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Batman Begins Directed by: Christopher Nolan Based on: Some guy dressed as a bat and Industrialized Mass Media serving, for once, a good purpose. |
Media | Batman Begins
Article by Kolbe | February 1, 2008
“...The Batman movie I was wating for,” said famous film critic and videogame sneerer Roger Ebert at Batman Begins' 2005 release. And Ebert certainly wasn't the only one thinking that very thing, as bat-fans and movie enthusiasts the world over applauded director Christopher Nolan’s take on the classic comic-book hero. But there was hidden meaning beneath his words, unanswered questions and accusation. For example: Why wasn’t Batman Begins made sooner?”
The answer is simple: in order for this Batman to exist, we needed the appropriate context. A context built with both the achievements and failures of Batman's previous outings in popular media. Yes, even includes George Clooney’s nipple-enabled Batsuit. Especially George Clooney’s nipple-enabled Batsuit.
The Lord of the Rings trilogy is based on Tolkien’s books of the same name. Francis Ford-Coppola’s The Godfather used a Mario Puzo novel as the source for its story. It's easy to judge precisely how faithful (or unfaithful) these movie adaptations were, because each was based on the work of a single author. Batman, however, is a different story. The world's greatest detective and his Gotham haunts were created by Bob Kane and Bill Finger in 1939, but both character and world have been modified, adapted, scrutinized and morphed through the works of different writers, artists, actors, directors, animators and even psychologists for almost 70 years now. How can anyone be faithful to that? Is there, in fact, anything to be faithful to?
But that's simply the nature of creative industries: to keep things fresh in the consumer's mind, giving them “what they want," and rake in the loot. Just ask Square Enix, which appears to be run these days by fashion disaster Tetsuya Nomura. Not only has the company given him almost total control, often at the expense of storytelling and game design, but now they're “expanding” the Ivalice universe without the involvement of Yasumi Matsuno, for whom the world of Final Fantasy Tactics was a deeply personal labor of love. Or you could just watch Spider-Man 3, a movie with the legend “please the masses” written all over every forced second of the Venom/Sandman team-up.
Of course, Batman's fate has been no different. DC has authorized plenty of questionable changes to their anti-hero since his birth. His original vigilante methods were famously toned down in the '50s in response to the accusations of Frederick Wertham, a psychologist who argued that comics -- violent and morally ambiguous -- were the root of America's decadent youth. Batman and Robin, for their part, were accused of promoting homosexual child buggery. Heaven forbid our precious children should be exposed to gayness! And then there was the pastel-colored 1966 TV series starring Adam West, about which the less said the better.
It's been a rough ride for Bruce Wayne, but a necessary one. The U.S. Senate agreed with Wertham; if DC hadn't changed the tone of their comics, the company would have gone the way of E.C., and Batman could have been ereased from the map for good. Or worse, turned into an Alfred E. Neumann clone -- although one could argue that West’s parodic take did precisely that. The TV was important, though, because it brought Batman to a broader audience, making it popular outside the comic book world. But this Batman was bad -- funny, maybe, but uninspiring -- and many people, including DC's up-and-coming writers and artists knew it. Dennis O’Neal and Neal Adams were among those newcomers, and when they took the reign of Detective Comics in the '70s they brought with them the mandate that Batman deserved better. Way better.
The Batman of the '70s was dark again, like his original incarnation. But this new version went one better: the new Bruce Wayne was more of a detective than ever before. Some traces of fantasy and science fiction remained, leftovers from the earlier, goofier era. But things slowly improved, and in 1986, O’Neal (then editor in charge of all Batman magazines) authorized hotshot creator Frank Miller a project outside Batman’s official continuity titled The Dark Knight Returns. Dark and grim, sure, but Miller's four-issue mini-series was far more than that, a new take on an old hero set in a possible future. Compared to the harmless Batman non-readers knew, Miller’s vision was both satiric and agressive. Batman was no role model, no perfect hero in shinning batsuit, but a truly fierce crime-fighter. But he was also, to many people in both sides of the fourth wall, a madman -- a tormented soul just barely different from the people he sought to punish.
The book was very successful and Miller followed this vision a year later with Batman: Year One, an origin story updating the Batman mythos for the world of the '80s. Just as in DKR, the story was dark, but this time is was more realistic. Not only Bruce Wayne’s traumas were developed, but so were detective James Gordon’s and the backdrop of corruption that had besieged Gotham City, too. Miller justified as much elements of the Batman mythos as he could. His Bruce Wayne was molded by an unhappy personal history, his psychological traits and the world beyond. David Mazzucchelli’s more realistic art also helped this Batman to feel like an actual person, and Gotham City to seem like an actual metropolis.
