gemini://commie.space/blog/batman/

as ive described, im gonna be including some of my letterboxd reviews where they appear to fit into the theme of this blog, and this is definitely one such post. it deals with the legacy of trumpism (and centrist reactions to that legacy) in the biden era, an era this blog has wholly failed to describe due to my absence, and, in the end, sort of sets the stakes for the discussions that this blog will end up covering in the next few years.

As soon as the Riddler said that all of the elected officials would be sheltered in the stadium, and that was the bad guy brigade’s chance to move in, to strike and murder them all, I vomited on my laptop screen. I started crying uncontrollably as the bile burned my eyes. I shit my pants and, much like the city of Gotham in the film, my room was suddenly flooded, but not with water. No, this flood was much worse: a roaring torrent of piss and shit spewing out of every orifice of my body.

I mean, it had been clear where things were going before then. I understand that Gotham City is, in every iteration, traditionally full of corrupt police, but it’s a common liberal trope to misunderstand leftist hatred of police as a fear of corruption and not, instead, of the only function (and the necessary function) that policing serves in capitalism. As if people are afraid of police because there might be cops getting paid by the mob and not because police shoot unarmed people all the time for no reason. For the last decade, movies and TV shows have been full of hints at the idea of police being like-not-very-good-sometimes, but then it’s actually just that a few cops are working for a mobster or secretly dealing drugs or something. This movie is no exception. This can’t surprise anyone – it’s just the way that BLM and Abolish The Police have been filtered through Hollywood. Let’s allow that to stand for a moment, though. We can call it a metaphor for the way that police serve the interests of the rich and powerful. It is, at the very least, valuable that they show dozens of elected officials and the most powerful individuals at every level of the justice system all hanging out together as one big, incestuous, naughty family. What’s crucial is that the film paints the issue of these intertwining interests as so massive in scope as to be inescapable, which is, probably, a good thing? "There are so many bad individuals in the system that it de facto becomes bad" is about as close as a liberal can get to understanding what adults call "systemic issues." As he’s being led away John Turturro says that he owns the police; he owns the city, and the film has shown us that he’s right. But he isn’t. “You don’t own all the police,” Jeffrey Wright assures him, and we follow the camera out onto the street, where we see assembled before us the Good Cops that we hear about so often.

It makes a lot of sense why Jeffrey Wright would agree to be in this movie. From a leftist perspective, he’s one of the most despicable Hollywood liberals, being a millionaire who literally owns a gold mine in Africa. In true liberal fashion he started it with the noblest of intentions. Teaming up with a literal mercenary he met filming a movie, he said he would make it the nicest and friendliest gold mine in all of Africa, paying its workers better than anyone else, treating its workers better than anyone else. I wonder if there are any articles out there detailing how well that turned out, and how quickly those ideals went bye-bye. I’d say it’s hardly his fault – this is how markets work, after all – but if you’ve ever heard Wright talk politics you know how his brain works, so I'd go so far as to make an exception in his case. He's fucking evil lmao. When I started the movie I didn’t expect it to be the urtext of post-Trump liberalism. Wright must have felt like it fell out of his own brain fully formed. The police were actually (with a few exceptions) good, when we thought they were bad, and why is that? We were fooled, strung along by the perverted machinations of our villain. Batman and Gordon, however briefly, lost faith in society. Gordon tells Batman at one point that he doesn't know who to trust: the conspiracy seems so wide in scope, how could you know? But it turns out there are a ton of cops that we can trust. The Riddler is painting a picture of a fucked up society, and that picture is so compelling that even Jeffery Wright loses faith for a moment. That’s when you know it’s serious. How did he do this?

