Mythic narrative is a living thing. Well, any narrative is a living thing, but myth is particularly so because it is always in dialogue with the living. If that statement perplexes you, then let me use Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies as an example.
Batman was a much darker character in his first appearance, remorselessly killing criminals — a far cry from the ‘no guns’ hero of today.
Batman as a character was invented in the throes of World War II. He first appeared in 1939, and by 1940 he had gained his own title, origin and character defined by his childhood trauma. In a time when serials like Doc Savage, the Green Hornet, and Superman were emphasizing a kind of humanistic modernism through the ideals of order, human achievement and ‘rugged individualism,’ Batman and the Shadow were the only two who embraced the darkness in order to do what was right. It can hardly be surprising that in the aftermath of World War I and the Great Depression Batman arose as a character who emerged from brutal psychological trauma into a dark world that needed a “caped [read, 'cloaked'] crusader.” Batman was formed by a loss of innocence, that same loss which our world has been struggling with in the wake of two World Wars.
Naturally, each generation has redefined Batman for its own needs. In the fifties and sixties, Batman was imbued with the escapist urge that sought to distance the brutality of two World Wars from the post-war decades, while in the 70′s and 80′s the sense that something had been lost and needed to be recaptured prompted an urge to go back to the original, darker Batman; Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns gave voice to this and has defined much of Batman’s narrative since it was released in ’86.
Now our society has moved into a whole new chapter of its life. Our emphasis is no longer on printed serials and radio, but on episodic videos and the internet. Almost like a strange replay of Batman’s history in print, the movies began with a dark, pulpy feel with Tim Burton‘s Batman (1989) and Batman Returns (1992) but then spiralled into the much campier Batman Forever (1995) and Batman & Robin (1997). Nolan’s reboot is parallel to the change that occurred when the ‘Batman’ show ended and Denis O’Neil and Neal Adams began to reign in on the campiness.
There are even nods to The Dark Knight Returns in The Dark Knight Rises. At the start of the movie, the Batman has ‘disappeared,’ though in Nolan’s world it is because the Batman was blamed for Harvey Dent’s death, not because Robin died as the result of one of the Joker’s schemes. There has also only been eight years between The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises, whereas it has been a couple of decades at least in The Dark Knight Returns, but this is long enough for Nolan to insert a scene from the Dark Knight Returns into his final film. In this scene, an older cop who remembers the Batman in action has a mildly humorous set of exchanges with his younger partner who has never seen the Bat.
Similarly, the primary drama in The Dark Knight Rises centres around a powerful, terrorist leader who threatens all of Gotham with his vile machinations. For Miller it was the leader of the Mutants, and for Nolan it is Bane, but Nolan — presumably deliberately — departs from the original Bane storyline and structures his story after the pattern of Miller’s Mutant storyline. Alfred at one point even points out that Bane’s ferocity and youth give him the edge — the same edge that the Mutant leader had. There are other similarities as well, but I will leave you to spot them.
Bane and the Mutants’ leader in Miller’s ‘Dark Knight Returns’ are so similar that there must be a deliberate comparison here.
I will make no mystery of it: I think Nolan’s work on these films is brilliant, though not because of his interpretation of Batman, but because he has now elevated Batman to the place of myth. ‘Well, duh,’ I hear you cry. Again, let me explain.
Myths change from generation to generation. King Arthur never existed as he does in the stories we have received, but we can see him changing over the course of the Middle Ages as the needs of his storytellers and storylisteners changed. Robin Hood, Cú Chulainn, Finn MacCumhaill, even Vlad the Impaler all changed according to when and where the story was told. Now, Batman has changed, but changed so effectively!
All the elements are there, but they have been recombined in different ways to tell a new version specific to our day. Nolan’s themes map out like this (bear with me if you don’t agree):
- Batman Begins: Duty
- The Dark Knight: Duality
- The Dark Knight Rises: Privilege
Now, all the themes above are present in all three movies, and Nolan does a great job in bringing them all to a climax in the third film; but each movie focuses its action and drama on one theme or another.
