Batman Begins #2

‘Power you can’t buy – that’s the power of fear’ Falcone, Batman Begins.

In my last post I set out what I think are some of the more apparent archetypal figures and patterns in Batman Begins (Warner Bros., 2005). In this post I give an analysis of the narrative of the narrative on the basis of those patterns.

The film opens with a cloud of bats swarming the screen, which segues into a first scene set in the gardens of the Wayne mansion. Rachel is chasing Bruce, who holds an arrowhead. This is the time of harmony experienced very early in life, before the experience of separation (from the mother) and recognition of the separate consciousness of the ego. The ego and Anima play together in a unity that pre-exists individual experience – this is a time represented, for example, by the concept of the Garden of Eden in Western culture. The arrowhead represents direction, possibly destiny, and also holds the possibility of violence. The undifferentiated ego holds the arrowhead but, after falling down the well and being swarmed by bats, Bruce gives it Anima – he is unable to act as guardian of his destiny at this stage.

The well or cave that the child Bruce has fallen into connects to a cave complex (pun kind of intended) that lies beneath the mansion, a complex that Bruce was apparently unaware of until this moment. He is terrified by this experience – which stands for the experience of exposure to the power of the Mother and the unconscious. Dark, enclosed spaces are often symbols for the Mother and, by extension, for the unconscious, as the unconscious is a realm dominated by the Mother. Bruce’s father rescues him – the power of the masculine ego can draw him out of the unconscious and, if he successfully integrates the qualities of the Father the adult man can thus rescue himself – he Thomas Wayne also attempts to diminish the terror with morality (frequent weapon of the Father) – ‘Why do we fall? So that we can learn to pick ourselves up’.

The pattern repeats. We cut to the adult Bruce, imprisoned somewhere in central Asia, who has become a violent man divested of name and identity in his prison uniform. He is rescued from his cave-like cell by the mysterious Ducard, who knows his true name and again provides a moral analysis for Bruce’s experience. Ducard is reaching into the dark recess into which Bruce has fallen and is offering him a route out.

In jail and then on his way to R’as ah Ghul’s sanctuary Bruce is helped by two old men, the helpful old man being a frequent archetypal representative of the principle of Spirit. Ducard himself also shares some of these qualities. Spirit appears in quest narratives when the hero is at his most hopeless, his most desperate; Spirit offers help but also facilitates the self reflection or ‘lucky idea’ that provides a way out of the entanglement. Spirit, in other words, is the magical quality in the psyche that rescues us when we are apparently at the end of our resources, and is often represented in fairy tales by old men or magical animals (Yoda, arguably, illustrates both categories; Mr and Mrs Beaver in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe more squarely represent the latter).

And so it is for Bruce. Ducard, with his magical flowers and explosive powders, his ability to teach men to be invisible and his almost supernatural insights, is offering a s/Spiritual path for the questing hero (after all, Liam Neeson is a Jedi). The sanctuary itself looks like a temple and, of course, is in the East – the Westerner’s projection of the qualities of Spirit and the quest for consciousness.

It’s also worth noting that this sanctuary is in a wild and remote mountain pass, a cruel and cold landscape that stands for the more ruthless and savage qualities of the Mother archetype that initially were hinted at in the cave. More usually associated with nurture and protection, the Mother can also abandon and deny nourishment, and this precarious temple like home on the edge of a precipice connotes those dual qualities. The Mother presides over the unconscious, a place of danger as well as inspiration. The home of R’as ah Ghul draws together and articulates the narrow area of balance between these apparently conflicting qualities.

The action, after a brief exchange between Bruce and Ducard, turns back to the experience of the child Bruce and in particular the scene of his attempt to get his father to understand the depth to which he is haunted by his own fear. His father tells him that scary creatures are even more afraid than Bruce, and then shows him the pearl necklace he intends to give Bruce’s mother. The three of them go to the opera but leave early because Bruce is afraid. In a dark alley behind the opera house, Bruce watches as his parents are shot dead (see my last postfor more on this sequence).

