Batman Begins

Warner Bros., 2005. Screenplay by Christopher Nolan and David Goyer.
Batman originally featured in DC Comics and was created by Bob Kane

‘A guy who dresses up as a bat clearly has issues.’ Bruce Wayne in Batman Begins.

Christopher Nolan’s revamp of the Batman franchise, the 2005 release Batman Begins, is a very twenty first century version of superheroics. It is self aware in its exploration of the psyche of the hero, of the area between mental health and ill health which the superhero often allegorically treads. It explicitly draws on childhood trauma as a spur to adult weirdness, uses altered states of consciousness and the release of the unconscious as a core plot device, mental hospitals, their patients and their creepy doctors feature prominently. There is extensive discussion of the impact of father/son relationships and Bruce Wayne is, for the early section of the film, shown to suffer nightmares. It’s a film that knows what it’s about.

Like many super hero movies, from the Jungian perspective BB is inhabited by and explores elements of the heroic quest archetype. For Jung, the archetype of the quest was a part-expression of the journey of the male psyche into consciousness, a man's journey to become most fully himself. In terms of the family dynamic, and for those attuned to the influence of Freud, this required separation of the ego from the earliest identification with the mother and a resolution of the early competition with the father, in other words the Oedipal conflict. Bruce, the young prince, must make a long and difficult journey and overcome many obstacles in order to come into his heroic inheritance (not only the role of Batman but of controller and owner of Wayne enterprises, the source of his influence and resources; and of the moral leader and guardian of Gotham in both personae). This journey takes him into darkness (representing his own unconscious), where he finds the inspiration and resourcefulness to come into his power. His lonely wanderings in the early part of the film are a figurative death (he is missing presumed dead in Gotham when he comes back) from which he returns reborn into a new identity and purpose – death and resurrection being the central motif of arguably the most powerful quest archetype of our time, the life of Christ. He thus experiences initiation (both through the death of his parents and his training with the League of Shadows) and is aided in his quest by archetypes of the Spirit (principally his butler Alfred and the appropriately crafty Lucius Fox).

In this post I cover the particular complexion of the Shadow in this version of the quest myth, Father and Mother in the film and the role of Anima. Next week I'll say more about how all these dynamics operate in the narrative itself. For more on Jung and quest archetypes, see this stuff here.

Fear and the Shadow

Particularly strong in the BB incarnation of the myth is the Shadow, in this instance associated with fear and with masculine power. Fear is repeatedly and explicitly discussed in the film. The 'primal' event is the intense fear experienced by the young Bruce when he falls down a well and is swarmed by bats. He re-experiences this fear at the opera – a production of Boito’s Mefistofele, based on the Faust legend and thus making the association between destiny and fear and darkness in the soul – and asks to leave. In a deserted alley behind the opera he watches, terrified, as his parents are shot dead by a thief. His dying father tells him ‘don’t be afraid’.

As an adult man, prompted by the moral lecture of his childhood sweetheart Rachel, he confronts Gotham’s crime boss Falcone in order to show that he, like his father, is unafraid of criminal power – that is, power outside the structures of society and morality. A Freudian might describe this as the struggle between id and superego. Falcone tells Bruce he should be afraid – Falcone's power that goes beyond money, it’s the power of fear. He tells Wayne that the anarchic underworld of the gangster is ‘a world you’ll never understand and you’ll always fear’. Bruce sets off immediately to confront and overcome that fear, sinking deeper into gangsterism until he ends up in a jail somewhere on the fringes of the world (remote Asia is the edge fo the world as far as Hollywood is concerned), beyond the reach of the ordinary structures of law and order. Here he is rescued by a man calling himself Ducard (Liam Neeson) who take him to the mountain retreat of Ra’s Ah Ghul and his League of Shadows. It is not after all the criminal and the violent that Wayne fears; Ducard tells him ‘you fear your own power, you fear your own anger, your own power to do great and terrible things.’ In other words, he fears what is within, not what is without; he is withdrawing his projections. Again Bruce attempts to initiate himself into his own fear so as to go beyond it; in his final trial before he can join the League of Shadows, Ah Ghul tells him ‘you must become fear... you have to become a terrible thought… embrace your worst fear and become one with the darkness.’ With these words the hallucinating Wayne opens a casket to release a cloud of bats, the motif representing Bruce's most deep rooted terror.

Returning to Gotham Wayne makes plans to inhabit his own fear, as Ra’s Ah Ghul’s training has shown him. 'As a symbol,' he tells the faithful Alfred (Michael Caine), ‘I can be elemental, terrifying.’ He makes a secret, alternative home for himself in the very cave whose bats terrified him as a child and creates his alternate identity out of the symbol of his fear, the bat. ‘It’s time my enemies learned to share my dread.’ In the mean time, Gotham is being gradually drawn under the control of Ah Ghul through his agent, Dr Crane, inducer of paranoid psychosis through the use of the same hallucinogen that was used in Wayne’s mountainside training – a drug that causes intense panic. This drug will enable Ah Ghul to bring Gotham to its own destruction through the release of the feared contents of every individual unconscious in the city. It will devour itself in a frenzy of its own fear, beginning with the Narrows, the slums where the most feared elements of the city’s society dwell.

