We've got a lot to teach you, Cassius Green

Rating: Null/10 (22 July 2013)

"Take up the White Man's Burden, and reap his old reward; the blame of those ye better, the hate of those ye guard." - Rudyard Kipling
Chris Nolan's "Batman Begins" tells the tale of Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale), a billionaire industrialist and weapons manufacturer who becomes a masked vigilante. The film's the most conventional outing in Nolan's Batman trilogy, the least pretentious and the least overtly fascist. It also has the coolest action sequences in the franchise, including a night-time car chase across the streets and rooftops of Gotham City.
The film's first half offers a by-the-numbers origins tale. It then pits Bale's Wayne against Ra's al Ghul, a vaguely Arabic, quasi-Oriental bogeyman who leads the League of Shadows, a terrorist group which hopes to destroy Gotham City, which it views as being a "cesspit of corruption".
From here the film launches into your usual White Man's Burden narrative: are you too weak, Ra's al Ghul poses to Wayne, too frightened, to do what is Necessary? Do you have the gall to break the law and actually act? Turns out Wayne does, as he promptly turns himself into a figure of impersonal Justice. He will break the Law, he will accept the Blame, but only for the Greater Good. You know, like every other fawned over psycho in world history who cooks up a "few eggs must be broken in order to defend civilisation" narrative. In each case, the "hero" righteously takes on a little "blame" and "sin" in order to prevent others from getting their hands dirty. In graciously accepting villainhood, he also sheepishly expects adulation.
This Batman film doesn't have all the renditions, wire-tappings, mass surveillance, illegal torturing and extra-judicial stuff seen in Nolan's other Bat flicks, and it's less in love with the spectacle of reactionary counter-revolution (the later films are so fascist, Wayne practically invents a device to end world poverty/scarcity, but then mothballs it because crazy Green loving eco-terrorists might turn it into a bomb!). It does, however, have a subplot about Bruce Wayne's father, Thomas Wayne. He's the archetypal good capitalist, who turns his back on Wayne Industries in favour of medicine, science, and cooking up projects which will lift the post-Fordist Gotham out of social disintegration. Al Ghul and his Middle Eastern/Oriental ninja terrorists wants to destroy Gotham, Daddy Wayne wants to heal it. Here, finance capitalism is offered as a problem which will be solved by the return of re-personalised capital; by enlightened despots and humane industrialists. In this regard, Thomas creates a massive public transport system which he hopes will "bring the city together" during times of economic depression and which will "lift the masses out of the slums". It is this rail system which Al Ghul hopes to destroy. Terrorists, apparently, hate privately financed public transportation.
The film also contains a second sub-plot with a super-villain called The Scarecrow (Cillian Murphy). He uses hallucinogenic drugs to drive people into fear. Wayne's Batman identity is offered as the flip-side to this: Wayne creates a devilish bat persona with the hopes of both driving dissidents into fear, and vanquishing his own fears. Like Nolan's "Inception" and "The Prestige", there's thus an obsession with putting on shows, performances and spectacular sleight-of-hands in order to misdirect and control people/populaces. The act of being Batman is ultimately an elaborate theatrical production.
Still, what the film's "incepting" into your brain is total junk. "Some men aren't looking for anything logical, like money," characters state in the later films. "They can't be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. They just want to watch the world burn!" Pandering to the idiots-guide-to-terrorists, all three films ultimately promote the same straw-man: outside of late-capitalist civilisation is something irrational, chaotic, lawless and terrorist. We know there are a lot of problems with the existing system, the film says, but hey, revolutions are worse. There be some crazy dudes out there. Historically, these "crazy dudes" used to be straw-man revolutionaries, Robin Hoods, Marxists, communists and "radicals" (even Einstein, Edison, Ghandi, Chaplin, Lennon, Wells and Orwell were labelled "dissidents" for being "socialist"), today they're "terrorists" and "Islamofascists". Sure Gotham isn't paradise, but it's better than "their paradise". The violence within (the masses) and without (Bane! Al Ghul!) must thus be contained. If this means investing in secret police forces or spandex heroes with monopolies on violence, so be it. Such thinking has led to the liquidation (and demonizing) of every egalitarian movement across Latin America, the Caribbean, Europe, Asia and the Middle East, the financing and promotion of fascist despots as a "better alternative" to social change, the annihilation of billions across the world (from Indonesia to Ecuador and back again) and the support of hundreds of brutal militias and dictators over the last century alone (from Bao Dai to El Sadat). In real life, Gotham loves nothing better than supporting Tsars, monarchs and, if push comes to shove, crazy super villains (Barre, Saddam, Castaneda, Hitler, etc). And in each case, the Batman narrative (better some black ops, extra-judicial jiggy than letting Them win! Right?) is used to sell such actions to the public, though actual facts tells us something else: Power creates, passively or actively, bogeyman super-villains, oft to squelch change, and then later uses them to both justify its own use of force and denounce contestation to the status-quo. All the Batman films go to extreme efforts to distort and evade the consequences of their own parables.
Unlike the Michael Mann inspired cityscapes seen in the franchise's later instalments, the Gotham City of "Batman Begins" mixes the medieval with the ultra-contemporary; part Gothic, part German Expressionism, part cyberpunk, part favela slum, part future Megalopolis. Like all of Nolan's Bat flicks, "Begins" insists upon being taken seriously, but then feigns naiveté ("it's just popcorn!") when taken seriously. The film co-stars Morgan Freeman as a wise white man and Katie Holmes as Two Face.
7.5/10 - Worth two viewings.