The Riddler, in this film, embodies the political fringe. He is, more than Nolan’s Joker ever was, chaos incarnate. He's here to cast doubt on the good intentions of our elected officials, our government, our police. He's here to send society into disarray. Characters regularly make reference to how, if he succeeds, Gotham will descend into bedlam. The fringe as a monolithic entity is a fictitious bogeyman that lives in the corners of the centrist mind. He exists to stir up trouble; rather than agitating for change the Right way, he does it the Wrong way. As a leftist, I’ve heard a certain accusation before. It goes like this: I’m so far left that everyone to the right of Lenin blurs together to the point where I can’t read the distinctions. It’s a trick of perspective: Trump and Biden aren’t distinguishable when each is a mile or two downrange in the same direction. I’ve just lost a reasonable frame of reference for normal politics, so I can’t even tell my enemies apart anymore. The same, they say, goes for the right. They claim this right here is why conservatives call everyone to the left of Reagan a Marxist. Fortunately, centrists, being smack-dab in the middle, don’t suffer from these optical delusions. They see each side clearly, and for what they are. In case you can’t hear me laughing from the other side of the country or the planet, I am. A lot of people were, reasonably, mad that Bane was an obvious allegory for Occupy, which is problematic because it just directly implies Occupy is evil. Enter the Riddler, a villain whose portrayal is sampled willy-nilly from the palette of both the radical left and the radical right. Here he is, literally the only person in the entire city who knows or cares that the city is run by old money and that all of its social systems are poisoned and poisonous and only exist to keep things the way they are, not to make them better. But he’s also amassing a legion of followers on /pol/ to destroy society and kill AOC. He is, more than anything, supposed to be a representation of the radical left, but with the aesthetics of the alt-right sprinkled in, because, of course, despite all their claims that they alone don’t lump their adversaries together as one monolithic enemy force, liberals can’t tell the fucking difference between leftists and the people that stormed the Capitol last yea–

And we’ve made it back. Here I am: an ever-growing stream of my own piss and shit carries all of my furniture out onto the street, my laptop has wedged itself between my chair and the doorframe of my room, and I’m hanging onto it for dear life, my legs trailing out the door, buffeted by wave after wave of diarrhea, my puke-scorched, blood-red eyes glued to the screen. In my brain, a sentence echoes: “this is the most liberal fucking movie ever made.” It’s not true. It’s the most socdem movie ever made, with the unspoken clarification that socdem and liberal are rapidly becoming synonyms, if they haven't been all along. January 6th, 2021 – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez takes cover, fearing for her life, as hordes of boomers casually walk into the Capitol. Most of them are really stupid. That one guy takes Nancy Pelosi’s laptop, planning to sell it to the Russians because he believes that anyone would store state secrets on an unsecured HP Pavilion from 2007 or whatever the fuck. The sanctity of the halls of government is in grave peril. The greatest crime imaginable to an institutionalist. But then, before anyone knows it, the good cops manage to stop the swarm of parademons. The Storm is averted. For the next few weeks, AOC gives interviews about how scared she and her fellow congresspeople were of the masses. And so, heroically, Mayoral candidate AOC walks onto the stage to be a true leader. The Riddler instructs his henchmen to open fire and destroy her, because he cynically and wrongfully believes that she does not represent Reál Change.

The truth I’ve known all along ripples through my mind, the reason I’ve been continuously shitting and pissing: the movie is about January 6th. “You’ve made the breakthrough,” a voice in my walls echoes. The entire film is confirmed to be about how we need to have faith in our institutions, as we already knew ten minutes before. The climax plays out as it does, AOC survives and becomes the mayor. She gives a speech telling us what we, again, already knew:

