- Do you have any examples handy (fictional or otherwise) of other rich people who’ve used their money to just solve a problem outright? How’d that work out for them?
- Let’s say Bruce Wayne was able to somehow use money to stop crime in Gotham City. No Batman, no weirdo surveillance state with robots, just a shitload of money thrown at a well-considered public safety strategy that focuses on the root causes of crime rather than ongoing escalation of tension through armaments and violence. You don’t want a Batman story; you want something else. Go find it, or if it doesn’t exist yet, write it.
- I’m not an economist but even if Bruce Wayne is now a capitol-B “Billionaire,” it’s hard to imagine how he could pay to eliminate crime in such a way that it lasts for any reasonable amount of time. Maybe he funds some kind of annuity that just keeps tossing off dividends and interest to fund this project for years or decades? Is that even possible?
- Let’s say he eliminates crime. Crime no longer exists in Gotham City. What about the suburbs? What about the counties next door? Is he building some kind of fortified city-state in the middle of America? Cause if he isn’t, I guarantee there’s plenty of crime happy to be bussed into Gotham to test its new public safety strategy.
- Crime is gone in Gotham. What about homelessness? Poverty? Education? Crisis readiness? A pandemic? A natural disaster? Infrastructure? How do you pay for one or two of those things and then not wonder what the fuck happens to the other ones? Does eliminating any one of the Big Societal Problems Facing A Major American City somehow make the others evaporate too?
- You can do a lot with Batman, but at their heart, most of the best Batman stories function at a level percolating just a couple inches above hot pulp garbage. This is a superhuman (but still human!) fantasy, revenge porn, escapist violence, whatever you want to call it or whatever about it gets you off. I can’t think of a single great Batman story that somehow manages to intellectualize its approach to the character and then somehow emerge on the other side with the visceral thrills of a guy in a bat costume punching a bad person in the face hard.
- “What about Christopher Nolan’s trilogy?” Okay, that’s the closest I’ve seen, too. But I don’t know if it fully manages to succeed, or just creates enough of an intellectual landscape around it to make the punching seem thoughtful and mature. Lots of modern superhero stories use dumb ideas to playact as incisive social commentary.
- If the idea is to create Gotham as a utopia where there is no crime, and then depict that utopia torn apart by crime that can’t be stopped, then I guess that’s mildly interesting? But the prior state that Batman/Bruce Wayne is yearning for can’t be a peaceful, happy Gotham. It’s always his parents. His inciting event isn’t that Gotham is a shithole; it’s that a criminal in Gotham killed his parents. Batman is trying to return to a moment when they were in his life, or when he knew the safety of their presence; he’s not trying to fix Gotham. That’s not something he really wants, whether he realizes it or not.
- And if Bruce Wayne “fixes” Gotham, it’s not going to make him feel better. It’s not going to quiet his inner rage or fill the parent-shaped hole in his heart. Maybe he becomes obsessed with using money to solve problems instead of beating up criminals? Maybe that makes him realize he should just go beat up criminals because it feels better? But then it’s just ultimately a long road to a Batman story, when your boy could have been beating up bad guys from the jump. (And if he DOES feel better after using money to solve societal problems in Gotham, then please refer back to number 2. That character is not Batman or Bruce Wayne. Make your own dude.)
- There’s often a political agenda behind this idea, as though Bruce Wayne should not only use his money instead of his bitchin’ badass Batcostume and persona to save Gotham, but should do it to adhere to a specific political point of view. Batman is apolitical. He beats the shit out of criminals. That’s his appeal and his limitation.
- The real question here is this: Does Batman act out of service to a greater good, or does he act out of selfish vengeful gratification? I think he does both, but the balance is always a little skewed toward the vengeance. So this idea that Bruce Wayne would realize he could do more good with his money than with a Batarang? It would never, ever even occur to him.
Oonta Goota 