another labeled Level 188.8, which is a reference to “the Flooded Windows” sublevel in Backrooms lore. Other labels are almost impossible (for me) to read, but one seems to be about tiles, another about building games, and yet another about solving something.
  •  There are two sketches, an incomplete one of a human torso and, below that, an architectural drawing labeled “entrance,” as well as a human figurine.
  •  Also on the desk are two books, one on human anatomy and another titled “Architecture: Build Your Dreams.”
  • A scene from Chapter 1, the “helping hands” ladder and hole, is presented to us as a painting on the wall. The depiction is more artistic than photorealistic, and displays an artist’s signature.

There’s a final clue – other than the fact that the most significant anomalous artefacts in the game are art-related – that supports the idea that POOLS isn’t ultimately a found footage horror game. Look closely at the TV, and you’ll see it’s branded with the word “IROSNET” – Tensori spelled backward. Could the office be a reflection of the game developers’ studio and, by extension, their creative process? Could questions about the Explorer-Self’s in-game fate be, essentially, beside the point, because the Explorer-Self is merely a user interface illusion? If so, the camera gets sets down simply because the experience has come to an end and it is we, the actual players, who exit the door in our minds as we rejoin the game’s creators in the real world. POOLS is thus, ultimately, interactive performance art. Its meaning comes not from interpretation, but from experience.

Of course, there’s no definitive way to prove whether my interpretation is either “correct” or what Tensori intended or not. It might not appeal to fans of horror games. But it’s that unresolvable uncertainty, and the corresponding opportunity to create our own meaning, that allows the experience of playing POOLS to be truly liminal … and linger long after the credits.

What’s next, then? Should Tensori decide to continue making games in the liminal genre, I would hope they’d resist the temptation to add levels and lore to POOLS as some Steam commenters suggest. The game offers a complete experience, and there are possible development directions that wouldn’t risk its meticulously crafted. After all, the psychology of space, and the experience of solitude, is far richer than terror. After producing a game with a bias toward psychological horror, I’d see an opportunity to further subvert the Backrooms genre with a game biased toward kindness: what could a compassionate liminal environment look like? I’m not Tensori, though, so ultimately that’s neither here nor there. Whatever the future holds, POOLS stands as a magnificent achievement on its own. It certainly can, and should, be revisited to soak in the many different environments, catch previously unnoticed details, and admire the work of art that it is.


 Get the game here.

18.1.24

F vs the Franchises: Index of Posts

Given the unsophisticated formatting of my blog and ridiculously lengthy posts, here’s a collection of all the posts in my Frederik vs the Franchises series for easy reference.

Introduction

James Bond

Star Trek

Star Wars

 

Superhero Fatigue

Part 1 - Comics

Part 2 – the MCU

Part 3 – the DCEU

Part 4 – Batman :

  • Part 4A , covering Nolan's Dark Knight Trilogy, plus some introductory thoughts.
  • Part 4B, covering The Batman and Batman in the DC Animated Universe.
  • Part 4C covering Tim Burton’s films and the Snyderverse.
  • Part 4D covering my favorite Batman stories.

17.1.24

F vs the Franchises: Superhero Fatigue (Part 4d - In the Shadow of a Man Dressed As a Bat)

Click here for Part A of my Batman discussion, covering Nolan's Dark Knight Trilogy.

Click here for Part B of my Batman discussion, covering The Batman and Batman in the DC Animated Universe.

Click here for Part C of my Batman discussion, covering Tim Burton’s films and the Snyderverse.