In the first film, Bruce must grapple with his sense of duty to his family, to Gotham, and ultimately to his own humanity by protecting Gotham from his antithesis, Ra’s al Ghul. In this supervillain we see what Bruce was becoming but stopped due to the selfless legacy of his father. It is that legacy that prompts Bruce to take on the cowl and fight crime his way, and Nolan very quietly and brilliantly uses Alfred to point out Bruce’s insanity with increasing (and very believable) urgency. In other words, Bruce has gone mad but has found a way to channel his insanity for the greater good by trying to emulate his father, thereby living up to his familial, civic and human duty.
Any movie involving superheroes begs for a central theme of duality, and Nolan does not fail to provide.
In the second film, Bruce comes literally face-to-face with the chaos of his psychosis in the form of the Joker. Nolan’s Joker is so chaotic that he actually ceases to be a character because he is simply no longer human. By comparison Bane is epically complex, but for Nolan it was not enough to have this duality on screen. He took the other great duality of the Batman narrative, Two-Face, and recreated him as a foil for Bruce. Not only are Bruce and Harvey mirror opposites (Batman the cloaked vigilante, Harvey the shining example of due process), but they’re going after the same girl — the girl whose death destroys both men. For Dent, though, it means turning him in on himself, which prompts Bruce to invert his own character and become the image of a villain because that is what the city needs him to be. Again, duty saves the day.
In the third film, Nolan gives us a brilliant slight of hand — though I won’t define precisely what it is. Bane is, in effect, the combined forces of Ra’s al Ghul and the Joker, and Nolan makes a bold statement here that Marxist rhetoric, popularized most recently in the Occupy Movement, is used by powerful leaders only to deceive the wretched. Bane’s thesis to Batman, that the way to torture someone’s soul is to dangle hope before them until they tear themselves to pieces, is really an assertion that in almost every case Marxism is the ultimate opiate of the masses. The plan has always been to destroy Gotham, but Gotham becomes a better example of what people do when not under a totalitarian regime (according to al Ghul’s thinking) if the world watches it self-immolate before the end. Nolan beautifully cites historical events like the French Revolution and the Occupy Movement in order to show how a charismatic and clever leader can use poverty as the greatest tool against the People.
At the same time, the inner development of Bruce Wayne never leaves centre stage. The main question here is ‘can Bruce continue to enjoy the privilege of being the Batman,’ and the simple answer is ‘no.’ Why is being Batman a privilege and not a curse?’ you ask; because he is only given the opportunity to render his insanity beneficial because his father left him a fortune, Lucius Fox gives him weapons, and Alfred wipes his nose. His circle of intimates make it possible for Bruce to be crazy in the hopes that their kindness will one day allow him to live his own life, and in this drama of Bruce claiming himself does Nolan’s contribution stand out most. In all other Batman stories, the Bat is a Good Thing. Only in the original Bane story-line does the archetypal Bat-in-the-Darkness become a demonic figure contrasted with Bane’s own boyhood vision of himself as der Übermensch, the paragon of humanity that allows Bane to become a leader and thus beyond the morality of the common man.
In the origin-story for Bane, his boyhood self undergoes a crisis in which the Bat becomes a fetish for the fear that limits us.
Duty, duality and privilege come crashing together in a crisis in which Bruce must actually learn to fear death again, implying that by not fearing death he has simply not been alive, that his obsession with instilling fear into criminals has prevented him from trusting others to keep Gotham safe. This issue of trust becomes a motif in The Dark Knight Rises, finally reaching a climax at the film’s end … but I will not spoil it for those who have yet to see the film.
Many people say that superheroes are our modern mythology. This is almost certainly true, but until Nolan’s Batman films there have been no stories about them that so thoroughly manifested the issues and psyche of our post-modern world.
Generosity is the blood of society.
