Batman vs. "economics".
First, Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins really is the best Batman picture so far, even better than the 1989 Tim Burton one (although there's bias on my part since I can't stand Tim Burton, the Robin Williams of directors). Nolan's Batman is nice and dark. It's gritty and violent. It's haunted and human and defiantly imperfect. Nolan's Batmobile is more Abrams Tank than Ferrari. The Bat Suit is imported in pieces from Asian subsidiaries of Bruce Wayne's multinational tech firm and assembled in the Bat Cave underneath the Wayne Mansion. The bat signal is created slapdash by stringing up villains across floodlights. The Bruce Wayne "hero" is as comfortable playing his alter-ego drunken millionaire playboy by day as he is being the avenging superhero by night. There's little visible blood or bruising, but in the film's climax -- though you have to think a bit to realise it -- a doomed little blond kid, gratuitously showing up to remind us of Bale-Wayne-Batman's own fucked-up childhood, gets gassed, his only solace being the right to die, by going insane, in Katie Holmes' surregate mother arms. This is pretty dark stuff.
On top of all that, the cast is great. Christian Bale is a better, more respectful-of-his-responsibility-to-Bob-Kane's-vision Batman than Val Kilmer, George Clooney or Michael Keatan were. He's so good that he almost overcomes the essential ridiculousness that dooms all goth-comic movies: the spandex suit. Bale's Batman is twisted (and narcisstic) enough to enjoy dressing up like a bat and rasping at villains, yet self-conciously macho enough to be vaguely uncomfortable in his chosen uniform. (Bale and Nolan know you don't need nipples on the batsuit to be a bit kinky, to exploit the thin line between fear and fetish.) Katie Holmes is, of course, too-perfect-by-half as the Brainy Girl in Silk Shirts with the Heart of Gold -- but Bale is creepy enough to make her goody-two-shoes chastity credible. Besides, she's a requisite, and the rest of the cast is a real hoot, in the best way. There's Gary Oldman as the Last Honest Cop. There's Morgan Freeman as the Brilliant-but-Cool Physicist Who Makes the Bat-Gadgets. There's Michael Caine as Alfred the butler, Bale's surregate father-figure and the film's best source of comic relief.
There's also a whole smorgasbord of terrific villains: Liam Neeson plays the Evil Psychobabbling Vaguely European Ninja-Fighting Arch-Villain. Chris Lehane--er, Cillian Murphy--plays the effete but demented shrink who eventually gets a taste of his own shock-therapy medicine. There's a mob boss named Falcone. There's also a whole gang of ninja-fighting baddies, under Neeson's employ, called the League of Shadows, whose historical and vaguely mythologically-rendered role has been to wreck Shiva-like havoc on societies that have become too decadent (making them an interesting and tantalizingly opaque combination of al Qaeda and God). But the real villain in the film, the great evil with which the Shadow-Ninjas originally tried to destroy Gotham, is (Neeson sneers knowingly) "economics" -- or, maybe more precisely, rampant capitalist economics. By contrast, the real force for good in the film isn't really the creepy, humourless, self-obsessed Wayne-Batman. Rather, it's that scourge of rampant capitalism: noblesse-oblige. Noblesse-oblige is personified in the film by Bale's dead father, who once built a giant, audacious, subsudized public-transport system to help the poor and the politically unconnected get where they needed to go in Gotham. Such altruism, we're told, led him to "nearly bankrupt Wayne Enterprises during the Depression trying to fight poverty". And that's why "economics" alone couldn't get the job done for the bad guys. Instead, the League of Shadows has had to come back and try to finish the job in a more appropiately science-fiction manner: by gas-poisoning Gotham's citizens and turning them into flesh-eating zombies.
Batman Begins is uber-political (contrary to what Liam Lacey at The Globe and Mail says) but it's uber-political in a very old-school kind of way. In a terrifically observant review, the L.A. Weekly's Scott Foundas describes Bale and Nolan's creation as the first "neorealist" Batman. Maybe, but this sure isn't a "neoliberal" Batman. The film is set in a distinctly American time-warp. Afterall, the Depression, during which Jonathan Wayne spread his largesse being a model unto other capitalists and thwarting the League, took place during the 30s. The childhood flashback parts of the movie look distinctly Greatest Generation. The film's "present" (which should be about 20 years later) could conceivably represent any time between the actual 80s and George Orwell's 1984. But society's problems are apparently timeless. Neeson, being evil, advocates cracking down on the underclass: "criminals thrive on the indulgence of society's understanding" he tells Bale omniously. The hero thinks there might be more to it than that.