It was followed soon after by Tim Burton’s Batman (or Batman89 if you prefer). Inspired largely by Miller´s work, Burton created a new Batman for the non-reader audiences. Of course, his take was largely about the visuals -- this is Burton we’re talking about. That's not to say it was a bad movie; it was fun to watch, but the story was fairly incoherent. All those puzzle pieces Miller had placed so carefully were tossed aside in favor of a script as campy in places as West’s version, two decades before -- just with darker colors. Even so, Burton’s Batman, like West’s, put the Dark Knight in the spotlight and made him popular again. 1989 was the year of the Bat, and bat-merchandise was everywhere -- true bat-mania spilling all over the fabric of our consumerist society.
Of course, it seems like a work of genius next to the sequels that followed throughout the '90s. Meanwhile, comic books were actually getting better and better, following in the serious steps of O’Neal and Miller. Graphic novels like Arkham Asylum (by Grant Morrison and Dave McKean) and short sories like The Killing Joke (by insane comics guru Alan Moore) expanded the more psychological, down-to-earth and sometimes frightening world of Batman. For almost a decade, it seemed that all good writers had a good Batman story to tell.
And things weren’t going bad in TV either. Paul Dini and Bruce Timm began production of Batman: The Animated Series in 1992. The series’ somber atmosphere saw modest success, attracting adults as well as Saturday morning 12-year-olds and shaping DC's subsequent animated efforts. It offered a tightrope balance between the inoffensive themes expected from a kid’s cartoon and the scary, sometimes sordid material it was based on.
But Saturday morning cartoons are invisible next to blockbuster films, and fans were infuriated by what Warner Bros. was doing with their beloved character on the silver screen. When the last of them, Joel Shumacher’s Batman and Robin, was released in 1997, chaos reigned on the streets. Well, not chaos, but many people were completely disgusted by what had happened to a classic character -- even non-fans. Their adverse reactions set the gears into motion for what would be, eight years later, Batman Begins, a reboot (read: “not prequel”) for the Batman movie franchise. Someone at Warner realized that people, while collectively pretty lacking in taste, have their limits... and they have a clear idea of what Batman should be.
And then that someone said something like, “We need to know what is this Batman that people expect, and give it to them”. And someone else in the board room gasped, “That’s crazy! A faithful Batman movie would push people away. They only care for boobs and explosions.”
And maybe that last somebody was right, but some of us were perfectly thrilled to see a good Batman movie, one that represented the characters and world we have been reading for more than ten years now.
And so Warner hired Christopher Nolan, a director with a fetish for obsesive characters and someone who had proved that he knew what it took to craft a good story. (That’s character developement, if you were wondering.) Batman Begins is awesome, no doubt, but to say that it's good simply because of Nolan's influence would be a very unfair lie. Just like Burtman wasn’t good not because of the director or the cast, but the sum of all these elements, Batman Begins was great because it was all about the right people at the right moment. Christian Bale was born to be Batman, just as Christopher Reeve was born to be Superman?. To represent an obsessive persona like Bruce Wayne, you need an equally obsessive actor with just that intense look in his eyes -- just like Bale. Jim Gordon had some justice, too, thanks to both Nolan and Goyer's script and Gary Oldman’s performance. Also, the techology pulled though, too. True, Begins is no special effects movie like, say, Harry Potter or Spider-Man, but it was needed to flesh out the small but important details: Batman flying trough The Narrows, or the Scarecrow’s fear toxin.
Perhaps most importantly is that for the first time we had a movie about Batman, not anyone else. Everyone, from the villians to the secondary characters, had the sole mission of developing Bruce Wayne's story.
The only weak spot in Batman Begins is Rachel Dawes. The character herself sucks, because she was forced to be a romantic interest. But even Bale’s performance seems awkward during the kiss scene thanks to Katie “I love Tom Cruise with all my heart” Holmes. Thankfully she’s not coming back for the sequel. Maybe things would have been different if Maggie Gyllenhaal had been given the role in the first place.
And so, Batman Begins was made. It was the product of terrible corporate decisions, conservative moralists and a few brilliant writers and artists with the guts to say “that’s enough”. Altogether... just not at the same time. It's a movie that couldn't have been made until today, which works out just fine for us. Although it's a pity Bob Kane and Bill Finger didn't live to see it. Bob Kane actually died in 1998, a year before Batman and Robin. My theory: depressed to death.
We, on the other hand, wait impatiently for the sequel, The Dark Knight.