TOP 5 BATMAN HAIKUS

I asked CHAT GPT for some Batman Haikus, and the results were good enough that I am posting them right here. Please note that all my articles are my own original content, and if I post anything like this again as an experiment, I will mention it in the intro. One should never be a lazy writer, but one should also use all tools in ones Bat utility belt wisely.

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Gotham’s dark knight waits, Silent protector at night, Justice never sleeps.

Caped crusader soars, Fearless, vigilant, and strong, Evil meets its end.

Amidst the shadows, Batman strikes fear in their hearts, Hope for the helpless.

Beneath the cowl’s mask, A hero fights for justice, Gotham’s dark defender.

The Bat-Signal shines, A beacon of hope and strength, Batman is on guard.

Batman’s cape billows, As he perches on the edge, Ready to take flight.

Gotham’s hero stands, Silent guardian of the night, Watching over all.

Bruce Wayne’s alter-ego, Protector of the helpless, Vengeance for the lost.

Batman strikes quickly, His foes are left in dismay, Justice is served well.

A symbol of hope, The Dark Knight rises again, To vanquish evil.

The Batmobile roars, As Batman rushes to save, Gotham City’s fate.

The Joker cackles, But Batman’s calm and focused, Ready for battle.

A solitary figure, The Caped Crusader stands tall, Defender of good.

The Bat-Signal glows, The night sky is illuminated, Batman responds swiftly.

Gotham’s protector, A legend in black and grey, Forever vigilante

2

Tom Hardman Hardy as Bane in The Dark Knight Rises

Of the three Christopher Nolan Batman films, I feel that The Dark Knight Rises is the weakest.

The performances are good, the movie is spectacular in just about every way with meticulous production design, cinematography, an epic score and all the usual bells and whistles.  It’s got emotion, heart and pathos.

Nolan pulls out all the stops and delivers an epic over the top memorable Batman film.

However  Dark Knight Rises also has gaping plot holes too big to jump over even in that magical Tumbler. Repeated viewings are not so much fun as tedious exercises in looking past the bad to find the good.

Tom Hardy plays Bane, a one-dimensional gimmick villain from the comics that I really can’t stand, but somehow Hardy manages to take a character I could not give a crap about, and not only make him compelling, but actually likable and sympathetic.

When I watched the Dark Knight Rises for the fourth and fifth time, it was to enjoy Tom Hardy’s Bane, as many other elements of the film just don’t work in my opinion, and even fly in the face of what Batman stands for. Batman is out of character, too many villains and sub plots are goind on making it a bit of a mess of a film.

While the scope of the Dark Knight Rises effectively ramps up the tension and large scale mayhem from The Dark Knight’s claustrophobic riff on Micheal Mann’s Heat, it seems to come unraveled with plot holes and too many slap yourself in the face in disbelief moments.

The first much anticipated viewing of Dark Knight Rises at the local sticky floored multiplex had me genuinely annoyed that Batman is so easily beaten by Batman, and he made so many bone-headed rookie mistakes in the film.  That was not the comic book Batman we know and love.  But hey, it is a movie adaptation, and they are doing their own thing.

I just don’t have to agree with it.  And yes I did just say Batman beat Batman and not Bane, why?  Well it was a typo, but I reread the sentence and you know what?  Batman DID beat Batman.  He beat himself by being out of condition and ill-prepared for an enemy he knew next to nothing about, idiot!

Bruce Wayne was Batman for like two other times in those other movies, then he sat on his ass for around eight years doing nothing, moping about some woman who chose to be with a good guy turned sociopath rather than him.  Cry me a river Bruce.  Great work, way to stay in shape and keep your edge, way to stay true to your vision of your war on crime and avenging the death of your parents, and the whole never give up thing. Well done mate.

What the heck was Bruce Wayne doing for all that time?  I hope he didn’t just watch television while wearing turtle necks ala Michael Keaton’s Batman.  Did you ever notice that Tim Burton never let you see Bruce Wayne’s neck?  Kind of weird if you ask me.  What was that about, was he planning to turn Batman into a vampire in that cancelled third Burton Batman film? Because I would watch that film.

The epic scope of Dark Knight Rises is sometimes criticised as being the type of large scale scenario that is outside of Batman’s abilities. The city being taken over and the imminent threat of a nuclear bomb seems more like the sort of thing Superman or JLA could handle without breaking a sweat.

Putting aside the rampant plot holes, the logical inconsistencies and all the things that a very out of character Batman does seemingly without reasons shifting focus from what I didn’t like, what is there that I did like about Dark Knight Rises?

By about the third viewing, I started to warm up to Tom Hardy’s Bane.  Tom Hardy is a excellent  actor whose career has gone from strength to strength.  I have enjoyed following his various film roles, my favourite films with Hardy being the Nic Cave penned Lawless, followed by Warrior with Joel Edgerton and eternal booze-hound and swear machine that is Nic Nolte.  I like Hardy in just about everything.

He is not quite the chameleon-type of actor like Gary Oldman, but Hardy disappears into any role he sinks his teeth into. Let us be clear, I don’t like Bane.  He is a gimmick character who is rather boring and shallow, so I was not easily won over by Hardy in Dark Knight Rises.

When I first read that Bane was to be a villain in Nolan’s third Bat-film, I felt a cold shiver down my spine not felt since the words Joel Schumacher and Batman were uttered in hushed tones for fear that even mentioning said words would warrant a rather justified public hanging.

Bane is boring, dumb and one dimensional.  I had no belief whatsoever that any film with that character would be a a good film.  But now when I think of the film, Tom Hardy’s Bane is really the only good reason to watch the movie.

Michael Caine, Gary Oldman and Morgan Freeman all do serviceable jobs, but they are just there was wallpaper rehashing what they have already perfected in the previous two films, and at times they just feel redundant in a very busy film.  Alfred and Lucius seem to exist in the Dark Knight Rises just to give exposition and push the plot forward.  Sure you could say the same of the previous two Nolan Bat-films, but here they feel non-essential.

Tom Hardy’s Bane becomes the performance to watch in Dark Knight Rises.  He is genuinely un-nerving and scary with his strong man physique juxtaposed with the bizarre choice of an aristocratic Englishman’s voice.

Bane is just creepy enough to be scary.  He is strange enough to be a Bond henchman ala Jaws or Oddjob, but surprisingly much smarter than a henchman, and fans are still debating who the real villain / mastermind was in Dark Knight Rises.  What could have turned out to have been the most unintentionally camp villain in a Nolan Batman film, instead becomes a performance of a very driven, obsessive, intelligent and capable man.

A man not unlike Batman himself.

Whether Bane is the mastermind of the plot to give Batman grey hair at an early age and that whole thing with the Nuclear bomb set to blow Gotham to teeny tiny pieces or actually just a pawn of Talia and Ra’s Al Ghul is never clearly established.

Was Talia the master planner who used Bane?  Did Bane use Talia?  Were both merely pawns of the deceased Ra’s Al Ghul?  All are valid speculations, and Nolan loves to keep fans guessing about the official version of events in his films.

Unlike some directors who leave things open ended (which Nolan also has a habit of doing) Nolan always has his official version of events that is not revealed to the fans or press.  But sometimes, even years later he leaks out little morsels, little crumbs to salivating fans eager to promote or debunk the latest Inception, Prestige or Batman theory.

On a sidenote, I really like Schumacher’s other films such as Tigerland, The Client, A Time to Kill, Falling Down and Phone Booth.  Schumacher is a competent director, but any Batfan knows the two Batman films he directed were terrible films on nearly every level.  Schumacher is not solely to blame, Batman Returns is bizarrely the darkest most messed up of all the Batman films ever made, and yet slides into cheesy camp territory before Schumacher was even a whisper around the water cooler.

Oh wait, you don’t think Returns is all that dark?  Let’s see, for your consideration, in The Dark Knight the Joker puts a pencil in some guys eye, (a criminal) and blows up at empty hospital building.  In Batman Returns two parents try to kill their newborn baby, then Batman sets a guy on fire and leaves him to burn to death.  That is just the first fifteen minutes.  It gets worse.

Getting back on track, the anti-climactic first fight of Batman vs Bane is so one sided that Batman is laughable, but then he had been sitting at home for several years moping and doing nothing.  Perhaps taking a leaf out of Keaton’s Batman and watching a lot of television in turtle necks.

The second fight scene between Batman and Bane packs plenty of punch. While the brief fight with Batman and Bane in amid the crazy crowd under a blanket of fresh snow is just a prelude to Talia and the eventual saving of Gotham City, in this scene the actors actually make contact with one another.

Christopher Nolan is a brilliant film maker, he makes blockbuster films, but with brains.  The cinematography and film scores are top notch.  However, one area that is a consistent let down in the Nolan Bat trilogy is the fight choreography, which looks like pre-matrix era american action movies. He admits this weakness in this area in several interviews. But to me that is no excuse not to hire better poeple around him who can do better.

