Batman Begins: The Thread

i don't see how *any* film, from 'the godfather' to 'battleship potemkin' could be watched using your criterion here.

walter: "Once again, Gotham is not a real city. It's a fictional society that was created to serve whatever point the author was trying to make. Gee, what a big surprise that it was portrayed in a way that makes vigilantism seem forgivable or even inevitable."

okay, here goes. gotham is not a real city: agreed. was it created to serve an author's intention? maybe, but the process is *liable to be a little bit more complex than this*. but this aside, where is the problem? any fiction effectively invents its setting by slection and ommission. the new york of 'taxi driver' or the paris of 'les enfants du paradis' for two examples. this is standard practice.

but by doing this the artists give us a vision of the world, or an extrapolation from it. was chicago in the '30s like gotham. no, but it was a bit, from certain angles. terrible (racist) exploitation meets civic corruption and gangsterism. is vigilanteism as bad as you say in this bleak setting? i don't know: that's the problem posed by 'batman'. otoh, batman is no ordinary vigilante, and he has a complex relation with the law.

but in your view a work of fiction ought to conform to given ideas about society? this would basically mean only one book is possible, and thatall questions have been answered, wouldn't it?

So yeah, it's a valid criticism that seems to miss the entire point of the story to such an amazing degree it's hilarious.

Actually, I never said vigilantism was bad per se. I have said that think that Batman Begins creates a typical fascist narrative where a powerful individual fights to clean up a corrupt and degraded society. Coming back and saying "but the society is corrupt and degraded!" doesn't really make sense.

but in your view a work of fiction ought to conform to given ideas about society?

Of course not, I never said that. I'm saying that if we're going to analyze and criticize the politics of a story, the setting of the story is part of the author's creation and needs to be taken into account as well. I feel like many of the defenses of Batman Begins are treating Gotham like it's a real place: the old "it's just reflecting reality" argument.

Batman Begins creates a typical fascist narrative where a powerful individual fights to clean up a corrupt and degraded society

I'm not sure whats inherently fascist about that.

But why do we need to clean Gotham up at all? Once again you're acting like it's a preexisiting reality that needs a solution rather than a scenario the author set up to create a certain type of hero.

BECAUSE IT'S ONE OF THE BASIC PARAMETERS OF THE STORY THAT IS BEING TOLD.

xpost

Yeah, shame on me for inferring that the reams of posts you've made criticizing the basic plot elements of this movie mean that there are things about it you would change to make it better. My bad.

Yeah, shame on me for inferring that the reams of posts you've made criticizing the basic plot elements of this movie mean that there are things about it you would change to make it better. My bad.

And once again, I'd be perfectly able to enjoy a right-leaning film based on its merits as a film (see Sin City). And yet I would have no problem criticizing that same film based on its politics. I see those as two separate factors.

Who's the fascist now?

Peter Conrad
Sunday November 7, 2004
The Observer

Pity the poor superhero. What ingrates we are when aerodynamic avengers sew up the gaping San Andreas fault, defuse rogue nuclear bombs, or rescue our pussycats from trees; intent on destruction, we force our exhausted saviours to perform their miracles over and over again. In Pixar's new animated epic The Incredibles, a disenchanted redeemer retires from what he calls 'hero work'. 'Why,' he sighs, 'can't the world stay saved?'
Mr Incredible - whose jaw looks as if it was carved from Mount Rushmore, though his puffy face wears a permanent expression of dim-witted bemusement - resigns in disgust after swooping down to catch a man who has hurled himself off a skyscraper. The would-be victim sues his rescuer: he wanted to commit suicide, and is enraged by this unwanted interference. Disempowered, Mr Incredible retreats to the suburbs and takes a job as a claims adjuster in an insurance office. It marks the end of a long career.

The superhero was dreamt up by Nietzsche during the 1880s, and has been summoning humanity to transcend itself ever since. Does Mr Incredible's renunciation mean that the superman has finally despaired of the midget, puling race he was meant to lead onwards and upwards?
Nietzsche - having dispensed with God and belittled the majority of men as miserable fleas - invented an Ultimate Man as his 'prophet of the lightning'. Zarathustra gambolled through mountains, and vaulted over crevasses; his feats were mental and metaphoric, though the caped crusaders who imitated him in the comic books defied gravity in physical earnest. The first Superman film with Christopher Reeve promised on its posters to make us believe that a man could fly. That indeed was Zarathustra's aim: to fuel the uninhibited ego for orbit. Stanley Kubrick famously quoted the thunderclap which opens Richard Strauss's tone-poem about Zarathustra at the start of 2001, as the globe is enlightened and electrified by the sun. The superman had become the sponsor of technological conquest and cerebral triumph, actualising the proud future.