My Favorite Batman Stories

For all that film and television have told Batman stories with varying degrees of success, and personal appeal, the stories that stand out to me as my favorite actually come from DC’s Elseworlds line of comics. Freed from the obligation to feed and maintain any kind of continuity and canoncity, these “what if” stories offer focused explorations of wildly diverse ideas, settings, and scenarios for its characters. Among favorites are Brian Augustin and Mike Mignola’s Batman: Gotham by Gaslight, in which a Victorian-era Batman confronts Jack the Ripper in Gotham City, and Jean-Marc Lofficer, Randy Lofficier, and Ted McKeever’s Batman: Nosferatu, the second book (following Superman’s Metropolis and preceding Wonder Woman: The Blue Amazon) in an absolutely thrilling trilogy inspired by German Expressionist cinema. Approaching Batman from opposite yet complementary perspectives – one is noir while the other is modernist – are two books that in their own way encapsulate what is most compelling to me about the Batman concept: Batman: Nine Lives, written by Dean Motter and drawn by Michael Lark, and Batman: Death by Design, written by Chip Kidd and drawn by Dave Taylor. Neither includes child sidekicks, the Bat-family, and villains better suited to horror movies, which to me creates the opportunity to tell more focused stories.

However realistic you might think Reeves and Nolan were in their approach, neither compare to Nine Lives, which strips away the trappings of superhero comics to leave, instead, the type of cinematic noir narrative that came out of Hollywood during the 1940s and writers like Chandler and Hammett. Its hard-boiled noir detective story that sharply distills the concept of “Batman” to its essence as a portrait of crime, justice, and trauma. There are no fantasy elements nor sci fi gadgets to be found in its pages, and villains from Batman’s gallery of rogues are here presented as gangsters and petty criminals, whose familiar monikers are casual nicknames rather than costumed personas. Even Bruce Wayne, however forceful in and out of his Batman costume, is offered to us as a fallible human rather than a mythical figure with near-superhuman abilities. One could argue that Nine Lives isn’t really a superhero comic at all, which would be a fair impression – and I enjoy the book all the more for it. Another reason for me to enjoy it: the relatable, flawed humanity of its characters. Unlike the comics, where villains’ criminal pathologies are amplified to grotesque, lurid extremes, Nine Lives offers a grounded portrait of desperation and the corrupting influence of money and power.

The story revolves around Selina Kyle who, as owner of the Kit Kat club, is privy to the secrets of Gotham’s powerful business and criminal elites she consorts with, often intimately. When she’s found dead in the City’s labyrinthine sewer system, a chain of events is set in motion in which the motive to find her killer is often obscured by the desire to learn her secrets. What’s make the mystery interesting as a Batman story and not just a noir murder mystery and crime drama is Motter’s decision to tell the story not from the point of view of Dick “Wonder Boy” Grayson, a former cop turned private detective. Like the protagonist of a good noir story, he plays a key role in figuring out the mystery. But he also provides an outsider’s view of Batman’s activities, with an attitude that is suitably cynical. Furthermore, he offers a working-class view of wealthy Bruce Wayne that, again, is rooted in suspicion and mistrust. Without the ability to see events from Bruce Wayne/Batman’s point of view, we get to experience how mysterious, and perhaps misunderstood, he is to the people he encounters. And the impression, at least initially, makes Wayne just as much a noir character as anyone else in the story. With Lark’s gorgeous art to complement Motter’s nuanced writing, the overall book is the rare Batman story that, in my mind, checks all the boxes.