Nolan’s Bat film fights are not Batman Forever levels of awfulness, but noticeable enough to anyone who has grown up watching Hong Kong action flicks of the seventies and eighties.  Take the worst Jacky Chan or Jet Li movie from the eighties, and the fights scenes are one hundred times better than anything you will see in the Nolan Batman films.

Why?  Well, the Hong Kong action movies get by on their action, and little to no story.  The genuine martial arts and amazing stunt men (and women) of asian action cinema took the world by storm with the rise of Kung-fu cinema in the seventies, and it took Hollywood decades to catch up. Notably the Wachowski Brothers worked with Yuen Woo Ping on The Matrix.

The Matrix was the first mainstream american Hollywood film to really embrace the superior technical knowledge of asian fight choreographers that people actually watched.  Once you had watched The Matrix you could not un-watch it.

Seeing John Wayne throwing haymakers in old western films (or any of the generic and boring movie fight scenes that followed in his wake in american cinema) just would never seem the same again.  But take another look at the fight scenes in Batman Forever or Batman and Robin  made just two years earlier and see how laughably bad the fights are.  You will cringe if you freeze frame and take a look at the cut-aways and absolute nonsense on display.

Coming back to Dark Knight Rises –  in the first fight between Bane and Batman, they barely touch each other.  While the fight has emotional impact, and the sound makes us feel how brutal the beat down for Batman is, freeze framing any part of the fight (or playing it in slow motion) will show the actors are often several feet apart from one another, and it is even noticeable at full speed if you really pay attention. It is a laughably bad on screen fight. They did better in Adam West’s day.

In asian action movies, by and large there is contact.  Often you have amazing stunt men and women, genuine martial artists, acrobats, athletes and stunt professionals who are not afraid to get roughed up.  By contrast, in Hollywood the studios have to protect their stars, have all sorts of insurance issues to worry about and so actors rarely fight.  Cue the stunt people, they come in an do the hard work, and generally don’t get any credit for risking their necks.

While Hollywood post-Matrix has embraced better fight and stunt choreographers, allowing the open influence of the superior Hong Kong action cinema methodology, Dark Knight Rises really drops the ball.  In american action movies (or movies in general) the actors don’t actually hit each other, they stand slighty askew, and the camera makes it look like they are getting hit with clever angles.

But in Dark Knight Rises, you can actually see the wrong angles that show the two actors not hitting each other.  On repeat views, the hardcore brutal fight scene with Bane demolishing the ineffective out of shape Batman, it becomes laughably bad.  Once you notice the bad camera angles and cuts, you can’t un-notice it.  This is really just me nit-picking here, but in future if a Nolan film has a fight scene, I am not saying I want Ninja Turtles and Kung-fu masters flying through the air and doing spin kicks.  Not at all.

Whether showing a martial artist like Batman or an ordinary Joe Billy Bob in a bar room brawl, what needs to be improved is the shot showing the close up action and mid-distance action.  This can be improved simply by bringing on a consultant who already knows not just how to stage fights for the cinema screen, but how to shoot fights for the cinema screen.  Both skills are essential, there is no need to reinvent the wheel.  By and large American cinema has dramatically improved the staging of fight scenes since the old days of ham-fisted Westerns.  American cinema has been a tremendous innovator of action cinema and stunt work.

When it comes to big-budget big-spectacle action films, America is the world leader.  But when it comes to showing up close and personal fights, whether ring fights, bar fights, or martial arts chop-socky, Hong Kong kicks the rest of the worlds collective ass.  Yet, strangely when it comes to World War II films, American cinema manages to display reasonable combat scenes, usually due to having ex-military experts on consulting duties.

There is a place for every type of fight choreography.  A Punisher film should look and feel different from a Batman film, a Batman film should look and feel different from a Captain America film, Crank, Rambo, Commando, Police Story, Kill Bill, Enter the Dragon, Ong Bak, Scott Pilgrim and friends should all look and feel like independent entities with their own very unique styles of fights from realistic to cartoonish and anything in between.

Rarely is any sort of combat shown in a realistic manner on screen outside of a military context. Pseudo-military influenced entertainment like James Bond, Bourne and Jack Bauer in 24 while moving closer to fight/combat realism than the typical cartoonish action movies such as the Rambo sequels are still far removed from reality, but convincing enough to do the job.

My point is there is an infinite variety of cinematic fight styles and choreography styles, and it is the job of the director, writer and producer to identify what is most relevant to their film, and if they don’t know, bloody well find somebody who does know and ask them. Do not skate by on minimum effort.

The fight scene in the sewers between Bane and Batman – the two Titans of Gotham – has so many bad camera angles that while selling the fight, also make the fight look ridiculous on repeat viewings to anyone who has even a passing knowledge of action cinema and fight choreography.

The fight scenes are passable to a general audience.  But a LOT of that geek audience has been watching action movies most of their lives, and they know the language of cinema, and the language of action.

A significant number of fans like wrestling, superhero comics, UFC, Batman and other cool shit.  They have read Batman comics and watched UFC for a decade or more, and when Batman fights worse than the lower tier fighters in UFC, well that just looks bad any day of the week.  Batman is supposed to be an expert martial artist, and yet he flails his arms like a little school girl in the first fight with Bane.  The best he can do is cover up like a boxer facing Rocky or Clubber Lang, Bane reigns down one merciless blow after another, and Batman does virtually nothing.  In the second fight at the end of the film, the actors are much closer together.

In the second encounter, Batman is now the stronger willed fighter back in top form after training and out matches Bane.  Batman is hungry for the win.  Bane is now the one on the receiving end of a beat down courtesy of Batman, who fights a little closer to how we would expect him to, but still manages to look like a bit a jack ass because of the obvious limitations of the costume he is wearing, and the fact that we are (for the most part) watching an actor and not a stunt person.

I don’t know how much of the fight scene is Christian Bale and how much is the stunt double, and we should not notice with good editing and creative camera angles, or it takes you out of the bloody film – but there is enough Bale in there and the scene has much better camera shots than the first fight between Bane and Batman. The second fight feels much better, it looks better close up and far away.  If you go frame by frame (and I did) there are no glaringly obvious flaws.  Pound for pound it is a better screen fight.  Also if you watch Bane and Batman in slow motion in this scene it looks like they are dancing, in a rather weird and creepy way that makes me want to see it on Youtube with pop music.

Bane / Hardy notably shifts his bodyweight back and forth, pivoting on his feet displaying the kinetic chain of powerful punches good strikers are known for, snapping his hips and whipping his arms into Batman’s body in a flurry of merciless bodyshots.

Perhaps I am picking on this one element of the film too much, but my background in martial arts, watching action movies all my life, reading way too many Batman comics and expecting more of Christopher Nolan just makes it hard for me not to be critical when modern Hollywood is capable of so much better.

I really dig The Dark Knight Rises.  It gets a lot right.  It is a phenomenal  spectacle of a film that is brilliant to watch, but it makes some critical errors that are hard for any Bat-Fan to ignore.  Had it been a smaller tighter paced film, with some actual detective work, perhaps it would have had fewer plot holes and head scratching moments.

But fans and studios demand more in big budget action movie sequels.  And more of everything is what we got.  More action, more explosions. Bigger explosions.  More explody explosions.  Angrier Batmen.  Hotter Women.  More plot.  More Stupid, more everything.

More is not always better, but we keep asking for it, so it keeps showing up.  We really only have ourselves to blame.  In the case of Batman I want a good story.  I don’t think more is better.  If I watch Jason Statham in Crank then yeah, more is better in that scenario because it is a movie that is vapid, shallow and pointless, and  I love it for what it is.   A hyper-kinetic insane movie of top-this ludicrous series of events, set-pieces and lashings of the old ultra-violence turned up to eleven that is highly entertaining.

In Dark Knight Rises Tom Hardy effectively becomes the Darth Vader of the nolan Bat-Trilogy.  He has the mask and creepy voice, and we really don’t know what it is that he wants – other than to destroy the life of Batman and break the will of Gotham City.  He is just a really nasty, smart and evil guy you do not want to mess with.  It is not an easy task to act with your face obscured, particularly the mouth.

Tom Hardy gives a mesmerising performance as Bane, effectively using his body language, his voice and he says a lot with his eyes.  Bane is a bad guy, but one we can’t help but feel some sympathy for.  He may be a monster, but his reasons are far more human and relatable than the Joker or Ra’s Al Ghul.

Bane is perhaps the most humane villain we have seen in a Batman film, despite being a killer and potentially part of an assassin death cult who presumably will be killed along with the citizens of Gotham in the planned nuclear explosion.  He will kill you and beat you mercilessly, but he will also give you a damned good reason for why he did, and you will be hard pressed to disagree with his reasoning.  Bane would make a great salesman.

