The Batman (Catching Foxes Ruins the Movies)

Episode 334 · March 12th, 2022 · 1 hr 5 mins

About this Episode

Spoiler review. Don't plan on watching the movie? Then you will still love this episode as we discuss the bigger themes, film, and the hero's journey.

This review contains spoilers. The spoiler horn is sounded at the very beginning. If you have no interest in this movie, I think you will still get something out of this, especially the art of film and how Grunge still owns us in our late 30s and 40s. Now if you will excuse me, I have to plop in all of the ads and record a new one because Luke got sick and his voice is shot.

Luke's Show Notes

Matt Reeves Background

  • Older Gen X
  • Childhood friend on JJ Abrhams
  • Cloverfield director

Why ‘Something in the Way’ as the main thematic music?

  • Bridge, Kurt Cobain
  • “When I write, I listen to music, and as I was writing the first act, I put on Nirvana’s ‘Something In The Way,'” Reeves, 55, told Empire. “That’s when it came to me that, rather than make Bruce Wayne the playboy version we’ve seen before, there’s another version who had gone through a great tragedy and become a recluse.”
  • What’s in the way?

The Central Theme: the response to trauma and the obstacles of existence

  • Oh, you Gen Xers
  • Vengeance is carnal, hope is a choice

“Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two sisters without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance.” - Han Urs von Balthasar

In this regard, the teaching of Sacred Scripture is unequivocal. The Israelites were already encouraged to love one another: "You shall not take vengeance or bear any grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbour as yourself" (Lv 19: 18). At first this commandment seems restricted to the Israelites, but it nonetheless gradually takes on an ever broader sense to include the strangers who sojourn among them, in remembrance that Israel too was a stranger in the land of Egypt (cf. Lv 19: 34; Dt 10: 19). - John Paul II

The world needs God. We need God. But what God do we need? In the first reading, the prophet tells a people suffering oppression that: "He will come with vengeance" (Is 35:4). We can easily suppose how the people imagined that vengeance. But the prophet himself goes on to reveal what it really is: the healing goodness of God. And the definitive explanation of the prophet's word is to be found in the one who died for us on the Cross: in Jesus, the Son of God incarnate, who here looks at us so closely. His "vengeance" is the Cross: a "No" to violence and a "love to the end". This is the God we need. - BXVI to German Bishops

What does this movie say about modern society?

  • Gen Xer made good
  • Batman as a reflection
  • Director/Writer
  • Society
  • The Ringer- the end of the 80s
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