In fact the history of these jet-propelled evangelists is darker and nastier. The superman is a man of power, which means that from the first his mission was political. Zarathustra soon turned into Wagner's Siegfried, the muscular marauder with the lethal, newly forged sword. The superman's existence is a rebuke to the lowly, inferior humanity he has outgrown. The trampling arrogance of the Nietzschean ideology briefly raises its voice in The Incredibles when the villain Syndrome jeers about high-school graduation ceremonies, which give illiterate cretins mortar boards to wear and diplomas to brandish: 'They keep creating new ways to celebrate mediocrity!' Are these superlative beings marvels or monsters? In 1903 Shaw appended to his play Man and Superman an incendiary handbook to be consulted by revolutionaries; here he examined 'the political need for the superman', and argued that we scan the sky for a redeemer because we have mired ourselves in an impotent 'Proletarian Democracy'. If no superman came to man's aid, Shaw predicted 'the Ruin of Empires, New Zealanders sitting on a broken arch of London Bridge, and so forth'. The catastrophe would occur, he declared, 'unless we can have a Democracy of Supermen'. Soon enough, just such a political system came into being: it was called the Third Reich.

In 1938 when Action Comics began to chronicle the exploits of Superman, the character was equipped with a liberal social conscience. Ejected from the doomed planet Krypton, Superman bumps down to earth in Smallville, USA. Nietzsche would have deplored this landing and the small-mindedness that it inevitably implies, but Superman - disguised as the nerdy Clark Kent, a figure of Christ-like altruistic meekness - was billed as 'champion of the oppressed', as if his missions of mercy disseminated the policies of Roosevelt's New Deal. Superman comics were stuffed into the knapsacks of GIs sent off to fight the Nazis, which alarmed army chaplains: had the cartoon character become a substitute for the absentee God they ineffectually extolled?

Terence Stamp, as the Mephistophelean Zod in the second Superman film, announces that he has finally identified Superman's weak spot, which is his genuine compassion for 'these earth people'. Despite Superman's oath, in the first instalment of the comic strip, 'to devote his existence to those in need', the rancorous Nietzschean heritage lived on in his rival Batman, who first appeared in Detective Comics in 1939. Superman is a humanitarian, but Batman's motives are obsessively and neurotically personal: traumatised in childhood after witnessing the murder of his parents, he wants to avenge them, and his adventures are the rampages of a ruthless, irresponsible urban vigilante. The story - in the words of Tim Burton, who directed the first two Batman films with Michael Keaton - is ' Death Wish in a bat suit'.

The suit of course is crucial. Normality is Superman's alias, but Batman chooses a disguise that will terrorise his victims and becomes, as the first comic put it, 'a creature of the night, a weird figure of the dark'. The Batman films are fashion parades of nocturnal fetish gear. Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman in the third film zips herself into vinyl and wields a whip, George Clooney preens in skin-tight rubber through which his erectile nipples protrude, and the camera peers deep into the leather-clad buttocks of Chris O'Donnell, who plays Robin. Nicole Kidman, investigating the hero's abnormal psychology in the fourth film, suspiciously prods Val Kilmer by asking why a grown man would dress up as a flying rodent. The perversity is political as much as sartorial: hinting at a private theatre of mastery and submission, this is fascism staged as a masquerade. Officially, however, the Nietzschean rantings are assigned to the villains. In Batman Returns it is Danny de Vito's lewd, waddling Penguin who sabotages his campaign to become mayor when he sneers at the electorate as 'the squealing pin-head puppets of Gotham'.

The first Superman film with Reeve appeared in 1978, and the Batman series began in 1989. In retrospect, the superheroes limbered up by acting out scenarios of carnage and catastrophe that passed soon enough from fiction to reality. A gang with a bomb seizes the Eiffel Tower in Superman II ; al-Qaeda, in its early days, planned to fly a hijacked plane into the tower. 'Jeepers, that's terrible,' mumbles Reeve when his editor tells him the news. 'Yeah, Clark,' replies the grizzled hack, 'that's why they're called terrorists.' Stamp and his cronies from Krypton demolish the Boulder Dam outside Las Vegas - nowadays considered such a natural target that new highways are being constructed to bypass it - and fly on to crash through the roof of the White House like al-Qaeda pilots. As they topple the flaunting American flag, the President (played by EG Marshall) moans 'I'm afraid there's nothing anybody can do. These people have such powers, nothing can stop them.' An aide whimpers 'Where's Superman?' In Batman Forever, Tommy Lee Jones as the schizoid Two-Face anticipates another atrocity that must be on the wish list of George W Bush's 'bad guys': he steers a helicopter into the vacant cranium of the Statue of Liberty, at last setting its symbolic torch on fire. Although The Incredibles takes place in cities called Municiburgh and Metroville, you can see the Chrysler Building, Manhattan's elegant Art Deco spire, vulnerably quivering on the skyline.

