I love Matt Reeves's The Batman, to the point that I have watched the movie at least eight times—I'm not actually certain of the total number. One week, I watched The Batman three times, and I continued to watch it, but all subsequent viewings started to blur together. These facts are often met with horror and dismay from those around me, including people who have watched and enjoyed The Batman. For my actions, which have harmed no one, I have faced relentless interrogation, even persecution. What everyone ultimately fails to comprehend is that this behavior is fine and normal.
The primary sticking point for many of my detractors is The Batman's three-hour runtime, which, multiplied by eight, is 24 hours of my life spent watching The Batman. I do not think we want to begin tallying what people have spent 24 hours of their life doing. Some people have watched Californication 1.71 times and How I Met Your Mother 10 times, and they even work for this very publication. Some people have spent 24 hours of their life watching Instagram reels of comedians doing crowd work. Indeed, some people have easily spent 24 years of their life watching the New York Mets. Twenty-four hours of watching The Batman is practically wholesome. Also, I would like it on the record that The Batman's approximate runtime with credits is actually two hours and 56 minutes, which makes it closer to 23 hours and 30 minutes of my life spent watching The Batman.
Is The Batman perfect? Nope! Most egregiously, the film's director appeared to have confused "chemistry" with "having two attractive people with opposing levels of clothing coverage bring the movie to a screeching halt by gazing at each other," rendering the romantic subplot disposable. Also, Robert Pattinson's Batman needed to cry. But something doesn't have to be perfect to be rewatched. In fact, perfection is at times antithetical to making for a perfect rewatch. There are many perfect things I only need or want to bear witness to once.
A perfect rewatch movie needs to fall short in a certain way. Part of the temptation is hoping that this time, somehow, it might be different. Maybe this time Sir Battinson would simply shed a dramatic, manly tear over Alfred in the hospital! It also needs to scratch some itch, usually through a plot that is rewarding, even if—or maybe especially—you know exactly what's coming.
The Batman scratches the perfect comic-book retelling itch. (After watching it for the eighth time, I watched both The Dark Knight and The Lego Batman Movie in rapid succession, so I'm speaking from a broader basis of knowledge here.) It's not a pure origin story, which I would be deeply uninterested in watching more than once, but it picks the moment when a superhero's conception of himself changes. While the plot is action-packed, the true stakes are internal, which make for my favorite superhero stories.
Superhero politics are fundamentally broken. Any attempt to make a broader social critique through superhero media will faceplant into the genre-necessary act of legitimizing the One Vigilante Who, Despite His Flaws, Is Correct And Also Law Enforcement. Trying to reconcile progressive, communal politics with the superhero figure results in messaging that is, at best, confused. At worst, it's fascistic. This is true of The Dark Knight as well, but I found the most extreme of clawing-at-the-bars-of-the-superhero-genre writing to be in Chip Zdarsky's Daredevil run.
Leaning into the superhero of it all is one solution, but The Batman takes a different tack by taking the burdens of the superhero genre away from Batman and pushing them onto the setting instead. The most superhero thing Battinson does in the movie is unleash a prototype wingsuit, ram into an overpass, and walk away mostly unscathed. Other than that, Gotham City—canonically in New Jersey, by the way—is the fantastical, stylized, unrealistic star of the movie, and its primary actor. It is a cesspool that has to wall off the sea to keep from washing away, and perhaps due to its unique microclimate, perpetually raining. It has elevated rail. Wayne Manor is an absurd gothic tower in the middle of the city. It is night in Gotham City at least 80 percent of the time. It's cool to look at!
The relentlessness with which the plot and also Gotham City just sort of happen to Battinson is what makes the movie so rewatchable. You know when the punches are going to land, where the characters are going to run off for clues next, how Battinson will solve the riddle, when to tune out because Catwoman and Battinson are going to stare into each other's eyes, the whole thing with the sea wall, and how Battinson is going to be too late for most of it. In some ways, The Batman is kind of like Michael Clayton, which I have also watched approximately eight times. Also, Robert Battinson is my close personal friend, and I must have imprinted on him when I saw the movie for the first time in theaters while visiting a friend in Princeton, N.J., which, as previously mentioned, shares a state with Gotham City.
Most beautifully, each rewatch still does reveal something new. On my eighth watch of The Batman, a friend of mine—who had himself watched The Batman five times up to that point—pointed out how often the characters say, "Jesus," or some variation thereof. If you do conduct your own rewatch of The Batman, I recommend counting that, and also saying "Jesus" like Jeffrey Wright to everyone else in your life. I can't wait to see how many times they say "Jesus" in The Batman Part II—whenever it comes out.
