Enclosure and exposure

Tracing patterns between The Batman, loneliness, and Hopper's Nighthawks

Hello old and new subscribers—welcome! If you like this newsletter, follow 💌shelfoffering on Instagram and please share with a friend or two.

A scene from The Batman inspired by the painting ‘Nighthawks’

Somewhere towards the end of The Batman (2022), which overwhelmingly struck me as a film on loneliness, is an Easter egg of saturated proportions. The Riddler, played by Paul Dano¹, sits in an empty cafe illuminated by fluorescent lighting on a dark rainy night just as he’s about to be arrested. There is no mistaking this setup: it’s an homage to Edward Hopper’s ‘Nighthawks’ which is a haunting portrayal of urban isolation. Although he didn’t mean to, Hopper himself recollected that “unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a large city”.

‘Nighthawks’ is strikingly iconic for many reasons — the establishment is glass-walled, like a human aquarium to observe its occupants who don’t interact with each other. The couple sitting side by side seem detached from their surroundings and themselves, while the solitary man has his back towards us, lost in his own thoughts. There is no entrance nor an exit; in fact, the only door is on the inside, maybe leading to the kitchen. The details are scant. The scene depicts a desolate night where the blues and the greens prop up the serene yellow glow of the diner. If there’s no escaping brat green, which is (meant to be) garish and irreverent and all around us, the cavernous hues of ‘Nighthawks’ are that of the grim, yearning, and ceaseless night.

This may be an imagined world but the malaise of existence is very real².

“The enduring power of Hopper’s Nighthawks is that we cannot know,” writes Sarah Kelly Oehler. “We can only ever attempt to fill the void of uncertainty with our own interpretations — to find in the painting what we need to see.” So here are my interpretations: things that I have seen, patterns that I have traced, and threads that I have sown

Between this painting and the Nirvana track³ that plays during Bruce Wayne’s motorbike ride back home, and which sets the tone for the movie, The Batman has been viscerally personal, reminding me of teen years spent locked in my room and listening to Nirvana at an unbearable volume. Nirvana’s nihilistic, anguished, and solitary music eventually led me to Pearl Jam, Evanescence, and Linkin Park, the latter of which really cemented my lifelong affection for angst (that drives me to write this newsletter)! While I’m not my teenage self anymore, and thank god for that, I’m still unconsciously searching for narratives about alienation and estrangement everywhere.

And I found one in Blade Runner (1982), which I remember seeing as a double feature with Blade Runner 2049 at Prince Charles Cinema on a lonely, rainy evening in London. That evening would come to set the tone for my stay in the city, resolving me to watch movies alone on Christmas and New Year’s Eve and walk back home by myself. I remember Blade Runner as glowing neon and foreboding in its theme, visually influenced by ‘Nighthawks’ throughout, particularly in the scene where Harrison Ford steps into a noodle bar amidst the pouring rain.

Harrison Ford at a noodle bar in Blade Runner.

It is this theme of piercing melancholy of (city) life that’s present in Taxi Driver (1976), in Paris, Texas (1984), in Road to Perdition (2002), and in most of David Lynch’s filmography. The interplay with diners and bars, with light and shadow, with deserts, cities, and small towns, with detachment and estrangement is poignant. Loneliness seems to almost be romanticised in both Hopper’s paintings and the movies above, symbolising our insecure individualities in trying to belong somewhere, anywhere.

This is a central theme in The Batman, where Robert Pattinson as Bruce Wayne is aloof and distant quite literally, standing many feet away from everyone all the time. But as Batman, he is obsessed with safeguarding Gotham and its residents, like a shining beacon in the darkness, which, I think, is another ‘Nighthawks’ reference. Batman dons the bulky suit and the pointy mask and runs around rooftops in his personal war against crime, which draws ire from everyone around him, especially the police. One officer in particular, Martinez, loathes him. “Goddamn freak,” he says in visible disgust when Batman enters a crime scene. As the reclusive billionaire insomniac Bruce Wayne, he draws admiration from the same officer. It’s funny because he is a weird figure and an outcast, as both Batman and Bruce Wayne, yet only one persona is acceptable to the public.

This duality of personas — one that is public facing and another that is inward — is a theme in Hopper’s life as well. The persona we all know about is that he created a world of brooding and ennui through his pictures of everyday lives, that he knew the modern urban experience can be isolating, that he relished solitude, and that creative work is more lonely than we think. What’s often missing from the picture is his wife Josephine, who was also an artist.

We’re informed about this in Hopper: An American Love Story, which is a revisionist film about the artist who refused to infuse his work with the thriving multiculturalism in New York, was spiteful and abusive towards his wife even as him and his art depended on her (the red haired woman in Nighthawks, as well as most of the other women he painted, was modelled on her), and whose work flourished even as Josephine — an established artist in her own right — died unknown. Olivia Laing records this in her book Lonely City as well: that Jo poured her “considerable energies into tending and nurturing her husband's work… and needling him into painting”. Josephine’s diaries also outline their volatile and violent relationship. If there was only room for one of them, it was undoubtedly him, she wrote.

I understand the setting for ‘Nighthawks’ a bit better now. It is both enclosure and exposure, featuring Josephine in the centre even as we gawk from the outside in. I understand every Hopper painting that features a woman modelled on his wife. She is the woman in ‘Chair Car’, lost to reading. She’s the woman crouched in front of their dresser, reading in ‘Interior’, as Hopper watches from the edge of the bed. It is voyeuristic and private, similar to the woman in ‘Night Windows’ unaware of who is watching her. Hopper’s urban loneliness is as voyeuristic as it is romanticised, alienating than hermitic, lingering on the anxieties around entrapment and uneasiness.

This “loneliness of a large city” has struck me often in the last five years that I have been living in my hometown. Like Hopper, it has become my metier. Like Laing, it has been acutely painful prompting me to question the reason for my existence, trying to not paint myself as the tragic figure. I suppose you can be lonely anywhere and everywhere, but if you’ve never felt tethered to the city you live in, loneliness can drive you away from society, from small rituals you’ve held dear, from tangible spaces even in a still city. I guess that’s why I relate so much to The Batman, to Bruce Wayne’s strange distress, to Hopper’s feeling of separation, to dual personas of aloof offline but connected online, and perhaps to Josephine’s evaporation of self.

---

If you’d like to support my work, paid subscriptions work out to Rs. 3500 per year (which is Rs 291/month) or £32 per year or $41 per year.

1. Unlike the more campy version by Jim Carrey in (the Val Kilmer) Batman Forever. My favourite Batman villain will always be Danny DeVito playing the Penguin.

2. Hopper painted this scene at the aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor that prompted blackout drills in public spaces in New York, which is where this painting is supposed to have been set.

3. Something in the Way