Granted when superheroes in the comic strips comic pages first came to life back in the '30s and '40s America was a vastly different country. So much so that yes it's entirely likely police could have used the assistance of a billionaire Playboy who dressed up as a bat to strike fear in the hearts of criminals but was also "The world's greatest detective." That is something that is obviously continue to be minimized as the Batman continues to propagate in pop culture. In the Michael Keaton era Batman his detective work involved figuring out what the smilex products were and how their combinations prove deadly. In the sequel his detective work involved finding out who Oswald cobblepot really was and what he was doing looking through the birth records of Gotham. In the follow-up horrific Joel Schumacher films I honestly can't even think of any sort of detective work those two Batman worked through. When we got the reset with the Nolan trilogy the only detective work I could think of across the entire trilogy was when he reconstructed a bullet fragment to discover a fingerprint to track down a potential cop killer. Across three films that was the only detective work I can think of that Batman was involved with. The Batfleck, I'm stumped at any sort of detective work that he did. He was easily the most brutal Batman where he just would pop up and start butchering Henchman.
I laugh at the thought that as the film series continues, the less and less actual detective work Batman does and instead confronts villains with full force on force. In fact, the trailers for the latest film show the bat walking, WALKING directly into automatic gun fire. I'm already rolling my eyes at that and I haven't even seen the context The ideology that he would never kill or take a life gets murkier when clearly his actions have led to deaths of countless henchmen.
Even more outlandish is just how utterly incompetent Gotham PD is. How much contempt for police do the writers and directors hold to make them a minor step up from Keystone Cops level of incompetence at every turn that the Batman is their only savior? I think to the Nolan trilogy especially when the chief of police sends the entire force into the sewers searching for the villain. Who on earth would do that? That's an insane level of incompetence. Follow that up with the massive turnout between police and villains on the streets of Gotham where the police are all showing up en masse, out in the open on a public street facing down villains who have armored vehicles? Real world, it would have been a slaughter.
Yet we continue to suspend disbelief. Because, let's face it, the whole story revolves around a multi-billionaire Playboy who decides to dress up in a rubber latex suit and fight criminals at night.
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