Comic book characters and situations to highlight the basic existential dilemma? That’s an oxymoron, if ever there was one, but, no, not in case of Christopher Noaln’s cinematic Batman.
The Batman trilogy — The Batman Begins (2005), The Dark Knight (2008) and the just released concluding episode, The Dark Knight Rises — is only nominally based on the Diamond Comics character. The three films are entirely the work of Nolan the auteur, who not just directed them but also wrote the story and the script jointly with long-term collaborators, his brother Jonathan and David Goyer. Unlike most other hit film franchises, the Batman movies were clearly planned ahead, as the very first film contains references to events and characters that appear in the final one.
The protagonist Bruce Wayne is traumatised in his childhood when he watches his philanthropist physician father (who also owns a vast business empire) and mother being shot to death by a random street mugger in Gotham (read New York) City, the epitome of a modern metropolis. This singular event defines his character and pursuits. He is motivated by desire to avenge the killing by eradicating crime in the city. He wanders far afield, becomes a master warrior and takes up his mission with the help of state-of-the-arts technology and equipment he has inherited or invented. He is unique among the superheroes in that he possesses no supernatural powers.
How he saves the city from various megalomaniac villains provides the plots of the three films. Gripping as these stories are, Nolan’s real narrative is about the basic conflict of good vs evil. In his world, evil can be pure and unadulterated, while is good is always circumscribed by ambiguity. He portrays Ra’s al Ghul as a noble warrior gone evil (not unlike Darth Vader in the last and best instalment of Star Wars), the Joker as cunning evil in The Dark Knight and Bane as the raw, unbridled evil, and Miranda Tate as refined evil at its most seductive in The Dark Knight Returns. The good is racked by self-doubt and inability to relate (Bruce Wayne the Batman), succumbing to evil (Harvey Dent the crusading district attorney), affection and loyalty leading to resignation (Lucius Fox the scientific genius of Wayne Enterprises, Alfred Pennyworth the caring butler), insufficient courage (Police Commissioner Gordon), inadequate scruples (Selina Kyle), flawed judgment (Rachel Dawes, Bruce’s childhood sweetheart who prefers Dent and dies because of Dent’s machinations). Even events and mechanisms meant to be good are not so in any unalloyed sense. Entrepreneurism leads to prosperity, but also to inequality and deprivation, leading the hungry to crime. Beneficial scientific innovation at the cutting edge can become the ultimate terror (fusion reactor of a power plant becoming neutron bomb), laws meant to restore order can also be repressive, and so on. The common people, whose interests all good characters champion, can themselves become tools of the oppressors (an echo of Occupy movement).
The Batman character is a fascinating evolution. He is a loner, conflicted by the horror he suffered early on. His fatal flaw is his inability to relate. His only true relationships are with his retainer-mentors (Alfred, Lucius and later the nameless doctor in the well). He can neither read the characters of the women who walk into his life (Rachel, Miranda, Selina) nor communicate with them except in an inchoate way. He yearns to do good to people he doesn't understand and he goes into deep withdrawal when they turn against him, which causes him untold physical and emotional harm. The prison doctor correctly identifies his real weakness as not being afraid of death, which deprives him of the strongest motivation of a human being. His technological genius makes him even more withdrawn. He cannot offer even the least explanation for his actions, preferring to suffer in stoicism which incidentally also hides his fears of being open to other human beings. Wayne treads the path of the Nietzschean Übermensch, exercising incredible will to mend his broken body and displaying the strongest affinity to good against evil even at the cost of defying traditional mores. But he does not quite get there as he cannot overcome his conflicted past and is unable to create values or make an eternal return.
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Many of these traits and features are also seen in the other Nolan masterpiece, Inception (2010). The protagonist Dom Cobb shares many of Bruce’s traits. He is forever locked in his dead wife Mallorie’s memories. Michael Caine, who plays Alfred Pennyworth in the Batman films, is Professor Miles and Dom’s mentor.
Both sets of films display in full Nolan’s love of technology. While Batman indulges in hardware to probe physical depths and heights, Inception follows layers of consciousness and reality through software. Both are exercises in fantasy, but the suspension of disbelief is so great that the viewer does not doubt the happenings even for a nano-second.
Nolan has found in Christian Bale an actor born to play the role. His brooding visage and taciturn speech with the minimalist display of emotion are in perfect sync with the character.
In a sense, our own Shanghai and Gangs of Wasseypur raise the same primordial questions about good and evil, but one can entertain a theory that it is the viewer who imposes this moral dimension on what were meant to be crackers of action films. In Batman, however, the director signals very early on his clear intent to address these issues at the very core of our existence deliberately and continually.
In the final analysis, it would be as wrong to think of Batman films as being about possible threats to a city including nuclear holocaust and its rescue from them by a superhero as it would be to consider Wasseypur a saga of the badlands of coal mining or Shanghai as a narrative of political opportunism. In all three instances, the contextual setting is used as a device to frame larger moral issues. And all three succeed as allegorical tales, modern parables of our times.