Citizen Wayne

 Tim Burton’s 1989 reinvention of superhero cinema, Batman, is a lot of things. In some ways it was the dawn of the modern blockbuster, the first truly successful “tent pole” blockbuster to capitalize on the success of Star Wars, in part because it transformed Darth Vader into a Dark Knight in black rubber. It was a gangster movie when it wasn’t really cool to be a gangster movie (and kickstarted that, too). It was Burton and Michael Keaton achieving the seemingly impossible, what no one could have expected from any of their previous movies.

And it was also kind of Citizen Kane.

Which is to say, it’s an unlikely example of truly exceptional storytelling. Most viewers are going to begin and end their thoughts on it as being a superhero story. That’s fine for them. For most people the simplest explanation is always going to be the best one, even if it’s simplistic and even inaccurate. The most interesting things can play to this kind of interpretation, but they have a lot more going for them.

Batman certainly does. From the moment we meet Billy Dee Williams’ Harvey Dent under a giant banner of his face, evoking Charles Foster Kane’s campaign poster, one can begin to ascertain Burton’s ambitions. Naturally you’d expect his Kane to be Bruce Wayne (there’s of course a later Batman comic written by Brian Michael Bendis called “Citizen Wayne,” where I borrowed the title for this post), but Burton and Keaton’s Wayne is such an anonymous individual he’s introduced without the other characters even being able to identify him. He’s the opposite of Kane. Wayne Manor, as opulent as Xanadu, is as foreign and curious to Wayne as his guests. He isn’t bursting with boundless ego, he’s secretly a vigilante who wants common street thugs to tell their friends about him. He’s an urban legend, not plastered across the newspapers of an empire he himself owns.

And even by Burton’s second movie, Wayne, and Batman himself, still kind of seems beside the point to the flashy villainy around him.

Wayne’s parents were killed in an incident much like the one Burton stages again at the beginning of Batman. Kane’s whole story is dominated by being forcibly adopted into wealth. Kane lives a life dominated by ambitions that are never really his, with a wild goose chase trying to solve the riddle of what was really important to him. Wayne’s mystery isn’t that hard to decipher, but it still drives him to achieve something even more impossible than Kane’s wildest dreams. And he never even pretends it’s possible. He doggedly tackles one problem at a time.

Kane’s love life is about buying love; Wayne’s is about what he never really believes possible, someone truly understanding him, a recurring problem that keeps looking like it has answers but, for someone like Wayne, probably as forever as elusive as his other goals.

You might say that this is beside the point for a superhero, but that’s what really makes the character interesting. In the comics, it wasn’t really for another twenty-five years that a guy named Tom King figures this out. In all the ways Bruce Wayne isn’t Citizen Wayne, it makes him so human it actually makes him seem dull, but he’s anything but. Even lost behind a mask, sometimes lost to it, he remains a fascinating case study of what can be accomplished if someone is truly motivated to use their resources for the good of others. Wayne runs his business well, but he never loses sight of doing right by those he encounters along the way, as if it means nothing at all to him, but really because it just seems so obvious. And as Batman, he tries to go that one step further. He’s as impossible as Kane, but in a way we seldom get to see the good guy, especially in the past twenty years, when it seems we’ve become far more interested in Kane figures, men driven to bad impulses as a matter of course, never thinking, sometimes even when it’s too late, that their lives have gone astray. And Wayne made a vow to do the right thing when his life had fallen definitively apart.

All of which is to say, even a simple idea can be complicated. A simple idea should be complicated. That’s great storytelling. That’s the whole idea.