Where Nine Lives dwells in the shadows, cynical and suspicious, Batman: Death by Design walks in daylight with the refreshing conviction that Gotham can be made better. Yet for all their opposite perspectives, both reject exaggerated extremes in favor of a grounded approach to their narratives and world-building. For Nine Lives, it comes from focusing on the corrosive psychology of greed and its manifestation in organized crime. For Death by Design, greed and corruption are also the focus, but here viewed through the novel lens of architecture and the understanding that the civic health of a community is tied to the quality of its built environments. While Gotham has always been a character in its own way, Death by Design stands out for paying attention to the design and construction of its buildings – specifically, the Wayne Central Station, envisioned as a grand social landmark and transit hub but ultimately a failed promise due to a compromised design and flawed construction. At the story’s beginning, Bruce is determined to demolish the building commissioned by his father and replace it with something new. But as the new vigilante X-Acto appears targeting people he holds responsible for the building’s failure, such as the corrupt head of Gotham’s leading general construction company, Wayne Central Station becomes the focal point for a story about historic preservation and the inspirational value of civic architecture. As the story involves ordinary citizens such as journalists and social activists, Death by Design understands that the fight for Gotham’s future isn’t limited to the influence of freakish villains and the costumed vigilante who opposes them. Here, then, is an opportunity to address the general critique of Batman stories that views him as essentially ineffective in achieving lasting change to make Gotham a safe place to live. Where Batman is an effective agent in dealing with the immediate danger of crime, like the police is supposed to be, it’s ultimately up to Bruce Wayne as a Gotham citizen to influence the city and address the root causes of crime, corruption, and urban despair. While there’s plenty of Batman in the story, and the Joker is the usual wildcard (although thankfully not as a quasi-supernatural Hannibal Lecter; more like a less campy Cesar Romero), Death by Design stands out for the way it pays attention to Bruce Wayne’s civic-mindedness. By extension, we get a more hopeful version of Bruce Wayne and Batman, one who is clearly motivated by tragedy but not chained to it as we see in the more common brooding interpretations. Also demonstrating how Batman can act without resorting to killing, the book gives us an inventive engineer who, in the same optimistic spirit of modernism, has gadgets like a force field that can protect the people within it. IGN may feel that “People looking for a memorable Batman yarn, however, might want to look elsewhere,” and perhaps that’s true for people with specific expectations of a Batman story. But as far as I’m concerned, Death by Design is not only a fun story but a thoughtful, insightful and in a way surprisingly plausible interpretation of Batman precisely because it foregoes the usual cliches of superhero comics. And it’s gorgeously illustrated too, which adds to the joy of reading it.

 

F vs the Franchises: Superhero Fatigue (Part 4c - In the Shadow of a Man Dressed As a Bat)

Click here for Part A of my Batman discussion, covering Nolan's Dark Knight Trilogy.

Click here for Part B of my Batman discussion, covering The Batman and Batman in the DC Animated Universe.


Tim Burton

Each of Burton’s Batman films have jarring scenes that needlessly break their illusions. In the first it’s when Batman homes in with guns and missiles on a defiantly stationary Joker, only to miss despite apparently sophisticated computer targeting. As if this isn’t bad enough, Batman manages to get shot down from the single shot of an implausible gun there’s no way the Joker could have been keeping in his pants. The terrible choreography of the scene makes for an empty and pointless spectacle. What good are tools that don’t work as intended? Granted, the film would have been over if Batman had successfully killed the Joker on that first pass with the Batwing, but that’s an argument for replacing that scene with another that actually works. Batman Returns offers a more puzzling than jarring scene when the Penguin’s goons use plans of the Batmobile to hijack the vehicle. Where did they get the plans? Ebay? The follow-up question is: who engineers a car with a skinny mode just in case it needs to squeeze through a narrow space? Isn’t that a cooler version of keeping shark repellant in the utility belt, just in case?

In the bigger picture, though, these amount to quibbles in films that are, in my view, the best live-action Batman films to date. Obviously, gloriously gothic and German expressionist production design is a contributing factor, as few films in or out of the comic book genre can boast such iconic visuals. But the films also succeed as Batman stories, offering a synthesis of the character’s various interpretations that is remarkably coherent both in itself and in relationship to the fictional Gotham setting. In Burton’s and screenwriters Sam Hamm and Daniel Waters’ Batman we see influences from Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke, and Grant Morrison’s Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth, which is to say that this version is quite brutal with hints of psychosis. Yet the character is kept from being overly grim by drawing on more classical depictions of the characters, such as his detective skills, engineering abilities, commitment to defending Gotham’s citizens from terrifying threats, and charmingly eccentric Bruce Wayne. From a narrative standpoint, the scripts by Sam Hamm (Batman)and Daniel Waters (Batman Returns) aren’t burdened by dead-ending topical references, as Nolan’s trilogy is. Both films keep it simple with Batman as a vigilante acting (reacting) in the absence of effective public institutions to confront rampant crime and corruption, notably oversized villains. It’s in the characterizations that we find material for rich interpretations, and the strength of both films, especially Batman Returns, is the extent to which the characters and the city of Gotham, itself a character, both feel like symbiotic extensions of each other.

