The American Spectator
How the Caped Crusader’s latest crimefighting caper is derailed by Critical Race.
"Matt Reeves’ The Batman (2022) is a beautiful disaster. Gotham is a rain-lashed living contradiction, with Times Square-sized LED billboards built into 19th century Gothic gargoyle-studded skyscrapers. The fight choreography features moves as brutal as Ben Affleck’s, or the Arkham videogame series. But beneath the superficial veneer of neo-noir lighting and the war drums of the score, is a rotten plot infested with progressive talking points. From the declining sales of DC’s comics, to the overt and covert racial politics of this newest Hollywood adaptation, the Dark Knight Detective is being damaged by the ideological obsessions of unimaginative writers.
"As a Batman aficionado, I am infuriated by the legacy media clapping like seals for The Batman’s “more diverse cast,” without buying the comics which keep the character’s legacy alive. But Zoë Kravitz’s casting as a black, bisexual, polyamorous Catwoman is as fraught with issues for progressives as it is for those who care about continuity.
"It is contemptible that the tale of tragedy turned heroism that Batman has been for over 80 years has fallen prey to the critical race theory narratives of contemporary politics.
"A great example of how the left eats its own is progressives’ complaints that Claudia Rankine’s police brutality poem Citizen focuses on black Americans and so racially excludes Latinos. The same logic goes for Kravitz’s Catwoman, whose casting erases the character’s Cuban heritage via Catwoman’s mother Maria. After she fled Castro’s communism, Maria Kyle’s refugee status was one of the reasons why Catwoman grew up impoverished and developed a talent for theft. A line by her illegitimate father alludes to this in the film: with Falcone inverting the comics’ criticism of socialist dictatorships by having the profit-driven villain joke “That’s why communism didn’t work: austerity.” In ascending the progressive stack of oppressed identities to make Catwoman black, Reeves and the rest of the film’s crew have erased a part of Catwoman’s canonical non-white heritage which was instrumental to her character.". . .
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