 Starring: Christian Bale, Liam Neeson, Katie Holmes, Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman
Director: Christopher Nolan
Year Of Release: 2005
Plot: After his parents’ murder when he was a boy, troubled young Bruce Wayne heads off towards the Himalayas, where he comes across the League Of Shadows. After rejecting their rather harsh view of justice and balance, Wayne heads back Gotham City, where he takes on the guise of Batman, who fights criminals by being even scarier than they are. However while trying to bring down organised crime, Bruce stumbles on a plan to destroy the entire city. |
I suppose I really ought to talk about how Batman Begins reinvented the Caped Crusader for a new era and the difficulties of rebooting a film franchise, but I’ll have to put that to one side, because there’s a single scene in Batman Begins that drives me so nuts that I have to get it off my chest or I’ll go on a rampage. It is, to my mind at least, proof that Bruce Wayne is a complete idiot.
The scene in question comes fairly nearly the beginning, when Bruce Wayne is training with Ra’s Al Ghul and the League of Shadows before he becomes Batman. He’s just completed his training and Henry Ducard (Liam Neeson) tells him that in order to graduate (or whatever the hell it is you do to get your League Of Shadows Scout badge), he must execute a criminal.
“You must demonstrate your commitment to justice,” says Liam Neeson. “F**k off,” says Bruce Wayne, although slightly more politely than that.
You see old Bruce doesn’t reckon he’s an executioner. He’s higher minded than that and believes that whatever the criminal has done it should be dealt with by the courts, and that compassion is the important difference between the criminals and those who fight against them. The League Of Shadows aren’t impressed that Bruce won’t do what is necessary, especially as they want him to help destroy Gotham City.
So what does Master Wayne do immediately after saying, “I will not become an executioner”? He sets the entire building on fire, which promptly begins to explode and kill most of those inside. What does he think's going to happen? Is it okay to execute people if you do it by arson, rather than with a sword? Make up your bloody mind Bruce (actually throughout the film and its sequel he does have a rather cavalier attitude that it’s fine to cause as much death and destruction as you want, as long as it’s only a by-product of something else – or, as he says to Ducard in Batman Begins, “I won’t kill you, but I don’t have save you”).
It means that having just refused to kill the prisoner with an instantaneous and probably painless beheading, he kills him in an agonising fire instead, along with any other criminals the League Of Shadows happens to be holding. Unless Bruce believes that like witches, criminals don’t burn, he might as well have just chopped the bloke’s head off, as it seems the more compassionate option compared to what he does immediately afterwards.
You can’t say you shouldn’t kill people before murdering an entire building full of them, and still expect to maintain the moral high ground, but Bruce Wayne does.
However the thing about this scene that I can’t decide, is whether Bruce’s apparent hypocrisy is deliberate or not (I hope so, or else it’s rather silly). The reason I wonder is because what Bruce does to the League Of Shadows is essentially what the League Of Shadows plans to do to Gotham. The main difference between Batman and The League isn’t just compassion, but that the Caped Crusader still believes that no matter how desperate things have gotten, there’s always hope to turn Gotham around, while the League says that the only way to remove the crime and degradation is to let the city die for the good of the rest of humanity.
However, with the League Of Shadows itself, Bruce makes the split second decision that there’s no hope to turn it around, and that the only way to deal with it is to destroy it. It really is a have your cake and eat it situation, because Bruce’s moral authority to blow up the League Of Shadows headquarters and everyone in it, is the exact opposite of why he believes it’s worth trying to save Gotham.
The only difference is his saving of Henry Ducard, which presumably shows that while he refuses to execute a criminal because he’s so compassionate before frying him and everyone else in an exploding building, there is still a difference between him and the League. However even this comes back to bite him in the ass later on when Ducard returns.
That’s why I’d like to presume Bruce’s seemingly hypocritical actions are deliberate, because it does kind of show the futility of the League Of Shadow’s plan, because no matter how much you destroy something corrupt, some elements of it will escape and will return to cause trouble. Not only that but it simultaneously reveals a flaw in Batman’s prized compassion, because by saving his League Of Shadows mentor, he puts Gotham in more danger than if he’d simply killed him.
While it all works superbly the bolster the complex themes of an excellent film, for Bruce himself, it just leaves him arguing against killing people and giving up on a corrupt system, by giving up on a corrupt system and killing loads of people in excruciating agony. Like I said, Bruce Wayne is an idiot.
TIM ISAAC
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