Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight Vol. 1 by Damon Lindelof
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Liked this. It’s a throwback to something I didn’t realize I was missing, the comics where a story begins and ends within those few pages. No long arcs spanning volume after volume, wrapping up in some sort of package or reboot. You’re just thrown in with Batman, and you watch him work.
Can I ask a Batman question here?
Or maybe it’s more like a Batman Request?
Can we never, ever show Bruce Wayne’s parents get gunned down in a movie, ever again, ever?
Every time I see Batman on screen in a new iteration, I know what’s going to happen there. And why are so many directors obsessed with the same thing?
“Oooh, dudes, I got it. Imagine this: Pearls in the Gutter! That’s poetic, right? Because it’s like pearls are for rich people and the gutter is for trash. Or wastewater or whatever. I don’t know. They have those things that say the water goes to where fish live, which seems like a terrible idea, but anyway, Pearls. In. The. Gutter.”
We got it. We get it.
We’ve seen it before, and it’s been done. But that’s not the only problem I have with it.
When my grandmother died, it wasn’t a world-shattering event at first. What happened was, over time, various little things would happen, and those were the things that made it real. When my mom cried. When I visited my grandmother’s house and she wasn’t there anymore. When St. Patrick’s day rolled around and she didn’t send a card, or 4th of July. She was kinda on this thing of sending cards for pretty much any holiday, including holidays where no one sends cards.
I wouldn’t mind seeing a Bruce Wayne who experiences grief in a less light switch fashion. Where there are these different events, these milestones that build up. I’ve gone to the lake a million times, but this is the first time I did it without my parents. I saw part of Alfred that will never be the same. This was the chair my father sat in, and it took me years to ever even think of sitting in it.
The death of the Waynes is certainly shocking and poetic, but I think what it lacks is the feeling of long term impact. I feel like Bruce Wayne does what he does as catalyzed by the Waynes, but the same way it goes with certain chemical reactions, that catalyst is burned away. The Waynes are dead, and that’s it. One moment to inform an entire life.
Of course, watching your parents be gunned down is a lot more than a single moment. And that’s what I feel is missing. It’s not that moment when your mother’s pearls fall in the gutter. That’s not the entirety of it. It’s the years that follow, the years where you’re an orphan, where you decide not to be a powerless child and what that’ll look like.
I think what I’m saying is, let’s get a good, sophisticated, more nuanced Batman origin, or let’s just skip it. I’m fine with that too, by the way. We can just skip right past if the 170 minutes don’t provide enough time to tell a story.