Throughout the film, then, we are dealing with fear from a variety of sources and experienced at a number of levels. Bruce Wayne is attempting to find a way of living with fear. He confronts it; he makes it a part of himself. And yet we are left wondering exactly what it is that he is afraid of. Precisely because his greatest fear is un-nameable, beyond the symbolic realm of language and speech, it can be represented only through symbol, bat. Where language fails only symbols will do. In his journey through the narrative Bruce explores the possibility that he fears the people who killed his father, or of the kind of people who killed his father – in other words the dread the wealthy feel of the poor. He wonders whether what he fears is his own guilt and failure – in other words, he fears the truth that he caused his parents’ death. Or perhaps it is his anger that he fears – he is frightened of the hate he feels for the father who failed to save himself and to save Bruce’s mother, who has made Bruce ashamed of feeling fear. Is he afraid, as Ducard claims, of his own power? He rejects the roles of billionaire capitalist and leader of an assassin vigilante group because he is afraid of his own possible actions – and after all, he seems to have some significantly violent tendencies. It seems none of these can be quite right; at the end of the film he is still living in, and as, his own fear, unable to express it and live with it other than through the life of the symbol itself.

Good fathers, bad fathers

Closely associated with the figure of the Shadow (fear of what we may become) in BB is that of the Father. Initially the set up is to do with the loss of the Good Father – Bruce’s father Thomas Wayne (Linus Roache) is in many ways almost God-like (more complex than it might seem - for Jung’s view on God and his biggest mistakes see his Answer to Job). Deriving power from his enormous wealth, Gotham is Thomas Wayne’s creation, one in which he intervenes to secure the ends he considers most important. All Gotham's power and water, in other words, the necessities of life, run through Wayne Towers, the heart of the city in the full figurative sense. He considers himself solely able to rescue the city from economic depression and improve the moral qualities of its citizens. Not only that, Wayne is a doctor; he has power in the business of life and death, he has the power to heal.

He is also, in my view, distinctly creepy; he's a repressive, suffocating force. He tells Bruce to repress his fear – ‘don’t be afraid’ – he refuses to acknowledge and accept Falcone’s ugly side of life. He simply refuses to accept the darkness of individual in his paternalistic insistence on the goodness of the human soul, and it is this failure that ultimately means he cannot, unarmed, defend himself and his family against the uncontained criminal who, under a different system, would not even be on the street. He thus leaves his young son alone and unprotected in the dark world he denied.

Yet Bruce cannot escape his father to find his own identity. He is invaded by his father: his psyche, represented by the Wayne mansion (houses being a familiar Jungian symbol for the psyche) is not his own. ‘It’s my father’s house,’ he snaps at Alfred when asked why he won’t stay there, and adds that he wants to pull the place down. On one hand Bruce struggles to live up to his heroic father and to sustain the grief at his loss; on the other he furiously resents him. Bruce's quest is to withdraw the projection of the Good Father, in other words to integrate those qualities into himself instead of associated them with an external figure. What if Thomas Wayne is also in Bruce, and what is not?

Ducard initially appears to offer a higher, more spiritual kind of path, a more elevated kind of fathering altogether. He trains Bruce Wayne as a warrior and turns him almost into a shaman – able to confuse and mystify his opponent, to become invisible and distort reality. Here is a fuller acceptance of power, beyond morality into the world of the Nietzschean superhero, a kind of masculine identity that goes beyond the normal human structures and is arbiter of pure justice, a fuller and more biblical God than the older Wayne’s anaemic New Testament tendencies. Bruce discovers, however, just in time, that this masculinity is too savage, too unbalanced; it comes to represent elements of the Bad Father, also a projection. This time he does destroy his (new) father’s house, burning it down. Nonetheless, he has learnt from Ducard: the training has enabled him to free the possibility of action in himself, and channel the violence that made him first a failed murderer and then a hired thug. His experience of darkness, difficulty and failure, in other words the qualities archetypally associated with death, has inspired him and provided new resources for his quest. This is the positive function of the descent into, in other words, dominance by, the unconscious and it features commonly in quest narratives

It's also worth observing that Bruce Wayne has a good deal in common with another tortured hero, Hamlet – beyond even a taste for a good deal of theatrical black. The father’s death arouses guilt in the king-in-waiting who knows that’s what he secretly wanted. There is an attempt to stifle the guilt with anger and direct blame outwards in a desire of vengeance but neither can act; it's as if each knows the real problem isn't the uncle/gangster . When the prince finally does confront the act of revenge it turns out badly – Polonius gets it and Falcone gets to Shill first. Both are drawn to death, both are disgusted by their own capacity for wickedness. Neither finishes his degree.

