Batman as a Monster in a Classic Horror Film (Batman Begins)

(Someone sent me an email asking if I thought Nolan had shot Batman like a monster in a horror film in the fundraiser scene.  I replied that I had not.  But when I taught Batman Begins last quarter I taught it as a horror film.  What follows are lightly-redacted notes for that class.  It may read a little staccato.)

Christopher Nolan spends the first ninety-three minutes of Batman Begins denying his audience what they paid to experience: the vicarious thrill of costumed vigilantism.  The film opens with a violent tease (Wayne beating back multiple attackers in a Bhutanese prison) before settling into an almost leisurely sequence of expository flashbacks.  That Nolan sustains any narrative tension while recapitulating the most famous origin story in comic history testifies to the talent that made Memento more than the sum of its gimmicks.  He pushes the narrative forward on three fronts: from his childhood to the death of Thomas and Martha Wayne; from their death to his imprisonment in Bhutan; and from his release from prison forward (the narrative present).  Setting the narrative pace so slow ensures that the first glimpse of Wayne in full regalia will bring the catharsis.  Or would have had Nolan's direction not transformed Batman into a monster.

Cut to the docks.  The corrupt Detective Flass and mobster Carmine Falcone oversee the delivery of a drug shipment.  The stevedores load boxes into the back of a truck:

 

Cut back to Flass and Falcone discussing the drugs in a limo:

 

Then back to the stevedores.  Note that the stevedores are directly beneath a cone of warm light of the sort being put out by the light in the background:

 

Nolan chooses a deep shot here because he wants you to know how far the stevedore must travel to deposit that box onto the back of the truck.  He cuts back to Flass and Falcone discussing drugs (similar to above) then back to the stevedore carrying the box:

 

Only that is not the stevedore with the box.  Nolan confounds the conventions of continuity editing by violating the 180° rule.  If a car careens off the right side of the screen it should emerge from the left in the next shot.  (Otherwise.)  Figures moving away from us should continue to move away from us.  But Nolan aims to disorient here.  He crosses the 180° line and follows the hooded man who had been moving toward us.  (Note that he had been under one cone of light in the shot above and walks toward another.  The stevedore with the box also walked toward a cone of light.  We now know that this stretch of warehouse is illuminated by three lights.*)  By the time we realize where we are and who we see, the hooded stevedore has nearly traversed the fraught space between him and the storage unit:

 

Note the classic horror blinds to his left and right.  One more cut to the stevedore with the box establishes the forthcoming reaction shot:

The hooded stevedore struggling to remove the next box:

Nolan keeps the camera still here.  The stevedore cannot dislodge the box from the container.  Frustrated grunts are heard.  He works at it for three or four seconds before being violently sucked into the container by some unseen percussive gust:

 

Nolan stays with the dark empty space for a beat before cutting away to the reaction shot:

 

He lingered so the audience could peer into the ominous blackness of the bin.  Now begins the classic horror scenario: the search for the thing that just went bump in the night.  The camera follows this stevedore as he walks around the end of the truck and peers down the alley:

 

Nolan cuts to a point of view shot and for the first time the audience sees the entire distance the stevedores must traverse.  The camera moves inquisitively toward the open container.  The suggestion is that whatever bumped the other stevedore is still in the bin.

 

Nolan again flips the camera 180° and now we see the stevedore whose head we just occupied walking towards us.  The camera is positioned a foot outside the cone of the light closest to the bin.  And because the previous shot had an identifiable point of view we assume this one does too.

 

But it doesn't.  If there was a perspective to embody a foot outside the (now) far cone of light it would be visible.  Note though that we are now behind the man whose point of view we occupied not but three seconds ago.  We are now seeing through the eyes of the man who followed the first guy.  All this shifting of perspectives disorients cumulatively.  Every time Nolan confounds convention we are less able to situate ourselves in the scene or predict where the next cut will land us.  Will we be borrowing the eyes of the lead man?  The trailing one?  The disembodied whatever-it-is down the corridor? 

Nolan sticks with the trailing man's P.O.V. as he and his companion cautiously traverse the space between them and the bin.  When they reach it Nolan again reverses:

 

He lets us know where they are by showing all three lights in the frame.  They lead man sticks his head toward the bin and shouts.  Then whatever went bump in their night starts taking out our only means of orienting ourselves in the scene:

 

With those lights extinguished we will no longer be able to measure where we are relative to the truck or the bin.  But at least we know who was responsible for all the bumping:

 

Note that the lights are shielded on the all sides.  The only direction to throw something that will blow the bulb is from below.  The stevedores know this.  The first one looks left and right.  While he tries to see what might be lurking in the blind alleys his companion hears something rustle:

 

The shallow focus is deliberately misleading.  The man in front will learn nothing from his study.  But Nolan doubles down on the misdirection here.  Not only is what is out of focus in the frame more important than what is: the most important element in the shot is not even in the frame but above it:

 

Monster!   Runaway!