In Bane we see a brutal and ruthless man dedicated to his cause, but also a small and timid boy, a wounded soul not unlike Batman himself, born in tragedy and pain.  The comic book version of Bane, who appears to be like a muscle bound idiot was the creation of Chuck Dixon.  In the first Bane story Vengeance of Bane, (a 64 page one shot that introduces the character as a prelude to the Knightfall storyline) Bane is established as being very smart and very strong. More than a meat head.

A self-made man like Batman who studies and perfects his mind and body while in a harsh South American prison run by a corrupt warden.  Born into captivity, prison is the only life he has known.  That he not only survived, but thrived in that environment is a testament to his strength of character and mental resolve.  Like Batman, he too is a creature of will power, strength, intelligence and emotional trauma.

Bane was still basically a gimmick character to break the bat.  A big strong bruiser of a man to mess up Batman conceived in the same era as Superman died at the hands of the mindless killing machine Doomsday.  Unlike Doomsday, Bane has as much brains as brawn.  He is more than a simplistic character, yet he is still a throw away gimmick character that I really don’t care for.

Except when Tom Hardy breathes raspy charismatic life into him, then I care about Bane, I feel something for Bane. Without tom Hardy, I don’t think Dark Knight Rises would be worth watching more than one time.  He takes a flawed film and salvages something in it that makes it worth repeat viewing.

The Dark Knight film I can watch again and again any time, but Dark Knight Rises not so much.  I’ll always remember the time that Nolan and Tom Hardman Hardy made me care about a character who I thought was lame and stupid. Hardy transforms Bane into a very flawed, passionate, dedicated, and horrible human being, who remains deeply human and strangely relatable, like the best villains such as Darth Vader or Dr Doom.

Aaron Eckhart as Two-Face Gothams White Knight

Aaron Eckhart could have been Batman.

He has the square jaw and intensity of Batman, the charisma, charm, slick confident attitude and good looks to be Bruce Wayne.

It seems fitting that an actor who could have easily played Batman / Bruce Wayne ends up becoming Two-Face.

Two-Face has been handled differently in the comics according to the values of the day, and who was writing the character.  In his original inception, he is a knock off of a Dick Tracy era ugly gangster with a gimmick.

The split in half suit of contrasting colours, double sided coin and split personality were a gimmick that made Two-Face distinguishable from other comic book or pulp villains.  The classical look of Two-Face speaks to the era of guys in suits, Al Capone era bad guys, mob enforcers and other similar crooks and made men.

The modern day version of Two-Face plays up the similarities and differences between Bruce Wayne and Harvey Dent, and gives more emphasis to the psychology of Two-Face rather than just the gimmick clothing, coin and gangster schtick.

In Batman: The Animated Series the early years of Bruce Wayne and Harvey Dent show the two of them as friends and contemporaries.  Both men are passionate about law and order, and genuinely care about proactively fixing the corrupt city they live in.

The relationship of Bruce Wayne and Harvey Dent was retroactively established in Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One. Comics are a strange medium where time is fluid, where events can change seemingly without warning.  The next retcon (retro-active continuity) is only just around the corner for most modern characters.

When the friendship of Harvey Dent and Bruce Wayne was established in the Batman comics, set during his earlier years in Millers Year One, it retroactively meant that every story before that was now affected by this new continuity.  It meant the relationship had always existed, even if stories  in the previous decades had failed to mention it.

That Harvey Dent / Bruce Wayne relationship endures in most modern interpretations of Batman.  Nolan’s The Dark Knight takes it cues from Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns, Miller’s Batman: Year One and Jeph Loeb’s The Long Halloween.

The movie version of Two-Face is played by Aaron Eckhart as Gotham’s White Knight, a bastion of goodness, moral virtue and incorruptibility.  He is a day time version of Batman, who needs no mask and operates within the law, he exists as a bold contrast to Batman’s Dark Knight.

In some ways The Dark Knight is more the story of Harvey Dent than Bruce Wayne.  The entire film sets up Harvey Dents’s inevitable fall from grace, he is used as the Joker’s example (one of his many pawns) of how even the best of us can become rotten inside, if we were not already rotten to begin with.

Even the best of us can turn our backs on our own highest values and dreams, and instead be overcome with anger, grief, depression, vindictiveness, the need for revenge or to take out our frustrations on the world, rather than owning our behavior, and accepting the roles and responsibilities as authors of our own lives.

Harvey Dent’s transformation into Two-Face comes about not because of the scars on his face, the damage to his body, but because of the unbalancing of his fragile mind.  He becomes Two-Face because of his psychological scars, although the movie does hint that he has a hidden dark side.

A throwaway line earlier in the film has Gary Oldman’s Gordon refer to Dent as Harvey Two-Face, a name he had been called by former associates. Whether this meant he was genuinely bad, or just unpopular because did his job so well, putting criminals behind bars (many of whom who had were in league with corrupt cops) is unknown.  The Joker does not make Two-Face so much as give Harvey Dent a small push at a critical point in his downfall.

Had the Joker hospital room conversation with Harvey taken place earlier in the film, Harvey might have laughed it off. Instead in his fragile, weakened and traumatised state, he subconscious is laid bare, he openly lets the Joker’s foul ideas into his own mind, and accepts them as his own.

Two-Face is one of the most popular villains in the long running various Batman comic books.  While it was good to see him used in the Nolan Batman Trilogy, we only see Harvey Dent become Two-Face towards the last third of the film.  He could have been the main villain in a Batman film, rather than a side-note.

A one time gimmick character who appears only sporadically through Batman’s first thirty years became a staple in the Bat mythos of the seventies and eighties and has been used regularly since then up until the modern day era.  The character has enough complexity and depth to him that there are more stories yet to be told with Harvey Two-Face.

Considering the amount of characters, plots and sub-plots that must be given screen time in the Dark Knight, Aaron Eckhart does an excellent job with the Two-Face character.

I really enjoyed Aaron Eckhart’s performance, and would have liked to have seen more of him as Two-Face in the Dark Knight film, before his untimely demise at the hands of Batman.  Despite his strict no-killing policy Batman manages to cause the death (directly or indirectly) of a major villain in each of Nolan’s three Batman films.

Whoops, so much for those values and codes of behavior Batman holds so dear.

One weaker element of The Dark Knight is Dent’s relationship with Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal) which seems under baked at best.  Poor Rachel seems to exist in a man’s world, where despite being a strong, feisty independent woman, her role still revolves around the men in this fictional world.

In Batman Begins Rachel wants to be with Bruce, but that does not work out as Bruce will not give up being Batman.  In The Dark Knight, she is with Harvey Dent, but then he dies.  It is assumed that between the films she reverts to the strong independent solo women she supposedly is, but any time we see Rachel on screen – in either film – we only see her reacting to events caused by the male leads, or being saved by Batman who is also secretly Bruce Wayne, or being held hostage by a villain.  She fails to exist as her own character separate from the male heroes and villains.

It is no secret that women come off second best in Christopher Nolan’s films.  They are there to serve the plot, and the male leads.  Nolan is no more guilty than the majority of other mainstream films in a patriarchal society that is content to churn out multiple male superhero leads every year, despite roughly half their potential audience being women.

Rather than being second-stringers, it is long past the time when we should be seeing female leads in superhero films, there are no shortage of characters to choose from.

But getting back on topic, I really liked Aaron Eckhart as Two-Face, he was a welcome addition to the Nolan Batman franchise, and his face looks truly horrific in the film.  I was surprised how graphic and detailed his realistically damaged face looked on screen.

I winced when I first saw it, but the horror fan in me was proud of the special effects and attention to detail shown in Dent’s exposed eye socket, jaw, teeth and muscle and connective tissue.  In The Dark Knight Eckhart shows us some of his best talents.

He shows us his charming best qualities – the slick charismatic and genuine guy we saw in Thank You for Smoking, the leadership  qualities he displayed in Battle: Los Angeles and the softer, fragile tender side he displayed in Rabbit Hole with Nicole Kidman.

I think Aaron Eckhart is a wonderful actor, and I have enjoyed following his career and hope to see him in more films that really utilise his talents and have him grow as an actor and a human being.

 

 

Christian Bale – the Batman Gotham Deserves

I never want to feel I am playing it safe – Christian Bale

A few years ago… well, MORE than a few years ago my best old mate would not shut about some guy called Christian Bale.

Who’s he then?  Never heard of em I said.

Oh, he’s good, you gotta watch him in The Prestige, or The Machinist! he replied.

I don’t know what the hell you are talking about, I’ve never heard of those films… and I don’t know I care to continue this conversation, good DAY Sir!

Trust me, you have GOT to watch them, you’ll thank me man

And so it went.

Except the good DAY Sir part from Willy Wonka, I added that in just now.

