Why the Batman gatekeeping makes no sense

Enough with the Batman gatekeeping. Seriously. 

I’m 37 years old. Yeah, I’ll go ahead and out my age, it’s part of my point here. 

Growing up, the first image of Batman that I had was the 1989 Tim Burton film with Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson. As you may or may not know, Nicholson’s Joker literally scared the hell out of me for five years and I couldn’t touch that movie with a ten-foot pole. It was an out and out phobia. 

Why is this important? Because in the middle of my phobia, my mother called me into the basement of our house where we had the big TV and told me that a version of Batman was on screen that had a Joker I wouldn’t be afraid of. She swore up and down to me that I would be alright to watch it, because she knew I really liked Batman as a character. 

What she showed me was Batman ‘66, which was being run by The Family Channel at the time as part of the Batmania that was seriously gripping the country in 1989 after the movie came out. The hype was real and now I could finally take part in it, because there was nothing scary about Cesar Romero’s Joker at all. 

I inhaled every episode of that show for the next three years as my “safe” Batman choice, and then Batman Returns released in the summer of 1992, but more importantly that fall was the premiere of Batman: The Animated Series, which to this day is my favorite cartoon of all time. 

Eventually a year or so later, I got over my phobia of Nicholson’s Joker and watched ‘89 a ton, just in time to absorb the Schumacher films in 1995 and 1997, which featured two different Batmen under the same tonal umbrella. On top of this, during a family vacation in our van that at the time had a video cassette player and TV screen(yes, we were spoiled), my dad bought a VHS of the 1949 Batman and Robin serials with Robert Lowery and Johnny Duncan in the title roles, which I watched on repeat the whole time during our trip. 

To recap, I was exposed to FIVE different interpretations of Batman in my life before there was even a “teen” in my age, and this isn’t even counting the Batman: Sword of Azrael TP or the version of him in Cosmic Odyssey, both of which I got for Christmas in the same year during this time. 

In my formative years, I understood that Batman was an evolving concept and could be done more than a dozen different ways. I watched and read them all without caring one bit how different each one was and wasn’t interested in picking a favorite at the time either. It was all Batman to me, just told differently. 

I dearly wish I could beam that understanding into the brains of so many people right now. The rhetoric on Batman in the midst of the first trailer reveal of Robert Pattinson’s version, directed by Matt Reeves, is nothing short of incredibly frustrating. Now he apparently shouldn’t be “dark” anymore and his superpower is “violating people’s constitutional rights.” This is apart from the whole “Bruce Wayne could have spent his money better” debate that also pathetically exists as well. 

Batman as a character is over 80 years old, has been adapted by dozens of different writers and artists, has graced the big and small screens numerous times since 1943, and has so many different incarnations that you literally can choose which ones you like and which ones you don’t without needing to employ fake wokery gatekeeping to disparage the ones you don’t care for. Actively trying to do so says a lot more about you than it does about Batman, a character that will continue to have “light” and “dark” interpretations long after the whiners get tired of raining on everyone else’s parades.