However impressive Heath Ledger’s Joker is, within the limits I’ve discussed, Jack Nicholson’s Joker in Batman remains my favorite live-action interpretation. (Jared Leto’s version in Suicide Squad is more interesting than people give him credit for, but with so much of his performance and role in the story cut, according to David Ayer, it’s hard to form a decisive opinion.) Notably, he’s no less terrifying for having a biography of sorts, one that doesn’t give us a sob story about a bleak childhood or asks us to sympathize with him as a tragic figure. When we are first introduced to Jack Napier, it’s as the right hand to Jack Palance’s crime boss Carl Grissom. Later, we learned of his earlier role as a small-time hood mugging people, like Thomas and Martha Wayne, for petty cash and jewelry. Already established as ruthless and cold-blooded killer, his transformation into the Joker is chillingly believable: his disfigurement by the acid removes the thin layer of civilization necessitated by his position within an organized criminal organization. Without the restraints that comes from social hierarchy, Napier is freed to act out on his murderous impulses on a larger scale, and with a warped sense of humor, as the Joker. Although it doesn’t seem to me that Batman purposefully drops Napier into the vat of acid, and both screenplay and novelization apparently support the view that it’s unintentional, the scene itself has enough ambiguity that whatever actually happens, the outcome creates symmetry between Joker and Batman. Napier killed Bruce Wayne’s parents, leading to Batman’s creation, while Batman in turn has a role in Napier becoming the Joker. Stripped of ideological posturing and grandiose mythologizing, the antagonism between two classic opponents is refreshingly straightforward with, in my opinion, a greater visceral impact.

Surpassing Batman and, indeed, all other live-action films is, of course, Batman Returns. With greater freedom, Burton and screenwriter Daniel Waters craft a film whose story is operatic in scope and delivered with even more expressionistic gothic design. What makes the film stand out is the extent to which settings and characters reflect and influence each other, painting a dystopian urban portrait with its own insular, grotesque logic. We have Danny Devito’s Penguin embodying the outcast as both victim and threat, the alienating and atomizing effect of a city without community. Representing the corrupt business elite, we have Christopher Walken’s Max Shreck to encapsulate the failures of capitalism. Michelle Pfeiffer’s iconic Catwoman presents a radical feminist revolutionary bucking both system and social order as defined by patriarchy. And in the volatile mix is Bruce Wayne, an uneasy and problematic counterpart to these antagonists, especially when acting as Batman. Literal realism is far from the point to the film, and the story – simultaneously thrilling, disturbing, sublime, and silly – is all the better for it. By recognizing the inherently fantastical notion that is a Batman story, our ability to layer interpretations on the film is all the freer for not having to quibble with attempts at social commentary beyond the abstract.

If there’s a question that hangs over Burton’s films, though, it’s that of Batman’s frequently deadly violence, sometimes purposeful (as in his blowing up a Red Triangle gang member), sometimes oblivious (setting a Red Triangle thug on fire with the Batmobile’s fiery exhaust), and sometimes as collateral damage (e.g. from blowing up Axis Chemicals). The famous “no kill” rule clearly doesn’t apply. In fairness, the rule isn’t consistent across all versions of Batman, as Mark Hughes explains in his overview of the subject at Forbes, and if there’s a trend it’s that the moral use or rejection of lethal force is not so much an argument but the outcome of storytellers manipulating scenarios to make whatever argument they want to make. For example, if you want to justify Batman killing, make him choose between saving the lives of innocents or preserving the life of a villain, out of a principled commitment to avoid any killing, at their expense. But there are cheats. You could make kid-friendly fare in which villains aren’t sufficiently homicidal, sadistic, or generally dangerous for Batman to consider a deadly approach to foiling them. You could also draw on Batman’s engineering brilliance to give him gadgets that let him effectively stun his opponents. However you manipulate it, the question of Batman’s use of lethal force is inextricably tied to the question of how Batman actually deters crime and prevents recurrent threats? Hughes might be satisfied with the idea of a Batman who perpetually fights villains he refuses to kill out of principle, but I have to ask what good it does when public justice and mental health institutions are incapable of resolving the challenges of crime. It’s one thing if Batman catches the villains on behalf of an incompetent/corrupt police force and the public system helps confine and/or rehabilitate them. But when nothing works, Batman’s fundamental purpose is, to me, dissatisfying and pointless. The comics don’t tend to address the repair of public institutions, of course, focused as they are on keeping Batman in perpetual conflict with one antagonist or another, and the movies follow suit.

