Reevaluating Christopher Nolan's Batman Films

Some years ago I offered my thoughts on The Dark Knight Rises--which were less than complimentary. But I had received its two predecessors more favorably.

One reason was that when those earlier movies came out I had been ready to give certain foolishnesses a pass.

Looking at Batman Begins, for instance, there was plenty that seemed off to me on even a first viewing. The worldwide journey Bruce Wayne is on when the film begins, undertaken for the sake of "investigating the criminal mind," struck me as a silly self-indulgence on the part of the billionaire--criminological priv-lit--a wealthy wannabe vigilante's equivalent of Eat, Pray, Love. And that silliness was tied in with a still bigger silliness. It is by no means a new realization that the biggest and worst crimes are not generally labeled crimes at all--while even if one does not, for example, consider the conquest and enslavement of countries, the exploitation of the disenfranchised and the ruination of the environment to be crimes, the line between ordinary business and what is normally recognized as crime in the narrowest sense has never been more than finely drawn, and has only got blurrier over time. However, Nolan did not seem to have caught on to this, Batman's world one where, at least normally, the criminal were all clearly on one side, the "decent, law-abiding citizens" on the other. As it was 2005 there were those who saw in it something of a statement on the War on Terror, but people were always doing that kind of Zeitgeist criticism, and on the relevant level the film seemed to me too flimsy to take seriously.

Still, if it was risible on the level of sociology and politics, I did not expect much more from a superhero movie, and there was a little psychological interest, at least--which seemed novel enough in those days, and at least less of a downer than it appeared in, say, 1995's Batman Forever (when I experienced it as a pure and simple annoyance, out of place in that movie's lighter treatment of the character). It helped that the superhero boom was still fairly fresh, and this more superficially serious and artful approach still novel.

All of this carried over to my reading of the sequel, The Dark Knight, three years later. I enjoyed it as Jungian psychodrama--a level on which I think it is still interesting (even as I find that kind of thing less worthwhile than before)--and brushed off the talk of it as much else.

Alas, The Dark Knight Rises afforded no room for that--Nolan's insistence on making a point that I can least offensively call "questionable" impossible to shrug off, all while simply not being as good a film as the prior ones in the formal ways. (The third installment was, as so many third entries in film trilogies are, not just less fresh and outright repetitive, but less tight and coherent also, so that it was not just a fascist film, but a badly made fascist film.)

And if anything, the Ben Affleck-era take on Batman (what I saw in the perhaps not insignificantly Nolan-produced Batman vs. Superman, and its follow-up Suicide Squad) was still less pleasant. In fact, it soon had me thinking again of how in 2010 I wondered on this blog if it was not time to "Give the Superheroes a Rest?"

Ten years later, it seems fair to say that the studios didn't give us a rest--so I guess I just gave myself a rest from their not giving us a rest.