Rachel Dawes

Rachel Dawes is the Anima figure who appears in every quest narrative and stands for the tensions within the psyche, its otherness and its destiny. She stands by and for the significant moments in the development of the masculine psyche: she and Bruce are chasing in each other for possession of an arrow (giving direction) in the opening sequence of the film, through an edenic kind of garden, when Bruce falls into the old well. It’s Rachel who then goes to fetch help. She literally occupied his childhood home, the home he has such difficulty reinhabiting; she comes to his parents’ funeral. She is present at Shill’s hearing, at which Bruce nearly becomes a murderer. Her challenge to him about how he can move on from the loss of his parents (‘look beyond your own pain’) sends him to confront Falcone and from there onto his long journey into the world beyond society’s limits. Interestingly, she does not knowingly see him for a while after his return to Gotham (she does meet Batman); and when she does, it’s the playboy she sees, and she questions his belief that he can hold together the separate personalities of his psyche – in other words, his way of uniting himself into functionality.

Rachel also articulates and acts as reminder of the conflicts in Bruce: between wanting to live up to his father and wanting to lose him; between revenge and selflessness; between order (she works for the District Attorney) and anarchy (crime and deprivation). She seems to be on the side of Bruce as his good father’s good son, and of a functioning civil society: she is more or less the only character who believes Gotham’s civil structures – politics, the police, the justice system – can still be saved. She therefore also perhaps stands, along with Alfred, for the hope of order being restored in the psyche (Gotham) and therefore also in Bruce. She does not accept, as the superhero’s girlfriend so often does, the dual life of the hero. Instead she problematises it as a solution to the struggle of light and dark in the soul. Alfred, towards the end of the film, accuses Bruce of letting the superhero get in the way of the duties of the man; Rachel, at the end, rejects Bruce because he has let the need to find an accommodation with his won the Shadow has taken precedence over the other elements of the psyche. His love affair with his own darkness has led him away from the romance with Anima. The Batman (dark warrior prince, or Dark Knight as Batman is sometimes referred to) has driven out the lover-prince. Rachel raises the question of whether being Batman is really his destiny.

Martha Wayne

If there wasn't a mother in the picture somewhere we wouldn't be talking about Jung, so I'll finish with some thoughts about where she is in BB. I would argue she’s the greatest mystery of the film, linked closely with the question of what it is that Bruce really fears. Martha Wayne is Thomas Wayne's greatest love – he dies protecting her, not Bruce. She is associated with his father’s denial of fear feelings – for example, he distracts his son from talk of whether scary creatures feel fear with the pearl necklace he has just bought for his wife. She wears the necklace to the theatre and it is stolen and destroyed by her killer, connecting repression of fear with the failure of Bruce’s father to prevent his own and her death. It represents the failure of his world view and his failure of his son.

Bruce’s mother is beautiful but distant – she hardly speaks, she shows concern when he has been rescued from the well but hardly powerful emotion. She is a beautiful and distant goddess who Bruce never mentions. We never see mother and son together; she appears usually at the back or to the side of shot. She is less the personal mother, more the presiding goddess in the mansion of the psyche.

As for the symbolic Mother, that is, the archetype that stands behind and shines the woman, her realm underlies the house of the Father and is the source of fear and miraculous resources – the unconscious realm where Bruce finds his inspiration from the Shadow. That si the significance of the cave and well swarming with bats. This is where he first experiences the fear of what he cannot know or name, and it where he makes is own, most secret home of the other self, Batman. The Mother, whose realm is the unconscious, is the source and home of fear. Is Bruce’s father’s worship of the goddess-mother perhaps another fact of his repression of the primal fear associated with the Mother? Through failing to keep her alive he loses Bruce the opportunity to perpetuate the cult; perhaps if he had been able to do so he too would have been able to keep fear, the Shadow, in the unconscious. As it is he returns constantly to the watery, womb-like cave, where he obsesses, in his violent bat fantasies, about the return to the womb, that is, about death. It is this womb of death, the desire to return to the time before and after life, that also inspires the fantasies of purification and destruction articulated by Ra’s Ah Ghul, fantasies to which Bruce is for a time drawn.

So what does this all add up to? Next week, I look at how these archetypal patterns operate throughout the film.

Carl says: Life is always bringing us up against [the problem of]… the uncertainty of all moral valuation, the bewildering interplay of the good and evil, and the remorseless concatenation of guilt, suffering and redemption. This path to the primordial religious experience is the right one, but how many can recognise it? It is ambiguous, questionable, dark, presaging danger and hazardous adventure; a razor-edged path, to be trodden for God’s sake only, without assurance and without sanction.