I've always been a Batman fan. Having read numerous comic books and owning over twenty of them, I'm well aware that my knowledge of Gotham's protector extends further than the average Batman fan's (though not nearly as far as the die-hard DC enthusiast, so if I misspeak, please correct me). One semester, I used Alan Moore's The Killing Joke in a freshman writing class in order to discuss how we read comics, and just this past weekend, the groom's cake at my wedding was adorned with the Bat Signal. Needless to say, Nolan's movies stay on constant rotation in my blu ray player, and bout midway through what was likely the twentieth time I watched The Dark Knight, I realized a possible logical terminus for the story Nolan had begun with Batman Begins. Speculation surrounding the fate of the Dark Knight abounds, and, since the first trailer released last summer, fans everywhere have been wondering whether Nolan will kill his titular hero. I must confess, though, don't find this question as tantalizing as most loyal fans do. I cannot wait to see how it all ends, but I don't really care if Nolan's Batman lives or dies or passes the mantle or any other scenario in terms of its narrative importance; the movie's going to be awesome, that's a given. Nolan's said repeatedly that this is going to be his last Batman film. He's explained that he's looking to early film epics like Metropolis or maybe Birth of a Nation in terms of cinematic scope. We know he's going big, also, because the movie is nearly three hours long.. Perhaps a more useful question than "Is Batman or Bruce Wayne or both going to die?" would be "Why would Nolan feel compelled to kill off the Dark Knight?" The key difference is that the latter question broadens the discussion of of the films in dialogue with not only other incarnations of the Batman but also discussions of American ideologies. Nolan's changed the way we perceive one of the most influential and persistent contemporary American icons, and I think it's about time we talk about what exactly that means.
 |
| "But They never talk about the mean one. The cruel one. The one who couldn't fly or bend steel in his bare hands. The one who scared the crap out of everybody and laughed at all of the rest of us for being the envious cowards we were." (Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns) |
Nolan's movies are not as divisive among comic fans as one might expect. He grounds his project in a reality that asks us to think semi-realistically about what would happen if Batman would enter a real world scenario, and few people with whom I've discussed the films tell me that Nolan's tampering with the Batman universe borders on blasphemy--and we all know how loyal fans can be. I like to view his films as Elseworld's type stories (i.e. Thrillkiller or Gotham by Gaslight), a type of alternate Gotham that gives the auteur a large enough sandbox to play in. The result is a movie that "feels" like a Batman movie even though it's not the same Batman as the one ("ones"?) in the Post-Crisis continuity. The Dark Knight entertains as both a cape and cowl caper and a provocative crime drama. Nolan's films can have their cake and eat it too, so to speak.
Placing a comic book concept in a very serious, real-world context, though, should call attention to how weird it would be for a guy in a costume to swoop around the city and attempt to stop crime, but that rarely (if at all) happens in Nolan's movies--at least not explicitly. Sure, people have discussions about whether the Batman is "doing good" for the city or whether he is simply, as Gordon puts it in Batman Begins, "Just some nut." But the overall seriousness of the film suggests that its world could (or ostensibly does) exist. In this way, Nolan's trilogy offers the best experiment with the Batman mythos I have ever seen, but it yields problematic results. The films are so damn good that casual fans begin to think of Batman as a real character rather than a pop culture icon, and I'm not sure Batman can withstand the seriousness. I think the Joker in The Dark Knight calls attention to this problem directly with his (painfully over-quoted) mantra, "Why so serious?" The famous line is a meta-question not just to his victims but to the fans. Why do we need such a serious hero in a serious movie that deals with serious subjects like murder on massive scale simply to cause societal chaos?
