The best Batman villain in the movies isn’t Joker, it’s Catwoman

Every cinematic incarnation of Batman seems to agree on one thing: The Caped Crusader’s most consequential and marquee-friendly adversary is the Joker. This has been expressed in many Batman movies. 1989’s BatmanJack Nicholson was the Joker, and he was a megastar right from the start. Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins The Dark KnightJoker is a film-ending teaser that can be used to prepare for highly anticipated sequels. 2016’s Suicide Squad This gives him the opportunity to attract viewers into another sub-series with a spotlight cameo. And 2019’s JokerHe has his own off-continuity, stand-alone feature. Even when the character isn’t a focal point, he looms large. In 2022’s BatmanRiddler draws heavily on the Joker’s script, while the movie suggests that the Joker might be waiting for a sequel.

Yet even as Batman tees up yet another Joker running around Gotham, it helps make a case for a decidedly different member of Batman’s rogues gallery. Matt Reeves, director, allows his fans to see a Joker for a small treat. This only serves to show how different costumes are more important in these movies. It’s Catwoman.

Catwoman may be a familiar villain to those who only know her from movies. (Or as “Catwoman.” Only 1992’s Batman Returns and 2004’s Catwoman You can call her Selina Kyle, her famed nickname. Selina Kyle is her alter ego in Batman films. Batman completes the gradual progression Selina has followed onscreen, from Michelle Pfeiffer’s unpredictable, sometimes Penguin-allied version in Returns to Anne Hathaway’s self-interested, briefly Bane-allied version in 2012’s The Dark Knight Rises to, finally, Zoë Kravitz’s undercover avenger in Batman, where she’s just as vengeance-minded as the Bat who warns her about the moral quagmire of delivering fatal justice. In the newest film, she’s more wild card than bad guy. She wants people to rob her of worse crimes than herself, which is why they deserve more than she gives them.

Photo by Jonathan Olley/DC Comics

This evolution hasn’t followed the same version of Selina Kyle, and the character’s development over time doesn’t necessarily mean the Kravitz version is better than those that came before. However Batman continues to build the case that Catwoman complements and complicates the Batman character in ways the Joker can’t always accomplish.

It has been this way for nearly the same time as Batman’s big-budget series of marquee films. Tim Burton’s 1989 blockbuster Batman was sold on its big showdown between Jack Nicholson’s Joker and upstart Michael Keaton, playing a lovably odd, low-key Batman. It’s a Batman movie where the guy playing the Joker gets billing above Batman. Yet perhaps because the movie tinkers with both characters’ origins, their symbiosis comes across as contrived. In Joker’s pre-clown days, he “created” Batman by murdering Bruce Wayne’s parents. What was the point of a young, slick career-criminal who did a short job for a stick-up? But Joker claims Batman “created” him by letting him fall into a vat of chemicals during a scuffle. Joker, however, was already a casual killer and the acid seems to have just given him some self-pity or nihilistic ingredients.

Catwoman, however, makes a far more compelling mirror to Batman in Burton’s sequel Batman Returns. The whole movie is a more successful house of cracked mirrors: Oswald Cobblepot/Penguin (Danny DeVito) is a rich kid like Bruce Wayne, separated from his parents because of their cruelty, rather than fate’s cruelty. Selina (Michelle Pfeiffer), meanwhile, is part of an oppressed underclass, toiling for rich industrialist Max Shreck (Christopher Walken), and so meek that her self-loathing manifests in calling herself a “corndog.” (She can’t even work up the boldness to swear to herself.) Through her Catwoman identity, she mirrors Bruce Wayne/Batman. She uses it to let loose and not to restore order in the city. Though Penguin is a memorably grotesque version of a Wayne-style scion, it’s Catwoman who lays bare the turmoil Batman keeps inside.

Pfeiffer’s performance, like Heath Ledger’s in the Dark Knight trilogy, goes beyond those of her talented co-stars — and at times, beyond what’s been available on comics pages. One of her best scenes is itself a mirror: After Burton shows Selina running through her lonely evening routine, he repeats the scene after she “dies” and is “resurrected.” (The specifics of that are left wonderfully, impressionistically unclear.) After her transformation, Selina instinctively returns to her apartment and attempts to go through her usual motions, then breaks free and destroys what’s in front of her. Catwoman is born from the passion that she feels.

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It’s a more harrowing bit of operatic anguish than almost anything else in a superhero movie, and it echoes in the background of the subsequent scenes where Pfeiffer vamps and quips. In spite of Selina’s formidable sewing skills, the uneven seams of her psyche keep tearing, something Burton visualizes at the climax of the film, where both she and Bruce Wayne half-emerge from their costumes, willing to reveal themselves if it means getting what they want.

For Selina, it’s revenge. For Bruce, it’s Selina. Both characters met in the middle of the 20th century. Batman Returns, both unaware of each other’s costumed identities for most of the film. Entwining their stories never reduces Selina to a mere love interest, it only makes her misbehavior as Catwoman feel personal and inextricable from Batman’s life in a way that the Batman/Joker melodrama in the earlier film never is. Jack Nicholson’s Joker does “unpredictable” stuff that mostly reads as the actor’s shtick: fun without the complexity of his best work. Pfeiffer is hilarious, badass, and filled with hurt that keeps Batman and the audience guessing until the very end.