 

All that attention on the length of the corridor pays off.  The Batman is right behind him.  He better run fast!

 

Violate 180° again to show us that the Batman is not actually behind him.  Then a series of quick cuts in which everyone asks themselves "What just went bump?"

 

 

 

Something moves and the man with the gun shoots in its general direction:

 

Note the shadow in the upper middle portion of the screen.  That would be the Batman.  Look where the man with the gun shoots:

 

That would be the lower middle portion of the previous shot.  An eyeline match shows the audience a character looking and then what a character was looking at.  The first shot contains no eyeline match.  Its purpose is to show the audience what happened.  The eyeline match in the second shows that the man with gun ready-fire!-aims at an incorrect assumption: that bats are land-based mammals.  This bat might not be able to fly but neither is he limited to terra firma. 

Cut back to the running man.  Nolan's emphasis on the original alleyway again pays off.  The audience knew that space.  It also knew that there were blinds branching off to its left and right.  Nolan takes advantage of this by cutting back to the hooded figure running down the familiar alley:

 

Then plunging him into down and between a series of identical looking alleys.  He turns a corner and seemingly emerges back where he started:

 

Two significant differences: the lights are on and this alley is not neatly framed.  The composition of the original shot breaks down: both the alley and the figure are off-center.  The gyroscopically stabilizing steadicam has been ditched in favor of a jumpy hand held camera.  Whose eyes (if any) are we borrowing here?  Does the jumpiness of the camera simply correspond to the nervousness of the man running?  Or are we occupying the head space of the thing chasing him?  Where is he running to anyway? 

 

To the man with the gun.  Nolan puts us back into the head of the running man with another point of view shot so we can see the man with the gun point it at us.  He had heard the running man bumping around in the night and—

 

Back behind the running man?  But when we were just in his head the man with the gun was ten feet away.  Unless we weren't in his head.  Maybe we were in the head of someone else?  Someone who dashed into one of those alleys on the side?  The running man will check it out:

 

Nolan will now employ a shallow depth of field to make the Batman look really fast.  Consider this diagram I snagged from Wikipedia:

In the previous shot the running man is within the depth of field.  He is not so close or so far away as to be defocused.  Nolan has him running away from the camera, but unlike the previous shots, this time the camera itself is not following him.  It remains glued in one spot.  As he runs away from the stationary camera, he is running toward that second line in the diagram—at which point he will be defocused.  Nolan manipulates his lenses such that the second line corresponds with the back end of the shipping container.  In this shot the running man is within the depth of field whereas Batman is beyond it:

Batman grabs the running man and pulls him into defocused territory:

 

Now both the chaser and the chased are defocused.  Nolan banks on the audience confusing blurriness for speed.  Had Batman idly strolled across the screen he would have been equally blurry.  By having him move quickly and be blurry Nolan heightens the perceived speediness of the Batman. 

All this running into and out of alleys got you confused?  You're not alone.  These previously-unseen thugs each think they heard something a different over there.  You can tell because Nolan has them all in different directions:

 

Back to the man with the gun.  He shoots to his left:

 

He hits nothing, but because he already fired to his left he assumes nothing can ever occupy that space again.  The area on the left side of the screen has been swept and will remain clear for the rest of eternity.  Time to inspect the right side. 

What was that?

 

Shoot it!

 

Where you incorrectly assume it will be will suffice!

 

Note that Nolan has again changed the angle so that it corresponds with the shooter's incorrect assumptions about his target.  When Nolan cuts back to the shooter he switches to a close-up:

Two benefits here: the larger his face the easier it is for the audience to register the panic in it.  The audience sympathizes with his fear even though it know he deserves to be punished.  The second benefit: the tight shot leaves more of suggestively off-screen.  He hears something and looks right:

 

He walks backwards he musters enough false bravado to yelp: "Where are you?"  As he does this Nolan opens up the right side of the frame:

The audience expects that space is opening up on the right side of the frame because something is about to be revealed to be occupying it.  But Nolan needed space to do a quick pan:

It would have been difficult to swung the camera with any suggestion of urgency if Nolan had centered the previous frames on his face.  The pan makes it seem as if Batman has moved very quickly and suddenly appeared when the audience can plainly see he is just hanging upside down there.  The space in the previous frames was Nolan's answer to the question: "How do you make a stationary object dangling from a crane look like it's moving really fast?"

