Batman Begins

Batman Begins
A Review by John David Ebert

The Megalopolis, these days, seems to be under attack from all directions. Indeed, ever since Merian C. Cooper’s 1933 film King Kong, Gotham has been under siege by attacks from monsters of all sorts. Nowadays, though, the attacks seem to be ever more vitriolic, and are reiterated with almost obsessive consistency in our movie theaters. The attacks are sometimes subtle, as in M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village, in which a council of Elders disaffected with big city living have fled from the metropolis into the woods, in favor of a more spiritually centered life; or in David Cronenberg’s upcoming A History of Violence, in which the big city is portrayed as a machine that generates criminals with deformed, hunchbacked souls who prey upon the naïve. Other attacks, recently, have not been so subtle: in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, New York City was invaded by an army of giant robots, while in Spielberg’s remake of The War of the Worlds, it is invaded by an army of giant aliens from outer space. There is no question about it: for the modern psyche, the cosmopolis has become something of a problem, for the imagination of contemporary Western man is dreaming forth ever larger and larger visions of the destruction of its megalopolises by transpersonal powers from the world beyond.

The case is no less so in the most recent Batman movie, Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins, which is without a doubt the finest Batman film so far (and in actuality, the only really good one). For in it, we are shown that Gotham is under attack by demons who claim that the city is a decadent place whose inhabitants lead empty, artificial lives and should be put out of their misery. Surely the recent reiteration of this theme—especially in the post 911 epoch when real, actual assaults upon the city have been attempted, as though to demonstrate that the point our movies have been making is not merely superficial entertainment, but a message to be taken deadly seriously—surely this obsessive imagining of the destruction of our big cities—usually New York—is not an accident, or some random by-product of the Hollywood machine. When the same motifs and images keep turning up in a culture, reworked by its poets and artists again and again, it means that something is being mulled over in that society, not by any individual person, but by the collective mind of the culture taken as a whole. And what the Western Mind is apparently worried about at this point is whether Megalopolitan life is worth living.

Why, then, is Gotham under attack by demons from the realm of ancient myth? Perhaps it is because the founders of Manna-hatta, with their ethnic cleansing of the island, thought to have rid themselves of their Algonquian Indian tribes, with all their messy pagan divinities and Trickster heroes. The revenge of the neglected dead, therefore, might be a particular bird that is coming home to roost, for when the spirits are pushed out of their native abodes in the hills and woods, they do not leave easily, but rather flit about in the ether, looking for warm skulls to crawl into and curl up in as new habitations. This is why asylums always figure so prominently in Batman mythology, and why its villains so often turn up there.

But it may also be a psychological consequence of the fact that New York was built as an apotheosis to rationalism and secularism, in which anything that smacks of myth and the occult is ridiculed by urbane cosmopolites who have no more time to take myth seriously than they do to have their fortunes read by astrologers. For as any reader of Greek tragedy well knows, impiety and hubris are not characteristics smiled upon by the gods.

In Batman Begins, all of this is demonstrated as Batman goes to war against villains who are, for the first time in the Batman movies, taken seriously and not merely portrayed as campy leftovers from the TV series. This was the mistake made by Tim Burton and his followers, but sidestepped by Christopher Nolan, who has a feel for the eerieness of the Batman world, of its dark shadows and even darker light. His villains are truly creepy, and he understands the world of Batman as well as Frank Miller or Alan Moore ever did.

