When Warner Bros. hired Tim Burton to direct Batman after the success of 1985’s Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, they understood that the film would take a more serious approach to Bruce Wayne/Batman compared to previous adaptations. Part of this connected to interest in the Caped Crusader, which had fluctuated since the 1960s Adam West television show. Few studios saw potential for a cinematic venture to be anything other than camp, but Batman’s growing popularity as a darker, more Gothic figure — thanks to works like Dennis O’Neill’s Batman #227 The Demon of Gothos Mansion, Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, and Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke — sparked interest in transitioning the character towards a more mature tone.
This is not unlike Christopher Nolan’s onboarding for Batman Begins, which placed Batman in a realistic, 21st-century aesthetic after Joel Schumacher’s timelessly campy Batman Forever and Batman & Robin. And now, with Matt Reeves’ investigative thriller The Batman, we have another live-action film that takes the iconic superhero into grittier territory. Throughout countless iterations, Batman and particularly Gotham City have shapeshifted to the aesthetics of their specific directors. But while the vigilante and his turf can transform depending on who’s telling the story, Batman’s live-action adaptations have often explored similar themes of Gotham’s corruption, chaos, and order.
The first instance of this comes in the opening shots of 1989’s Batman, as Burton introduces us to his Gotham sprawl: a steampunk cityscape of industry, nightlife, vibrancy, and movement. Streets are wet, smoky, and grimy. People are everywhere — they get into taxis, smoke on the sidewalks, and hustle the corners for money. Prince’s original pop music for the film and Danny Elfman’s sweeping score play out of boomboxes and radios, making this Batman movie feel both very much of its time and like a fever dream combining 1980s pop culture with brooding, romantic orchestral pieces.
The early years of the “Burtonesque” style take shape here, especially in the textures of Gotham and Anton Furst’s Academy Award-winning production design. Twisted ironwork that almost looks like sets from Burton’s stop-motion animation efforts often leads to nowhere, passing foggy windows, steamy vents, and glowing signage. The parade balloons from Joker’s final attempt to destroy Gotham look like draft character designs for The Nightmare Before Christmas; more antique architecture could belong in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. And the shapes and colors that Burton regularly plays with, including shocking neons, playful palettes, and designs that could exist in some of his other works like Beetlejuice, are present. This may be Gotham, a city known from comic books and superhero stories, but it is a Gotham warped by Burton’s predilections for all things quirky.
Burton’s style contrasts heavily against Nolan’s modern urban landscape in Batman Begins. Here, Gotham looks like an amalgamation of many American cities, flooded by crumbling infrastructure, grimy public transportation, penthouses above unhoused communities, and trash on street corners. The scale, like Burton’s, is immense, although Nolan’s filmmaking style is less about exploring the city and more about keeping the camera close to the actors. Even in moments where Batman is jumping off rooftops and fighting criminals at the docks, Nolan lets Batman lead us through the environment. But even with that cinematography, it’s as if Nolan populated an already-existing city — which feels in line with his preference for filming on location — rather than creating something otherworldly like Burton.
Batman Begins also builds on Nolan’s interests in interweaving various flashbacks and time periods, like Memento. We follow multiple plot lines, from the death of Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale)’s parents and Bruce’s departure from Gotham after he nearly murders their killer, to his travels around the world, all in a nonlinear format. Every step of the way, Nolan populates Batman Begins with actors who have since become synonymous with his work. Performances by Cillian Murphy, Bale, and Gary Oldman give modern drama à la The Wire, while Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard’s gravelly and almost minimalist score grounds the film.
When the plots all connect and Nolan sets his Batman up to fight against terrorist Ra’s al Ghul (Liam Neeson) to save Gotham from destruction, Batman Begins positions Gotham on a sort of edge. The city, already so consumed by crime, could fall into the deep end, collapsing into chaos. Or it could rebuild. That theme — Gotham’s chaos or order — is present in both Nolan and Burton’s works. Despite their aesthetic differences, both set their films in a time of transition. For Burton, this means following the rise of the psychotic Joker (Jack Nicholson) as Gotham attempts to clean up its streets and celebrate its bicentennial. Along with the recent arrival of Batman (Michael Keaton) to fight crime, there’s a sense that some sort of change is on the horizon.
In Burton’s criminal underworld, he explores Gotham’s final days of traditional mob crime as the Joker becomes the new kingpin of the city. Most of Batman’s old gangsters feel like boisterous caricatures of 1930s noir films like Little Caesar and Scarface, their criminal activities done for wads of cash in smoky back alleys. Nolan’s criminals, like Carmine Falcone (Tom Wilkinson), also seem to draw inspiration from that gangster stereotype, although their portrayals are a bit more understated.
