To Dead Man’s Point.
I don’t know if you’ve read much about the new Batman game,Gotham Knights.
I’ll call it a Batman game for simplicity’s sake.
Batman’s dead, so instead you play as four members of the wider Bat family.
This is all super interesting, I think.
Firstly, yes, a lot of games complicate this relationship.
A second Batcave on Arkham Island.
There are a lot of reasons why this works.
The theatrical staging of the reveal.
The sheer star power of actually being in such a hallowed place.
But the real reason it works is much more complicated, I think.
He knows something you don’t know.
Which is weird, because aren’t you Batman in the first place?
Isn’t that the premise of the whole game?
Years ago I was taught about this concept: dramatic irony.
Dramatic irony, I was told, is one of the most complex tools a writer can deploy.
Dramatic irony takes place if the people in the audience know more than the people on screen.
At table level it’s all chats about holidays and what the weather’s like.
Below the table, though, we, the audience, are screaming: get away!
Don’t even tip!
There’s a bomb you idiots.
Dramatic irony rarely needs a bomb to make it work.
And it’s rarely used only to create suspense.
Maybe one character has had an affair, and we know about it but their partner doesn’t.
Maybe we know they earned Class President, or got expelled!
The Batcave sequence works because of a sort of reversed dramatic irony.
Batman knows something and he hasn’t shared it with us.
All this time he’s known there’s a Batcave on the island.
But we didn’t need to know until now, even though we are him.
So he has this internal life that we are not privy to.
There is a him without us.
You get this in a lot of movies too - caper movies are particularly rich in it.
The film is exploiting a separation of protagonist and audience that everyone understands from the start.
Arkham Asylum is a bit different.
Games are a bit different
And I’m tempted to say that Batman is a bit different in general.
Maybe Gotham Knights is drawing from a deeper well after all.
