The Hero by Matt Reeves The Batman boldly does something none of his previous on-screen counterparts have done: when the hood is off, he sports a heavy, smoky eye.
While Robert Pattinson’s dark-rimmed eyes certainly make for a compelling, memorable look, this aspect of his character design isn’t Everyone about the aesthetics. (To be fair, a lot is about the aesthetics.) The eye makeup has a practical purpose: Bruce Wayne needs to cover the area around his eyes to completely hide his face while wearing his black hood. Other actors usually play Batman in live-action films Even wore those raccoon eyes, though The Batman is the first to acknowledge that the illusion of darkness requires some cosmetic skill.
As makeup designer Naomi Donne tells Polygon, director Matt Reeves was keen to create a makeup look that focuses on how Batman looks immediately after removing his costume.
“Matt was very interested that there were remains of [the eye makeup] when he took off his hood,” she explains. “So we pushed that forward. We actually took the hood off and looked at what was left and we used that. It’s really difficult to get blue eye makeup off and we used that.”
It was a process of trial and error, says Donne, to find the perfect mix of dark eye makeup that looks good but also lasts. Between the film’s rainy setting, sweaty costume, and intense action scenes, they needed something with a lot of staying power. In the end, Batman’s perfectly calibrated emo look was a mix of pigment, a creamy eyeliner, pencil, and liquid makeup.
“And then,” she says, “to lighten it up, we used this slightly glittery pigment to give it a little bit of light so it reflects the lights the same way his Batsuit does.”
While the dark eyeliner is certainly reminiscent of emo and goth subcultures, Donne says Reeve’s touch point for Batman’s look came from another specific source: Kurt Cobain. Reeves previously revealed how the Nirvana singer inspired his take on the Caped Crusader and how he leaned more on a tortured Bruce Wayne than a Playboy millionaire. In fact, that connection prompted Reeves to cast Robert Pattinson. Of course, it makes sense that the deeper character threads that connect Kurt Cobain and this version of Bruce Wayne would extend to their visual aesthetic as well. Finally, in the ’90s, Cobain rocked the black eyeliner look—though it wasn’t as messy as Bruce Wayne’s getup in the film.
“I loved that sometimes it was very smudged and running down his face, and sometimes it was just a smokey eye. But at any time it was never clean. It was always coming from what was left of the hood,” says Donne. “This is how Batman lingered in Bruce Wayne after he removed his costume.”
But as much as we can talk about the metaphors in eye makeup and how Batman’s lingering specter will haunt Bruce Wayne forever, Donne brings it all down to one universal truth: “It looked sexy as hell, too. Men in makeup look with black eyes Yes, really Good.”