In both cases, this contrasts Nicholson’s Joker and, in 2008’s The Dark Knight, Heath Ledger’s Joker. Burton personifies Gotham’s flirtations with chaos in Joker, making him more of a playful, macabre bringer of mayhem than a criminal with any real motive. Joker’s biggest schemes in Batman — putting chemicals in hygiene products that leave deceased customers with a big Joker-ish smile and throwing a giant parade with toxic gas-filled balloons — are aligned with Burton’s own flair for drama and eccentricity.
Meanwhile Ledger’s Joker, which has become a sort of gold standard for comic book villain portrayals, wants to usher Gotham towards moral destruction through more anarchist, cynical ways. In the film’s climax, Joker pits two ferries of people, one full of convicts and one of civilians, against one another: if one chooses to blow the other up, they will be saved. If neither sacrifices the other, Joker plans to destroy them both. While the scene again positions Gotham on the edge of chaos, it also builds on Nolan’s cinematic interests in humanity, paranoia in post 9/11 society, and morality. Here, Nolan is asking if his Gotham — urban America — can have collective responsibility to care for each other, or if we have lost all trust in our public institutions and one another.
When neither ferry decides to kill the other and Batman puts an end to Joker’s campaign of chaos, we get Nolan’s answer to that question. Gotham is saved from destruction, both physical and moral. A similar conclusion is met in both Burton’s Batman and his 1992 sequel Batman Returns, as Batman keeps Gotham in order and puts it on track towards a better future. But Nolan also gives us a second possible answer to his question. 2012’s The Dark Knight Rises, Nolan’s finale to his trilogy, puts Gotham in a much more perilous situation than both his previous films and Burton’s, pushing it past the point of chaos. The film brings in Bane (Tom Hardy) to both revolutionize and destroy Gotham. Here, Nolan matches Gotham’s apocalypse with darkness, letting it seep into the film’s setting, lighting, costumes, and ethos. It becomes impossible to tell the difference between where black-clothed characters end and their surroundings begin; even though Batman ultimately saves the day, the prospect of a Gotham that could become so militarized and close to total annihilation is sobering.
The most recent Batman live action adaptation, 2022’s The Batman, continues to play with The Dark Knight Rises’ aesthetic and moral interests. Here, Reeves gives us a twisted, Zodiac-esque Riddler (Paul Dano), who exposes a trail of corruption that Batman (Robert Pattinson) must follow. Reeves brings his interest in genre filmmaking, particularly found footage horror in Cloverfield and science fiction in two of the Planet of the Apes films, to his Batman, developing a Gothic noir vibe heightened by hazy shadows, low amber lighting, and a crisp color palette of blood red and black.
Here, Gotham is grittier than ever. Its roads are crumbling and dark, with only the occasional dumpster fire for light. Walls ooze, fluorescent lights flicker, and overcast skies make everyone look sickly. Rain soaks streets and smoke hazes around street corners. In this instance, Reeves shows us an almost post-apocalyptic and diseased Gotham. As Batman says, “The city’s eating itself.”
Embracing film noir and Batman’s title as “The World’s Greatest Detective,” The Batman plays with many of the genre’s tropes. Its protagonist struggles with morality; his love interest Catwoman (Zoë Kravitz) is untrustworthy and broken. Few, if any, cops can be trusted to help save the city from its corruption. Cinematographer Greg Fraser’s camera often keeps us shaky and close to Batman’s perspective, letting us view the city as if we are under the cowl ourselves. It’s as connected to Double Indemnity, Notorious, and Se7en as it is to previous Batman iterations, a take on Batman where our Caped Crusader is struggling just as much as the city he vows to protect.
As the plot of The Batman plays out, eventually climaxing in Riddler blowing up seawalls and flooding the city, we see how Reeves takes Gotham past the line of order and chaos. He pushes Gotham into a state of destruction not previously seen in live-action Batman adaptations; a city waist-deep in trash-filled water, now under martial law and waiting for the National Guard to bring some order as people panic. While Batman did a few good deeds and stopped some of the Riddler’s destruction, he ultimately failed to save Gotham. That’s a decision clearly connected to Reeves’ interests in apocalyptic settings, but there’s also some hope to it. Even as Reeves decides to push Gotham firmly into the basecamp of chaos, the final moments we spend with Reeves’ Batman read like a noir protagonist who has had a change of heart. As Batman drives off into a murky dusk, he seems more determined to bring Gotham back to order than ever.
Reeves’ choice begs the question: will Gotham’s live-action adaptations, no matter how far they take the city towards doomsday, always have some sort of optimism on the horizon? Can a specific directorial vision take Batman and Gotham beyond issues of urban decay, order, and chaos? No, it seems likely that no matter who helms Batman, the Caped Crusader and his city require an interest in the fate of Gotham. And even if the character continues to enter darker territory — which is far more likely than it was when Burton signed on over 30 years ago — that interest will most likely remain, infusing itself with the aesthetic whichever director or creator is bringing Batman to the big screen this time.
