Sunday's Cool: He Was Vengeance. He Was the Night.
Kevin Conroy understood Batman like no other actor has before or since.
In his book Caped Crusade, Glen Weldon argues that there are four crucial elements to any good Batman: the superhero, the ninja, the detective and the father figure. Most actors who’ve been tasked with playing Bats nail one or, at most, two of these. Pattinson was Batman the Detective, Affleck was Batman the Superhero, Bale was Batman the Ninja, and so on. I don’t think anyone has even tried for more than two. Except for Kevin Conroy, who inhabited all four.
The news of Conroy’s death after a short cancer battle hit like a freight train. The character he was associated with is so immortal that Conroy himself seemed just as invincible. He is the least famous person to play Batman in the last few decades, but he was the best at it and, relatedly, took it the most seriously.
That wasn’t a given. When Batman: The Animated Series creators Paul Dini and Bruce Timm started dreaming up their new show, they envisioned something far more theatrical than the goofy fare Warner Bros. was known for. They wanted a show for kids that featured psychological complexity and dramatic heft, and they worked with a team of crackerjack creative talents to create the show’s telltale “Dark Deco” style. To pull off something this daring, they’d need a miracle. They got Kevin Conroy.
They almost didn’t. According to Abraham Riesman’s oral history of the show, the team auditioned 500 actors and passed on all of them. A casting director buddy mentioned that he knew of a Julliard grad who was making ends meet with soap operas. He’d never done any voice acting, but he might be interested. Conroy entered the casting office knowing little about the job and next to nothing about Batman himself. The team had to explain how different their interpretation of the character was from the 1960s show.
Earlier this year, Conroy recounted his experience auditioning in a wonderful graphic short for DC Pride. Though Conroy was only passingly familiar with Batman, he was well acquainted with living a double life, having grown up gay in a devout Catholic family. The story is a heartbreaking read, as Conroy recounts praying that God would make him straight and fearing the ridicule he saw hurled at the Stonewall activists. “Better to wear a mask, I thought.”
His family life was bad. His parent’s marriage crumbled around his father’s addiction to alcohol and his brother suffered from schizophrenia. Conroy studied theater and started getting small parts on stage and television, but kept his sexuality a secret as AIDS ravaged a generation of gay men around him. As Conroy tells it, this time of living two separate lives — public confidence and private torment — informed his understanding of Batman.
“Was I my public face or my private face? Had I made too many compromises?” he wrote. And in that question, Conroy formed the two voices he would use for the character. “My heart pulsed, I felt my face flush, my breath grew deeper, I began to speak, and a voice I didn’t recognize came out. It was a throaty, husky, rumbling sound that shook my body.”
That voice is now as key to Batman as Joker and the Batmobile. It’s the voice I hear when I read Batman comics; the one by which all others are measured and, let’s be honest, found various degrees of wanting.
It’s been a long time since we’ve had a bad Batman performance. I’m not a Zack Snyder apologist, but I do think Affleck was a keen choice for the role and made some interesting choices in how he played it. I’m interested to see where Pattinson takes his iteration. Bale’s is what it is.
For all of them, Bruce Wayne was the “real” voice, while Batman is an affect. Whether it’s Bale’s throaty growl or Pattison’s ASMR wheeze, Bruce Wayne is the man and Batman is that man’s performance.
But Conroy understood something that you can probably only internalize after, as he put it, “thirty years of frustration, confusion, denial, love, yearning.” He understood that the outwardly confident, carefree Bruce Wayne is the mask. The wounded, furious, obsessive Batman is the man.
And in that, you get Batman the superhero, dressing up in a costume to fight costumed crooks. You get Batman the ninja, leaping from the shadows to strike fear into the hearts of evil. You get Batman the detective, casing the streets for clues. And you get Batman the father figure, granting the likes of Dick Grayson and Barbara Gordon what was cruelly ripped from him.
Conroy spent the rest of his life playing Batman in various offshoots of the TV show, animated films, video games and even one live action gig as an aging Bruce Wayne on the CW. By all accounts, he loved it and treasured the character. His legacy is secure. Plenty of terrific actors have attempted to unseat him as the definitive Batman, but none have surpassed him. I doubt anyone will. And the value of the legacy he leaves behind about triumphing over the incredible adversity he faced, what it took to succeed and why he succeeded the way he did probably can’t be overstated. He was vengeance. He was the night. He was Batman.
The terrific team at Religion News Service picked up one of my Substacks earlier this week. If you’re a free subscriber and want to read past the paywall in my piece about Ron DeSantis, you can do it there!
Watched Don’t Worry, Darling or Why Are Men? The Movie last night, and man, did that thing ever not justify its own discourse. Olivia Wilde did a nice job setting up an idyllic world in which Miss Flo can tell something is not quite right. But then things continue to be inertly not quite right for another couple hours until the final fifteen minutes which requires so many people have to make out-of-character choices to get to the end credits I have to assume Wilde had already abdicated the set with Styles and everyone else was left to make up a third act off the dome. A really strong scene in the middle in which Pugh gets to match wits with Pine hints at the better movie which may have gotten lost somewhere in the rewrites.
Finished Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger, which I really dug. Might write on it next week, if I can think of anything interesting to say. We’ll see!