Inside The Batman's Mind

"Why do we fall? So that we can learn to pick ourselves up."
                                                                            
                                                                                             Thomas Wayne

Ever since I was a child, Batman was my favorite superhero. As a young girl, I used to watch re-runs of the corny Batman show starring Adam West after school. I especially loved when Batman would fight the villains and the words, "Bam" and "Pow" would appear on the screen. I also loved when the announcer would say at the end of each show, "Same bat time, same bat channel."

Back then, I did not know anything about Bruce Wayne's past, that his parents were murdered and he was raised by the butler, Alfred. When I saw the Batman movie starring Michael Keaton, they show his parents being murdered at the beginning of the film. I then felt an even stronger affinity towards Batman. I've always had a soft spot for kids who lose their parents at a young age considering I have two loving parents that I wouldn't know how I would have grown up without.

What I love about Batman Begins, the first in the latest series of movies directed by Christopher Nolan, is that it goes into detail about how and why Bruce Wayne becomes Batman after his parents are murdered. Lucky for Bruce Wayne, after his parents are murdered, he had a lot of people who cared about him and gave him advice like a parent would including Alfred and his childhood friend Rachel Dawes. 

After Bruce Wayne watched his parents get shot and killed, he felt guilty considering the reason they left the opera early was because he was scared when something in the opera reminded him of bats. At some point, as he puts it, his anger outweighs his guilt. He grapples with the idea of taking revenge on his parents' killer, but before he can, the killer is murdered. When Bruce Wayne tells Rachel Dawes that he wants to kill the murderer, her response is, "You're not talking about justice, you're talking about revenge."

Bruce then travels all over the world seeking the means to fight injustice. He is recruited by Ra Al Ghul , from the League of Shadows, who becomes his mentor. The League of Shadows is a vigilante group who performs their own version of justice when criminals are let free by the government. Bruce Wayne's mentor teaches him how to fight. He also teaches Bruce about the philosophy of the organization, which is criminals should be shown no mercy, because if they are, they will just continue to commit crimes. Eventually the League of Shadows asks Bruce to execute a criminal, but he refuses, remembering what Rachel said about revenge.

Rachel's also gives Bruce more advice when it comes to Gotham and he follows her advice. After Bruce Wayne's parents are murdered, the city of Gotham becomes under the control of a very powerful crime boss. The Gotham citizens who benefit financially under his rule refuse to stop him, while the poor are too powerless to stop him. Rachel tells Bruce Gotham doesn't have a chance if good people do nothing and its not enough to just be a good person underneath. but it's what you do that defines you.

Batman Begins also explains why Bruce Wayne chose to fight crime in a disguise. He chose to dress in a disguise because as he tells Alfred,  "As a symbol, I can be incorruptible and everlasting." The obvious, next question would be why choose to dress as a bat. He specifically chooses a bat because "bats frighten him and it's time his enemies feel his dread." Also, Ra Al Ghul told Bruce, "He fears his anger and that in order to conquer fear he must become fear." Considering bats are Bruce's biggest fear, it makes sense he would choose to dress as one.

Batman Begins is very layered and could be seen through a variety of criticisms we learned this semester. It could be seen through a feminist lens considering Rachel's advice seems to dictate what Bruce Wayne does through the entire movie, which begs the question who is the real hero in the movie. The film could also be seen through a Marxist lens considering Gotham is divided into the powerful, rich, corrupt class and the poor class powerless to stop them. One could also do a formalism critique and analyze how the movie's scenes are structured to show how Bruce Wayne's past affects his present.

What I took away from Batman Begins, is that Bruce Wayne took the tragedy of watching his parents get mudered as a child and turned it into a positive. The quote from above that Bruce's father told him as a child really brings that message home. He could have wasted his parents' money by partying, but instead he used it to bring justice to the people of Gotham. He wasn't going to let anyone bring down the city he loved and more importantly the city his father built. 

A Tale of Two Classes

"Any city, however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the   rich; these are at war with one another."
                                                                                                     -Plato
                                                                                                      Greek philosopher (427-347 B.C.)

                        

In Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, there are two cities that Marco Polo travels to that depict the disparity between the wealthy and the poor. Moriana is a city with two sides, one for the poor and one for the wealthy and Zobeide is a city where the poor search for a dream that is never fully realized.

Moriana is a city with two distinct and separate sides that never interact.  Moriana is described as "a sheet of paper, with a figure on either side, which can neither be separated nor look at each other." 