Bruce has come into his princely inheritance, but is not yet able to take on the king’s mantle – we see the small boy dwarfed and shivering in his father’s coat in the police station. At the funeral the CEO of Wayne Enterprises tells him that he and his Board will ‘be watching the empire’ until Bruce is old enough to come into his kingdom. You know you’re in trouble when Rutger Hauer says things like that to you.

It’s made clear, then, that Bruce has a task to accomplish before he can come into his mature identity, signified by control of Gotham and Wayne Enterprises. Cut back to Ducard and the adult Bruce, and their discussion of Bruce’s struggle with his own guilt, buried in anger, and the question of how to live with this anger. In a parallel process to Bruce’s internal struggle, they gasp the conversation during a duel on a frozen lake (the paralysed emotional contents of Bruce’s psyche). Ducard tells Bruce that he must channel his anger into vengeance; and makes an interesting, if brief, reference to his own loss of his wife, i.e. his loss of contact with the feminine, remarking that in time the pain of loss makes one hate the lost. Perhaps this is a small indication of severance of the contact with the feminine that must balance masculine power if it is not to become distorted, overblown.

We then see the younger Bruce’s own, failed attempt at vengeance. Returning home fro college with the intention of killing his parents’ murderer, Shill, at his remand hearing, Bruce insists he cannot live in his own home, so haunted is it by his father. He cannot stay; in other words, he cannot inhabit his haunted psyche. He meets with Rachel in the kitchen, location of warmth and nourishment, and she talks nostalgically about when she lived at the mansion too, in other words encouraging Bruce to ‘come home’ to himself. She does not want him to attend the hearing, indicating and advocating (she is a lawyer) the qualities of the psyche already articulated through the Father, those to do with repression and denial of personal difficulty. Anima thus indicates the elements of the individual soul that do reflect the Father, however much the ego seeks to reject those qualities by projecting outside onto the personal father.

At the hearing Bruce is Hamlet-like in his paralysis and can only watch as Shill is assassinated at the orders of Gotham’s crime boss, Falcone. Afterwards Rachel challenges him to look beyond the personal fact of his loss to the disintegration of Gotham, of the whole Self: the failure to integrate the Shadow through alienation from the Father – has brought it to the point of fragmentation. Like Denmark, there is something rotten in Gotham – and Rachel says as much. Bruce is being shown his quest: to find another way to integrate the struggling elements of the city/psyche into a stable Self – a way to integrate the Father and the Shadow, in this psyche closely connected.

Rachel sends him into a confrontation with Falcone and a further discussion of fear and power. Falcone reiterates Rachel’s challenge: ‘You think that because your mommy and your daddy got shot you know about the ugly side of life. But you don’t. You’ve never tasted desperate.’ The quest must take Bruce further into darkness and initiation than hitherto – he must take charge of it rather than passively receiving experience. Anima has prompted this, Falcone drives him on his way. The prince sets out on his quest, discovering his own strength, ingenuity and capacity for endurance in his journey through moral and literal wastelands.

The culmination of this journey, his near-initiation into the League of Shadows, exposes the archetypal, archaic nature of R’as ah Ghul and the League, who were present at the ruin of Rome and of Constantinople. The League stands for an eternally recurring pattern of destruction, the violent restoration of purity. Having integrated elements of the Spirit archetype and the archetypal qualities associated with justice and patriarchal power, however, Bruce can find his own direction and rejects the League as too pitiless, to unbalanced a paradigm for his own identity. He rediscovers his direction and returns to Gotham (thanks to the ever-helpful Alfred, perhaps the most helpful old man in fiction) to address the city’s disintegration, having recognised this as his own responsibility. In leaving he burns down the mountainside retreat, representing not only his break with the League and the cleansing of his motive but also the light and passion of the Spirit – Spirit archetypes often being represented by fiery visionaries.

Returning to Gotham Bruce is returning from the grave – he had been gone so long that he was presumed dead and his inheritance had passed on. Again, the theme is the return to the unconscious/death/darkness to find inspiration. He does not, as Bruce Wayne at least, make himself known to Rachel, perhaps suggesting that he knows she cannot easily be brought into relationship with either of his new identities, the playboy and the dark arbiter of justice. He can at least now inhabit his own home, and he also makes a home in the caves beneath, implying a new balance between the deepest, most unconscious self and the closer, more developed, more contingent qualities of the self. The bats, in fact, have started to come into the house.