Batman also proves himself on the right side of the film's ideological debate by disfavouring capital punishment. In effect, he's the Mario Cuomo of superheros, throwing his veto around with relish. Early in the film, he breaks with the League of Shadows by refusing to execute a sacrificial murderer they've brought him, an act the League requires to prove their proteges' war-on-drugs-style hardassedness. Neeson tells Bale that sort of softness will be his undoing, sort of like coddling those welfare moms. (The sacrificial criminal comes to a bad end anyway when Batman escapes from the League by torching their ninja training center located at the top of the Himalayas; more on this kind of thing below.)
There is a little bit of New Left anti-corporate, anti-military-industrial-complex posturing to temper the film's bleeding-heartedness, but it's pretty half-hearted by Hollywood standards. Afterall, the rapaciousness of the corporate behemoth, Wayne Enterprises, is eradicated as easily as changing the CEO and getting the company out of the arms industry. As Bale returns to Gotham to begin his dual-identity life, we learn that, since Jonathan Wayne's death, the nasty CEO of Wayne Enterprises proved his nefariousness by taking the firm public, (something "Jonathan Wayne probably wouldn't have done.") Of course, the Waynes, salt of the earth, kept full partner legal-responsibility for their own business back in the day. Bale's great act of market-savvy and public responsibility is to restore that legacy by buying up most of the IPO shares so that the firm once again becomes his and his alone. He can then fire that rabidly downsizing CEO and appoint Morgan Freeman in his place. And probably raise wages up to some respectable level down on the floor.
Of course, noblesse-oblige has its moral ambiguities. Batman doesn't kill the big villains if he can avoid it. But he knocks off their underling thugs with relish. And if the whole of Gotham has been corrupted and people are desperate, is it really the fault of these thugs that they're working for the bad guys? Aren't they just cogs in the corporate-capitalist wheel? In the film's big climax, Batman refuses to kill Neeson, but informs him that "I don't have to save you," then lets him plunge to his death in a train crash that Batman's friend, the Last Honest Cop, had set up. Similar ambiguity surrounds the Gotham underclass, a member of whom killed Bale's parents and set him on the road to Batman-hood. The murderer was desperate, we're told, because the mob boss Falcone kept everyone desperate, unemployed and poor. So was the mugger more a victim of The Man or more of a heartless, socially irresponsible criminal who destroyed good lives? The villain Neeson and the League of Shadows have their answer of course -- it's the same answer as Bat Buchanan and Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich and Jon Kyl have given. The film's good guys know, or come to know, that it's the wrong answer, but their own alternative response is more ambiguous. They hem an haw a bit. Bale overpays a homeless guy for his coat. Holmes comforts a doomed little boy. The evil CEO gets fired. But at the end of the film, the lunatics from the asylum are still running in the streets (how should the criminally insane be dealt with?), Wayne-Batman is still a hell of a lot richer than anybody else, and the essential questions about how to run society remain unanswered.
I like this. I think noblesse oblige is generally underated in today's politics and it's sure as hell neglected in today's popular culture. North American society doesn't demand nearly enough from its people in power. The failure to make demands on our economic and cultural elite is a major failure of the post-Great Society era, and it's probably the definitive failing of the American neoliberals. And here is that rare film that rises above the typical Hollywood libertarianism. Batman Begins is wonderfully austere; it's all about the responsibilities, rather than the rights, of liberalism. It's about the interplay of the public good and the selfish good in the dark human heart. But while my poor maligned discipline -- "economics!" -- takes another hit to the solar plexus, Nolan also ignores the solutions it offers. Where's Keynes in all this? Economics, the good kind at least, can offer us the proper channels for greed. It can help align private incentives with the public interest where markets fail. It can help keep make noblesse-oblige more than just noblesse-oblige. In fact, the dream of well-regulated capitalism is that it turns economic victims into players, that it spreads autonomy. Granted, autonomy is not a social value that's very conducive to the goth-comic world, composed as it is of heros, villains and their miles and miles of victims. But it's important to any vision of liberalism in our real world. As Joseph Stiglitz or Paul Krugman or Jackson Lears or the editorial staff of the Washington Monthly might tell you, 20th Century history, be it the 1920s or the 1990s, suggests that the capitalist class' noblesse oblige might not be enough to ward off the League of Shadows. On the other hand, when demanded by the political class and combined with smart market regulation, meaty enforcement agencies (the Last Honest Cops), strong labour interests who feel they have a stake in the economic and political system, and maybe a Democratic Congress, it probably can play a major role in keeping us from turning into flesh-eating zombies.