The figures, I believe are the poor and the rich. The fact that both sides can't be separated implies that you can't have one without the other. What an interesting concept, I thought. A concept, which means to me, the poor can't be considered poor if the rich weren't so exorbitantly wealthy. By the same token the rich couldn't be considered excessively wealthy if there weren't very poor people. Also, the rich have made their wealth on the backs of the poor and the poor cannot advance due to the wealthy's need to keep the poor working for low wages.

In Moriana, the fact that both sides also can't look at each other means to me that each side never comes in contact with the other. That might be because each side doesnt' want to be reminded of the other's existence. I imagine the poor wouldn't want to see what they don't have and the wealthy wouldn't want to see where they could wind up if they lost all their money somehow. It could also be that people feel more comfortable dealing with people who are of the same social class. Whatever the reason, it doesn't help anyone when people of different classes don't interact.

Another city described in Invisible Cities is Zobeide, a city where immigrants moved after having dreams of an unattainable woman.  This woman, I believe, is a metaphor for wealth. Sadly their dreams of attaining this wealth are never fulfilled once in Zobeide.

These two cities reminded me of New York City, which has an upper class and a lower class that never interact such as in Moriana. Just like in Zobeide, immigrants who moved to New York City, as well as native New Yorkers, are in search of a dream that may never come true. 

Some areas of Manhattan, where some of the wealthiest people in the country live, is relative to Moriana, a city "with alabaster gates transparent in the sunlight, its coral columns supporting pediments encrusted with serpentine..."  Now, while these things don't really exist in New York City, the upper class does enjoys a lifestyle relative to this side of Moriana. The wealthy in Manhattan live in large, decadent apartments worth millions of dollars in high rises with respectful, helpful doormen in clean, safe, quiet neighborhoods. 

On the other hand, the other side of Moriana is described as "an expanse of rusting sheet metal, sackcloths, planks bristling with spikes, pipes black with soot, piles of tins... and ropes good for hanging oneself from a rotten beam."  Apparently in this city, the poor people lived in the more industrious area. That's probably because that's where the poor worked.  While the poorer neighborhoods located in the outer boroughs of New York City aren't exactly industrial, they are a lot less polished than the wealthy areas of Manhattan.   

When the people of Zobeide dream of living in one of these polished places, it's just that--a dream.  To the inhabitants of Zobeide, "the city's streets were streets where they went to work every day, with no link any more to the dreamed chase. Which for that matter, had long been forgotten." 

Just like in New York City, non-wealthy people work hard everyday, but get no closer to living the American dream. They work in low level jobs that pay the minimum wage with no hope of working their way up. Unfortunately in New York City, like most cities in the United States, once people are born into poverty it's very hard for them to pull themselves out. That's why people forget about the dream, like in Zobeide, and keep their head down and work just to make ends meet.

While it may be understandable that this dream crushing may have occurred centuries ago in a city like Zobeide, the fact that this is still occurring today in the United States is not only incomprehensible, but also reprehensible. Considering our Constitution states we are all entitled to the pursuit of happiness, it is unfair and unjust that this pursuit is becoming so difficult and discouraging for so many. 

 

"Our inequality materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower class."

                                                                                                    -Matthew Arnold
                                                                                                     English essayist (1822-1888)

Utopia for Men?

In Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, the city of Eutropia is constantly moving, literally. The city owns land in a vast area divided into many smaller cities.  The citizens of Eutropia only inhabit one city at a time. The people of Eutropia move to the next city when they are fed up with their professions, relatives, debt, homes and basically life in general.

This sounds like a nice idea in theory. After all, life can get pretty boring and mundane sometimes. The one problem I have with this idea, is that, as the story indicates, men can not only change professions, but also their wives.  Now, the story doesn't say if women can choose to stay with their husbands or not.  In fact, the story doesn't say how the women of Eutropia feel about the idea of being traded in, which is, in and of itself a little sexist. 

The story goes on to say that life is "renewed" from move to move. Again, that sounds nice, but women aren't things that you can pick up and then drop when you get bored with them. Women are also human beings who deserve to have husbands who don't throw them away and trade them in for new wives. I guess in Eutropia, marriage has an expiration date. 

 Apparently having the same wife for life is boring to the men of Eutropia which begs the question, why do the men get married in the first place. My theory is the men of this city have wives so they can have someone to cook and clean for them. The men obviously don't marry for love in this city, because if they did, they would hold on to their first wives for their entire lives. 

