As a bisexual woman, I fully expected to walk out of my screening of The Batman having experienced a fair amount of what the kids on TikTok call bi panic. After all, the latest venture in Gotham City stars two of the hottest actors in the business, Robert Pattinson and Zoë Kravitz, and easily hosted the sexiest press tour of 2022. Unfortunately, I left the theater three hours later feeling what would more accurately be described as bi exhaustion.
This is not because the film, in theaters now, wasn’t sexy—though, to be honest, I’m still waiting for a Batman movie that truly fucks—but because of a recent interview with Kravitz that set my expectations for the film a bit too high. Ahead of The Batman‘s release, Kravitz confirmed to a reporter that she “definitely” interpreted her version of Catwoman as bisexual. Minor spoilers ahead.
For context, while Batman (Pattinson) is busy hunting down a crazed serial killer targeting crooked politicians, he forms a partnership with a mysterious club worker named Selina Kyle (Kravitz), who is desperately searching for a missing woman named Annika. The viewer’s grasp of Selina’s relationship with Annika is limited—she describes the victim as her “friend” to Batman and others, though Selina calls her “baby” in their first and only scene together. This interaction prompted a Pedestrian reporter to ask whether we were witnessing a romantic relationship.
“That’s definitely the way I interpreted that, that they had some kind of romantic relationship,” Kravitz told the reporter, who then expressed excitement over witnessing a bisexual Catwoman, to which Kravitz said, “I agree!” Unfortunately, after seeing the film, I think we should hold off on inviting Selina to Gotham’s next Pride parade.
I had hoped when initially reading this article that the instance the reporter referenced was not the only indicator that Selina and Annika were more than friends. Perhaps, I naïvely thought, they were avoiding spoiling another moment in the film. I should have continued reading director Matt Reeves’s response to Kravitz’s quote.
“In terms of her relationship with Annika, I spoke to Zoë very early on and one of the things she said, which I loved, was that [Selina is] drawn to strays because she was a stray and so she really wants to care for these strays because she doesn’t want to be that way anymore, and Annika is like a stray and she loves her,” Reeves told the same reporter. “She actually represents this connection that she has to her mother, who she lost.” Her mother!?
Reeves continued, “So I don’t think we meant to go directly in that way, but you can interpret it that way for sure. She has an intimacy with that character and it’s a tremendous and deep caring for that character, more so than a sexual thing, but there was meant to be quite an intimate relationship between them.”
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