Bruce now sets about the key task, staging an underground coup to reclaim the city and his company, bringing representatives of the police and justice system, and of his father’s firm (Lucius Fox being another older man who’s handy to have around the place), into his network.

Bruce eventually reunites with Rachel by accident, as he leaves a hotel and she enters. In this encounter he tries to get her acceptance of his splitting of his identity but she undermines it, problematising the question of who he really is and how he can know himself. Nonetheless, as a gift for his thirtieth birthday she returns the arrowhead, signifying that it is time he took back responsibility for his own destiny and direction but also that he needs to take care that he has not lost his way, not least by continuing to build a relationship with her.

By this point in the movie the marvellously wicked Dr Crane (Cillian Murphy) has come to the fore. His asylum, Arkham, is the darkest recess of the darkest place in the city, the Narrows, and he is the most horrifying shadow aspect of the doctor: the doctor who makes you sick. In this he is the Shadow in particular of Thomas Wayne, and he stands for the fear and power of madness, in other words of the mind over the body and the unconscious over the conscious – the fear that Thomas Wayne sought to deny. Crane applies his panic drugs both to Batman and to Rachel, seeking to overpower Anima and ego; through his eyes we also see the terrifying truth of Batman, the contorted and salivating face that, in the original DC Comics, was the face of R’as Ah Ghul himself. The archetype of evil, we are being reminded, is a projection of internal reality. Ah Ghul is much a projection of the individual psyche as Rachel or Alfred.

Batman rescues Rachel, acknowledging the need to keep relationship with Anima (‘stay with me’ he growls at her as they flee to the Batcave). Through a wild tunnel in the forest and under a waterfall they sweep into the cave, a symbolic return to the dark womb of death and unconsciousness - we cannot truly return to the womb to be born again, so a fantasised return is always in fact a fantasy of death. And all this by way of Bruce’s celebration of his birth, with the party guests gathered above in the mansion. Here is the ambivalence of birth - without it there is no consciousness, no life; but there is also no pain of separation and the only way to regain that unconscious unity is death.

In the climax of the movie Bruce realises that R’as ah Ghul has used his own resources - Wayne Enterprises’microtransmitter, Thomas Wayne’s elevated railway, the water supply channelled through Wayne Tower - to bring about the destruction of the city. In other words, the Shadow is seeking to destroy the psyche that is beyond redemption, the Nazi’s fantasy of purity through destruction. But Bruce now knows and lives with the Shadow to the extent that the archetype cannot take him under its total power, and he is able to save the city and those he cares about. The Shadow destroys the house of the Father, again with fire and again the fire connotes knowledge and the passion of the Spirit for the achievement of the great vision (Gotham’s destruction or rescue).

At the close of the film Bruce is nailing up the well that he fell into as a child. Perhaps he can now connect with his unconscious resources at his own will; or perhaps cannot risk another unintended fall. Rachel arrives and for a moment it seems there is to be the expected romantic uniting of ego and Anima to close the film, but in fact she again raises questions and concerns about whether this splitting of identity into Bruce Wayne and Batman can in fact offer the means to provide a stable Self. Nonetheless she commends Bruce for finally living up to his f/Father. Bruce tells Alfred he intends to rebuild the house exactly as it was, and finds his father’s stethoscope in the wreckage – has he therefore escaped his father’s s/Shadow? The stethoscope, though, offers a means to find out what is inside, what the heart is doing, and perhaps therefore indicates the possibility of future insight and the continuation of the quest to successful conclusion. That it is not complete we know: Crane is still on the loose, the lunatics are out of the asylum and the Trickster, apparently is on the way.

Carl says: The archetype of the spirit is capable of working for good as well as evil but it depends upon man’s free – ie conscious – decision… Man’s worst sin is unconsciousness.

Reasons to be cheerful: shooting on Nolan’s next Batman movie, The Dark Knight, begins in 2007 and will again star Christian Bale in the title role.