Selina Kyle can’t triumph so handily over the Joker in Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy. Heath Ledger’s version of the character became the definitive movie version, with good reason. It’s terrific work. Yet the function of Anne Hathaway’s Selina Kyle is arguably just as important in the overall arc of the trilogy, if not more so. The Dark Knight Rises, the trilogy installment that features her, is, to date, the only Batman sequel to offer substantive and satisfying closure for her, and the tentative relationship she shares with Christian Bale’s Bruce Wayne is a big part of bringing the material in for an affecting landing.

Unlike the Joker, the Nolan-verse Catwoman isn’t devoted to chaos. Unlike the various mobsters or League of Shadows members, she isn’t after power. This Catwoman steals as part of an exit strategy, something Bruce doesn’t have, and steadfastly refuses to develop throughout the movie. He starts it almost as a retired recluse. Selina is more aware of the frustrations over Gotham’s inequality and the ways it will fuel unrest, even though the crime rate drops. She’s also, perhaps paradoxically, the one telling Bruce Wayne that he doesn’t owe his city anything.

While the movie may not agree that her points do dovetail — at least, Nolan may feel Bruce could give the city a little more, whether he owes it anything or not — Gotham City can’t rest on the actions of a single man. That man, in particular, needs an escape strategy if he hopes to continue his work one day. It’s a stark contrast with the trilogy’s version of the Joker, last seen musing that he thinks his conflict with Batman is destined to continue “forever.” That idea of their eternal struggle is accurate to the comics. But whether the point was forced by Ledger’s death or Nolan simply interpreting Batman’s fate differently, Dark Knight Rises up rejecting Bruce’s future with Joker in favor of his future with Selina.

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Hathaway’s Selina seems more self-interested than truly wicked, but she does sell Batman out to Bane. On the other hand, pretty much everything Kravitz’s Selina does in BatmanIt is quite sympathetic. Her “crimes” include investigating the disappearance of her friend (or girlfriend?She also seeks revenge on her father’s murder and steals from the mob. It’s fair to say that this Catwoman doesn’t especially belong in the same police lineup as the Penguin or the Riddler.

But that moral ambiguity — the grays and blacks of the shadows where costumed vigilantes hang out — is probably always going to be a part of contemporary Batman stories, so it makes sense not to focus on Catwoman as a committed career criminal. A similar approach worked with Harley Quinn. She has been an interesting movie character for the past decade and is a better example of the Joker. For a movie where Batman only has a few notable scenes out of costume, it’s especially important to feature a character who can break through that barrier, and Kravitz’s onscreen heat with new Batman Robert Pattinson does that, however briefly. In a movie where Alfred is sidelined and James Gordon keeps calling his uneasy ally “man,” Selina Kyle provides a few important moments of genuine emotional intimacy, humanizing a particularly grim-faced Batman. If the sequel isn’t called The Bat and the CatAs the film suggests, there is something wrong.

This newest Catwoman also arrives at a time when many of Marvel’s biggest superhero movies seem more reluctant than ever to depict romantic relationships, or even sensual chemistry. Marvel’s honchos are concerned about alienating young viewers and younger viewers or opening the door to accusations of sexism. Sometimes, the male-centric nature so many superhero stories makes it difficult for cinematic Catwomen to fill multiple roles simultaneously. But this also gives Catwoman a dimensionality her more virtuous or more maniacal counterparts don’t often get.

Catwoman doesn’t need to be defined by her relationships to various Batmen, of course. A solo film would be a great option for her, like the 2004. CatwomanHalle Berry’s portrayal of Patience Phillips (not Selina Kyle) seems like an exception to the rule. While it is not a story about Batman, the main problem with this movie is the way that it was created as a parallel knockoff to the whole previous Batman film series: Catwoman comes from a chemical-adjacent background (akin to the Joker). BatmanSelina, a cat who revived the spirit of Selina (and other cats) Batman ReturnsShe is also a super-cute cartoon girl who lives in a bizarre world with crazy angles and cartoon garishness (e.g. Joel Schumacher Batman movies).

Keep in mind, though, that Todd Phillips’ 2019 Joker is equally larcenous: It’s just more pretentious about ripping off vastly better movies like Comedy King Taxi driver. JokerThe Waynes are steered to their death by the Waynes, inadvertently reviving the same bad symbiosis from 1989. Batman. Although the Joker is an excellent villain, cinematically, has he really surprised us? The Dark Knight? For all that’s asked of Catwoman — to be a villain who isn’t all bad, to play love interest to a character who can’t fully commit to love, to fight with and against Batman in equal measure, to parallel his heroes’ journey and offer him different path s— she keeps finding ways to sneak into these Batman movies and steal them. Rococo psychos are not permanent, but Catwoman has been a constant.