"Batman Begins" and "Sin City"

(WARNING: This blog posting contains spoilers for both movies!  However, you should know that Sin City sucked, really sucked badly).

Just saw Batman Begins last night, which more than amply fulfilled my summer-action-movie cravings.  Going out on a limb, I am a little uneasy because I found the movie particularly, deeply profound in its depiction of the city and its super-hero.

In the story, the city -- Gotham, of course -- is recast as the legacy of the Wayne family, and their struggles against evil in all of its forms.  There is a scene when Bruce Wayne's father gestures out of the window of the subway, talks about the family's responsibility to the city, and how the family built the city's infrastructure -- a spindly monorail topped by grimy New York subway cars, circa 1980 -- to unite the people of Gotham.  Alfred, the butler, frequently reminds Bruce Wayne of how his parents fought to save the city, and how their deaths rekindled the spirit of “the good people” of Gotham.  Bruce Wayne's love interest, Rachel Dawes (Katie Holmes) is embroiled and endangered in the grimy city, yet all of her gestures and speeches are to the people of the city, and to the hope and spirit of the city itself.

Evil, of course, is also represented by the city in its squalor and filth.  Though the CGI rendering shines a bit too brightly through clouds of steam, it is a different kind of dystopian vision of the city than in Blade Runner.  That movie by Ridley Scott depicted the city as a place of Frankenstein-like technology run amok; instead, Batman Begins shows the city as a kind of shantytown that mocks our original ambitions for city life, and is instead weighted down under decaying infrastructure, aging buildings and a core rottenness of human spirit.  Liam Neeson, who plays a great villain, for once -- instead of a hammy hero -- delivers two great speeches identifying Gotham as the very embodiment of grotesque excess, and that cities themselves must be destroyed.  “Every time a civilization reaches excess, the League of Shadows emerges,” he says, and then quietly and powerfully delivers one of the best and most over-the-top lines of the movie: “We sacked Rome.  We spread the Black Death.  We burned London to the ground”.  He goes on, in a super-villanous way, to recap and plausibly explain the struggles of our cities in this century: “Now the weapons are more sophisticated.... we tried to use economics to destroy Gotham.... but people like your parents stood in our way”.  Batman replies, “there are still good people in Gotham,” but even his reply acknowledges that the city has somehow subsumed and enslaved them, and that the worst elements have come to rule the city.

Tom Wilkinson (“In the Bedroom”) turns in a small but spectacular performance as the mob boss, and restrains Bruce Wayne's desire for vengeance by threatening holds most dear.  “Kid,” he says to a young Bruce, waving a gun in his face, “you haven't thought this through.”  He says to this effect: “Power is knowing how to hurt you.  Your lady friend at the DA's office, that old butler you have,” listing Bruce Wayne's remaining emotional connections, “they might get hurt.”  Emotional ties and communities are what criminals use to threaten and ensnare the good people.

The web of infrastructure in the city again takes on particular meaning as the means of transmission of disease.  The villain, the Scarecrow, disguised as a psychiatrist -- though the wire-rimmed glasses certainly give him away as a villain -- uses the insane asylum as his lair, and by breaking into the decrepit water mains, is able to infect the entire city.  The climactic battle scene between the villains and Batman is a race to save the city's infrastructure, and to prevent it from exploding and harming the citizens, by unleashing chemicals in the water supply, but more importantly, their own madness.

Depictions of the city in the movie come to symbolize and reify Bruce Wayne's fears and struggle.  In a theme that is brilliantly translated from the original comic book by Frank Miller, Gotham City is the ecosystem in which the Batman arises.  Has there ever been a more fitting hero and his city?  Batman's Gotham City is filthy, rainy, shrouded in grey night, while Superman's Metropolis is filled with clean, muscular buildings and light-filled avenues.  Batman doesn't have superpowers: instead, he is a human being, and though equipped with weaponry and a costume, his struggles are all internal and his impact is symbolic.  He plans to revive the spirit of the inhabitants, and strike fear in the hearts of criminals through theatricality, deception, symbols and legend, all things which bind us together in the city.

Caryn James, the New York Times critic, has an interesting article on the Manichean representation of good and evil in both Star Wars and Batman Begins.

In comparison, Sin City, though slavishly and faithfully copied from another Frank Miller graphic novel, was relatively boring.  The city is stunningly drawn as a dark, mysterious, unfamiliar place.  There is certainly corruption there -- in the police, in the Church, in the government, and certainly in the inhabitants -- but none of the characters are ever given the kind of story or background that gives Batman Begins its narrative richness.  Sex -- in the form of thong-wearing prostitutes, naked parole officers, brightly-lit, golden-haired Jessica Alba as a stripper -- are all supposed to indicate something about the inhabitants, but whatever point the directors were trying to make founders under its own garishness.

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