My own view is that, realistically and without resorting to tech gimmicks, while Batman shouldn’t murder people when he can avoid it, the reality is that in life and death situations someone is bound to be seriously injured if not killed. And seeing that it’s not going to be Batman, that means his criminal opponents. However, if Batman is to be a credible perspective on crime, stories also need to pair Batman’s vigilantism with Bruce Wayne’s ability to influence Gotham for the better.

Insofar as Burton’s films are concerned, I can’t help but wonder to what extent Batman’s deadliness is the product of glib choreography rather than purposeful characterization. It doesn’t really matter, though, since we get what we get. So in my view, Batman’s disturbingly cavalier violence does work in context of Gotham’s overall character. Burton’s Gotham is fundamentally a capitalist dystopia in which social dynamics are mediated (and corrupted) by money and violence, not public service and civic engagement. However much Batman is committed to protecting the innocent, and however ethical he is in his business dealings as Bruce Wayne, Batman is ultimately as much a symptom of the city’s dysfunction as he is a reaction to it – the projection, like its villains, of a damaged urban psyche. With lethal violence arguing for Batman as antihero more than hero, it serves to distance us from him even as we root for his success against destructive terrors like Joker and Penguin who are far beyond common street crime that, by the film’s logic, getting killed is an unsurprising outcome. Burton’s films are almost a deconstruction, since without being able to unreservedly romanticize Batman as a hero we are made to ask whether we want Batman so much that we’d also want the nightmarish Gotham that gives him life.

Ben Affleck & the Snyderverse

Michael Keaton delivers a singularly distinct interpretation of Bruce Wayne and Batman, one so tailored to the universe Tim Burton creates, that he can be argued to be in a class of his own. But among the Bat-actors who aren’t Michael Keaton, my favorite is Ben Affleck. His ability to blend charm and dry humor with intensity and pathos not only gives him an assertive screen presence as Batman, but also as Bruce Wayne. It’s unfortunate that he didn’t get the chance to have a story to himself, instead of existing on screen in relationship to Superman, the Justice League, the Suicide Squad, or the Flash. At least Snyder’s vision for his Batman was a redemptive one and a highlight in his films. If all we had gotten was Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, the missed potential would have been much worse.

F vs the Franchises: Superhero Fatigue (Part 4b - In the Shadow of a Man Dressed As a Bat)

Click here for Part A of my Batman discussion, covering Nolan's Dark Knight Trilogy.

The Batman

With the partial exception of Tim Burton’s films, only Batman: The Animated Series and its successors/spin-offs in the DC Animated Universe really emphasized Batman’s intellect as much as his physical abilities. So of all the reasons to look forward to The Batman, it was Matt Reeves’ promise of leaning into Batman’s detective roots and delivering a neo-noir mystery, hinging on a plot by the uniquely cerebral Riddler, that excited me the most.

