Batman Sucks.

I’ve always said that batman sucks. Never tried to hide it, never reconsidered it, I simply didn’t like him. I’ve always acknowledged that the movies are great, very well made, good, plot, fantastic production… but as I was watching The Dark Knight Rises, I had an epiphany. It all of a sudden became clear to me why  I don’t like Batman as an  entity, as a brand. Why it irks me. I dislike it not on a basic, comic based-superhero level, but a very personal level.

Batman, the storyline, the character, the plots and problems to overcome: they’re all very plausible, very human, very real. It takes the bad, the good, the grim, the tragic and the morally questionable from reality and becomes this constant reminder of what we are and how bad it could get. This is a man who got his parents killed in front of him. We all know that this is something that breaks a person, something that completely cracks their character and breaks their soul, making it the central theme to their existence. I take Batman, or at least the Dark Knight Rises, as a faint hyperbole of the world, more specifically of our present day existence. It’s a reminder of our unstable world ready to leave us at a state of overwhelming helplessness and vulnerability reducing us to torture guided by our most primal selfish instincts.

I must say I was troubled at the thought of agreeing with the infamous League Of Shadows -- we do need a substantial reduction of people in the world. And in retrospect when I see all the faces of those children that die everywhere because someone brought them into the world guided by ignorance or the selfishness of irresponsible sex because of its pleasure, then I understand why someone would feel so strongly about it. But the fact that these characters think that they are the evil that’s not so much a small part of human existence but necessary and needed to balance the world; to swipe the world clean so everything that must grow can in fact grow, worries me because I see this as a very likely and at times not-so-farfetched reality that we’re stepping into. I am all for social media and the world being connected because that is how Libya found international support and KONY 2012 got spread, but the internet awards an uncanny false sense of worth to everybody’s opinion making them believe that just because their voice is heard and they have an audience they’re all-of-a-sudden right.  The fact that I can see an international army of League of Shadow followers rise before my eyes overnight on the internet frightens me.

This is just one of the things that deeply disturb me about the dark knight rises. Aside from the Hollywood-esque logic regarding unstable nuclear constructions being manhandled, and Bruce Wayne surviving an atomic explosion, I don’t like the fact that catwoman is a burglar because it was either that or prostitution, that because of it she automatically gets a free pass to be a total backstabbing bitch, I don’t like the fact that they’re further tainting the image of middle-easterners, and I don’t like that Batman is such an attention (for the sake of using the whole phrase) whore.

Basically, realized that I don’t like Batman, not for the plot or the lack of superpowers as I seem to claim, but more so how close it hits to home and how it reminds me, personally, of how much disappointment I have towards humanity. I dislike the internal turmoil it ignites in my head battling between the morally questionable proposal of a pandemic as population control versus killing my loved-ones' loved-ones. I don't like the fact that people kill because they think it's the right thing to do, or the fact that when faced with power, we don't act differently than the corrupt and dishonest politicians in the movie.

But I don’t see myself getting into this every time I get asked the age-old question:

Batman Or Superman?  So I’ll just stick to “Batman Sucks.”