Another thing about Eutropia is that it sounds suspiciously like word Utopia. The story makes you wonder if most men would think the idea of living in a city where you continually get new wives is a Utopia, a perfect place to live or not. I'd venture to guess that most of the men in this city would be perfectly ok with this arrangement.

Just What All Women Desperately Need--White Teeth

"I don't want to sit around and hope good things happen. I want to make them happen."
                                                                              --Drew Barrymore


When I first saw this commercial for Crest3D toothpaste, I was instantly struck by its sexist overtones. The premise is a woman sees an attractive man from across the restaurant and automatically she starts to think of marriage and children. That's what all women think of immediately when they see a new man, right? Oh, but remember to whiten your teeth first. Because if you don't, the commercial warns, he'll never walk over to you and make you his wife and the mother of his children.

C'mon advertisers it's 2013. Not all women obsess over marriage and children.  Some women are actually happy being childless and employed without having perfectly white teeth. The commercial reminds me of some Jane Austen novel where the women stand around trying to look as fetching as possible while waiting for the men to ask them to dance. Women don't wait for men anymore. Women go out and get what they want and they don't have to look perfect doing it. 

Another thing about the commercial that irked me is the notion that you should use Crest 3D to land a man. You shouldn't use it in order to feel better about yourself or advance your career, but in order to have pretty teeth and a husband and children. I suppose, then your life as a woman in the 21st century would be complete.

Ballad of Injustice and Heartbreak

"We must scrupulously guard the civil rights and civil liberties of all our citizens, whatever their background.  We must remember that any oppression, any injustice, any hatred, is a wedge designed to attack our civilization."

                                                                                                            Franklin D. Roosevelt

Ballad of Birmingham

“Mother may I go downtown

Instead of out to play,

And march the streets of Birmingham

In a Freedom March today?”

“No, baby, no, you may not go,

For the dogs are fierce and wild,

And clubs and hoses, guns and jails

Aren't good for a little child,”

“But, mother, I won't be alone.

Other children will go with me,

And march the streets of Birmingham

To make our country free.”

“No, baby, no, you may not go,

For I fear those guns will fire.

But you may go to church instead

And sing in the children's choir.”

She has combed and brushed her night-dark hair,

And bathed rose petal sweet,

And drawn white gloves on her small brown hands.

And white shoes on her feet.

The mother smiled to know her child

Was in the sacred place,

But that smile was the last smile

To come upon her face.

For when she heard the explosion,

Her eyes grew wet and wild.

She raced through the streets of Birmingham

Calling for her child.

She clawed through bits of glass and brick,

Then lifted out a shoe.

“O, here's the shoe my baby wore,

But, baby, where are you?”

The first word that comes to mind after reading "Ballad of Birmingham" is heartbreaking. The poem is about a little girl who dies in a church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963.  At the beginning of the poem, she asks her mother if she can go to a freedom march.  Her mother thought the protest would be too dangerous for a little girl, so she suggests her daughter go to church.  After the mother hears an explosion, she runs to the church that is now reduced to rubble and finds only her daughter's shoe. As if this wasn't heartbreaking enough, the little girl in the poem bathed, brushed her hair and dressed in her finest clothes to go to church only to be killed in an explosion instead.  It was as if she was preparing for her death.

Another word that came to my mind after reading "Ballad in Birmingham" is injustice.  The fact that an little girl died in an explosion in a place that should have been safe from such hate is just plain unfair.  An innocent young girl should not have been the target of a bombing just because of the color of her skin.  It is also  unfair that for the rest of her life, the mother in the poem has to live with the fact that the church she suggested her daughter spend the day is where her daughter is ultimately killed. 

I also thought of the word progress. The fact that a man of color could be elected president in a country where not long ago, a man of color would be routinely harrassed and assaulted by white supremacists shows that we have come a long way in this country.  Of course there still remains racism and prejudice, but black churches in the South are not routinely being burned to the ground anymore.  I couldn't imagine Barack Obama's daughters being subjected to the senseless violence the little girl in this story was subjected to. 

All in all, this poem was in a word, "powerful."  After reading it, I was so horrified by the tragic, senseless death of that little girl. On the other hand I felt proud to live in a country that could progress to a point where churches are no longer being burned or destroyed on a daily basis.  The poem ultimately pushed me to a place where I want to see more progress being made in this country when it comes to civil rights, not only for African Americans, but also for any monority being treated unfairly.