Posted in: Games, Look! It Moves! by Adi Tantimedh, Movies | Tagged: arkham night, Batman, entertainment, games

Batman: Arkham Knight From The Butler's Perspective – Look! It Moves! by Adi Tantimedh

Adi Tantimedh writes, 

(From the memoirs of Alfred Pennyworth, esq., retired)

As I write from my modest abode here in sun-drenched Marbella, amidst retired gangsters from Essex and bright and not-so-bright young things from England, I can't help returning again and again to my time in service to the last scion of the Wayne family in the gothic glooms of Gotham City.

A gentleman's gentleman does not tell tales or sell stories to the tabloids, and I have left instructions for this memoir to be published only after I'm long gone. The media has already poured over everything there is to know, relishing Master Wayne's obsessive need to pummel the criminally poor and flirt with women in highly specialised fetish gear.

I shall not comment on the theory that Master Wayne was a deeply repressed sociopath whose psychosis and subconscious transferred the city of Gotham into an extension of his neuroses, that all the eccentrics and exhibitionists he fought were external expressions of his id, the inner chaos he was unable or unwilling to express himself. For all his protestations about the never-ending fight against Chaos, I wonder if on some level he desires, even relishes it. I have read all the reports by pop psychologists and armchair therapists with great amusement. They wrote that he had somehow summoned that contrived and mad final night as a final external telling of the mad tale that had been spinning in his head for decades. That certainly lends a sense of myth to his gallivanting about beating people up. Master Wayne always did keep an eye on his own myth.

At the end of the day, I can only say that Master Wayne was just not a very nice man.

After his parents' death, he spent years studying, searching for ways to stop crime. I tried to suggest that he used his family's enormous wealth and foundation to introduce educational programs for the poor, to invest in jobs and employment, in infrastructure, to lobby for better education policies, only to be answered, finally, with one declaration.

"I shall become a bat!"

It was probably then that I should have accepted my cousin's offer to manage a nudist colony in Malta and avoided the next decade and change of indulging an employer who liked to go out at night dressed as a bat to get in fights, who spent his money on toys that could level entire city blocks.

The rich are not like you and I. They use their fortune to impose their will on the world and transform it into their playground. Take in point that monstrous tank he spent that last night gallivant around the city in.

Many were the hours I spent watching surveillance footage of Master Wayne speeding through the streets in that tank, hearing him growl "I'm Batman" each time he ran someone over or scored a direct hit with the cannon. When I suggested that he stop killing people, even if they were criminals, he insisted that they weren't dead. His live rounds were rubber bullets. He ignored the dozens he rammed and ran over with the tank. Those men in the getaway cars his tank had squished were not crawling out of the wreckage. He also spent a great deal of time careening up the sides of skyscrapers in that thing. These are not things a man does regularly unless they gave him a great deal of pleasure, even of Master Wayne refused to admit it. As the one who had to clean his underwear, I know what I'm talking about.

"I didn't kill them," he insisted. "I only gave them a good thrashing."

By' 'thrashing', he was giving them severe head trauma, permanent brain damage, broken spines, legs shattered at the joints and faces shoved into live junction boxes to receive over two hundred volts of electricity. He always did excel in technicalities.

Why, you may ask, did I continue to work for an employer who many call barmy? Well, a gentleman's gentleman is steadfast in his duty. I ran his household well, managing the budget and the running of the day staff with a butler's professional pride. I admit my butler's bible was filled with appointments for Master Wayne in the dead of night that involved beating someone up, terrorising some other victims and generally being rude to the police commissioner and other policemen. I even tolerated his breach of etiquette in calling me by my first name rather than my last name. It's a mark of his wealth and political influence that none of them thought to arrest him. I suppose I stayed as much out of morbid curiosity as my sense of duty. That and I got an impressive discount on various goods and electronic gadgets. With a master such as him, one could never have too much bulletproof clothing.

Now that those days are long over, I almost miss them, even the years of wondering whether I would end up in jail. It took faking my death and a few years in a non-extradition country to find my post-retirement sea legs.

Now I grow weary. I rest my pen and take a Viagra to await the girls from the bar to arrive with their gak and Ecstasy for our night of clubbing.

Batman is a dick at lookitmoves@gmail.com

Follow the official LOOK! IT MOVES! twitter feed at http://twitter.com/lookitmoves for thoughts and snark on media and pop culture, stuff for future columns and stuff I may never spend a whole column writing about.

Look! It Moves! © Adisakdi Tantimedh

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