Anna Daniels
If you’re someone who likes superhero movies, then you’ve seen Thomas and Martha Wayne get shot more times than Boromir did at the end of The Fellowship of the Ring, and frankly, it’s gotten a little boring. That’s probably not the feeling that you want to evoke from a scene where a traumatized ten-year-old watches as his parents are murdered in front of him, but after a full 30 years of seeing Martha’s pearls fall to the ground in Crime Alley, it’s hard to care. Besides, real pearl necklaces don’t fall apart like that, even if it looks good in slow motion.
The thing is, as important as Batman’s backstory might be to the character, it’s not actually something that we need to see again when the Dark Knight returns to the screen, and we know that for a couple of reasons. First, there’s the simple fact that you don’t really need to show it in order to tell a good Batman story. In the entirety of the Adam West TV series, the Wayne murders are only even mentioned once — briefly, in the very first episode, as Bruce is making a donation to fund Gotham City’s social programs to attack the root causes of crime. Even if you don’t like the campiness of the 1960s show, most Bat-fans would agree that Batman: The Animated Series is as close to the ideal version of Batman as you can get, and there are plenty of great episodes where the murders never come up.
Second, and perhaps more compelling, is that we’ve already seen that when a character is so iconic, whose origin story is so well-known, you can actually get a lot out of being more subtle with it. Spider-Man’s defining tragedy is every bit as important for his character as Batman’s is, but we saw Uncle Ben get shot so many times since 2002 that when it came time to reintroduce the wall-crawler in Captain America: Civil War, we didn’t need to see it again. It’s very clear that it still happened — Tom Holland’s Peter Parker makes a reference to blaming himself for something bad that happened in the past as his reason for fighting crime — but there’s an understanding that the audience is going in knowing about it. Giving Batman’s origin that same kind of subtlety could actually add something to the new film and also help get to the action faster without getting bogged down in insisting that Batman is just a sad boy.
Written by: Looper
