It may sound like a trivial link, but the movie Batman Begins is worth a thought. At a conference on trauma and the mind that I attended last week, the cinema critic Mark Cousins pointed out that this is a film which will be seen by an audience of 10-15 million people and it contains a basic, popular idea about the meaning of trauma and the influence of childhood events on the life of an individual.
Two things stand out from the film. First is the principle that confronting and “embracing” a childhood fear can give you strength. The comic book idea of Batman is given, in this case, a comparatively sophisticated Hollywood treatment. Liam Neeson, playing the role of the “bad” ninja master, tells Bruce Wayne that if he wants to manipulate the fear of others, he needs first to master his own. So far so conventional: childhood fear plus a psychoanalytic interpretation plus technological control = adult power (put on a mask and that power becomes legendary).
What is a shade more interesting, perhaps, is the hint of the refrain in the film: “It’s not what lies inside, but what I do that defines me.” The hint here is of a philosophical trade-off. Is it the identity of the trauma, or the action, that creates character? In an action film, of course, it’s the action. The trauma plays an explanatory role, but ultimately it’s a flimsy one. The episode returns to the causes of Batman’s do-gooding pathology, but the story is already known by the audience. Batman’s fate as the caped crusader was defined – by DC comics, by the audience knowing what is to come – long before Batman Begins. So we have a the curious experience of a film that aims to explore causes that are already well known – ie Bruce Wayne’s parents were killed, he got scared by bats as a child – but in which the outcome is predetermined.
The audience may feel a shiver of easy psychological insight, based on the precepts of psychoanalysis, but the storytelling process is closer to the precepts of tragedy, in which events are shaped (and known) prior to their telling. It reminds me of a line from one of the old Norse sagas – which, like Greek tragedies, are eminently non-psychological: “Why should I feel fear? The length of my life and the day of my death were fated long ago.” Legendary stories – even comic book ones it seems – are accounts of fate and action, not psychology. Or rather, the psychology is post-facto; it is a secondary explanation. It gives neither characters, nor audience memebers, any power to master themselves. They are doomed to repeat the script.