So one lazy afternoon, weeks later after I had finished work and completely forgotten the conversation with my friend I ambled into a video rental store from the last century and saw the cover of some movie that proclaimed it was Memento meets Fight Club! Well, balderdash and poppycock!  I love both Memento and Fight Club, and surely this was another wild and irresponsible claim that would prove to be a bald faced lie.

But then I remembered my mate who was raving about The Machinist from a few weeks back. I decided that it would probably be crap, but I would watch it just to prove whoever wrote that steaming pile of hyperbole dead wrong.  I watched The Machinist later that night, towards midnight, the perfect time for a paranoid fever inducing film of madness and insomnia.

That quote on the front cover turned out to be pretty accurate. Fast forward in time and I watched The Bale in The Prestige, which became my favourite film for several years.  Not because of Bale, but because our man (I live in Oz) Hugh Jackman was in it, and I liked him in everything, even the crap films. Also,  David Bowie was keeping up appearances as Nicola Tesla, and Bowie is my favourite musician of all time, so I knew I had to watch it, at least for old Ziggy Stardust. The Prestige is without a doubt, Christopher Nolan’s best film.  The internal structure is so sound, that it makes criticisms of the plot in his later films such as The Dark Knight Rises and Inception even more poignant.

To be fair, The Prestige was based on a book, while Inception was not.  Inception is my favourite Chris Nolan film by far, and the one I have watched most next to The Dark Knight.  But while Inception is my personal favourite, I think that The Prestige is Nolan’s best overall film so far.  It became the mold for most of his following films, it established his working relationship with Christian Bale and good luck charm Michael Caine.

The Prestige sets up two warring adversaries – not unlike the Joker and Batman, and it features women marganalised by career obsessed men who abandon their loved ones perhaps for a higher calling, or perhaps just because they are selfish – similar to Bruce Wayne in Batman Begins, Cobb in Inception and Cooper in Interstellar.  While similar ideas were explored in Memento and Insomnia, The Prestige became the prototypical blueprint for a Nolan film, one he has not deviated far from ever since. After watching The Machinist and The Prestige I sought out any other films with Christian Bale.

American Psycho was tremendous fun, I loved Bale’s performance, Harsh Times was another highlight.  Bale became someone I went from never having heard of, to eagerly anticipating any upcoming film he might be in. I was genuinely excited when he was announced as Batman/Bruce Wayne in the upcoming Batman Begins, but  I never went to the cinema to see it.

Why not?

Two words Joel Schumacher.

The bad taste in my mouth was still there from the previous off the rails lunatic high camp low intelligence Schumacher directed Batman films that I did not care for.  Every performance was turned up to 11, and not in a good way. Christian Bale brings a certain kind of intensity, passion and devotion to any role he inhabits.

The funny thing is, if you look at the other actors who have played Batman (not including the shitty old movie serials), all of the actors are pretty decent in their own way.  The two Schumacher films are total rubbish in my view, but both Val Kilmer and George Clooney I really like in a variety of other roles.

Val Kilmer I really dig in Spartan (that co-starred a young Kristen Bell, later sassy TV detective and crush of a million nerds Veronica Mars) and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang with Robert Downey Jnr.  Kilmer, while only briefly in Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans alongside Nicolas Cage makes a strong impression that recalls his best work, and had me pleading to the movie gods to rescue Kilmer’s long dead career from Micheal Madsen levels of bargain basement crap.

George Clooney I have enjoyed in just about everything.  Out of Sight and Oceans’s 11, The Descendants, Micheal Clayton, Three Kings, Good Night and Good Luck, Up in the Air etc.  Yet his Batman is shockingly bad, so much so that Clooney has publicly acknowledged his performance was not good. Yet, I don’t blame Kilmer or Clooney for their performances.  An actor who does their job follows the lead of the director, writers and producers.  With the exception of the power players like Pitt, Dicaprio, Russel Crowe and friends who write their own ticket these days thanks to Producer credits, and long term friendships with bankable name Directors.  They can make or break a project if they choose to. The Schumacher Batman films followed the Batman ’66 idea of over the top camp, there is nothing wrong with that – but they did it as a time when people wanted a darker version of Batman – at least the public did.

Meanwhile, the film studios felt that Tim Burton’s Batman movies were too dark.  Studios have been saying Burton’s films are too dark for over two decades now, despite the fact that most his films really are not that dark, if anything his films have become lighter in tone with the exception of the genuinely dark Sweeney Todd. How does any of this relate to Christian Bale?  Well, he is known for his passion and dedication to a performance.

But interestingly, if you look at the previous Batmen – Micheal Keaton, Val Kilmer, George Clooney – all of them I would call passionate and dedicated actors.  Except we don’t see that so much with them as Batman, but more in other films. Although, they don’t tend to put their bodies through physical extremes for roles like Bale in The Machinist, Rescue Dawn  The Fighter and Batman Begins. Bale’s dedication to total physical transformation, going from one extreme to another recalls the classic Bobby Deniro/ Scorsese pictures Raging Bull and The King of Comedy.  Denero transforms himself into a lean and mean athlete for the boxing movie Raging Bull, and then later an overweight comedian in The King of Comedy. Micheal Keaton for example is far darker as a recovering addict in the brilliant Clean and Sober.  Val Kilmer is far darker and more passionate as Jim Morrison in the Oliver Stone directed The Doors, or David Mamet’s Spartan.  George Clooney is far more brooding and dark in Syriana.  So each of these actors was quite capable of being a darker dark knight in the style of Chris Nolan and Christian Bale or Frank Miller or Denny O’Neil and Neil Adams. That they were not was really a reflection of the times, and what the studio wanted to put on screen more than anything.

It is easy to blame actors and directors for a poor movie, but for a studio blockbuster film made by committee, the fault equally lies in the people who dictate what the tone of a movie will be before it is shot, or a word of the script is written. The studio – in this case Warner Brothers – wanted a lighter tone for Batman and Robin after the dark films of Tim Burton.  In Batman Returns the movie starts with parents trying to murder their own baby, who later grows up to be the Penguin, despite their efforts.

The Penguin consumes a raw fish and later vomits blood in generous amounts, and yet later in the film Batman is harassed by cartoonish real Penguins with rockets strapped to their backs. The style of Batman Returns (thematically, not visually) is a bit of a mess.  In some ways it is the darkest Batman film ever made, in other ways it was already heading towards Adam West Batman ’66 style camp, BEFORE Joel Schumacher ever came along to ruin the dreams of a million children around the world. The idea that Nolan’s Batman is the darkest is somewhat erroneous.

For example, Micheal Keaton’s Batman kills goons left and right and dumps his love interests at the first available opportunity.  He seems amoral and uncaring, close to the original Batman in Detective Comics #27. By contrast, Christian Bale’s Batman goes out of his way to save lives, and is like a lovesick puppy-dog when he realises the love of his life has spurned him when he returns to Gotham.  So the idea that Burton’s Batman or Nolan’s Batman is darkest  kind of misses the point, both the Keaton and Bale versions of Batman are dark in their own way, and both are influenced by the same source material.

I start from scratch with each movie; I wipe the slate and I certainly don’t rely on some bag of acting tricks I’ve amassed over the years  -Christian Bale

Christian Bale came arrived at the right time.  He arrived when the world was ready to see another cinematic Batman that was more in line with the darker version of the Batman character that has been around since the 1970s. The foundations of the modern day Batman were laid down by artist Neal Adams and writer Denny O’ Neil run in the 1970s.

They re-established Batman as a super cool character.  A globe trotting spy and man of action like James Bond, who had over the top adventures, and he even got a cool Bond like villain in the form of Ra’s Al Ghul. Frank Miller established the darkest version yet of the Batman in The Dark Knight Returns in the 1986 prestige format four issue mini-series that was later reprinted in a single volume and has remained in print ever since.

Dark Knight Returns is the single most influential Batman story ever published. Miller followed this up with Batman: Year One which Nolan’s Batman Begins draws on heavily for its story and themes.  Allan Moore wrote The Killing Joke in 1988, the only story as dark, if not MORE dark then The Dark Knight Returns. The Killing Joke well and truly re-established the Joker as a psychotic amoral mass-murdering lunatic, and that version has become the main version of the Joker in recent decades.  The Joker had been portrayed in many different styles over the decades, sometimes he committed pranks and robberies, sometimes he was a killer, his personality varied with the times, as did Batman.

The Killing Joke, and a few other key stories would lead to the eventual metamorphosis Heath Ledger would undergo for The Dark Knight. All of the great Batman stories ultimately paved the way for a dark knight that was embraced in the modern era, who was closer than ever to the modern comics version of the Caped Crusader.  Christian Bale had the intensity, passion and dedication to pull off both Bruce and Batman in a believable manner, quickly becoming a fan-favourite Batman on screen.

