Essay: "Batman, Broken Windows, and the Uncanny Valley: Part One"

I saw Tim Burton’s Batman in theatres when it came out. I was nine years old and it blew my mind. But at that age, the Adam West Batman television show also blew my mind, and so I have learned to take my youthful assessments of artistic representations of the Caped Crusader with a grain of salt. I recently re-watched Batman for the first time since the Chris Nolan movies came out. I think the general consensus on the Internet is that the Nolan movies are much better than Burton’s but I was pleasantly surprised to see that it has held up very well.

Batman’s aesthetic, the 1930s feel, has been very influential, as has the design of Batman’s vehicles (the Batmobile and the Batwing) and his gadgets (the grappling gun, the black plastic costume).  Nicholson's performance as the Joker holds up even after Ledger's famous take on the character.  The theme by Danny Elfman is amazing, and the Prince songs, while dated, are infinitely more listenable than, say, Wang Chung’s soundtrack for To Live and Die in L.A., and infinitely more memorable than the bland soundtrack for the Nolan films. I believe Batman has other advantages over Nolan films, which I’ll get into in next week’s posts.

One of the most striking differences between Batman and the Nolan films is also one of the simplest. In the first five minutes of Batman, Batman kicks the crap out of a couple of greasy thugs who have mugged a tourist. When I was a lad, not a comic went by without Batman swooping down from the top of a building into a dark alleyway and beating up a mugger. It’s how he spent 90% of his time.

But Batman never goes after any muggers in Batman Begins or The Dark Knight. Bruce Wayne’s parents were killed by a mugger (Joe Chill) but the film goes out of its way, in a speech delivered by the Katie Holmes character, to make it clear that the “real killer” was not Joe Chill, who was poor and hungry, but the crime lord Carmine Falcone whose corrupting influence stopped Gotham from being prosperous. And when Bruce Wayne travelled the world to learn about crime, he learned sympathy for the “common criminals” who commit crimes because they’re poor.

Why the change? Well, we stopped getting mugged.

Let’s look at New York City, the real-life Gotham. In 1977, Howard Cosell could casually remark at a baseball game: “There it is, ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning.” Violent crime increased dramatically after the 60s, peaking in the late 80s and early 90s. New York City was a very unsafe place; its crime rate was 70% higher than the country’s average. The people that lived there were afraid to go outside and felt helpless about it. Oh, so someone put a knife in your face and took your wallet? So what? It happens all the time. People around would put their heads down and walk past. The police would tell you to fill out a form, get in line.

In 1984, Bernard Goetz blasted a bunch of would-be muggers on the subway who had asked him for $5. He was largely acquitted of wrongdoing at trial. Although it was portrayed by some as a racial issue (Goetz was white, the muggers were black), the year before the Goetz trial, a New York City grand jury refused to indict a black man who shot and killed a white youth who accosted him on the subway. Professor James Wilson noted: “It may simply indicate that there are no more liberals on the crime and law-and-order issue in New York, because they've all been mugged.”

However, the crime rate has since plummeted. Central Park is safe, the subways are clean and well-maintained, and they drove the hookers out of Time Square. There are as few muggers and panhandlers in Manhattan as Disneyworld. Visitors from Toronto could be forgiven for wondering: where are all the hobos? Did they get sent to labour camps in Alaska? Eaten by C.H.U.D.s? It’s creepy.

Of course, this means that we can now afford to feel much sorrier for muggers than we could back then.  We no longer desperately feel that somebody needs to do something about street crime.  So who wants to see Batman absolutely kick the shit out of some poor drug addict? If you’ve been mugged a couple of times it might be cathartic, but if not, it just seems regressive.

This has led to a change in comics. Instead of grim vigilantes, who beat up common criminals with their fists, comic book heroes have become elite strike forces, who spend are too busy duking it out with other costumed villains to wait around for and break up petty crimes. And that’s why, in Batman Begins, Batman targets the crime lord Carmine Falcone, instead of lurking around on rooftops waiting for someone to scream for help.

But this, of course, creates a problem for Chris Nolan. Dressing up like a bat and hanging around on rooftops is central to Batman’s “mugger-terrorizing” strategy (criminals being, after all, a cowardly and superstitious lot). The costume and cape seem altogether less necessary if you are trying to be bring down a well-organized international crime syndicate.  How can Nolan make Batman relevant in an age where “Gotham “is one of the safest cities in the world and people don’t get a kick out of seeing Batman stomp would-be thieves? And what does that mean for his version of Batman? The answer will be posted in two weeks.