On top of all that, the cast is great. Christian Bale is a better, more respectful-of-his-responsibility-to-Bob-Kane's-vision Batman than Val Kilmer, George Clooney or Michael Keatan were. He's so good that he almost overcomes the essential ridiculousness that dooms all goth-comic movies: the spandex suit. Bale's Batman is twisted (and narcisstic) enough to enjoy dressing up like a bat and rasping at villains, yet self-conciously macho enough to be vaguely uncomfortable in his chosen uniform. (Bale and Nolan know you don't need nipples on the batsuit to be a bit kinky, to exploit the thin line between fear and fetish.) Katie Holmes is, of course, too-perfect-by-half as the Brainy Girl in Silk Shirts with the Heart of Gold -- but Bale is creepy enough to make her goody-two-shoes chastity credible. Besides, she's a requisite, and the rest of the cast is a real hoot, in the best way. There's Gary Oldman as the Last Honest Cop. There's Morgan Freeman as the Brilliant-but-Cool Physicist Who Makes the Bat-Gadgets. There's Michael Caine as Alfred the butler, Bale's surregate father-figure and the film's best source of comic relief.
There's also a whole smorgasbord of terrific villains: Liam Neeson plays the Evil Psychobabbling Vaguely European Ninja-Fighting Arch-Villain. Chris Lehane--er, Cillian Murphy--plays the effete but demented shrink who eventually gets a taste of his own shock-therapy medicine. There's a mob boss named Falcone. There's also a whole gang of ninja-fighting baddies, under Neeson's employ, called the League of Shadows, whose historical and vaguely mythologically-rendered role has been to wreck Shiva-like havoc on societies that have become too decadent (making them an interesting and tantalizingly opaque combination of al Qaeda and God). But the real villain in the film, the great evil with which the Shadow-Ninjas originally tried to destroy Gotham, is (Neeson sneers knowingly) "economics" -- or, maybe more precisely, rampant capitalist economics. By contrast, the real force for good in the film isn't really the creepy, humourless, self-obsessed Wayne-Batman. Rather, it's that scourge of rampant capitalism: noblesse-oblige. Noblesse-oblige is personified in the film by Bale's dead father, who once built a giant, audacious, subsudized public-transport system to help the poor and the politically unconnected get where they needed to go in Gotham. Such altruism, we're told, led him to "nearly bankrupt Wayne Enterprises during the Depression trying to fight poverty". And that's why "economics" alone couldn't get the job done for the bad guys. Instead, the League of Shadows has had to come back and try to finish the job in a more appropiately science-fiction manner: by gas-poisoning Gotham's citizens and turning them into flesh-eating zombies.
Batman Begins is uber-political (contrary to what Liam Lacey at The Globe and Mail says) but it's uber-political in a very old-school kind of way. In a terrifically observant review, the L.A. Weekly's Scott Foundas describes Bale and Nolan's creation as the first "neorealist" Batman. Maybe, but this sure isn't a "neoliberal" Batman. The film is set in a distinctly American time-warp. Afterall, the Depression, during which Jonathan Wayne spread his largesse being a model unto other capitalists and thwarting the League, took place during the 30s. The childhood flashback parts of the movie look distinctly Greatest Generation. The film's "present" (which should be about 20 years later) could conceivably represent any time between the actual 80s and George Orwell's 1984. But society's problems are apparently timeless. Neeson, being evil, advocates cracking down on the underclass: "criminals thrive on the indulgence of society's understanding" he tells Bale omniously. The hero thinks there might be more to it than that.