Too many of the superhero movies that are being made these days fail to take their villains seriously, and so usually end up portraying them as thinly disguised variants of corporate CEO’s. Burton’s version of the Joker, for example, was a metaphor for the corporate attempt to replace real culture with cheap plastic crap, symbolized at the end of the film by Joker’s invasion of Gotham with an armada of Macy’s style balloon floats. Sam Raimi’s Green Goblin, likewise, is nothing if not a corporate executive, as was Magneto in X-Men. It is therefore refreshing to find someone like Christopher Nolan who understands that the original function of the superhero was not to fight corporate executives, but rather demons and devils from the ancient mythological realm of tribal man. Batman Begins is, therefore, a textbook illustration of the thesis which I developed in my book Celluloid Heroes & Mechanical Dragons that the real function of the superhero has nothing to do with fighting injustice and upholding the law, but rather with keeping devils, demons and other ancient mythological beings out of the great city, which has been erected in defiance of the existence of ancient myth altogether. Superheroes originated, in fact, as immune cells during the 1930’s, at precisely the time when the city was first being depicted as under attack by giant monsters like King Kong. To imagine the superhero as merely an extension of the legal system is to overlook his basically mythological nature as a monster slayer. The upholding of due process has nothing to do with his acts of physical violence or repeated vigilante actions that bring him into frequent conflicts with the law.

The film demonstrates this, after its lengthy prelude of developing the origins of Batman, by presenting the viewer with what at first appears to be a series of conflicts with mere underworld crime bosses and villains, but which slowly gives way to a deeper stratum of demons and spooks who are out to destroy Gotham by poisoning its water supply with a hallucinogen that causes its victims to perceive everyone around him as demonic beings. Soon, the city is under attack by a horde of monsters lead by Raz al-Ghoul and Scarecrow who can only be stopped—not by mere policemen—but by an ancient figure out of Native American myth and legend like Batman.

Indeed, the movie confirms Batman’s provenance in its opening scenes, when young Bruce Wayne stumbles upon an ancient Native American arrowhead, which points like a vector back into the realm of Indian myth and culture, whence this figure originated. The bat god, for instance, was known to the Cakchiquel Indians as Chamalkan and to the Maya as Camazotz, whom they represented in their art as a half-human, half-bat hybrid. In a Zapotec tomb at Monte Alban in the valley of Oaxaca, a site which has connections with the early Maya, there was found a six inch jade carving of a bat god whose anthropomorphic features invite a striking comparison to Batman’s. In Navajo mythology, furthermore, both Bat and Bat Woman appear as aides of the heroes Monster Slayer and Rainboy, helping them to pass initiatory tests and ordeals, whereas in the Popol Vuh, the Mayan batgod Camazotz appears in the underworld as an adversary who bites off the head of one of the twin protagonists.

Batman, moreover, was the first of the 1930’s superheroes to be linked with an animal totem as part of his iconography. His half-human, half-animal persona is an updating of an ancient tribal motif, for in their visionary trance flights shamans routinely transform themselves into animal figures in order to communicate with the herds they hunted. Batman, thus, is a sort of cyber-shaman who produces technological gadgets in his underworld cavern as aides to his megapolitan-wide exorcisms.

In contrast to Superman, furthermore, Batman is a god of the night, of the moon and the underworld, of caves and shadows, and not of the daylight. The classic icon on his chest of the bat silhouetted against a yellow moon confirms this — in addition to the fact that bats are nocturnal creatures. He is eminently suited, therefore, to battle demons — traditionally figures of the night from beyond the grave who return to haunt the living. Joker with his painted face is nothing more than a retrieval of the tribal motif of painting the face white in order to illuminate the skull underneath, as part of the X-ray style art of hunting societies, in which the dead Ancestors are invoked through the wearing of masks and body painting.

Batman as lord of the underworld lives in a cave, which echoes the motif of all the great Lords of the dead throughout the history of myth who inhabit caverns underneath the earth, like Hades, Yama, or Osiris. Batman on his electronic throne under the earth is a retrieval of this mythic image, and the figures of the night that he fights—Joker, Scarecrow, Catwoman—are the ghosts and spirits who plague Gotham and must be magicked away by its resident shaman.

How Batman—played brilliantly by Christian Bale—succeeds in doing just that is detailed with directorial skill in Christopher Nolan’s film, and it is only hoped that both he and his excellent cast and crew will return for the sequel.