Mr Incredible's resignation is in one sense a relief. His very name, after all, defies us to believe in him, and reminds us that both gods and heroes are insults to the brain. But it's also scary to find ourselves suddenly bereft: just when we need such a helper or protector most, none is forthcoming. Nevertheless, the faith - or delusion - is hard to abandon. Christopher Reeve, left a quadraplegic after his riding accident, consoled himself by insisting that the will, that indefatigable Nietzschean resource, could overcome physical impediment; he may not have believed that he'd ever fly, but he was sure he would walk again. It didn't happen. The politicians have not yet suffered Reeve's cruel disillusionment. Arnold Schwarzenegger has made the swaggering, belligerent tag lines from his action movies into a political philosophy. Superheroes are instinctive bullies and despots, which is why Arnie derided 'girlie men' - meaning limp-wristed liberals - at the Republican convention this summer.

The Incredibles concludes with the world once more saved, after Mr Incredible wriggles back into his latex tights. Then, in the last seconds, a globular robot called The Underminer rears up to drill through skyscrapers with its unfeeling calipers, unsettling our complacency. The film at once abruptly ends; no one ventures to fight the new menace. This, and the previous escapades of Superman and Batman, switch the Marxist epigram back to front. In these harmless escapades with their belated rescues, history happens first as farce. Will it, some time soon, be repeated as tragedy?

(is that Gorilla Grod!?!)

-- walter kranz (kranz_walte...), August 5th, 2005.

CRYBABY

-- DV (dirtyvica...), August 5th, 2005.

Me too, actually.

-- The Ghost of Dan Perry (djperr...), August 5th, 2005.

otm

Also, I think the reason there's been this whole discussion because the film is so unclear about it's aims. I'd say it's more easy to analyze, say, Dark Knight Returns, because Miller's more clear about his view on things. But because Batman Begins wants to both a serious flick portraying a tormented soul searching for revenge, and a blockbuster movie setting up a new Batman franchise, where the main character battles evil ninjas and saves the day, were bound to have conflicting intepretations about the film. Is it a tragedy, or does Batman end up triumphant? Is he a hero or an antihero? I don't think we'll ever reach a consensus.

Genesis of the Bat: Batman incarnations from the mid-1980s to the present
The Journey Begins: creative concepts, story development and casting
Shaping Mind and Body: fighting style
Gotham City Rises: production design
Cape and Cowl: the new batsuit
The Tumbler: the new Batmobile
Path to Discovery: filming in Iceland
Saving Gotham City: the monorail chase sequence
Confidential files
Character/weaponry gallery
Photo gallery
Theatrical trailer
DVD-ROM features: Batman Begins mobile game demo & Web links
Inner Demons comic: Explore the special features through an exclusive interactive comic book
Exclusive collectible 72-page comic book containing: Detective Comics #37 (the very first Batman story), Batman: The Man Who Falls (a classic story that inspired Batman Begins), Batman: The Long Halloween (a chilling excerpt that also inspired the film)

No commentary track listed, interestingly enough.

Hmm, I guess they're being rather explicit where this Batman is coming from... Then again, that was never a secret, was it?

No kidding. It's like they're deliberately thumbing their noses at the '60s Batman brigade. Will the DVD-ROM bonuses also feature a link to this thread, thereby allowing some of the less perspicacious Batman fanboys to pat themselves on the back for loving Batman Begins without having to spend too much effort?

They're also thumbing their noses at the quintessential Batman/Ra's Al Ghul stories where they fight each other SHIRTLESS in the desert.

Box Office Mojo: Is Batman a hero?

Christopher Nolan: Hero has become such a bandied about word, used so broadly, and it ceases to have any meaning. Is Batman a hero? Certainly, he's more a hero than superhero [but] I think the word "hero" is very problematic. He has no superpowers, but he's a heroic figure. The reason to me he's heroic is because he's altruistic. He's trying to help other people with no benefit to himself and, whatever motivates him—and this was the tricky thing to really try and nail with Batman Begins as opposed to previous incarnations—is the difference between him and a common vigilante, the Punisher or Charles Bronson in Death Wish. To me, the difference is he is not seeking personal vengeance. We did not want his quest to be for vengeance, we wanted it to be for justice. That's what sends him looking for an outlet for his rage and frustration. What he chooses to do with it is, I believe, selfless, and therefore, heroic. And that, to me, is really the distinction—selfishness versus selflessness—and that is very noble. But it is a very fine distinction. I do think he is a heroic figure.

BOM: But he does gain a value—justice is a value, even to Batman. Is he really selfless—or does he want to have a life to call his own?

Nolan: To me, he's not selfish in terms of how the word is generally understood—he's not obtaining personal gratification in an immediate sense. He's having to obliterate his own immediate [short-term] self-interest. I could tap into the reality of the story if I felt that he saw his mission as an achievable goal.

BOM: So his is a higher, more rational form of selfishness, as against irrational, short-range immediate gratification?

Nolan: Yes.

BOM: What is the movie's theme in essential terms?

Nolan: The struggle and the conflict between the desire for personal gratification or vengeance and the greater good for a constructive, positive sort—something more universal. Because Batman is limited by being an ordinary man, there's a constant tension between pragmatism and idealism.

So, in the end Batman is a "heroic figure"? Nolan's views seem to be more simplistic than what people read into the film.