Of all the big screen Batmen, he perhaps is closest to the character in his values. Bale is passionate, dedicated, unrelenting and determined in his acting career, and I feel that this puts him a cut above any actor to put on the cape and cowl so far.  To be Batman means being the best version of yourself you can be, it means making sacrifices instead of being soft and lazy, to be Batman requires that unwavering dedication and iron-will, and Christian Bale has no shortage of that.  He is by far my favourite live action Batman, and I am glad he took the role seriously.

I am Vengeance I am the Night – Exploring the dark Psyche of Batman

Batman’s weakness isn’t kryptonite, silver, or some otherworldly thing: it’s his own, very human nature. And that’s part of what makes him so compelling.

Sure, Batman sometimes acts as a savior stand-in. But for the most part, he’s not a Messiah figure. He’s us.

 – Paul Asay, God on the Streets of Gotham: What the Big Screen Batman Can Teach Us about God and Ourselves

Sometimes I like to imagine What If…? Carl Jung Had Survived Into Our Modern Day and if he did, who would be his favourite superhero?

Maybe he found the secret fountain of youth, the cosmic cube or I don’t know, the Tardis, it doesn’t really matter.  The answer of course to who our man Carl’s favourite superhero would be is obvious, it would be Batman.

—

Wait a minute… who the heck is Carl Jung?

Why he’s a world famous Swiss Psychiatrist, an explorer of the human psyche, a boffin, a super deep thinker and an all around genius, whose work has influenced not only psychotherapy but the worlds and studies of religion, art and literature and popular culture – that’s who.

Joseph Campbell used some of Jung’s ideas in his magnum opus The Hero’s Journey. Joseph Campbell was friends with George Lucas, you know that guy who made Star Wars and used Joseph Campbell’s theory of the Hero’s Journey as the model for the way to tell the story. So yeah, now basically ever Superhero film ever uses the work of Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, whether they know it or not.

A lot of Hollywood writers have actually read and applied The Writer’s Journey – Mythic Structure for Writers by Christopher Vogler, which is basically a cliff notes version of Jung and Campbells works as applied to screen writing and popular fiction. Batman Begins used the Hero’s Journey as a model for the mythic structure of the story, and it is a big part of why the movie was so gosh darn awesome.

Carl Gustav Jung often referred to as C. G. Jung, was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology. His work has been influential not only in psychiatry but also in philosophy, anthropology, archaeology,
literature, and religious studies. He was a prolific writer, though many of his works were not published until after his death.

The central concept of analytical psychology is individuation—the psychological process of integrating the opposites, including the conscious with the unconscious, while still maintaining their relative autonomy.
Jung considered individuation to be the central process of human development.

Jung created some of the best known psychological concepts, including the archetype, the collective
unconscious, the complex, and extraversion and introversion. – Wikipedia

This article then, explorers the mind / psyche of Batman, one of literature’s richest, most well developed, popular and resonant characters. It is very long, But by the time you get to end, your mind muscles will be well exercised.

Of all the costumed adventurers and dual-identity characters, Batman has the most psychological depth to him. Plus, he’s the coolest character in town. He embodies the kind of effortlessly cool and heroic bad boy attitude epitomised by the likes of James Dean and Bruce Lee. Batman exists in the upper echelons of timeless iconic pop-culture figures, and seems destined to remain there. I can see Carl Jung spending five minutes with Superman, then getting rather bored and hanging out for the day with Batman.

Carl Jung put forth many ideas in his numerous volumes of work.  One of the more popular ideas was his popularization of concepts such as individuation, a process of healthy integration of the various aspects of one’s psyche, such as the archetypes of the self, which we encounter through the recurring symbolic imagery of archetypal characters, events and motifs.  The hero who goes on a quest. The religious figure who goes to hell and heaven, or the underworld and limbo.  The mother who raises children and personifies the love of God/Goddess and life energy.

Taken symbolically, rather than literally, Jung’s ideas provide a useful framework for looking at stages of our own life.  Conveniently, those same ideas can be applied to works of popular culture such as novels, films, comic books etc. Anything with a story really -for when we want to explore the depths of a character, the themes in their stories, and see how we relate to them. Not all stories can be viewed in Jungian terms, some stories really just don’t fit that mould.  Perhaps Batman doesn’t fit that mould, but Batman is pretty damn cool, and I think I ought to give it a go, for this is not the blog Batman asked for, but the blog that Batman deserves.  That is Jung  up there on the right and left smoking his pipe and pontificating on the mysteries of the Batman in what I can only imagine would have been a very dull issue of the Brave and the Bold involving too much talk and not enough punching crime in the face.

There are no hard and fast rules when it comes to Jung’s psychological theories, he was constantly expanding and refining his ideas, adding a bit here, throwing something out there. So there is no sense in being dogmatic about his ideas when discussing and applying them to ourselves and the stories we tell. For the sake of simplicity however, I’ll throw out some basic ideas here, that are generally well known and applied critically to popular film and literature.  But this article is by no means intended to be a definitive explanation of Jung’s ideas on individuation and archetypes nor Batman. It is written as a playful exploration of ideas, and nothing more.

When we talk about the Hero’s Journey, then we are are talking about the work of Joseph Campbell, who was a friend and commentator on Jung’s work and theories, so it is only natural that the ideas of the two friends blended together as they are applied in today’s world towards film criticism and theory. Jung specialised in the mind or psyche, and motivations for human behavior, formulating ideas about archetypes or predictable culture free specific patterns that humanity followed in its development through stages of life.

Campbell specialiased in the journey in life that a person, or hero takes, rich with all of life’s symbolic meanings and parallels told through myth and story across many cultures throughout history. That journey or monomyth Campbell described typically involved several stages in a cycle.  I’m not going to cover every aspect of Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, but just give a brief outline, a further exploration of his ideas will be a topic for another article.

The hero is typically called to adventure, refuses the quest, meets a mentor, and travels beyond the ordinary world into the unknown.  This may involve actual travel or not, symbolically the hero journeys into their own mind, to confront death and their greatest fears.  Having conquered their fears, they gain some type of power, sometimes a special artifact such as a magical sword or talisman, which symbolises self-knowledge.

The hero returns to the ordinary world to be of service to their community or nation.  Heroes who never accept the quest, fail the quest, or complete the quest but do not render service and serve only themselves can be called failed or fallen heroes.  Characters such as Darth Vader or Alonzo Harris (Denzel Washington’s character in Training Day) are examples of failed heroes, who have failed or abandoned their quest at various stages and given in to their own darkness, refusing to reach full maturity, choosing to serve their own needs, rather than the needs of others.

Carl Jung talked about individuation as being the integration of the various elements of one’s psyche, which include the Ego (surface personality), Persona (the mask we present to the world, our false face of conformity and social obligation) the Shadow (our dark side, all our hidden, naughty or traumatic repressed secrets, feelings and primal life instincts, sex, death, birth).  The Self, unified whole that connects consciousness and unconsciousness, it is the light that shines in darkness until it becomes so bright that there is no more darkness, nothing more hidden from awareness.  Then there is the Anima and Animus, the aspects of the unconscious mind or true self in males and females.

The Anima is the female part of the male psyche.  The Animus is the male part of the female psyche.  Ignoring these or any other aspects of ourselves means seeing the opposite sex as objects, or opposites, rather than complementary to one another.  The integrated psyche in Jung’s theories is a healthy mind that represses no part of itself, and is fully aware of its various elements, whether literally or symbolically.  A mind or person that is at peace with their higher mind or intellect, embraces intuition and heart feelings, feels their emotions deeply, is empowered by their sex and animal instincts.  Nothing is hidden or repressed.

Now let us take a look at Jung’s ideas about the individual, as they may apply to a popular fictional character we all know and love who wears a black cape.

Let’s start with the fun stuff. Hands up who remembers Darth Vader? Okay, of course you do, we’re going to talk about him for a bit, hope you don’t mind, we’ll get back to Batman soon enough.  Darth Vader provides a good contrast and parallel to Batman of a character who has embraced darkness, but uses it for evil rather than good.  What was it that Vader gave into? Too easy, his dark side of course.

The Shadow self in Jung’s theories is the unknown that the hero journeys into when confronting their own subconscious mind. When Luke fought himself in the cave on Dagobah – you know the cave with the fifty dollar smoke machine that somebody left on overnight – he literally was facing his own dark impulses and the part of him that might become like his father.  This was one of his greatest fears I will never become like you Father or whatever the heck young Skywalker said, it was something along those lines.

Visually, we see Luke fighting Vader in the smoke machine cave, but of course he is fighting his own dark impulses, which he is afraid of. Entering the cave is a metaphor for Luke going into his own subconscious mind.  Seems like a waste of time if you ask me, he could have been ridding the galaxy of those annoying Ewoks as Skywalker Pest Control one light-sabre swipe at a time instead of discovering himself like a whiny self-indulgent teenager, but let us move on.

