Spent the better part of yesterday afternoon in the dark with a bunch of strangers, being plunged into the sensory overload of Batman Begins. The genre of the post-9/11 Blockbuster reaches its apogee with this film (and, I presume, the even less subtle War of the Worlds, though I haven't seen it), in which our hero receives his training at the hands of nihilist extremists (whom he, of course, then destroys), and goes on to destroy half the city he's attempting to save -- in short, Team America without the sense of humor.
My 10-year-old son is enthralled by comic book adaptations now, and I'm aware that, on some deep level, he is being trained to believe what we've all bene trained to believe -- that battles are deeply personal, thrillingly cinematic, and always won by us, and that at the end, the good guy is not only left standing but has all his bleached teeth intact.
Still, the Batman films have been excellent at what they do, and what they mostly do is capture the cityscape of our nightmares. Our cities, as represented by Gotham, are rotting honeycombs -- galvanized graveyards that entomb the prosperous dead above the impoverished living. Gotham's streets receive no light, and its denizens are bad, bad people of all races and creeds who have been hopelessly corrupted by pure, unadulterated desire.
Christian Bale, the current incarnation of Batman, is better known in our house as the hero of Newsies, a musical film about downtrodden orphans in turn-of-the-century New York who rise up to topple corrupt newspaper owners. The adolescent Bale is dark, funny and charismatic, and can dance a bit, too. Here, of course, he is muscled and brooding in the grand Bruce Wayne tradition, the perfect American hero: rich, talented, principled, buff, and mad as hell.
He is also perfect because he adapts the techniques of his enemies to forge their undoing, and this is the deepest message that Batman offers -- a kind of ethos of New Age Terrorism. We all leave the theatre, whether we know it or not, resolved not just to be like Batman but to be Batman: we will patiently, grimly, furiously track our tormentors until we drive them insane. Death will be a relief to them, and too good for their kind.
All color has been drained out of Batman's world, but it is besotted with power. Only the fiendish can turn it to their purposes, and only angry orphans with a Fortune 500 company at their disposal can redeem it. Symbols tower above reality, and power lives in glass and steel houses removed from street level and relieved of responsibility.
But even the wealthy are not immune to personal apocalypse. When Wayne Manor is burned to the ground by the hero's shadowy former mentors, Wayne resolves to rebuild it in perfect replica, "brick by brick." The faithful Alfred (the helplessly excellent Michael Caine) reminds his lord that the destruction is an opportunity to fortify the foundations and enhance the catacombs that have become the "Batcave" -- a metaphor that bludgeons us, if we've been too dense up to now to receive it: remain cheerily American on the outside, but be ready to replicate your smile, with the blade of a knife, on the throats of our enemies, at a cinematic moment's notice.
The evil are readily identified. They are some combination of the following: well dressed, corpulent, effeminate, accented, or martial arts experts. And they all mouth the platitudes one would expect of their kind.
Prior to the movie, we were treated to so many previews and commercials the audience began to get angry. Every preview was calibrated to the audience in attendance, so each was more like Batman Begins than the one before, and each was shot and edited in a way that sharpened one's anger to what was, by the time the movie began, a vengeful and psychotic edge.
The movie slaked our anger and devoured the enemies we had made during the previews. The evil were not only dead but incinerated in their own hurtling sarcophagi -- a clear, even unmistakeable post-9/11 revenge fantasy that our hero and his one-good-cop collaborator lived out for all of us.
Supposedly, a million people saw the fireworks over downtown Chicago last night. Most must have been blissfully unaware of the battles those fireworks were meant to honor -- and the future battles they were already evoking. Rest assured, however: those who had already seen Batman Begins were angry, vigilant, and ready, on your behalf, to destroy half your world in order to save you.
--T.A.
