When hasn't Batman been a thug?
1942-1986.
Which leaves out his first 3 years; that is, the original conception of the character. And I have to disagree that he was never a thug 1970-1986. As for the intervening years, 1942-1970, those were the years of the ridiculous, space-hopping, time traveling Batman where he was neither a thug nor a detective - if you dig that there's really not much I can say other than more power to you, enjoy those back issues.
But 1970-1986, the much-vaunted Darknight Detective years - well, let's review. A classic run in that period is the Steve Englehart material. Batman battles Dr. Phosphorus (and beats the crap out of him), Deadshot (and beats the crap out of him), and loses his lover Silver - and goes out and beats the crap out of street criminals to the point that Robin has to step in to stop him.
In those issues, Bruce Wayne is presented as Certainly Just in his actions. Dr. Phosphorus is crazy, Deadshot is an assassin for hire and Rupert Thorne (the villain in the background) is a corrupt businessman.
Does that make Batman any less of a thug for beating the crap out of the street criminals over his own emotional pain?
I don't buy it. Before anti-heroes were cool, superheroes adhered to a strict moral code and were rarely considered t be vigilantes - including Batman, who was a de facto deputy under Commissioner Gordon for decades. What made them heroes was that they didn't use the same tactics as the villains.
They didn't kill - but they pretty much used every other tactic the villains used. That's why everything boils down to a big fight at the end. The number of Batman stories that do not end that way are perhaps 3-5% of the whole.
See, the Hiroshima question is buried even in the most morally straightforward of superhero stories. Was the US right to drop the atom bomb? Plenty of people will tell you it was absolutely the right decision - it was just because it prevented the much worse loss of life that was sure to accompany an island-by-island war.
It's still a morally questionable action. Being part of an Authority doesn't automatically make you right. Being deputized to the police certainly doesn't. Police brutality is a continuing problem. Ask your average inner city black guy about the police.
It's not as simple as anti-heroes being cool. It's that in the 1970s the culture woke up to the fact that politicians lie (Nixon), governments conduct corrupt wars (Viet Nam), police can be hideously corrupt (Serpico) - the myth of the white, suburban paradise of the 50s, which never existed anyway for most people, shattered. Superheros could have continued on in their unambiguously simplistic world that reflected an unself-conscious belief that Mayberry was a real place - and no one would have read them, except maybe a few holdouts.
That's an excellent and interesting analysis I shall mull over for a while. At first glance I agree. But that's a rather ill use of the character by Nolan, since that's really not what Batman is about.
Batman has been about a lot of things. And one of the most interesting things he's been about has been whether or not overwhelming force supported by extreme wealth (the military philosophy of the US since the 1980s) 1) actually works and 2) is a morally dangerous path to tread.
The truth is I'm sympathetic - I love the 1970-1986 comics too. They're my favorites for the most part, and there's a ton of stuff about contemporary comics I can't stand (it's more the soap opera stuff than the moral ambiguity that bugs me though). But I don't want to see superheroes frozen in time when there's really interesting stuff to be done with them dealing with the issues of culture today. The Dark Knight did that in such a way as to make starkly clear to a lot of people, through metaphorical storytelling, the kinds of choices we're making in the world today.
Nothing magic about it, any more than it was magical for Sherlock Holmes to have an encylopedaic knowledge about absolutely everything. Superheroes are supposed to be bigger than life, both in their moral rectitude and their abilities. It's no more unbelievable that Batman would be able to make his own toys than that the police would capture Joker but let him keep his makeup on.
I didn't say it was unbelievable, since I don't think realism is anything anyone really wants in superhero stories, and you can't have it any way since superheroes simply aren't realistic. What I did say was that it is boring. And it is. So is Sherlock Holmes - as a character. Perfect characters are a snore. They're cardboard cutouts being moved around by the author and there's no tension to such tales. The Good Guy will Vanquish the Bad Guy - Again. Batman will find two itty clues, run them through the Bat computer, look thoughtful and then go beat the hell out of the villain. ZZzzzzzzzzzz....
And it's truer to the character, who despite his myriad abilities prior to this film series, has kept the popular interest for 70 years.
He was about to be cancelled in 1966, and you know it. He was only saved by a complete parody that pointed up how silly his books had become.
And he displayed myriad abilities in TDK. We see Bruce Wayne revealed as a tactical genius - both in terms of a penetrating one-man attack, and in terms of manipulating Gotham's politics. We see him as a brilliant detective, who apparently personally invented some kind of laser analyzer that can put together a shattered bullet with such accuracy that a fingerprint can be pulled off it, and we see him use that information as a detective to reveal part of the Joker's plot. We see him as a hero so bent on protecting others that he would throw himself physically in between weapons and innocent people - as he takes the bazooka blast meant for Harvey Dent's transport, the truck crash meant for the nebbish who was ready to betray his identity, and throwing himself into the building at the end between the police and the Joker's men.
What's unfair to the character is to try to reduce his complexities to a single scene in which he has clearly been pushed to the edge as only his arch-nemesis can do. What do you expect from a Batman-Joker story?
I seem to recall reading Batman comics where he was a detective, not a vigilante.
Indeed.
They are in no way mutually exclusive. And the stories in which Batman is purely a detective and does not engage in a physical fight - well, there's probably about two of them.
It's the nature of the genre of superhero movies that there is going to be more emphasis on action than on detective work, but TDK was praised time and again for being a taut crime procedural story for the way it showed Batman, Gordon and Dent trying to track down the mob and a crazed psychopath. It was more of a crime story than I've seen in Batman comics in probably 12 years and it had dozens of times more detective action than any superhero movie ever made.
I'm just not sure what you want because this movie was closer to the 1970s Batman than I ever imagined it would be possible to see. Is there a particular story you can name that you think would make a good model for a Batman movie?
I guess we'll just go back to our reruns and back issues." You know, just to see if he's got anything else in his bag.
