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| Monday, July 16, 2012 02:12 PM |
| On the Viewer - Batman Begins |
 by Fëanor |
I'm going to see the conclusion of Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises, tomorrow, so in preparation I decided to re-watch Batman Begins and The Dark Knight last week. I already loved the films, but watching them again made me appreciate them even more. They're not only a deep and insightful examination of the character and legend of Batman, but also a thought-provoking analysis of various complex ethical quandaries.
(I think everybody's had enough time to see Batman Begins, so the below is absolutely riddled with spoilers. If you haven't seen it yet, go watch it immediately, then come back. I'll wait.)
Batman Begins, appropriately enough, focuses on the stumbling beginnings of Batman. The central question is, how do we respond to crime and loss? Who do we blame? At first Bruce blames himself, but later he shifts much of that blame onto the man who actually did the deed: Joe Chill. Bruce decides to seek personal revenge and murder Chill. He's on the verge of doing so when someone else does the job for him. When he tells Rachel Dawes, the woman he loves, what he'd planned to do, she shoves him off this dangerous path and onto a new one. She slaps him and tells him his father would be ashamed of him, which hits Bruce hard, as he realizes it's true. His father believed in redemption. He was trying to save Gotham, to rebuild it. When Bruce fell in the well and met the bats, his father descended from the light above and lifted him up. "Why do we fall?" he asked Bruce. And he answered, "So we can learn how to pick ourselves back up." The fallen are not lost. They just need a helping hand.
Rachel points out that Joe Chill is just a symptom of a much larger problem: organized crime; the corruption at the heart of Gotham. In a nice allegorical touch, she literally takes him underground to see the rotting roots of the city, and to show him that killing one man won't solve this problem. Rachel gives Bruce someone else to blame for the death of his parents: crime lord Carmine Falcone, and by extension, all crime in Gotham. Bruce also realizes guns and killing can never be his solution. Were he to kill with a gun he would only become the thing that destroyed his parents. So he throws the gun away and gives himself a new mission: to defeat Crime, to cut the corruption out of Gotham, without killing.
His first step is to get to know crime and criminals, so he goes out to walk among them. He even finds himself sympathizing with them. And he tries to teach himself how to fight them. He makes some progress, but is still a bit of a lost soul when he is found by Henri Ducard and invited to join a secret society known as the League of Shadows. It's Ducard and the League that give him the training, the methods, and the tools he's lacking. They teach him to use theatricality and fear as weapons. And they also point out that no single man could possibly pose a threat to Crime as a whole. To fight crime, he will have to become more than a man. He will have to become legend.
But Bruce and the League disagree on two essential points: who is to blame, and what to do about it. Ducard gives Bruce a new person to blame for his parents' deaths: his father. Ducard proposes we blame the victim - that his father should have been stronger, fought back, attacked the man who was attacking him, despite the odds. Ducard and the League also believe that they can stand as judge, jury, and executioner; that a criminal can perform an act so heinous that they have the right to kill him; that some people are beyond redemption; that you can fall so far that you can never rise again. In fact, they believe the same thing about cities: that a city can become so corrupt and overrun with crime, that it must be destroyed. And they intend to do just that to Gotham.
Bruce does not and cannot believe this. Gotham has fallen, but it can rise again. It can be saved, and he can help save it. He still has faith in justice and redemption. He will fight crime, but he cannot be the arbiter of life and death. This argument with Ducard only helps solidify Bruce's own position and make his mission clear to him. So of course, even knowing the threat that Ducard presents to him and his city, he does not kill him, but risks his life to save him, and escapes.
Back in Gotham, Bruce finally gets down to the nitty gritty of becoming the ultimate warrior against crime. To make himself a thing to fear, he becomes the thing he fears the most: a bat. He knows he cannot work alone, so he recruits helpers - really, a foster family: Alfred (father figure, medic, general assistant); Lucius Fox (armor, weapons, other equipment); the only honest cop in the city, Jim Gordon; and, to a lesser extent, Rachel Dawes. After a little trial and error, he starts having some success. But he meets an enemy who, like himself, also uses fear as a weapon, and in a far more potent, direct, and dangerous way than he does: Jonathan Crane. And ultimately he comes into direct conflict with his old friends, the League of Shadows, who have arrived to realize their old plan of destroying Gotham; or rather, of starting a chain reaction of fear and violence that will cause Gotham to destroy itself. Ducard reveals that they had actually tried to use the weapon of economics to destroy Gotham years ago, but the deaths of Bruce's parents had galvanized the city and kept it alive. The Waynes have always been deeply tied into the health of the city, and have always worked to save it from within; Bruce's great-grandfather ran a portion of the Underground Railroad through the caves under the mansion - the caves that are now Bruce's Batcave. So Bruce is really only upholding the family legacy, and taking over the family business - its true business. This is another question he's having to answer throughout the movie: how can he honor his father and his family? Is it all right for him to tarnish the family name by day, pretending to be a drunk, womanizing jerk in his playboy persona, if he honors his family's legacy by night in the form of Batman? The answer seems to be yes: it's what we really do, not who we appear to be, that defines us.
Ultimately, with the help of his family, Batman defeats Carmine Falcone, Jonathan Crane, Ducard, and the League. He keeps Gotham alive, and by his example, he even inspires it to begin lifting itself back up out of the darkness. He has struck the first blow against Crime. He even has hope that one day, when Gotham is strong enough to take care of itself, Batman will no longer be needed, and he can set his mask aside and just be Bruce Wayne again. Rachel gives him hope that on that day, she'll be there to take his hand. But she points out to him that the mask he wears as Batman is not his true mask. It's the mask he wears by day as Bruce Wayne that's a false face. He has become Batman - that's his true identity now.
Meanwhile, Gordon warns Bruce of a new threat brought on by his actions: escalation. A new class of criminal has arisen to fight Batman on his own terms - passionate, clever, resourceful, determined, more than a little crazy. The first of this new class of criminal calls himself the Joker. And of course he will be the subject of the next film, and the creator of many more moral quandaries for Batman and Gotham.
I have only a couple of problems with Batman Begins. The first is its uneven tone. Most of the movie strikes a good balance between self-important solemnity and silly humor, but every once in a while it dips too far in either direction. There's a particularly weird and out-of-place moment during Batman's first big, successful strike, when he takes down Falcone. Inexplicably, despite the fact that a huge gunfight was going on right beside him, a bum is just hanging out there, eating some food. Batman sees him, recognizes him as the bum he gave his coat to years ago when he first set out to become Batman, and tells him, "Nice coat." I guess Nolan wanted to make a fun callback and lighten things up a bit after all the darkness and violence, but the scene is just confusing and odd and I'd much rather it weren't there.
My other problem is more central, as it has to do with the film contradicting its own themes at the very climax of the film. The central conflict between Batman and the League of Shadows - the moral hinge upon which the whole character and story rest - is that Batman does not kill. That's a decision he made early on, and it's what defines him in many ways. But in the climactic moment of the movie, he essentially kills Ducard. He says he's not killing him, he's just failing to save him, but come on, that seems like a huge cop-out. He's trying to have his cake and eat it, too.
Interestingly enough, something very similar happens at the end of The Dark Knight, but there it feels less like a cop-out and more like a deliberate change in the nature of Batman. I'll talk about that in my next post... |
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