Batman is a neocon

By Sharon McGovern

In conservative circles there is a tradition of wailing and gnashing teeth over American movie culture. It’s well deserved. There is much about the industry that is despicable, movies are dauntingly complex to make, and most of what passes as film criticism—which might serve as a corrective or guide—is degraded and lame. It’s a near miracle that decent movies are made at all, let alone any that would please the notoriously fussy and uptight Right.

The folly of the war in Iraq has been a defining theorem in Hollywood for the past few years, and the tenor of conservative complaint has become more frenzied as the movies have become more blatantly political and infuriating. One after another the dramas arrive, all bravely asserting exactly the same thing: Americans are epic bumblers with a corrupt and moronic leadership, and a security apparatus populated with bullies and monsters. Some, such as the Jason Bourne movies, have done very well. More—and specifically those that have portrayed US fighting men and women as rapists, murderers, cowards and dupes—have failed. They have failed so utterly that only the bright burning certainty of righteousness on the part of an influential segment of the American movie industry could explain why they continue to go into production in the face of massive indifference if not hostility of audiences.

Never let it be said members of the ideological left in Hollywood are without principles. They back their shuddering discomfort with the United States and its defenders with their sweat and toil, reputations, and many millions of dollars. But as it turns out, defeatism and national chagrin aren’t so terribly popular in America or abroad.

Conservative critics have spent a lot of time decrying, with justification, the anti-American movies and pleading for tales that address contemporary struggles in a dramatic, or even heroic manner. The truth is, they are. Some of the most successful movies of the past few years have embodied values and themes that conservatives—though not only conservatives, of course—embrace. The trouble is, those themes are embedded in fantasy and horror movies that more often than not evade serious critical scrutiny.

A few examples:

• A call to the “men of the west” to defend their civilization, the “good in the world…that’s worth fighting for” is from the Lord of the Rings movies.
• The revelation that, stripped of his uniform, the hero that stands between order and chaos is an unassuming young man is from Spiderman 2.
  
• The most vigorous defense of exceptionalism (and how it might be crushed by political correctness, envy, and legal maneuvering) is found in The Incredibles.
  
• The threat of rage infected fanatics overrunning England and Europe is explored in 28 Weeks Later. That movie also showed the American led NATO forces as brave and principled, and demonstrated the vital importance of suppressing facile compassion and following the rules.
  
• The grandeur and sacrifice of protecting home and family is exemplified in 300; which though based on a historical event was filmed in a style that blended classical Greek art and modern comics.
  
• Iron Man and Hancock both reform their dissolute ways dedicate themselves to protecting victims of crime and terror.
  
• Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull resurrects the idea of a noble quest, and the quaint-yet-revolutionary-considering-the-source notion that communism is an all-consuming evil that in any form (human or alien) will destroy those who submit to it.

Of course, it’s not all confirmation of conservative ideas in the fantasy realm. Ghost movie Dark Water (directed by Walter Salles, whose previous effort was the Che hagiography Diarios de motocicleta) made the case for terrorist appeasement. In the latest incarnation of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the assimilated become liberals and their return to individuality is met with the wistful regret of what might have been. George A. Romero has become objectively pro-zombie in his last couple of movies. But of the above, only Romero’s Land of the Dead was profitable, and his follow-up, Diary of the Dead, was a financial disaster.

A complete breakdown of blockbuster by ideology would be unwieldy, but let me focus on one in particular due to its boldness, its success, and the release of its sequel. I speak of the mighty Batman Begins.

When seeking to revive the Batman franchise, Warner Brothers studios pointedly looked for a darker version to supplant the garish mess director Joel Schumacher had left behind. Christopher Nolan was attached on the strength of his previous movies, which include the crafty and amoral Memento and The Prestige. Both are very dark, literally. Nolan is colorblind, so his films tend to emphasize texture and contrast rather than color. The subject matter is even darker, for Batman Begins is explicitly about conquering fear and administering justice—or if you prefer, a war on terror.

In Batman Begins, the boy Bruce Wayne suffers a fall down a well and is subsequently frightened by a storm of bats in the cave where he landed. Unnerved by the bat costumes in the opera he later attends with his parents, he asks his father if they could leave early. When they exit the theater, a mugger confronts and kills Wayne’s parents. The shame over the fear Bruce believes led to the murder of his parents, and the frustration he feels over the early release of the evildoer leads him on a quest to thoroughly understand criminals and to equip himself to fight them.

