How is kindness a bad thing? I thought that was universally agreed to be a good message to have in a piece of media. I guess the excuse is they don’t want media to have messages at all but like, how would you even have a movie where the hero has no values that they stand for?
Batman is definitely cool. That just can’t be disputed. He definitely spends a fuck ton of money on the city. His main obstacle, is the writing. Gotham City has to be awful. It has to be, or there is no story. He can’t kill villains regularly, because of plot. If the problems were capable of being fixed, then he’d be on of the best possible people to solve them.
The problems are capable of being fixed. The people of Gotham take to crime to survive because they have been squeezed by the ruling class and it’s the only way to protect what remains of their material conditions.
The Waynes and people like them, the owning class, prop up a system of inequality that forces these conditions to endure.
Bruce Wayne, the richest and most powerful of all, is hurt back (his parents killed) and instead of solving the systemic issues, he doles out individualized corporal punishment as a vigilante.
It’s the ultimate extension of “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”: Rich people will never acknowledge that the very system that provides them power is the ultimate root of all the issues they intend to solve via violence. Batman is himself the ultimate villain of the story.
I wish. He doesn’t even dole out corporal punishment, at least as far as those words mean to the state that he continually props up.
I agree his biggest problem is the writing, because in reality, he’d be the best person to fix the problems (as you say)… outside of his freakish inability to kill irredeemable trash.
Though that’s why he sucks so bad when reconciling everything back to reality. He absolves the rich of fixing problems because not even the “cool” insanely rich and very willing philanthropist Batman can fix a single city let alone a country, and heaven forbid killing irredeemable trash!
He’s inadvertently a perfect example of how blind capitalism and boundless optimism are absolute braindead garbage perspectives.