Unfortunately, Reeves and his co-writer Peter Craig utterly miss their mark by giving us a Batman whose detective work is always one step behind The Riddler’s manipulations. Their script knows it, too, first by having the Penguin mock Batman and Gordon for missing a clue (“Look at you two. World’s greatest detectives!”), then by having the Riddler express his disappointment that Batman didn’t figure out his master plan. By the time Batman, now suitably informed that there’s more detective work to be done, figures out The Riddler’s endgame, it’s too late. While he does prevent an assassination, the most he can do is help deal with the aftermath of massive city-wide destruction. The worst of it is that Batman never seems especially intelligent as a matter of character, never coming across as the intellectual genius that defines his usual portrayal. What’s unclear to me is the extent to which this characterization is intentional or accidental, especially since when we first see Gordon bringing Batman to a crime scene it very much recalls the way in which Scotland Yard Inspector Lestrade brings Sherlock Holmes into a case. The difference is that in Doyle’s stories, Holmes fully validates Lestrade’s need for assistance through assertive and superior demonstrations of observation and reasoning. In The Batman, the scenes are staged mostly for Batman to pick up an envelope left behind by the Riddler.

It’s a shame that the film botches its reason for existing so fundamentally, because in other respects it’s a terrific offering with a lot to commend it, including a more believable “realism” than Nolan’s trilogy. Apart from Paul Dano, whose stereotypical incel-serial-killer interpretation of the Riddler I didn’t like at all (give me the Animated Series’ Riddler, please), the cast and characterizations from Colin Ferrel’s Penguin to Zoë Kravitz’ Selina Kyle are compelling and distinct. Unlike Nolan’s bland metropolitan pastiche, Reeve’s Gotham is a suitably noir setting with a stylish character all its own. And the fact that Bruce Wayne’s personal journey leads him to conclude that Batman should be a symbol of hope to the people of Gotham, not just a symbol of fear and vengeance to its criminals, is a welcome take on a character that has otherwise been delivered so far with cynicism. Without establishing this early-career Batman as having the intellectual as well as physical talents – however yet to be honed to peak performance – to be the formidable hero he’s meant to be, the film’s strengths flounder and the film lays an unsatisfying foundation for future stories like the forthcoming sequel and the Penguin TV series spin-off.

Batman: The Animated Series

With its blend of murder mystery, tragic romance, origin story, and study of justice versus revenge, Mask of the Phantasm is arguably the best Batman feature film in any medium. And the series that made it possible, Batman: The Animated Series, remains a seminal achievement in both television and comic book storytelling. While its gorgeous retro-futuristic art deco style make it eye-catching, it’s the focus on detective work along with surprisingly sympathetic, or at least nuanced, villains that make it stand out from the usual beat-em-up storytelling. The obvious example: Mr. Freeze’s characterization as a tragic rather than a sociopathic figure. As the transitioned into the DC Animated Universe (DCAU), however, the returns begin to diminish for me. It’s not a question of quality or even entertainment value; the DCAU ranges from good to excellent and I wouldn’t argue that there’s anything “bad” about it per se in the sense that if someone loves superhero comics, there’s no reason not to enjoy watching its many series. For me, however, as the episode count rises the more I’m pushed against the limits of what I’ll enjoy in superhero stories, especially as the DCAU succumbs to the conventions and tropes I don’t like in comics. When it comes to Justice League, that limit is my preference to leave Batman out of stories involving superpowers, alien invasions, and that sort of thing: Batman just makes more sense, and is more enjoyable to me, in the context of Gotham and crime. That brings me to Batman Beyond, which I find both entertaining and dissatisfying. Entertaining, in that it works as an action-thriller. Dissatisfying, in that the series relies too much on fantastical technology and its characterizations are made to service plots that invariably focus on giving Batman an endless supply of new and recurring antagonists. Characters tend to be less interesting for their personalities than for their gadgets or superhuman abilities, and that includes Terry McGuinness, who is only interesting as Batman insofar as he has a suit, Bruce Wayne whispering in his ear, and eventual revelation that he is Bruce’s genetic clone.