Batman also proves himself on the right side of the film's ideological debate by disfavouring capital punishment. In effect, he's the Mario Cuomo of superheros, throwing his veto around with relish. Early in the film, he breaks with the League of Shadows by refusing to execute a sacrificial murderer they've brought him, an act the League requires to prove their proteges' war-on-drugs-style hardassedness. Neeson tells Bale that sort of softness will be his undoing, sort of like coddling those welfare moms. (The sacrificial criminal comes to a bad end anyway when Batman escapes from the League by torching their ninja training center located at the top of the Himalayas; more on this kind of thing below.)
There is a little bit of New Left anti-corporate, anti-military-industrial-complex posturing to temper the film's bleeding-heartedness, but it's pretty half-hearted by Hollywood standards. Afterall, the rapaciousness of the corporate behemoth, Wayne Enterprises, is eradicated as easily as changing the CEO and getting the company out of the arms industry. As Bale returns to Gotham to begin his dual-identity life, we learn that, since Jonathan Wayne's death, the nasty CEO of Wayne Enterprises proved his nefariousness by taking the firm public, (something "Jonathan Wayne probably wouldn't have done.") Of course, the Waynes, salt of the earth, kept full partner legal-responsibility for their own business back in the day. Bale's great act of market-savvy and public responsibility is to restore that legacy by buying up most of the IPO shares so that the firm once again becomes his and his alone. He can then fire that rabidly downsizing CEO and appoint Morgan Freeman in his place. And probably raise wages up to some respectable level down on the floor.
Of course, noblesse-oblige has its moral ambiguities. Batman doesn't kill the big villains if he can avoid it. But he knocks off their underling thugs with relish. And if the whole of Gotham has been corrupted and people are desperate, is it really the fault of these thugs that they're working for the bad guys? Aren't they just cogs in the corporate-capitalist wheel? In the film's big climax, Batman refuses to kill Neeson, but informs him that "I don't have to save you," then lets him plunge to his death in a train crash that Batman's friend, the Last Honest Cop, had set up. Similar ambiguity surrounds the Gotham underclass, a member of whom killed Bale's parents and set him on the road to Batman-hood. The murderer was desperate, we're told, because the mob boss Falcone kept everyone desperate, unemployed and poor. So was the mugger more a victim of The Man or more of a heartless, socially irresponsible criminal who destroyed good lives? The villain Neeson and the League of Shadows have their answer of course -- it's the same answer as Bat Buchanan and Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich and Jon Kyl have given. The film's good guys know, or come to know, that it's the wrong answer, but their own alternative response is more ambiguous. They hem an haw a bit. Bale overpays a homeless guy for his coat. Holmes comforts a doomed little boy. The evil CEO gets fired. But at the end of the film, the lunatics from the asylum are still running in the streets (how should the criminally insane be dealt with?), Wayne-Batman is still a hell of a lot richer than anybody else, and the essential questions about how to run society remain unanswered.
I like this. I think noblesse oblige is generally underated in today's politics and it's sure as hell neglected in today's popular culture. North American society doesn't demand nearly enough from its people in power. The failure to make demands on our economic and cultural elite is a major failure of the post-Great Society era, and it's probably the definitive failing of the American neoliberals. And here is that rare film that rises above the typical Hollywood libertarianism. Batman Begins is wonderfully austere; it's all about the responsibilities, rather than the rights, of liberalism. It's about the interplay of the public good and the selfish good in the dark human heart. But while my poor maligned discipline -- "economics!" -- takes another hit to the solar plexus, Nolan also ignores the solutions it offers. Where's Keynes in all this? Economics, the good kind at least, can offer us the proper channels for greed. It can help align private incentives with the public interest where markets fail. It can help keep make noblesse-oblige more than just noblesse-oblige. In fact, the dream of well-regulated capitalism is that it turns economic victims into players, that it spreads autonomy. Granted, autonomy is not a social value that's very conducive to the goth-comic world, composed as it is of heros, villains and their miles and miles of victims. But it's important to any vision of liberalism in our real world. As Joseph Stiglitz or Paul Krugman or Jackson Lears or the editorial staff of the Washington Monthly might tell you, 20th Century history, be it the 1920s or the 1990s, suggests that the capitalist class' noblesse oblige might not be enough to ward off the League of Shadows. On the other hand, when demanded by the political class and combined with smart market regulation, meaty enforcement agencies (the Last Honest Cops), strong labour interests who feel they have a stake in the economic and political system, and maybe a Democratic Congress, it probably can play a major role in keeping us from turning into flesh-eating zombies.
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