---

*For the record: Nolan can't count and thinks two objects can occupy the same space at the same time.  Or slipped up.  He shows you all three lights popped (here) then a fourth one directly above them blows (here). Which would be fine and all, were it not for the fact that that space is actually occupied by a crane-dangling Batman.

Comments

[Rich Puchalsky]

Not into film, not into Batman -- but given that he's so ubiquitous that you must be familiar with him even if the kind of comics you like are Vertigo, I should mention that Batman Begins is really the only time you can film Batman as a monster in this way. His origin myth stresses that when he starts out, he's depending on his costume to scare those superstitious criminals. And indeed the early ones freak out obligingly. But that's the only time it can work, because he quickly becomes well-known, and then the criminals know exactly what's going bump in the night -- it's Batman, of course. They may well still be scared, but they are scared for a rational reason.

One of the reasons Batman's origin story is retold so exceedingly many times is so that he can go through the predictable stages, none of which can easily be repeated once he's progressed to a new one: the (self) trainee. The monster in the night. The misunderstood vigilante, hunted by the city. The unofficial addition to the Gotham police force. The guy that everyone recognizes "owns" Gotham. The guy wired in with Superman etc. into the space-station-housed overlordship of superheroes.

[Ahistoricality]

Maybe it's the only time you can film it that way, but the comic book versions for the last twenty years have played with the horror convention. Batman is often an absence as much as a presence, his vagueness as a public figure leads to doppleganger errors and misidentifications, and his vigilantism is prima facie evidence of his mental break from reality, which sometimes gets worse, (especially under the Joker's influence) leading to questions about whether he is deluded about the positive aspects of his presence.

It's a fine line -- or rather, a huge gray area -- between the vigilante and the sociopath. Maybe you can't play with that in big-budget movies, but that doesn't mean that it's unfilmable.

[Rich Puchalsky]

I disagree, Ahistoricality. Being a crazed vigilante is not the same thing as being a monster. And the "mental break from reality, especially under the Joker's influence" bit typically comes up at the "he owns Gotham" stage, as a side effect of his megalomaniac self-identification as the city's protector, which everyone else sort of agrees with. There's a negative version of Batman at each of the stages -- for instance, sometimes at the last stage, writers will play with Batman as surveilling everyone through a panopticon. And the positive versions of Batman generally are the inversions of negative ones. For instance, in the last stage again, there generally has to be some story about how Superman or someone is getting out of control and surveilling everyone and Batman has to take him down.

[Jake]

Batman is often an absence as much as a presence, his vagueness as a public figure leads to doppleganger errors and misidentifications, and his vigilantism is prima facie evidence of his mental break from reality, which sometimes gets worse, (especially under the Joker's influence) leading to questions about whether he is deluded about the positive aspects of his presence.

Is this observation based off The Dark Knight? Because I'd say his role as Gotham's protector is more pronounced with the presence of the Joker. He never once breaches his ethical code, although he does come close. Whenever he does something that somebody else finds unethical he eventually redeems himself in their eyes. This is just what I see from the movies, not the comics. I haven't read them. I believe Burton's Batman is a lot darker and crazier than Nolan's. Wasn't he responsible for some heavy casualties in the chemical plant in the 1989 Batman movie? He also liked to sleep upside down... like a bat.

Has there ever been an instance in the comics where the villains discover that the Bat signal leads them right to Batman himself? This strikes me as such a gaping plot hole. If anybody wanted to ambush Batman they would know where he was since the signal is right there in the sky!

[Rich Puchalsky]

Batman doesn't send the Bat-signal -- it's a floodlight on the rooftop of the police headquarters that Commissioner Gordon puts a bat-cutout over and lights up in order to tell Batman that he needs to talk to him about something. So it would only lead villains to police headquarters. Of course, it tells everyone else that the conversation is occurring, once people have figured out what it's for, but maybe that's intended.

Again, this is a device that can only be used at certain stages of the story. Eventually, Gordon figures out who Batman is, or at any rate Batman just gives him a dedicated encrypted phone or something. Not to mention later baroque stages post-Killing Joke, such as Gordon's daughter (who used to be Batgirl) getting paralyzed from the waist down, becoming Oracle, a sort of super-hacker who coordinates superheroes, and generally obviating the need for any kind of primitive smoke-signal-like communication.

Needless to say, the whole thing is rather silly. DC now thinks of Oracle as some kind of outreach to people with disabilities, and therefore she can't use any of the multitude of methods that other people in that universe use for greater mobility than a wheelchair / curing nerve damage. I do have a soft spot for:

"In a world increasingly centered on technology and information, she possesses a genius-level intellect; photographic memory; deep knowledge of computers and electronics; expert skills as a hacker; and graduate training in library sciences."