The series isn’t helped by revisiting Bruce Wayne’s rogues gallery, transferring final (or simply continued) confrontations with classic villains onto Terry. Mr. Freeze is a prime example. I would have been perfectly happy with his fate left a mystery following Batman & Mr. Freeze: Sub-Zero, but he is inevitably brought back with a reductionist revenge-minded motivation. Another example is Harley Quinn, who’s not only made complicit in the torture of a teenaged Tim Drake, which makes her especially monstrous given that she started as a mental health professional, but only seeks reform after the Joker’s apparent death. Not only is her character escalated to an evil beyond what we’d seen from her previously, the series misses out the opportunity to present a strong woman character overcoming misogynistic abuse. It fell to the mainstream comics and DC movies to lean into a feminist stance and even dare to reform Harley into a heroic character.

Speaking of Harley, I’d point to Return of the Joker as a good demonstration of how I part ways with Batman Beyond and the overall DCAU. While I understand the feature-length film’s popularity – it’s a good thriller on its own terms – I still don’t particularly like it. In addition to its disappointing treatment of Harley Quinn, I’m not keen on the use of implausible, hence magical, technology to revive the original Joker (how could a microchip behind Tim Drake’s ear go undetected?) just so Terry can confront him. And the key premise – Joker, supported by Harley, tortures and brainwashes a teenaged Tim Drake, who ends up killing his tormentor only to be subjected, many years later, to technology that allows his mind and body to be digitally hijacked for a resurrection – is a horrifying escalation of the Joker’s evil that is treated far too casually. Still, there’s a story to be told out of that premise that would interest me much more if it were more charactered focused and less beholden to convention. Joker’s plan to kidnap and torture Tim Drake could have the been the step too far that finally leads Harley to make a break on her own. It could have also been the most severe test of Bruce Wayne’s no-killing principles, resolved (or, rather, evaded) only when Tim Drake shoots and kills the Joker himself. While the Joker’s plan backfiring is a fittingly ironic end, the moral impact of enlisting a kid as a sidekick would remain at the forefront of Bruce Wayne’s actions as Batman. Moving to Terry McGuinness, his Batman could face a moral challenge of his own as a new leader, patterned after the original Joker, takes over the Jokerz and engages in a series of extraordinarily lethal crimes, only to find him and his gang targeted by a murderous vigilante. That vigilante, of course, would be Tim Drake. In any case, the point isn’t my fan fiction but rather that if you’re going to tell a story involving psychological trauma – especially one so excessively brutal as to involve torture, brainwashing and murder – there should be a greater focus on character than action. (And yes, I’m aware that the film mentions Tim undergoing treatment after his ordeal, but I don’t think it’s enough.) If I have an overall critique of Batman in the DCAU, then, it’s that like comics there’s the unfortunate tendency of associating mental illness and physical disfigurements with evil and villainy. However unintentionally, this repeated association contributes to misunderstandings and stigmatizing stereotypes about mental health and physical appearance.

Ultimately, however strong the DCAU in terms of the superhero genre, I can’t help but feel that its creators missed opportunities to offer deeper and more varied characterizations than simply whatever is most expedient to set up a conflict. There are any number of approaches, predicated on the understanding that people can and do change as a result of their experiences, that could drive really meaningful characterizations for the many colorful villains. After all, criminals retire, reform, remain incarcerated, die of accidental or intentional causes, get sick, find love, have children … But the DCAU is what it is and my wish for something other than what it gives me simply points out, as I mentioned earlier, the limits of what interests me in stories. As it happens, though, Warner Bros. changed the animation style of the DCAU from Batman: The New Adventures onward, ostensibly to match Batman’s style to that of Superman: The Animated Series. This presents a continuity loophole I’m perfectly happy to exploit given that DC, by its own canon, positions its stories within a multiverse: since the characters looked different post-Batman: The Animated Series, then surely we can argue they exist in an alternate-history continuity? In which case, I’m perfectly content with seeing Batman: The Animated Series, from first episode “On Leather Wings” to the films Batman & Mr. Freeze: Sub-Zero and Mask of the Phantasm, as sharing the podium with Tim Burton’s films as the best of Batman on screen.