Batman Begins (2005)
Directed By Christopher Nolan
A rewatch under the influence of a ten-hour workday that didn’t show the movie’s age but with the kind of clarity a tired brain gets felt like a rickety assemblage of bad jokes connected together. I didn’t really care about Batman Begins when it was new. The initial take—a take that really encapsulated how cool I was in high school—was that it wasn’t as good as Batman Year One. It still isn’t but back then I really couldn’t grasp greatness without being antagonizing or antagonizing in an interesting way (“I’m Movie Bully”). It felt so much like an approximation of genre when the comics and the animated series found strength in those stylistic flourishes. A crime movie that wasn’t really wrapping around anything cool. “Influenced by” Blade Runner but covered in browns and unattractive hazels. Style in general becoming the aesthetic weakness of the mid 00’s. Naturally going against so much of the operatic elements of the Burton and even Schumacher movies (Batman and Robin’s legacy still lives as an example of bad art in ways a lot of bad movies don’t) and what made those appealing to children and designing a film based in rationalizing embarrassment for an older and increasingly more embarrassing audience*. I wasn’t really making a good case against it back then when I had my hardcover of Year One out when watching the movie and going “look this part where the bats help him out is better in the book” at my brother. I’m probably not making a real good case right now either.
But watching this again at the start of last week and still thinking about it as last week and what the immediate present felt and feels like, the movie’s goals were always more diabolical as a cartoony association and a deeply evil strategy. Looking at the movie you’re struck by how wonky it all comes out. Collaged images rapidly happening in a sequence trying to keep a pace but where most of the industrial energy shows off fatigue. Running through bad takes and the halves of actions (scenes would be generous) to get to a finish line while sacrificing a consistent discipline as it huffs and puffs across a longer distance. Actors with trademarks—Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman right before they became parody, Rutger Hauer a deeper cut for people with taste but terrible senses of humour**—in the same spaces as stock photo models asked to talk. Bruce Wayne’s Father (the bad guy from Mandy who gets killed by the tiger dude from Mandy) giving inspirational Facebook messages to his kid while Bruce Wayne’s mother looks at her son like a stop sign. The climax of the movie relying on an out-of-character action from a figure famous for not killing people and having the coda sit on the tired face of a subway engineer we meet two minutes before. A character created as an after-thought who might as well be made of cardboard or a wrench Batman throws not given the inane detailing of every aspect of his person and every motivating factor of his life like every facet this movie articulates for the rich kid who decides to dress like a bat to beat up the poor. Having the tension of this movie he was barely apart of on his shoulders lifted and now having a reason to be billed between Katie Holmes and Tom Wilkinson on the poster. Dismantling the worth of complexity in narrative through its own excess of explaining the reality of a character that always made more sense drawn instead of performed with a person who works a job and fills it.
The serious take on The Dark Knight always finding a reliance in the cheap joke of “normal” people reacting to his costume and gear. A constant force in the movie’s editing that wasn’t funny the first time and won’t be funny for the twentieth but becomes the shape of the cave as these jokes create an echo. Bystanders looking at this guy walking around in a bat costume that’s always going to look ridiculous (even for the criminally insane!). Homeless people looking at the Batmobile like it’s a Porsche they’ll never have (that’s the joke). Cops looking at the Batmobile like a tank in a magazine you look at with your pants down. Both seeing it as an aspirational object but the latter having the more perverse reaction. In line with a kind of marketing in the art of blockbusters but instead of a kid going “I gotta get me one of those!”*** it’s The Hero Cop who says it and produces that mild chuckle from the crowd. Repeated gags exhausting the “comedy” to the point where it can only be taken seriously as the marker of a truer intention. It’s the only flourish in this “realism”. It’s the only artistic choice that has a perspective. The kind of camp that is commonly associated with Batman than the more violent renditions but for maybe the first time under the gaze of another rich kid and all the Oxbridge attitudes that entails. That Republican non-satire confirming a bias and supporting a system’s prejudices with an exercise speaking more to this critique that the police don’t have the militaristic discipline or technology to truly oppress through a blunt ordering. Demonstrating through Batman’s actions the crueller methods to go about police work and knowing nothing or ignoring the true manifestations of poverty (“they oughta build a town that works!”) and crime (“there are just crazies out there”) but figuring out a way to dole out the punishment through forces that can only overpower and demolish, the movie’s goal then becomes a way to make that entertaining. A boring car chase pointing the camera towards the lit up faces of cops watching this tank with wheels crawl on roofs and in awe as it turns it’s backlights off. The climax—in that collage of Batman killing someone and the subway engineer quoting a math quiz—relying on the cop we’ve grown to love and respect taking control of this tank and clumsily knowing how to use it. All under this textbook understanding of how to make these associations pleasing in a bare process.
