"The Batman" and the Problem with Cops in Movies

By Liam Dwyer ‘22

**THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR THE BATMAN**

In Matt Reeves' 2022 film “The Batman,” the powerful mob boss Carmine Falcone (John Turturro) is apprehended by police in the second act. It’s been established that Gotham, the fictional city "The Batman" is set in, is extremely corrupt. The police commissioner, mayor, and district attorney are all in Falcone’s pocket. He even acknowledges this as he’s put in cuffs, saying to Lieutenant Jim Gordon (Jeffrey Wright), “I’ll see you when I walk.”

Falcone scoffs at the chance any more of the police force would stand against him. To his surprise, as Gordon and Batman lead him out of his high-rise, he is met with a display of the “good” cops in the Gotham City Police Department, who arrest him.

This moment is one of the most hamfisted scenes in ‘The Batman.’ It plays out like a shot of a cliche hero team-up. This might have not been an issue if the movie’s focus was on the heroism of Gotham’s police. But it isn’t.

Instead, the focal idea of "The Batman" is the corruption of Gotham’s justice system. A scene between Robert Pattinson’s Batman and Zoe Kravitz’s Catwoman shows Kravitz walking through a nightclub for mobsters while Pattinson identifies high profile Gotham police officers, attorneys, and more through a hidden camera.

The main antagonist of "The Batman" is a result of the aforementioned corruption too. Paul Dano’s Riddler, a pseudo-Zodiac Killer, murders Gotham’s elite because he discovered how deeply ingrained criminal behavior was in their ranks.

Each person Riddler kills is revealed to have put their own interests over those of the city and the Gotham Renewal Project, a stand-in for urban reforms of the modern era. This further muddies the waters of morality in ‘The Batman.’

Sure, Dano represents today's incels turned domestic terrorists – evidenced by his 4chan style messaging board – but his hatred of corruption that drives him isn’t wrong.

The movie further builds empathy for him by revealing him to be similar to Bruce Wayne: they were both orphans, but while Bruce lived in his penthouse, The Riddler lived in an underfunded orphanage which was a product of the city’s corruption.

The movie doesn’t avoid social justice in its story but pulls punches. Catwoman criticizes Batman for being a “rich white man” but no work is put into explaining how Batman responds to this comment.

"The Batman" insists that everyone in Gotham is corrupt until it serves the plot for them not to be. Not only is this a problem conceptually, but the cliche presentation of Falcone’s arrest further detracts from the original ideas the movie puts forth.

Propaganda of the police, or “Copaganda”, isn’t anything new. While early animated shorts and films in the 1910s and 1920s like The Police Dog portrayed cops as bumbling and idiotic, the Hollywood production boom changed everything.

One of the first notable cop shows that portrayed police as admirable was the 1950s series Dragnet, which was filmed with the aid of the LAPD. Vox describes that showrunner Jack Webb “submitted every script to the LAPD’s Public Information Division for approval before shooting, and any element they disliked, he would scrap.”

This still persists in the modern era. The magazine Task & Purpose, which covers military and defense news, called 2019’s ‘Captain Marvel’ “the recruiting tool of the Air Force’s dreams.” Military.com details that Air Force advertising coupled with the release of ‘Captain Marvel’ led to the highest percentage of female applicants to the Air Force in five years, from 26.5% to 31.2%.

Another modern example is the reality TV show Cops. A 2007 study found that the officers shown in Cops had a 67% chance of being white, and the perpetrators they arrested had a 93% chance of being African-American. These statistics distorted the true proportions of race in police work, creating a sense of whiteness being good and blackness being criminal.

Even if copaganda isn’t direct in its messaging, it establishes dangerous undertones in media that viewers can take to heart. “The Batman’s” frustrating scene merely continues this problematic history.

It’s difficult to distance American superheroes, including Batman, from police and the military. There will always be a connection to values of justice and honor that our institutions seek to uphold in the stories of heroes, whether inspired by a strong example or disappointed by moral failings.

However, stories that refuse to propagandize their portrayals of peacemakers will be freer in their critiques of contemporary and historical issues. By thinking critically about the messaging in the media we consume, we can all do our part to promote these deeper dialogues.