Batman Begins - discussion guide

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Summary

Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins delves deeply into millionaire Bruce Wayne’s history as it explores the origins of the Batman legend. We knew that Batman’s emergence as a force for good in Gotham City had something to do with the tragedy that befell him as a child (his parents were brutally murdered in a street robbery) but we knew little of how bats came into the equation. Batman Begins takes us back into the past of the mysterious Bruce Wayne as it explores how the bat got into the man.

Batman Begins follows the orphaned and disillusioned industrial heir Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) as he travels the world seeking the means to fight injustice. This search leads him to become trained and nearly recruited by the mysterious megalomaniac Henri Ducard (Liam Neeson). Ducard, who is involved with a group of ninja vigilantes called ‘The League of Shadows’, believes that they must annihilate everyone in Gotham City to purge and protect the wider world from impurity, evil and injustice.

Wayne escapes from the League of Shadows and returns to Gotham City, determined to fight injustice by wielding the psychological weapon of fear over the criminal fraternity. How will he accomplish this? Through embracing his own childhood fear of bats, he settles upon a predictable, but familiar symbol. This provides him with a way of creating a supra-human fear not limited to mere human form, as well as a way of facing his own demons, making him even tougher and smarter. So Bruce Wayne becomes Batman, the masked crusader who confronts his fear internally as well as externally. Batman pulls all this together as an alliance of resources with his martial arts training, and an array of high tech toys as he wages war on the sinister forces that threaten the city.

Background

This Batman film is a world away from the late 60s’ Batman series starring Adam West. As West kapowed, boffed, bammed and zapped[1] with polished and untroubled simplicity we weren’t really left asking questions about the caped crusader’s background, or delving into his plurality of motives.

Director Chris Nolan (Insomnia [2002], Memento [2000]) and Christian Bale (Shaft [2000], Laurel Canyon [2002]) were tasked with reinvigorating and breathing new life into the Batman franchise. Nolan says:

‘I think that when Tim Burton made his film in 1989, which was a brilliant film, visionary and extraordinarily idiosyncratic, it’s a very, very stylized movie and when you go down that road . . . I mean to get to four films is pretty impressive because you’re going to hit a dead end at a certain point. I mean, it’s so extreme in its approach it’s bound to.’ (movies.about.com)

The title went through many changes. First, it was known as Batman 5. It became Batman: The Frightening for a while and was then confirmed by Shepperton Studios’ website as Batman: Intimidation Game before settling on Batman Begins. Filming began on 22 May 2004 at Senate House (a property belonging to the University of London, just off Russell Square). The front of the building was made up as the Gotham City courts, complete with New York-style taxis and Gotham Police Department cars.

Filming took place mainly at Shepperton Studios near Bedford, England. The sets were housed in the Admiralty Hanger No. 2, one of the largest hangers in the world. The floor area is so big that it would take 8,338 of London's red double-decker buses to fill it. And it needed to be big too: a full block of Gotham city was built, based upon the towering slums of Kowloon, Hong Kong before 1994.

Questions for discussion

1. What did you think of Bruce Wayne? Did you warm to him or dislike him? Why?

2. Do you think that the original Adam West’s Batman of the 60s and 70s series was convincingly human? Are heroes who bleed and get drugged likely to win your trust? What does someone have to be like to really win your confidence?

3. What other options did Bruce Wayne have besides becoming Batman? Why wasn’t Assistant DA Rachel Dawes (Katie Holmes) getting anywhere using the normal judicial route? How are Batman and Rachel alike? Do you think Rachel approves of Batman’s means?

4. Why is truth telling essential to a judicial system? What would the judicial system look like if it didn’t have access to any truth tellers or truths?

5. ‘Gotham must be destroyed.’ (Ra's Al Ghul)

How does Bruce Wayne feel about the League of Shadows overall motive of justice and improvement? Why does he decide to do his own thing? What motivates him?

5. When Bruce Wayne is asked to kill an untried man and to lead The League of Shadows in their plan to destroy Gotham, he refuses. Then he asks, ‘Where would I be leading them?’ Where would he be leading them?

‘I lost many simple assumptions about right and wrong.’ (Bruce Wayne)

Do you believe in right and wrong? Are values (right and wrong) more matters of personal preference than fact? Why/why not?

6. ‘They told me there was nothing out there, nothing to fear. But the night my parents were murdered I caught a glimpse of something. I've looked for it ever since. I went around the world, searched in all the shadows. And there is something out there in the darkness – something terrifying, something that will not stop until it gets revenge – Me.’ (Bruce Wayne)

‘You care about justice? Look beyond your pain.’ (Rachel Dawes)

‘Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.’ (Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, part 4)

Does Bruce Wayne only hunger for justice for himself? Do you think that Batman is becoming a monster? What can he do to stop himself becoming one, but continue to fight crime?

7. Batman is often thought of as vengeful – Bruce Wayne was certainly deeply affected by the murder of his parents. To what extent do you think Batman Begins manages to totally unravel Bruce Wayne’s motives for becoming the ‘dark knight’? Do you think that things that happen to us can wake us up to our responsibilities? Could this have happened to Bruce Wayne or is he simply a vengeful monster?

8. Bruce Wayne decides to use a symbol to rise beyond normal fear of other humans to try and motivate the criminals to reform:

‘People need dramatic examples to shock them out of apathy . . . but as a symbol [Batman] they can live on.’ (Bruce Wayne)

‘I seek the means . . . to fight injustice. To turn fear . . . against those who prey on the fearful.’

Does fear cause you to reform? Which is better: the carrot (incentive) or stick (fear/discipline) approach to reform? Why? Which approach does Jesus of Nazareth appear to advocate in Matthew 10:26-33 and 11:28? How does John 3:5-16 fit in?

9. Batman Begins raises the question of Batman's right to set himself up as a vigilante and take the law into his own hands. Does Batman really have this right? Why/why not? Do you?

10. Rachel Dawes is never able to secure convictions of the city's most notorious criminals because the justice system has become so corrupt. She says:

‘What chance does Gotham have, when the good people do nothing?’

This is a paraphrase of the eighteenth century English Philosopher Edmund Burke who said:

‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.’

Is this true? How can people who set out to do good end up doing wrong? Where does the battle for good begin? What is the greatest need in the battle for good? Where does the battle begin for you?

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