 |
| "No, I don’t keep count. But you do. And I love you for it." (Joker to Batman in Miller's The Dark Knight Returns) |
Christopher Nolan's Batman is played seriously because he's in a serious universe that would never involve Killer Crocs, Clayfaces, or have the main hero hanging with aliens, yet fans are willing to forget (or they just don't know) that the universe(s) of the comics contains these characters and incidents. As a comic book character, Batman is no more grounded in reality than Spider-Man or Superman, nor is his origin more tragic--hell, as much as I don't like Superman, he lost an entire planet along with his parents. Nolan, however, draws on the aspects of the Batman mythos that humanize rather than immortalize the Dark Knight, and, by doing so, deceives the viewer into thinking of not just his Batman but the character in general in terms of his realism. Others, of course, have tread this territory before, but they did so by exploring Batman's humanity in an unreal universe. One story that comes to mind is Grant Morrison's Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth, in which the inmates of the titular madhouse take over, and Batman wanders Arkham's halls, battling inmates and his inner demons. But the difference here is that Batman is humanized in a world where the supernatural (aliens, mutants, Solomon Grundy, etc.) exists alongside the natural, whereas Nolan's Batman attempts to become "more than a man" in a purely natural world. At any rate, it's made it much more difficult for me to recommend Batman comics to friends who just know the Nolan movies...though everyone should read the top five graphic novels in IGN's list.
 |
| "People need dramatic examples to shake them out of apathy, and I can't do that as Bruce Wayne. As a man, I'm flesh and blood. I can be ignored, I can be destroyed. But as a symbol … as a symbol, I can be incorruptible. I can be everlasting." (Batman Begins) |
So what happens when we introduce Batman to real world besides bad ass action sequences and damn good storytelling (despite the fact that three men can meet on a rooftop while one wears a bat suit and no one takes a step back to say "Wait a minute...what the fu....")? We get a world of consequence. In Batman Begins, the main conflict is about administering justice to preserve balance. Gotham is a functioning system of political corruption and underworld crime, and Batman serves as a destabilizing element. When Batman stops Ra's Al Ghul's League from dismantling Gotham's infrastructure, he does so to give himself time to destroy the criminal structure of the city, but the increased pressure on the mob prompts them to employ a mercenary psychopath who, in turn, spreads chaos through the city in a way that neither the mob nor Gotham's protector could have anticipated. It's textbook chaos theory, in which a single alien element introduced in a system has the potential to ramify unpredictably. By the end of The Dark Knight, Batman understands that in order for the system to be reset, he must remove himself from the equation, giving the police someone to hunt (himself) and someone to idolize (Harvey Dent). Then, eight years later, something ambiguous happens (though the trailer in which Selina Kyle cryptically warns Bruce Wayne has clear overtones of the occupy movement) which awakens the Batman from his eight year slumber--Bane brings hell itself to the streets of Gotham. And we all know why Bane's dangerous...
 |
| I am Bane -- and I could kill you... but death would only end your agony -- and silence your shame. Instead, I will simply... BREAK YOU! Broken...and done. (Knightfall: Broken Bat) |
Don't talk like you're one of them! You're not... even if you'd like to be. To them you're just a freak, like me. They need you right now, but when they don't, they'll cast you out. Like a leper. See, their morals, their "code"... it's a bad joke, dropped at the first sign of trouble. They're only as good as the world allows them to be. I'll show you. When the chips are down, these uh, these "civilized people", they'll eat each other. See, I'm not a monster. I'm just ahead of the curve.--The Dark Knight
Thus, my long belabored point emerges: I think Nolan's films illustrate that being Batman in the real world is a potentially bad idea, and we're about to find out if Bruce Wayne's choice to become the Batman was the right one. By that, I don't mean it's a cautionary tale about why you shouldn't dress like a bat and fight crime--that's a terribly obvious lesson. The lesson runs much deeper. Much like Alan Moore's Watchmen, one way to read Nolan's films is to say, "Thank God all we have to deal with in real life is nice, clean organized crime. Because when people actually become superheroes, things...go awry." Batman enters a fragile system as a chaotic element, and we see these repercussions in The Dark Knight more clearly than any other Batman story I've encountered. It'll be interesting in The Dark Knight Rises to see how deep the rabbit hole goes. All in all, I think Nolan's films are about consequence rather than about character. Perhaps people do need a dramatic symbol "to shake them out of apathy," but Nolan proposes a scenario that explores what happens after the system that symbol disrupts fights back. Whoever wins, fans will have a lot to chew on and debate for years to come.
Cheers,
--David
No comments:
Post a Comment