In Asia he is recruited by the League of Shadows and suspects they have an approach to justice similar to his own. When asked what he seeks, Wayne replies, “the means to fight injustice and to turn fear against those who prey on the fearful.” At the end of his training, however, he learns the Shadows are a) far more ruthless and lawless than he had imagined, and b) have targeted his hometown of Gotham City for destruction. He chooses to defend and reform it instead.

The liberals of Gotham, especially as personified by Wayne’s parents and his childhood friend Rachel Dawes, are nice, idealistic people. They are also so ill equipped to cope with evil and violence as to become a significant contributor to the city’s decline. Wayne’s father, Thomas, abdicated running the business that was the lifeblood of Gotham to “more interested men,” although the economy is in depression and in need of jobs. Instead he gives gifts and endows a cheap system of trains “to unite the city.” Those trains will later be used by the terrorists in their attempt to destroy Gotham The demolition of the train system, much the worse for wear since Bruce rode to the opera on it with his sanctimonious parents, marks the salvation of the city.

When confronted by the mugger Joe Chill, Thomas responds with politesse. “Take it easy…it’s all right,” he says to the armed man. “Don’t be afraid,” he says to Bruce. He gives the man everything he asks for, and is murdered with his wife in front of his son because he appeased an aggressor. During Bruce’s apprenticeship with the League, his mentor Henri Ducard tells him, “Your parents’ death wasn’t your fault. It was your father’s fault.” That assertion is never challenged.

The city prosecutors, of which Dawes is a member, seem to accommodate criminals as much as persecute them. When pleading Chill’s reduced sentence, the DA tells the judge (a stooge of the city’s crime lord), “His crime was appalling, yes, but it was motivated not by greed but by desperation.” Dawes explains that because of the depression, people are susceptible to crime and drugs, which mitigates their moral responsibility. She becomes outraged when Wayne tells her the justice system of Gotham is broken, although he is manifestly correct. That’s why he literally turns his back on Chill’s court proceedings. She does her ineffectual job and hectors Bruce with righteous platitudes, and the city gets worse and worse. As Ducard says, “Criminals thrive on the indulgence of society’s understanding.”

That indulgence interfaces with criminal enterprise in the person of Dr. Jonathan Crane. Crane is a psychopharmacologist who gives sympathetic testimony in court to gain leniency for criminals who are then moved to his asylum. There, he experiments with the fear-inducing drug that is an integral part of the League of Shadow’s plot to destroy Gotham. As he sprays an expanse of the city with the drug, he shouts at the petrified victims, “There’s nothing to fear but fear itself!” He is an ace manipulator of liberal pieties and legal loopholes, and a superb front man for the League of Shadows.

The League of Shadows is a millennia old organization that uses terror to punish the decadent and the wicked. Like Dawes and her ilk, they believe “justice is harmony,” though the formers’ principles dictate near inaction, the League practice near annihilation. They are conservative in the worst sense of the word: inflexible, intolerant, and fanatical. Their history is one of destroying the village—London by fire, Rome though sacking, Europe with the plague—to save it.

So what is Batman? He’s too free with the rules for the political set and too much a squish for the League of Shadows. His affection for the former tempers his natural attraction to the latter. He is a compassionate conservative.

Bruce Wayne/ Batman is the scion of a wealthy Republican family (his home was used as part of the Underground Railroad). His father was a well thought of man who proved too weak to deal authoritatively with a looming threat, one that would later collaborate with a fundamentalist organization that sought to destroy the greatest city in America. With his British ally Alfred he opposes a terrorist enemy. Although he has a reputation as a drunken playboy goofball, those closest to him recognize his core of decency and will. has respect for business and industry. He is a believer in personal redemption, having learned the lesson that we fall “so we can learn to pick ourselves up.”

If Bruce Wayne, the League of Shadows, Dr. Crane, and the liberal members of Gotham’s political establishment bear a resemblance to certain contemporary figures and entities…well, the credits claim it’s a coincidence. But we are free to draw our own conclusions. And gloomy conservative moviegoers can lighten up about mainstream movies. We can despair over unpopular future curiosities which we may as well begin to forget right here, or we can remember we have Batman. And as Batman might have said, it’s not what the filmmakers’ are underneath, it’s what they do that defines them.