Now, this Vader guy of course never completed the hero’s journey, which meant returning from the Shadow and integrating its power into his whole self. If you imagine Vader fighting himself in a dark and cheesy smoke machine cave, well then he lost that battle to his Shadow.  Vader never literally fought himself in any of the Star Wars movies of course, I only use that idea here as an example of how Vader gave in to his negative Shadow.

Darth Vader’s Shadow self was all his core values (good and bad) pain, trauma, evil thoughts and intentions, ambitions, and impulses.  He gave in to those impulses and let the negative aspect of the Shadow self take over.

Just because Vader was a total bad ass, does not mean that our Shadow is bad or evil.  The Shadow is a necessary part of our psyche that represents our individual subconscious mind in the collective unconscious of humanity. The Shadow is neutral like fire or water, you can swim in water and have a great time, or you can drown in it, or be burned by fire instead of cooking a tasty meal for dinner. The trick is to know how to harness these natural forces for our own use, rather than get consumed by them or obsessed with the power of our Shadow for its own sake.

While in the case of Vader going over to the dark side meant giving in to the negative side of his Shadow and subconscious mind, it doesn’t have to be that way. Our personal subconscious is also the place of sex, survival and life instincts.  Without the primal forces that shape us, life would cease to have meaning. However if we were ruled entirely by these primal forces then we would live as animals, rather than living as free thinking and feeling human beings. Our Shadow self is not necessarily negative, it is anything that is repressed or unexpressed within us, including our bad and good potentials.

In classic folk tales and psychoanalytic theory, the subconscious mind has been something to be afraid of, a dark depository of everything bad and wrong about us, or at the very least strange, unusal and unpredictable.  Take for example Alice in Wonderland, which was originally titled Alice’s Adventures Under Ground  in the first short version, before the full length story was written.  Wonderland was a synonym for Underland, meaning the place beneath, or the subconscious mind.  The place where dreams and the intuitive spontaneous self have been wrongfully imprisoned out of fear, rather than integrated into a whole healthy individual.  Whatever we deny or repress we give power to, and when it erupts like a Volcano into our lives, we are rightly afraid of this torrent of mental stuff that seems so unwelcome in one hit, but is better digested in small bite size chunks.

Like playing with fire, if we go messing around in our own mind, we may get burned by the memory of old pains and trauma, reliving it, or at least some would suggest that this is so.  It is fair to say that if someone has been through massive trauma – war, poverty, starvation, loss of a family member etc, that the last thing they want to do is go stirring up all the dirt in their mind.

Even the very labels of subconcious or unconscious mind (interchangeable terms, although for this article Jung’s Universal Unconscious implies a vast network of non-physical minds or quantum information that make up the collective potential and knowledge of humanity) implies that is it something unknowable, or below our every day awareness.  This is really a fallacy, as any part of our mind is open to us, should we bother looking.  The very term unconscious mind creates false beliefs in people that lead them to feel cut off from the very deepest parts of themselves.

Talking to a professional therapist is one valid way to let go and process our emotions in a healthy way, in a safe context free of judgement and fear of reprisal. However, this is rather costly and impractical for most people.  Many individuals find their own way to process their own trauma, through meditation, yoga, alternative therapies, encounter groups and numerous other methods with varying results.

The association of the subconscious mind as the storehouse of past trauma, leads us to believe that it is too dangerous to go messing around in by ourselves, hence this is why in mythic tales the hero must follow a mentor or guide so they do not get lost in their journey or burned by the flame of Gnosis or knowledge. However, trauma is not the only reason to explore our own minds.

If we never explore our inner selves, then we are no more human beings than mindless automatons, full of reactions and pre-conceived ideas about life. If we rely only on guides however, if we passively wait for someone to guide us or fix us, we never become mature self-reliant adults.  We must become our own hero and explorer of our own minds, if we are to be healthy, sane mature adults.

The subconscious mind is not something to be feared, but embraced, this is a key defining point in Bruce Wayne’s journey to becoming Batman. Bruce learns to make friends of pain, fear and uncertainty.  In short he makes the unknown known through the light of introspection and facing ones fear and primal urges and instincts. He joins his most base impulses with wisdom and discipline, becoming a master of his own mind and body. He transforms his own pain and uses it as fuel for awakening to his own greater potential and his quest in life, to become the Batman, and war on crime.

In the example of Darth Vader, he never completed his journey. He stopped at the Shadow self, and embraced that as his new Persona – the face he presented to the world. But he also gave in to the wild energy of the Shadow not just in the outer physical world, but in his heart. Vader was no longer human. He underwent his transformation from a human Jedi warrior into an unthinking and unfeeling cyborg, more man than machine, but this happened first in his own heart, and then his body followed his inner most impulses and desires, to be inhuman, to give up his emotions and feelings.

Vader giving into his Shadow self is symbolic of modern man’s over emphasis on intellect, logic and rational thought, at the expense of all else. The mechanical modern man is a creature of thought and the head, who has cut himself off from the female aspect of heart, emotion, intuition, love and devotion to and respect for all life.
Only when the forces of head and heart combine, are we fully human. Otherwise, like Darth Vader we are denying an essential part of ourselves.

Fear disowned is a destructive choice, both emotionally and spiritually. It leads to all-too-happy spiritualities with beings who seek only the light. Fear starts to drive their being unconsciously. We end up seeking only goodness and pleasantness in order to avoid pain and fear.  But this is not the way. The truth is:

“To conquer fear, you must become fear”

Fear owned and embodied is a form of awakening. Batman is therefore a Realizer of Awakening through the form of Fear – Chris Dierkes

In the comic book story Batman: Ego, writer/artist Darwyn Cooke explores Batman’s Shadow and Egoic self. Bruce has a dialogue with a demonic primal shadow entity that has the face of Batman, minus anything human.

The entity tells hims that he is the very heart of Bruce, not just a persona or costume that he can just take off or walk away from. Bruce refuses the claims and when the Batman entity demands that Bruce give himself over to him, to let him have free reign and kill the Joker, Bruce refuses. The entity then says that he will drive Bruce insane, or alternatively Bruce can kill himself, as the wraith like Bat entity refuses to let go of its hold on Bruce Wayne’s mind.

Bruce begrudgingly realises that the Batman entity is an inescapable part of himself, that cannot be denied or suppressed. However he will not give himself over completely, he will not become a killer and a maniac like the super-villains he hunts. Instead Bruce makes a bargain with the Batman entity (his Subconscious mind, his Shadow) that each will live their part of the life of Bruce Wayne and The Batman. When Bruce puts the mask on he gives himself over to The Batman, the dark primal figure who terrorises criminals in the night.  It is basically the same scene where Luke sees Vader (his own fears) in the cave on Dagobah.

In Cooke’s story, Bruce encounters his very real fears symbolically through his Shadow. Realising the undeniable power of his Shadow Bruce Wayne moves through stages of denial, anger, bargaining, depression and finally acceptance.

He knows his Shadow cannot be denied and instead comes to an acceptance of this part of his psyche.  Bruce integrates the aspects of the subconscious that he may have otherwise suppressed and denied or given himself over to and become a killer. He strikes a balance. Without the integration of his Shadow self, Bruce would always be living a lie, torn between  two worlds – his desire to be the dutiful son of philanthropists Thomas and Martha Wayne, and his burning desire for vengeance, justice and righting wrongs as Batman.  How does Bruce accomplish this integration of his psyche?  Through allowing, non-resistance, through willing submission to his own Shadow self, but only on the terms that work for him, thus integrating his Shadow in a positive way, rather than giving in to the negative demands of his Shadow self like Darth Vader did.

Some parts of the tale Ego are a little clumsy, and Cooke is rather critical of his own story in the introduction to the collected edition of Batman: Ego. However, the story is unique, and addresses something that other Batman stories really only hint at by tackling it head on.

Did Bruce Wayne really choose to be Batman, or was he incapable of NOT being Batman?

Were the conditions and forces that drove Bruce Wayne to become Batman too much, was it inevitable that he become Batman.  Once Bruce gave himself over to that force, that burning desire to become Batman, could he ever give it up permanently? Was the death of his parents part of some higher order, that orchestrated the creation of Batman as a servant and protector of Gotham.  This idea is at the heart of many Batman stories. Some would call it fate, others a calling or simply a mission, Bruce being Batman gives a clear and definite purpose to his life, being Batman makes sense of the chaos his life had become.

Batman means order, structure and routine discipline.  Bruce without Batman is a lost soul.  This primal conflict makes for suitably dramatic – if not repetitive – stories where Bruce temporarily gives up being Batman, only to return with an almost religious zeal and rejuvenation to continue his war on crime, usually admitting that it was a mistake to walk away from being Batman, or feeling that the city truly needs him, that he is irreplaceable.

