Darkened Halls and Gothic Cityscapes

The Batman, Klute, Titane and going to the movies

Since the loosening of pandemic restrictions over the past several months one of the biggest draws for reentering public enclosed space has been visiting the cinema. There was something about the allure of those darkened spaces of concentration that seemed both thrilling and comforting in long bouts of relative isolation and boredom that typified lockdown. I initiated a routine on Saturdays where I’d watch various short videos, arthouse films, historicals and bombastic sci-fi that I had collected over the week. Curtains closed in a mock-recreation of the movie theatre’s ambience channeling the impulse to experience something in fullness, to get the mind working and memories implanted, where ideas and emotions can be mediated through the figures and temporal durations on screen. It was meditative, difficult, refreshing and odd. I followed Andrew Key’s weekly movie diary, partly for film recommendations and analysis, but largely as a way to understand the passing of time as tied to cultural viewership and leisureliness, to keep the structure of the week in-tact somehow, if only as a framing device. Film as a way to think about the passing of time, the cultural spectacle, entertainment and critique, the role of genre and trope. 

One film that has stood quite tall recently has been the latest Batman (Matt Reeves, 2022). While not necessarily the best film I have seen of late, it spoke to many ideas that have been percolating. Conceived as a neo-noir detective jaunt, Robert Pattinson’s Batman differs considerably from Affleck’s Marvel-lite outing, while expounding on certain aspects of Christian Bale’s portrayal, namely his broody laconicism. Perhaps every film is pastiche on some level, though this Batman feels even more so, with Reeves' stated influences leading me down some historical burrows. The detective trope is done well, with Reeves citing the Zodiac killer as exemplar, and thus making a clear break with Christopher Nolan’s action-oriented blockbuster, while the gothic elements are taken to new pastures. External shots of darkening Chicago are interposed with the decaying interiors of Britain, our very own rainy fascism island, with clear nods to the gothic melodrama of Hitchcock. Glasgow’s Necropolis provides the setting for the final scenes between Batman and Catwoman, zooming off into the urban abyss. And its no wonder, too, Pattinson’s depiction is part based off grunger Blake in Gus Van Sant’s 2005 Last Days, a brooding minimalist tale based off the last days of Kurt Cobain. Grunge as a basic antidote to the overblown excess of ‘80s glam and pomp; Reeves marking out his aesthetic territory. 

I always had a certain affinity to Gotham City. It reminded me of Croydon, where I grew up. Big brutalist structures, strange transport systems, a mesh of seediness and social activity all bound up in a seemingly cultureless metropolis. A failed urban expanse, best viewed on a sulphur-lit drive over the flyover, slow saxophone riffs playing, buildings following you like nightmarish titans through the smoggy malaise. I have never really seen a film that fully encapsulates that feeling of outer city dread and sedateness. So Gotham fills the void. In that subjectification one develops an eye for the urban uncanny. The Dark Knight Rises actually includes shots of Croydon, with Delta Point depicted as the Gotham Central Hospital; Nolan and his team saw something that I did too in the tawdry malaise.

The other trope looming large is the femme fatale. Zoe Kravitz is something of a marvel in the film, captivatingly resplendent from her first appearance delivering drinks through to her surreptitious night-acts in satisfyingly tight-fitted catsuit, finally doing justice to a canonical character whose hackneyed attempts seemed destined to continue ad infinitum. There’s undoubtedly more to come from her, not least as she hasn’t fully acquired the typical superhero mask yet, nor was she wholly in control of the plot with Batman ‘saving the day’ at key junctures. Reeves mentions Klute (Alan Pakula, 1971) as a key influence on the couple’s relationship, with Donald Sutherland playing a naive, straight-laced private detective, Klute, drawn into the sultry world of forthright sex worker Bree, played by Jane Fonda, set to uncover a murder of an industrial executive. Bree, the main protagonist of whom the film should really be named after, speaks candidly in multiple scenes to a therapist providing the emotional centre to the film. It’s a great film, and one that feels both casual and tense in a way only ‘70s seemed able to do. There’s an allure here rooted in a strong characterisation of interiority and a downbeat realism that can be seen in Kravitz’s Catwoman, providing substance to the aesthetic trope. 

Between the slick figuration of Catwoman, the gothic nightscape, Batman’s grungy broodiness, and the tension and dread of its neo-noir method, The Batman in many ways reminded me of the sensual potential of cinema-as-form. In large darkened halls, softly-padded, acoustics gently lapping off surface to ear, quietly in-communion, we are faced with these large figures in visual elegance and desirous frame. Perhaps this seems passe, talking of the psychosexual in the film theatre, but with the domination of sexlessness in the form of Marvel’s growing monopolisation of film this sort of hapticality feels refreshingly invigorating. A reminder of the import of culture and art for emotional and sensory mediation. 

I recently saw Titane (Julie Ducournau, 2021) after hearing bits-and-bobs from online discourse, and being told the need to watch it on the big-screen. It’s a great thrill, with lots to say on various queer and feminist theories of sexuality and the body, from car-crash trauma, body horror and eroticism, to murdering lechers, passing into male homosociality, and the improvisatory nature of queer family (Caitlin Doherty has written in greater depth about Ducournau’s work). Sat in that crowded hall, months after its official release, watching it got me thinking about these public viewings, the importance of communal experiences and the mediation of embodied experience. All this is perhaps to say that gentle experiences can be bodily ones, they do not have to patronising sanitations. The derangement of the senses, as that goes, is also a sharpening, a redolence, a calming, an ambling dread, a discordant motion, a moment of clarity amidst the muck and mulch of modern ephemerality and alienated life. Instances of respite and arousal, dispersing attention in waves of disidentification, in a world dogged down by the neuroticism of choice and perennial opinion. Feeling something as the kernel of structuring empty time and emptier purpose.