Sort of the joke of Batman is that beating people up is a terrible way to fix a city. Here’s Bruce Wayne, mega-billionaire, and instead of investing in charity programs, he spends all his time physically assaulting the criminal underclass. It’s a common refrain among fans – honestly it’s not even really a criticism in any genuine sense, it’s more of a joke. Batman’s methods seem counterproductive and inefficient. They’re rooted in bad sociology, in an ignorance of the criminal as product of social conditions. That’s a stylistic choice: obviously Batman isn’t meant to be about sociology. It functions as myth and metaphor. Batman battles against expressions of his own psyche, against unruly aspects of the city. You could read Batman as the essence of democracy, fighting each villain to maintain social and political balance. Certain villains can be aligned with different social classes, different political interests – Penguin is the aristocrat, Freeze the cold-hearted technocrat, Ivy the environmentalist. Batman serves as a central focal point, invoking each member and rebuffing their totalising claims. You can be an environmentalist, but you can’t eat the mayor with a carnivorous plant. In this reading, there is no end to Batman’s conflict because there is no end to society, no end to the democratic project. New voices will continue to emerge, forever, and we will always have to find a way to balance their interests against the health of the social whole. The complaint that Batman doesn’t fund literacy programs, in that context, sort of misses the underlying metaphorical function of the story. It’s like watching a musical and complaining about all the singing: it’s imposing the aesthetic standards of social realism onto a creative project that’s definitionally anti-realism. Of course, it is still sometimes funny to point out how weird musicals are. There’s a sort of affectionate roasting where you acknowledge that the whole thing’s a bit silly and then love it anyway. Musicals and Batman both require a lot of suspension of disbelief. And sometimes it’s also confusing when Batman media invokes certain realist principles that it doesn’t seem to want to carry through to their natural conclusion.

Batman Begins (2005) is the fourth feature film from Christopher Nolan. Predating the era of Marvel superhero films (Iron Man came out in 2008), Batman Begins was an origin story and a commentary on social responsibility and fear. An early scene in the film has Bruce Wayne and his billionaire parents ride the monorail to go to the opera, and Bruce’s father talks about how he funded the monorail as a form of cheap public transport to support the city during an economic depression. His father is portrayed as a civic-minded billionaire: rich, but socially responsible. After leaving the opera, the family is mugged by a desperate drifter who shoots and kills Bruce’s parents. This murder is treated explicitly as a consequence of the depression: in a later scene in court, a lawyer argues that “The depression hit working people like Mr Chill [the murderer] hardest of all.” The murder is framed as an act of poverty rather than malevolence or any sort of inherent evil nature: “His crime was appalling, yes, but it was motivated not by greed, but by desperation.” The lawyer presents both Joe Chill and the Waynes as victims of the economic downturn, and its social consequences in rising crime. The depression hurts the poor, and it hurts the good rich people who build urban infrastructure and cheap public transport.

Bruce’s emotional arc in Batman Begins is built around that economic problem. It’s a journey from detached wealthy liberal to socially engaged Bat-citizen. At first he argues with his childhood friend Rachel, who’s working for the city’s defense attorney, about the value of the justice system: “Your system is broken,” he sneers. He sees the imperfections and corruption and thinks – well, why bother at all. He deploys a lazy black and white thinking: if it’s not perfect, it has no value. Rachel lashes out at his indolence, driving him into the city’s underbelly to reveal the ongoing rot of poverty. She also sees the imperfect system, but she tries to make it better. She puts in the work in a way that highlights Bruce’s shallow self-indulgence. Emotionally, that conversation (and not the death of his parents) is the instigating event of the film. His emotional arc is a movement towards Rachel’s position: he becomes more like Rachel, and also more like his own socially-minded father.

