The Lego Batman Movie succeeds for most of the reasons you would hope and expect a children’s film to succeed. It’s consistently funny and clever, it hums a long at a quick pace and closes out in a tight 90 minutes, and the emotional beats are genuinely sweet and well-earned.
But beyond being a strong children’s film, the film does something very interesting with the character of Batman, something that feels downright radical given how much time, money, thought, energy, and money now surrounds Ol’ Bats. The film doesn’t just use the character of Batman; it reclaims him for audiences everywhere.
When a character has been around for a century or close to it, there has to be some elasticity to their make-up. If a character is too much of a fixed point, the conditions surrounding their popularity and resonance change, and they become artifacts of a different era. Just look at all the trouble people have been having trying to keep Tarzan relevant.
No, if a character is going to endure, they have to be flexible.
Batman has long been a poster child for this sort of Zelig-y adaptive process. In his various incarnations he’s been a standard crimebuster, a hyper-cuddly father figure, a jet-setting adventurer, a super spy, a noir-style detective, a ninja, and a groovy space voyager. By turns he’s been the head of an expansive Bat-family of cheery sidekicks and allies and a brooding loner with a misery streak a mile wide.
No one of these incarnations is the ‘real’ Batman. They all are. Each version, whether the neck-snapping Dark Knight or the endlessly chipper Adam West playboy, has represented a valid and ‘true’ interpretation of the basic character outline (dead parents, vow of justice, lots of gadgets).
But then things took a turn. Frank Miller redefined the character (and, if we’re being honest, the entire superhero medium) with the one-two punch of The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: Year One. The Dark Knight Returns brought heavy doses of grime, grit, and grief against Batman, repainting the Caped Crusader as a proto-fascist madman.
And with Year One, Miller took an origin story that Bob Kane and Bill Finger devoted a handful of panels to and expanded it into a full-length graphic novel. Not only was the entire iconography of Batman pulled apart and examined in minute detail, but this mythic story was repositioned to take place in a Gotham City that now swam in prostitutes, needles, and vice. The Art Deco design of the gothic metropolis was replaced with grungy sidewalks and run-down neighborhoods. This was Batman in the ‘real’ world, so to speak, and comic fans sparked to it as this version as the ‘real’ Batman.
(Sidenote: Around the same time, Alan Moore and Brian Bolland pulled a similar trick with The Joker in The Killing Joke. Whereas beforehand The Joker was often depicted as a malicious but merry prankster figure, The Killing Joke gave him a jagged edge [not least of all because of the physical and sexual assault against Barbara Gordon/Batgirl] that no one has been able to shake off ever since. A few months later, The Joker would kill Robin and all bets were off.)
That’s been the prevailing logic governing much of Batman’s canon ever since. Batman is the ‘real world’ superhero, which for the validation-obsessed comic fans gives him a higher placement than the ‘juvenile’ likes of Superman. Fans champion not only the so-called realistic character, but obsess over the signifiers of alleged maturity. That means Batman stories tend to be valued only in as much as they showcase grit and grime, bodily trauma and mutilation, emotional torment and distress. This is a Batman devoid of humor and goodwill, a po-faced martyr who treats everyone around him like shit, stays one-step ahead of a full-scale mental breakdown at all times, and is surrounded by villains who layer on torture with a fetishistic detail.
(This is the thinking that gets you Joker cutting his face off and nailing it to a wall, and yes, that’s something that really happened in a comic book series that is [allegedly] still aimed at children.)
But it’s not enough for this subsection of Bat-fans to champion this version of the character, they also have to denigrate the ‘immature’ other versions. The Adam West series and film are ignored most of the time, and when they are acknowledged it’s as a source of embarrassment and Ed Wood-ian incompetence. Cartoons like The Brave and The Bold have continued to feature a cheery Batman in a colorful universe, but examples like that are largely dismissed as ‘kids’ stuff’ and not true to the Real Batman.
(Sidenote: Plus, the grubby-grime has spread to DC animation as well, with several of their most recent films being rated R and slathering on the violence and overt sexualizaton of the female characters.)
When Will Arnett’s Lego Batman popped up in The Lego Movie a few years back, it was a giant, gleeful middle finger to this version of the character. Lego Batman got a lot of mileage just out of pointing out how, well…silly Batman is. Lego Batman works so hard to point out how dark and tormented he is, it only highlights how dumb and juvenile that obsession with angst is when you pull back from it.
The Lego Batman Movie continues in that same vein. It takes a special delight in taking the piss out of the basic concept of Batman (an early speech by Rosario Dawson’s Barbara Gordon dismantles every logical fallacy surrounding the character) and the mythos and attitude surrounding the character, and all the strange permutations that he has undergone.
But the film does something even more important: It makes the point that all those conflicting versions of Batman all count. When a threatened security guard counters The Joker’s threats by pointing out that Batman always foils him, he mentions both The Dark Knight’s “two boats” scheme, and Batman’s “parade with the Prince music.” Both versions are ‘true’; both versions are ‘accurate’ to Batman and The Joker and their rivalry.
Or look at how the film uses the classic Batman rogue’s gallery. On the one hand, it’s an excuse to pile the film high with in-jokes for comics and movie fans (best of all might be bringing in Billy Dee Williams to voice Two-Face), but it also serves to unify all of the character’s bizarre highs and lows under one umbrella. So we get a Bane who looks like the traditional luchador-inspired mass of muscles, but whenever he speaks it’s with Tom Hardy’s patented “walrus butler” voice from The Dark Knight Rises. And while all the classic rogues are represented, the film also features D-list weirdos like Calendar Man or The Condiment King, both of whom are real villains. Silly, serious, it all counts.
Nowhere is this affectionate uniting of a century’s worth of madness more noticeable than the way The Lego Batman Movie reclaims the Adam West incarnation of the character. Far from dismissing it, Lego Batman lists that movie right in the canon alongside the more highly regarded Tim Burton and Christopher Nolan films and declares it an equal.
Hell, the emotional and thematic climax of the film is the moment when Batman and Robin begin working together so well that when they fight bad guys, they do it so well that the classic “POW”s and “WHAM”s start appearing.
The Lego Batman Movie works to include every incarnation of cinematic Batman into one cohesive version, going so far as to give hat-tips to the old black and white serials that were the character’s first live action appearances. A lot of that is the cheerful “everything and the kitchen sink” approach that is rapidly coming to define these Lego movies, but director Chris McKay and his team of writers take it a step further. By simplifying the character down to his mythic, almost archetypal elements, and by establishing each and every version of the character as being equally valid, they have reclaimed Batman from the drudgery of grim-dark posing and convoluted continuity. They restore Batman to his foundations and invite the audience, young or old, to build from there.
Everyone is always going to have their preferred version of a character this expansive, and the version that has the largest cultural currency will cycle and change as the years go on. But Lego Batman gives this upcoming generation a head start, assuring them that they can feel free to love and celebrate and, maybe someday, write, draw, or direct any version of the character they wish.
After all, every Batman is the real Batman.
Yes, even the one with nipples.