In Legends of the Dark Knight #39-40, 1999 by Bryan Talbot in the story Mask – Batman is kidnapped by a criminal maniac posing as some type of therapeutic doctor. He drugs Bruce, keeps him in a hospital bed for weeks causing his muscle mass to atrophy.  The false Doctor further convinces Bruce that he is an alcoholic homeless man who only imagines that he is a superhero.  That Bruce retreats into a fantasy world of his own imagination, having never coped with the death of his parents.

You see the world as meaningless chaos. You feel that you need to impose order. It’s a fundamentally fascist impulse that many people share. When you put on that mask, a different personality takes over. Powerful. Dominant. Able to cope with things.  – Legends Of The Dark Knight #39

The story is pretty twisted, and really gets into the mind of Bruce Wayne.  The two part Mask story has some interesting ideas that give insight into the subjective nature of Batman’s particular brand of madness, or at least possible theories about Batman’s existence. A tormented sedated Bruce Wayne lies helpless in bed while the maniacal manipulating fake doctor tries to convince Bruce even further of his sickness, his fantasy life as Batman.

The doctor torments Bruce with a poor copy of the Batman’s true costume hanging in the corner.  A pale Halloween imitation of Batman’s costume that is sad and pathetic, filthy and falling apart at the seams, much like Bruce Wayne’s mind which has gone to pieces in his desperate struggle in the hospital bed.  Bruce struggles to find some semblance of self, to make order of the chaos he finds himself in.

The monologue from the fake doctor continues, giving the reader a convenient capsule meta-analysis of Batman as a mythic figure, and making us, the reader question if this really is Batman / Bruce Wayne or someone else altogether.  The fake doctor sews seeds of doubt in both Bruce’s mind and the mind of the reader, making for a brief but deliciously demented two-issue tale:

Did you know that the word Persona originally meant Mask? According to Jung, this is the personality assumed by an individual in adaptation to the outside world. There’s your mask Bruce, and you didn’t make it just to hide your face. Some masks were used in battle to frighten the enemy. What that your idea with this one?

Some are symbols of deep religious or personal belief systems. They could transform an ordinary person into a supernatural being. In Africa, people saw their fellow tribesmen transformed into spirits, demons, animals. Australian aboriginal Bush Soul masks conferred to the wearer the power of the animal or bird they represented.

When you put on your mask, a different personality takes over. Why choose a bat?

Something from your childhood I’ll bet. But it’t not that simple. The bat represents darkness. It’s associated with witchcraft, black magic, vampirism.

In Christian mythology it is the bird of the Devil, an incarnation of the prince of darkness. Satan is often depicted with bats’ wings. Do you see what I’m getting at? Batman is your dark side, your negative side.

Of course, Batman inevitably triumphs in the story, but not without the aid of a nurse (whom he hallucinates is Catwoman) who takes him off the various drugs and sedatives that kept Bruce weakened in a fugue state, and more susceptible to the suggestion of the angry vindictive fake Doctor.  The fake doctor/criminal feels that Batman made him a victim and blames Batman for the death of his parents, even though in fact it was the mob who killed his parents after his father became an informant for Batman.

The potential danger of analysis is that the analyser often makes erroneous assumptions about their patient, they look at little pieces and assume they understand the whole. Another character who tried to analyse and understand Bruce Wayne / Batman was Dr. Hugo Strange, who has popped up infrequently throughout Batman’s history, right from the very earliest stories.  Dr. Strange (no relation to Marvel) made various assumptions about Batman, many of them completely wrong.

The problem with another person viewing Batman is that they assume that Batman is like them, but he is not.  Rather than viewing our heroes and assuming they are like us, instead we can look at Batman and assume that he is not like us, that he is more psychologically together than we might suspect, and lives at a whole other level compared to us average Joe’s.  This erroneous assumption proved to be Hugo Strange’s undoing, at least in the early stories, eventually Hugo got his revenge in later stories where he dressed up and tried to become Batman himself.

The two part story in Legends of the Dark Knight #39-40 is a good deconstruction of the various elements of Batman.  It breaks him down and builds him up in two brief issues, managing to competently explore Batman/Bruce’s psyche without over staying its welcome nor being too philosophical or preachy for the reader. It was typical of the Legends title which aimed to do something different than the usual monthly marathon of punching crime in the face and finding clues that conveniently were there like bread crumbs to be found only by Batman.

Legends of the Dark Knight was a more cerebral, intelligent title, the thinking persons Batman if you will, that often dealt with more mythic elements of the character, with stories that mainly focused on his early years.  LOTDK managed to tell tales that were deeply engrossing and thankfully avoided being pretentious.  The stories in LOTDK also tend to be more timeless than the regular multi-part monthly books and all too often big event crossovers that are like junk food to readers – exciting at first, but ultimately shallow and unsatisfying, with rare exception.

Where Vader gave himself over to his negative Shadow self, and became the Persona of Darth Vader, Bruce Wayne gives himself over to the positive Shadow self, he uses the power of dark forces, but remains in his heart, a good moral and sane man. He may not think of himself as a good man, but his actions say otherwise.

He knowingly became a self-invented urban legend and myth, the Caped Crusader, Dark Knight Detective, the Guardian of Gotham, a Sentinel of Justice and virtue.  Unlike Vader, Wayne journeys into his Shadow and returns, having mastered the power of the Shadow and integrated this part of his psyche into himself.  Whether Hugo Strange, the Scarecrow or the fake doctor/criminal from the Mask story, Batman proves himself time and again to be mentally stronger than his adversaries had anticipated, and it is usually leads to their undoing.

Over the years Batman has worn may costume variants, and specialised suits, he adapts to the task at hand, appearing in different forms in different times. His metamorphosis is ongoing, some say Bruce Wayne wears a mask, others say that Batman is the man, and Bruce Wayne the mask of normality.  From time to time that mask of sanity slips, and perhaps even Bruce Wayne does not know whether he is really the Man or the Bat.

Bruce Wayne wears many masks and displays multiple personas. There is the rich irresponsible playboy on display for the public. There is the Batman who punches crime in the face and creates terror in the hearts of criminals. His irresponsible undisciplined Playboy behavior as Bruce discredits the idea that Wayne could ever be Batman.

Batman is sleek and refined, like a jungle cat.  Wayne is sloppy and obnoxious, lending further credit to Bruce Wayne’s acting abilities.

Then there is Bruce Wayne behind closed doors, perhaps sans Persona. Bruce Wayne in the Batman costume, with his cowl and mask removed sitting in his Batcave, usually in front of a bank of monitors and screens – neither fully Bruce nor fully Batman, but a third hybrid personality. Is this his true personality? Is this the self that he subjectively feels he is, behind closed doors, when nobody else is watching?

In Legends of the Dark Knight #1-5, 1990 by Denny O Neil, the story Shaman, deals literally with the power of masks, personas, transformation and the channeling of unknown mythic powers unto the bearer of a totem mask.  In the Shaman story Bruce Wayne is critically injured and near death during his travels, he is taken in and nursed by a Shaman and his grand-daughter.

The Shaman heals Bruce by telling him a story, the story is a magic ritual to access the hidden powers of the universe.  Bruce Wayne recovers, but is baffled how he could have survived or how could he be healed by a story.  Wayne is a man of Science, and the Shaman state is beyond him.  In later Batman stories over the years, we see Batman meditating, or journeying willingly to deaths door via Tibetan death meditations.  We also see him practice Yogic disciplines such as the slowing down of all bio-rhythms including the heart to near death to survive in low oxygen environments, a handy trick for Batman’s inevitable escape from the death trap of the week.

But Batman’s Yoga and Meditation derived abilities are of a different order than the Shaman’s healing powers, which leaves him with no frame of reference for how a healing of life ending injuries could be possible.  The story later continues in Gotham with some maniac wearing a similar mask to the healing mask causing trouble in Gotham, and some other guy with yet another mask that seems to have a hypnotic power over people.  The details don’t matter so much, it is a fun read and one that is certainly under-appreciated, if a little confusing.

A key scene (which takes place during Batman’s early years) takes place when Batman tracks down the medicine man / Shaman years later to see what the connection may be to the maniac running around Gotham in the healing mask.  He finds the medicine mas has lost the old ways and become an alcoholic, to the shame of his grand-daughter.  He still manages to tell Bruce a piece of timely advice however – Wear the mask.  Become the mask.

The Shaman hints at the totem/animal connection of Bruce as Batman, and the possibility that his mask has more power than he yet knows.  The Shaman also seems to have a sixth sense, how does the Shaman know that Bruce wears any kind of mask, is he just guessing?  No matter how the Shaman knows, it is a powerful scene in the story, and adds a little more to Batman’s inspiration than just the bat flying through the window.