Along the way, Bruce battles against villains who embody either aspects of economic depression or aspects of his own cynicism and disinterest. The crime boss Falcone is a symbol of the former. On her underbelly tour, Rachel lectures Bruce about how Falcone “floods the streets with drugs and crime.” Falcone is not the architect of the city’s poverty, but he’s a symbol of poverty’s effect. He is the spectre of poverty over the city. Scarecrow and Ra’s al Ghul, the other two villains, both represent Bruce’s cynicism towards the system. Scarecrow is a casually corrupt psychiatrist, falsifying insanity pleas to get Falcone’s men out of jail. He knows the system is corrupt, and he plays into it, taking what he can get with no regard for justice or integrity. Ra’s al Ghul is closer to Bruce, sharing his basic opinion that the system is like totally corrupt, man – but where Bruce lounges about feeling sorry for himself, Ra’s tries to tear the city down. Bruce’s movement towards Rachel is therefore also a battle against this shadow version of his cynical nihilism. Over the course of the film, Bruce learns to balance the demands of justice against the call of social responsibility. Ra’s represents Batman’s drive for justice unfettered from social responsibility. Spiritually, Ra’s is identical with Bruce’s attempt to gun down Joe Chill after the court case. Ra’s acts according to the same ideals as that murder attempt: the city is corrupt, its institutions cannot be trusted, and we must dole out our own justice if we’re to see anything happen at all.

By the end of the film, Ra’s al Ghul comes to embody both Bruce’s cynicism and certain aspects of economic depression. Ra’s monologues in one scene about how he had previously tried to destroy Gotham with a more abstract tool: “economics”. In that scene, the film brings its key villain themes together: it links a lack of social responsibility with poverty. Falcone works for Ra’s al Ghul; poverty and its consequences stem from a lack of civic-mindedness. That’s also the gap with Batman Begins. Batman is a billionaire who spends the whole film reflecting on social responsibility without ever thinking about where his fortune came from. There’s no reflection on the socially corrosive effects of accumulating that sort of wealth – on the inhuman methods by which that wealth was obtained. Economics is a weapon, but not when it’s Bruce’s money. That’s what I mean about the film invoking these economic principles and then refusing to commit to thinking about them. Batman Begins wants to explore poverty and economics, but it refuses to embed its main character within that system of economic cause and effect. It’s a problem we see again in Nolan’s third Batman film, The Dark Knight Rises (2012) – even more explicitly a film about poverty and money. The Dark Knight Rises draws on the language of the French Revolution, with its citizens’ courts and the proletariat rising up against the bourgeoisie. It’s a film where Bane robs the stock exchange barely a year after the Occupy Wall Street movement. Naturally, Bane calls the financiers a bunch of crooks:

“This is a stock exchange. There’s no money you can steal.”
“Really? Then why are you people here?”

The Dark Knight Rises demonstrates the same basic problems as Batman Begins. It’s a film where Batman leads an army of cops to put down the proletarian revolution – essentially Les Miserables if the moral was that Javier was right. Both The Dark Knight Rises and Batman Begins have the same deafness towards issues of wealth and difficulty integrating the hero into his socioeconomic context. If we were being generous, we could view those problems as a clash between two specific themes – between the economic context and the question of what it means to be a good citizen. Batman Begins sees being a good citizen as working to protect imperfect systems, as believing in the dream of democracy and justice. DKR has the same sense of social responsibility, clumsily articulated as a concern about anarchy at a time of social and economic unrest. That basic question – what it means to be a good citizen – threads through several of Nolan’s films. It’s in The Odyssey, a film about the collapse of the laws of hospitality. It’s in Dunkirk, arguably the most archetypal expression of the responsible citizen, as a story about a civilian fleet that came to save the soldiers. Batman Begins explores the question of the good citizen in a fairly protean form, and it gets tangled up in all the economic stuff. Bruce’s father exercises social responsibility by building cheap public transport; Bruce saves the city by blowing up that public transport, because the bad guy is riding the sky-subway to complete his evil plan. His father’s visions of public infrastructure and social welfare are replaced by fistfights with Liam Neeson. Terrible way to fix a city.