Robert Pattinson gives us the Batman we need

I  didn’t think I wanted another Batman movie. But it turns out that Matt Reeves’s The Batman—starring Robert Pattinson, who played Edward Cullen in the Twilight films—has the Batman we need.

I am sure many Batman fans and even Pattinson fans would like to pretend Twilight was an adolescent girl thing, something they can mock or at least ignore, if they even know who Edward Cullen is. I am fully aware Pattinson has taken many serious and interesting roles since his youthful days as a vampire heartthrob. But there are some roles that are so outsized in their cultural moment, they become ingrained in the actor’s very body. This does not mean that the actor cannot move beyond them or even radically depart from them. It does mean that there are bodily postures, physical gestures, and tones of voice that, when deployed, carry the long tail of the original performance. This is why, for example, when Robert De Niro sets his eyes just so as Jack Byrnes in Meet the Fockers, there is always a trace of Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver.

So it is with Robert Pattinson, who carries the hesitant masculinity of Edward Cullen in his body. Looking back a decade, Edward Cullen seems now like a tentative venture out of the death grip of toxic masculinity. He embodied a desired masculine power (he’s an immortal vampire after all) while remaining deeply wary of its uses and abuses, even when he used it tentatively to protect those he loved. Pattin­son conveyed this hesitant masculinity through an almost rigidly controlled physicality—talking and even laughing through nearly clenched teeth, moving with deliberate slowness, holding his body in check even when angry, ecstatic, or sexually aroused.