Batman: Part Two

Moving on to Batman finally. What kind of map of reality does Batman have? Three categories are useful places to start: God, evil, and redemption. There is no God in the Batman world (and I think that no one even takes God's name in vain, if I remember correctly). One student mentioned that vigilante movies (of which Batman is a type) are almost required to be humanistic to some degree, since there is no eschatological promise that God will deal with evil. If we do not have that promise, all I can do is take care of it now (notice how it has shifted into the American myth). The map of evil in Batman is the most interesting part of the movie for me. There are several paradigms of evil in the movie. The mobsters use evil as a means to an end: to get money. But for the Joker, evil is the end: he burns the stack of money to show this. Evil no longer is used to get something else, but as an end of itself. As the movie opens, this is not what we expect, since we meet the Joker robbing a bank! But we learn later that the point is not the money. The mob version of evil is what Joker tempts Batman with: just do a few bad things, because you have a good end and that way you can conquer me. But what is reality is that the step from the mob evil to Joker evil is a very slippery slope, and that is the reason Batman does not follow Joker's proddings. He refuses to kill, no matter what. But the ironic thing is that he does follow Joker to some extent in other areas: for example, in the area of truth. No one tells the truth in the movie, whether it be Batman, Gordon,  or Dent. Each of them lie to achieve a greater end, which is precisely what Joker wants Batman to do. A third brand of evil is introduced near the end of the movie with Harvey Dent's turn to evil. Harvey Dent cannot understand why the world is not going according to plan: in a sense, why the American myth is not working out for him. Or in OT terms, it is like a Job gone bad: instead of Job receiving a message from God telling him to be quiet and sit down since God is the creator and he can do as he wants, Job strikes out at those around him whom he thinks has caused him pain. Dent wants to control everything in a nice little box (hence the two-sided one-sided coin, which allows him to perfectly control the results), but when his world crashes around him he realizes he cannot control it all and goes insane. In a world without God this is to be expected. Speaking of evil, the ferry boat scene is interesting as well. We as the audience expect the criminals to blow up the other boat, but it turns out that both boats decide to do the right thing and do not blow up the other boat. Does this mesh with a Christian view of reality? Just as a side note, another aspect of the American myth is having your cake and eating it too: the people on the boat do the right thing and, at the same time, Joker does not blow up them up. They are rewarded for doing the right thing, which is certainly not how life usually works.
The ending. How does the solution mesh with a Christian map of reality. When I asked the class if Batman and Gordon did the right thing by covering up the truth, about half said yes and half said no. In the narrative world created, many were persuaded that lying was correct to prevent further crimes from being committed by all the mobsters who would be released from prison. But when I brought the question into the real world (for example, a pastor who commits has an affair with someone from the church), no one was willing to raise their hand to say that they thought it should be covered up. These are the types of issues which the movie helps to raise for us and to think through.
Is Batman a Messiah figure? In a sense he is: he takes on the sins of another. He takes the place of the sinner. But do the differences outweigh the similarities?
And does the movie have a political spin? Does the cell phone network which Batman sets up correspond to the Patriot Act? Is the movie a defense of George Bush?

Movies are powerful tools. This power can be both good and bad; and we must use our brains as we go to watch them. God can use them to shape us in profound ways, but they can also corrupt us. We have to know ourselves, our weaknesses. But there is also much that can shape us positively as we watch movies.

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