Graduate training in library sciences! Now there's an example of superhero outreach that really works.

[Ahistoricality]

Is this observation based off The Dark Knight?

No, haven't seen it yet. It's based on Arkham Asylum, The Killing Joke, Dark Knight Returns, and a few others. I'm talking about the difference between the movies which are basically morally unambiguous, and the comics which allow the distance to remain between Batman's sense of justice and the world's sense of law and morality.

the Bat signal leads them right to Batman himself?

First, they'd have to know that Batman comes to the bat signal itself: there's no reason why he has to go there as opposed to meeting at some other prearranged spot. Second, they'd have to assume that Batman comes to the bat signal without checking the area to see what's going on around it.

Being a crazed vigilante is not the same thing as being a monster.

True, from an objective standpoint, perhaps. But what this scene in particular is playing with -- and it's drawing heavily from the comics in this regard -- is that Batman is a horrific monster to his enemies because of his preternatural abilities. What the comics do -- and I've always like the way Spiderman foregrounds this, though Jamison is a blowhard character -- is highlight the way in which the vigilante can be unnerving, even monstrous to civilians.

[Rich Puchalsky]

"Batman is a horrific monster to his enemies because of his preternatural abilities"

Well, yes -- but the villains in comics read comics, sort of. There really isn't any way to have Batman around for years and not have everyone figure out that he's basically a guy in a cape. That doesn't mean that the bad guys aren't afraid of him, but it does mean that he's no longer preternatural. Instead, you start to see a sort of criminal stoicism, in which the risk of running into Batman is sort of like the risk of getting hit in a car accident; distressing to think about and impossible to fully avoid, but you don't stop driving your car because of it. He shows up, they go "Oh no, it's Batman -- see you later, Lenny, I guess we're going to wake up in jail" and then put up the usual doomed struggle that the criminal honor code evidently requires. (Why not? They're going to wake up in jail no matter what. There's no risk of getting killed by Batman.) You really just can't sustain him as a monster with that going on, or at least it would take a better set of writers.

And yes, the supervillains don't think this way, they a la Joker actively get off on challenging Batman's rep -- he's the fastest gunslinger in town, effectively, etc., and they can only gain in reputation by going up against him even if they lose. Again, not very monstrous.

To remake the later-stage superhero as a monster, people typically go in the direction of Miracleman or The Authority or something, in which they are monstrous because they are gods. But Batman can never quite pull that off.

[Rich Puchalsky]

"graduate training in library sciences"

I might as well add to my own tangent here: I wonder how many superheroes have as part of their origin stories that they were once grad students? Advanced degrees are usually a supervillain thing. And when superheroes get training, they like to get it from mystic Tibetan monks or masters of the psionic arts or something like that.

Or maybe, how many never really progressed past grad school. I mean, Reed Richards got Ph.Ds in both physics and electrical engineering from Harvard by the age of 22 (with additional work at MIT) but he's unquestionably rather professorial now, and grad school was only a larval stage.

[Fritz]

It's a fine line -- or rather, a huge gray area -- between the vigilante and the sociopath. Maybe you can't play with that in big-budget movies, but that doesn't mean that it's unfilmable.

It would be interesting to contrast Batman with The Reaper from Batman: Year Two or the Vigilante.

[CharleyCarp]

The missing line from the Dark Knight is relevant here. When the Joker is taunting Batman about having jumped out the window to save the girl, he opts for the junior high 'now I know who you like' instead of the grown-up 'you left me alone, armed, with all the richest people of Gotham.' But then we'd all have to face that he did so. And that the filmmaker left the Joker alone with all these people, and nothing happened.

[SEK]

I thought long and hard about that, Charley, and came up with this: in the end, the Joker's single-mindedness is the explanation here. Once he learns The Ultimate Button to push, he leaves because he realizes that he's found his "in." Granted, it doesn't make sense realistically, but it is true to the neuroses of this particular character. (I present this as an example to any students who may be reading this: this is what I mean by an "arguable" argument. It's not necessarily correct, but non-insane people will consider it has merit.)

[NBarnes]

That's always what I assumed happened in that scene. Joker got Batman to jump out a window like that, the richest people in Gotham are now boring. It fits his perspective. What's he going to do to them? Shoot them? Boring. Scare them? Briefly entertaining, but ultimately boring. Rob them? Money is necessary, but fundamentally boring. Going home to brood on the fact that Batman jumped out a window like that? Interesting.

[ana]

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