Robert Pattinson’s ‘Emo-Eyeliner’ Defended By The Batman Director

While the Batman we have seen in the DC comic books usually has eyes typically depicted as white slits, and almost every live-action interpretation of the Dark Knight has completely ignored this, instead, applying eyeliner on the actors in an attempt to have the exposed eyeholes of the cowl appear black. Matt Reeves’ upcoming The Batman is no exception to this, with director Matt Reeves himself defending the look.

“You can’t wear a cowl and not wear that. All of the Batmen wear that,” Reeves told Esquire. “I just loved the idea of taking off [the mask] and under that there’s the sweating and the dripping and the whole theatricality of becoming this character.”

After Robert Lowery, Lewis Wilson, and Adam West, who played the Batman in the 1940s on TV and the popular 1966 television show among DC fans, all actors to play the Batman have gon on to wear black makeup around their eyes, starting with Michael Keaton in Tim Burton’s classic 1989 Batman movie.

While the films always showcased Batman suiting up in a very dramatic fashion, the films never really showed him applying eyeliner to his face onscreen. Even the finale of Batman Returns featured a continuity error where Keaton, who is seen wearing black eyeliner under his mask in this one given scene, went on to rip off his cowl right before Michelle Pfieffer’s Catwoman, revealing no presence of eyeliner underneath.

Apart from defending the eye shadow of Batman, Reeves also went on to compare his version of Bruce Wayne to singer Kurt Cobain, who was the lead singer and guitarist for Nirvana and someone who struggled with drug addiction and depression before taking his own life in the year 1994.

“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 said in December 2021. “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. So I started making this connection to Gus Van Sant’s Last Days, and the idea of this fictionalized version of Kurt Cobain being in this kind of decaying manor.”

The Batman is scheduled to premiere in theaters on March 4.