The Batman Conundrum

Genre movies have always proven a surprisingly sturdy and effective way to explore the fraying edges of American society – the western and the hardboiled crime flick being two of the best examples. Though they vary in quality from popcorn flicks to prestige pictures, the familiar stories, tropes and character archetypes create an effective and easily relatable framework for filmmakers to ask tough questions and provide social commentary – think of the way The Searchers deals with our country’s ingrained racism and cruelty or Scarface’s funhouse mirror take on the American dream.

These days, the comic book movie seems the genre best suited for such filmic explorations. Indeed, we are living in the Age of the Superhero, not only because these splashy, big budget franchises have become one of Hollywood’s most reliable money makers, but because they have taken on a level of pedigree and complexity that is new and unusual for what have traditionally been popcorn flicks. Big stars and serious actors like Christian Bale and Robert Downey, Jr. are anchoring franchises helmed by critical darlings like Christopher Nolan and Joss Whedon. And in between flashy action set pieces, these films are exploring weighty issues and posing difficult questions. In director Zack Snyder’s reimagining of Superman, the titular Man of Steel grapples with arch villains and existential angst alike, just as Nolan’s Batman found Gotham City plagued not just by crime, but post-9/11 dread and paranoia. The comic book genre is capturing the zeitgeist like never before.

Perhaps this is because the narrative framework, origin stories and archetypes of the comic book world are uniquely suited to deal with the complex and often bewildering state of hyper-reality in which we now live. From Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg to Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, from Al-Qaeda to the hacker group Anonymous, never before in human civilization have individuals and small groups held such power to disrupt the status quo and reshape society for either good or bad. Zuckerberg has completely altered our relationship to privacy, just as Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin did for our relationship to information. Assange and Anonymous have proven that information is a weapon. Al-Qaeda has demonstrated that a small group of zealots can strike fear deep into the heart of even the most powerful nation. While their powers may not be “super,” per se, they are far beyond what was ever thought possible and our existing societal institutions and conventions are ill-suited to deal with the ramifications. In short, our world is struggling to keep up with their ability to change it.

Of course, the common thread in all of these – even, to a certain extent, Al-Qaeda – is the Internet. The superheroes (and villains) of the future will do battle online. Take, for instance, Anonymous a worldwide hacker group shrouded in mystery, a leaderless, decentralized network of anarchists and activists, vigilantes and pranksters. They’ve been in the news a bit lately. First, there is the Steubenville rape case, in which an Ohio town attempted to sweep the rape of a teenage girl under the rug until public outcry – much of it fueled by the Internet – forced the police to do their job. Anonymous stepped in to push the case for justice when the police wouldn’t, exposing the alleged attackers and leaking social media evidence implicating them in the crime. Now, there is a chance the hacker who led the effort, and has since gone public, may serve more jail time than the convicted rapists. Most recently, when a sweeping and scary National Security Agency surveillance program was exposed, then vigorously defended by the Obama administration, Anonymous quickly dove into the fray, leaking top secret documents related to the program.

The questions we must ask here are the very same ones posed by the darker and more psychological superhero stories – perhaps most trenchantly and saliently by Nolan’s Batman trilogy: When the law no longer serves justice, who or what will? When an independent actor flouts the letter of the law in order to serve its spirit, do we condone or condemn him? Can we allow the power to mete out justice to rest with someone who answers to no authority but his own – even if he uses it in service of the greater good?
And what of the villains? Again, they force us to wrestle with moral and existential conundrums that find their closest analogues in the pages of comic books. Just as X-Men’s Magneto is a dastardly madman driven by clannish righteousness and a sense of self-preservation forged in the persecution of the Holocaust, the origin story of Osama Bin Laden’s villainy is rooted in his days as a “freedom fighter” working side by side with the Americans to resist Soviet tyranny. Perhaps more frightening is the potential for villainy that lurks behind the noblest of causes. In Watchmen, the villain is revealed to be one of the good guys, driven to madness and atrocities by his single-minded quest for world peace. Google’s Page and Brin and Tesla Motors’ Elon Musk are similar to Watchmen’s Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias: brilliant and determined pioneers of powerful technology with the potential to reshape the world, utopian visionaries with an unswerving commitment to their idea of the greater good. But can they be trusted? Will they know where to draw the line between determination and ruthlessness, between utopia and tyranny? Only time will tell. Until then, I’ll see you at the movies.