While Batman has been involved with various potential female love interests over the decades – Silver St Cloud, Vicki Vale, Julie Madison, Kathy Kane, Nocturna –  perhaps the most significant female throughout his masked crime fighting career has been Catwoman.  Catwoman may be seen as a representation of Batman’s Anima (the feminine aspect of a male psyche).  The various models Bruce Wayne dates are distractions, part of the public mask of Bruce Wayne, and never serious love interests.  The models are far too mundane for a man who is equal parts James Bond, Sherlock Holmes and Zorro.

A man who dresses up in a fetish like costume would naturally be more attracted to a female who also dresses up in costume, and is not afraid to fight with Batman, nor to exist in his night time world, the seedy underbelly of Gotham, away from the prissy daytime glamour of Bruce’s false love interests.  But Bruce can never fully embrace Catwoman due to his morality, and Catwoman’s immorality.  She is a criminal, he lives to end criminals.  If Catwoman were to reform and give up her cat burglarly jewel stealing habits, Batman could conceivably have a deeper relationship with her.  But Batman would have to give up something to have a relationship with Catwoman also, whether he gave up being Batman altogether, or spent less total time fighting crime would mean compromise.  And Batman doesn’t do compromise, it undermines his whole work ethic and values, perhaps if he retired around age 40-50 and one of the various Robins took over as Batman, he may have a chance to fulfill the parts of his life he denies himself.

A relationship where Selina Kyle (Catwoman) would be part of both of Bruce’s worlds.  The night time adventures of Batman and Catwoman, and the day time romance of Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle.  The only other significant woman over Batman’s long career who could truly match him is perhaps Tali Al Ghul.  Talia, daughter of the relatively insane Ra’s Al Ghul (Batman’s most maniacal Bond-like villain with a plan to wipe out most of the world’s population to save the planet) had a passionate on again/ off again affair with Batman starting in the fan favourite 1970s Denny O Neil / Neal Adams run.

The trouble with Talia is that she is allied with her criminal father, and is a criminal herself, the same basic conflict that prevents Bruce from being with Catwoman also applies to Talia.  Batman’s morality is absolute and uncompromising in his modern stories.  In the graphic novel Wonder Woman: The Hiketeia Batman hunts a young criminal girl who has murdered several people who abused/harmed her.  When he finds the girl has invoked the protection right of Wonder Woman through the pact of Hiketeia, Batman doesn’t care and attacks Wonder Woman and continues his pursuit of the girl, whom he can only see as a criminal.

In some stories Talia al Ghul is less a criminal and more aligned with Bruce Wayne’s values, such as in the Elseworlds tale  Batman: League of Batmen.  A near future sees Ra’s Al Ghul at least partially successful in killing off most of the worlds population including Batman, whose corpse Ra’s keeps as a trophy.  The son of Batman fights to reclaim the mantle of the Bat from Ra’s Al Ghul, who has turned his league of Assassins into a League of Batmen, trained killers who enforce his will wherever he directs them.  Talia in this story fights back against her increasingly insane father with the aid of her and Batman’s son.

Superhero stories where the hero gets married and lives happily ever after mostly don’t work.  Those ideas work fine in a self-contained story, but not in ongoing comics stories such as Superman, Spider-Man and Batman.  Spider-Man and Superman both have been married, and then eventually separated as the stories suffer when the character is married, and the writer is forced to derail the story to include domestic scenes of sitting on the couch watching television.

Nobody wants to read superhero comics with their action heroes sitting on the couch.  Unless there is a market for a Big Brother comic book with a bunch of idiots in a house who have super-powers, I don’t think we will see  a demand to marry off more heroes.  The same basic idea applies to James Bond.  You can have the one true love, or the wedding story, but basically those stories are only there to turn bad and provide motivation to the main character, which is lazy cliched writing at best, and downright sexist at worst.

Batman is a deeply engaging character, the multiple interpretations through film, video-games, animation and other media are a testament to the strength of the basic design and themes of the character.  You can run Batman through many different filters, different theories and perspectives that may or may not lead to a deeper understanding of the character.  The strength of Batman is that he defies categorisation, but it is still interesting to explore the ideas that make up this popular fictional character.

Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell’s ideas were just theories. However popular they may be, popularity alone does not make them into some unshakable truth.  If something such as truth exists, then perhaps it is flowing, living and dynamic, rather than static, fixed and unchanging. One of the few truths we may come to know is that we are alive, we exist and we grow. If life is growth, then how can truth ever be static, fixed and unchanging. If Life is truth, then truth should also be constantly evolving and growing.  This is the problem of trying to conceptualise the unknowable in a few words, with limited human perceptions through the medium of language.

Ultimately however we describe reality, we are only using symbols, if we remember that we are using symbols, then we need not get lost in arguments over whose symbol is more important or more true, so we can playfully explore reality through different filters, that some may call beliefs, ideas, values, theories etc. The more different filters we are able to apply to our own lives, the more contrasting perspectives we are able to hold at one time, the larger our mental picture of reality grows, however it is still only symbolic of the whole of reality and not definitive.

Is Batman a kind of truth?  I really don’t know if he is, I just know that I experience very real feelings and emotions reading the comics and watching the movies, and I share many of his most sacred values.

Persistence… Determination… an IRON-WILL forged in the heart of self-knowledge

Let us just imagine for a moment for arguments sake that Batman is a kind of truth, if he represents some dark and primal archetypal force that is embedded within the hearts and minds, DNA, cells and ancestral memories of humanity, then I suggest the idea that he is a flowing dynamic constantly changing and evolving truth.   I don’t see him as a static figure, even though he may appear on a comic page, he is full of life and motion.

Batman may be a truth that is open to multiple valid simultaneous interpretations.  The more he expands as a cultural idea as fiction, fable and myth, the more he is consciously explored, the more we learn about ourselves.  How our values en masse and as individuals are reflected in him.  How the emphasis of his stories changes with the times, within the multiple competing cultural narratives, while something of the character, some core element… that is almost indefinable… remains.

What does this all this airy fairy jibber jabber mean? In simple terms we always recognise Batman, no matter what permutations changes and transformations he goes through.  Whether on the comic book page, the big screen or the little screen, the idea of Batman is so strong that he punches through the comic panels to pull our attention into his world.  Somehow when we read the flat two dimensional pages of a comic book, an imaginary character comes to life within our own minds.  We care about whether he is victorious in his war on crime, we feel his pain and defeats, we enjoy the vicarious thrill when he escapes a hopelessly desperate situation. From the darkest detective to Adam West’s bright knight and even Lego Batman, we recognise them all as fundamentally being valid aspects of Batman.

The Batman is a fear inspiring figure, he wears horn-like pointed bat ears upon his cowl that in silhouette give him the resemblance of a devil or demonic figure. He dresses primarily in dark colours, to better blend in with the night and shadows. His cape is a clear inversion of the gaudy four  color superhero archetype, black often being the colour worn by villains in Hollywood movies and popular fiction, he also exists as the counterpoint to Superman’s sunny cheerfulness and bright costume.

The dark cape is perhaps one of the most direct references to Zorro, Dracula and The Shadow. Shadows and the night time have long been often associated with the unknown, and danger.  To be in complete darkness IS dangerous, as without a source of light, we can trip, fall and even die from injuries. Thus Batman’s costume itself taps into out very primal, and very real fears, while Superman’s bright primary colours are more reassuring and comforting.  Fear can be purely irrational and confusing, and also keep us alive in the face of real physical dangers, a fact Batman knowingly uses against his foes.

The Batman’s eyes also were intentionally made into small white slits (rather than eyeballs) at the suggestion of Bill Finger. To give him even more of an other wordly appearance, he seems to be less than human, and more of a wraith like demon in a cape.  The white eyes would become a key visual feature of the character through the decades, giving him an almost instant mythic look.  His pointy ears, cape and spiked gloves mean he is always recognisable in silhouette, an important feature when designing iconic characters.

Perhaps the most relatable aspects of Batman are not just his self-realisation through training, the self-made man of hard work and discipline, who, with a bit of hard work and applied effort we could become more like if we chose to.  Inspiring a figure as he is, what keeps him grounded and relatable to kids, adults, movie goers, readers, fans, academics, working class stiffs and others is that Batman is deeply flawed.  He is a bit of a mess, at times he is confused and conflicted, we see something of ourselves in him.  He is not invincible like Superman, a bullet can kill him, but his real wounds are deep psychological wounds over his failures in life.

Batman makes all sorts of bone headed mistakes, goes back to the drawing board and starts again.  He is bull-headed, stubborn and frequently cuts himself off from human contact, to his own detriment.  Batman’s character flaws and suffering help make him more sympathetic and human.

Batman is neither man nor god, but somewhere in between.  In training his mind and body, he transcends ordinary human limitations.  But unlike Superman to whom the impossible is the every day, Batman shows us the way to be who we truly are.  Neither demon nor saint, hero nor villain, but a real person of angst and joy, pain and pleasure, light and dark, with nothing denied, every part of us owned, embraced and welcomed.