I’m hesitant to call this dated when so much of it is still emblematic of the times we’re having trouble comprehending and even writing out all these faults it somehow is still delusional to think this didn’t win. Not to entirely condemn people who have a passing and thorough like for it but I can’t shrug off the feeling this movie happened and spawned sequels of “better designs” because it predicates on this notion that Batman could exist in reality now under the same rationale as The Iraq War. A ludicrous idea that through this same “logic” and whys and wherefores becomes not only an absurd concept made into an action but a vocation of powers more willing to combust and combat an other to flex its powers rather than nurture and uphold a standard of basic decency. If Batman is the true Bruce Wayne then his philanthropy—which barely comes across in these films other than an excuse for a party—is a cover as charity and re-distributing his wealth becomes a ruse when this character—on his own conditions—funds a forever war. The death of his parents a justification to create and annihilate an enemy that never festers into a catharsis or an ending and only perpetuates.
An observation that could be pretty dated as you see war criminals become huggable, collective memory dull into a goldfish grasp of consciousness, or David Frum doing characters on Comedy Bang Bang but then realize the majority of superhero films operate under these terms even when they try to lighten the mood. A movie series with twenty-something instalments in a ten year span—like the rapidity of how The Beatles came and go—where an arms dealer is the centre of the universe, never goes on trial and whose sins produce a shrug, becomes the martyr at the end of the long cycle. The flagship crossover series within these movies showcasing how these heroes only commit war crimes where the atonement begets more international incident. The black superhero named after a radical group in American history who is friendly with a white CIA agent. Turning the everyman teen superhero (“It’s just a story we can all relate to”) into a nerd with abs who loves drone warfare but for some reason still has trouble with girls and being bullied. The degree to which this is accepted is more about a gentle lulling than a weaponization. Finding a way through this general collapsing of art as brows to illustrate militant structures as formats for mythical stories. Crafting non-narratives where a promotion of military might becomes that mythology. Not necessarily for recruitment but numbing an audience down into accepting these aspects of order as always good and common even when provoking violence is the only answer in these professions.
Batman Begins isn’t the worst example— The Dark Knight Rises orchestrating an image in context where it is acceptable for cops to open fire on protesters is probably the peak—but as a redundant object it is the start of a project—one that naturally has to reduce artists to producers—crafted to shape an infantilized audience’s mind**** into accepting reactionary impulses. Christopher Nolan figures out after this movie that in order to truly achieve that, a movie would have to exist totally within a present tense because it’s much easier to accept absurd actions in seconds than minutes. His aesthetic becomes more un-nuanced and conservative in the way that a dumb sincerity dwarfs an irony no matter how stupid certain ideas sit in his films. He travels to different genres but makes them all look like slabs of blue-grey concrete. The only Auteur where his budget feels limitless but subtext always has to be a statue that clearly means the one thing or if it isn’t totally clear he’ll explain it to you in the least romantic ways possible (he made an entire movie explaining the rules of dream-logic). Nullifying creativity and imagination to work like a sub-pump funnelling unattractive ideas in art. It’s pretty clear why he’s successful.
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From Beyond and Meek’s Cutoff
*I’m not talking about you.
**Not you
***If I remember correctly I think Batman just gives that poor kid from Game of Thrones a weapon of some kind. Which is also great.
****Not you but I think even when we consider how these movies toy with nostalgia it still has an effect on normal people. It’s working with our memory of a childhood thing even when you can be a cool person who does it like those two Irish young people in Normal People. But I also have to consider how I’m mad at this movie meant for children.