This is the most liberal movie ever made, and it’s the most socdem movie ever made. It’s both of these things because even the external expression of these philosophies is one and the same now, in the post-Trump era. 🌊 Twitter and 🌐 Twitter and 🌹 Twitter are finally one. January 6th’s counterpart in the movie is 9/11 times a million because it was the most horrifying event in human history in the mind of a liberal. It represents the most direct threat in modern American memory to the holy civility of our social systems. They went into the Capitol building! They sat at Nancy Pelosi’s desk! There’s a special place in hell for those blasphemers. Now there’s a Batman movie about it. We live in hell. But it’s so fucking important to note the fact that AOC, once considered by libs (and some particularly dumb leftists) to be a firebrand radical, is not a pawn of the Riddler. She’s not part of the plan. She’s part of the system, she’s the “good cops” of Gotham (and American) government. She’s the movie’s answer to a very nasty contradiction in the film's semiotics: the Riddler is objectively, factually right about the problems in Gotham. The system is broken and fucked up, but at the end of the day, the movie still needs you to believe in that system. How ironic that the Riddler wanted to fix Gotham, but was foolishly going to kill an elected official who wants to help Gotham. What an idiot!!! LOL!! If the Riddler didn’t like the fact that the entire government and police force and justice system were designed to prevent any change from happening, he should have just gone and phonebanked for AOC. He was going about his goals all wrong. If he'd just worked on her campaign, she would have shown him that Reál Change is possible, by living up to her one and only campaign promise: to be... tough on crime?? Wait a minute, what the fuck?

If nothing else, this movie reminded me that I am and always have been 100% correct to constantly make fun of leftists shilling for AOC and Bernie in socialist spaces every election cycle. Some lefties like to say that the thing with liberals is that they see the same problems as leftists but disagree on the solutions. I think that’s largely false: sure, they see the problems, but they don’t understand why they’re problems, and they usually don’t even think they’re problems. They’re opportunities for the mighty engines of democracy to improve. They disagree on the solutions because they don’t think solutions are required, and to the extent that they're required, they're already latent and implied in our democratic systems, and they'll reveal themselves when the time is right. Utopia is within our grasp. We are, ever so slowly, moving toward the good ending. But it’s crucial that we look at that kernel of truth: they see the problems. They know where they are. They know roughly what they look like. Unlike the right, liberals aren’t so thoroughly detached from human morality as to not recognize human suffering. But let’s look again: “the thing with liberals is that they see the same problems as leftists but disagree on the solutions.” This is being used as a beacon of hope. We can reach out to these people and show them the correct solutions, and they’ll see the light. This fails to consider a far larger issue: the fact that liberals see the problems of the world is the most absolutely insidious thing about them. It leaves them perfectly poised to point at those problems and say, “yes, we’ll fix this!” and then recuperate any and all social pressure to change things into a fucking slogan on a poster for the status quo. It’s exactly what makes them able to draw AOC’s followers into their ranks.

I’m fully submerged now. As I feel the last of my air leaving my body, I know there’s only one way out. I start screaming the truth that I now know in my soul, thanks to Matt Reeves, and somehow it breaks through the wall of piss and shit surrounding me: “Leftism is the same as Qanon! Leftism is the same as Qanon!” Nothing happens at first, but then the shit and piss spraying out of me slow down, first to a gush, then to a trickle, then ultimately to nothing. I tread "water" as the excrement gradually subsides, pouring out the door and soaking into the Earth. Eventually, I’m able to stand again. “We’ve all learned something today,” I tell the studio audience, which then erupts into a piercing laughter that causes me to nearly keel over in pain. It’s finished. I take The Batman off my watchlist. I post this review and check my phone for the time; that felt like it took a while, but I don’t know how long. My phone is loaded with notifications. “Where are you?” “I’m worried. Please respond.” "This isnt funny anymore call me" “Tell me you’re going to vote this time. Our country is at stake.” Vote? No, that’s impossible. That’s fucking impossible. My phone calendar says otherwise. Tuesday, November 5th, 2024. It can’t be. Some piss must have gotten into it and, I don't know, shit, it fucked with the electronics, or something. That doesn't even make sense, but this is a bug, I know it is – SMASH. A figure cloaked in shadow crashes through the wall. “It’s time,” Batman tells me. He’s right. I know he is. I put on my shoes, and, covered in my own shit, I follow him to the polling station and make a difference, casting my enthusiastic vote for the first all-female ticket to get the nomination of a major party in American history. The next morning, I’m overjoyed to see Kamala and AOC have won and saved America from the radicals by beating the Riddler and the Joker. I love the antichrist. I love the antichrist. I love the antichrist. It’s over. It’s all over. It’s finally all over.

living in the batman pod and eating the batman bugs

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review (written 25 apr 2022)