Well, maybe Wayne is somewhat off of his rocker. Maybe it is psychological torment. Perhaps he doesn't realize how empty a man he is so he tries to compensate his lonely nights by fighting crime. These are aspects yet to be explored in the films.
Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if that's the direction the series goes in; focusing on Wayne's loneliness, particularly after Rachel's death.
But that doesn't change the fact that it's all a belaboured endeavour to turn the childish and trivial into the adult and serious without altering the fundamentally childish and trivial elements of the story.
Which are evidenced here:
What if Bruce Wayne dressed up as an ostrich? Maybe he fell into the ostrich pen at Gotham zoo when he was a kid and they pecked him and broke his arm, and everafter a mortal fear of ostriches haunted him.
This is sub-Freudian guff. It always was. And yet suddenly it's supposed to be sensible. When Bruce lays out his plans to Alfred on the plane in
Batman Begins, Alfred doesn't seem in the least bit stunned and frightened by what he's being told. If these were real people, and Alfred really cared about Bruce's wellbeing (which we understand he is supposed to) and had an ounce of decency (also, established), he would strenuously object both on the grounds that it's spectacularly unethical and more importantly, given his affection for Bruce, the grounds that it's obviously self-destructive, delusional, psychotic behaviour. He'd attempt to dissuade Bruce, he'd refuse to be party to the lunacy, and if worse came to worst he'd take steps to have him arrested for his own safety. But no: some dry wisecracks and total support.
I consider serious art to be art that looks penetratingly and critically at reality and doesn't just react unconsciously to it, or skirt bewildered around its edges, or run away from it altogether.
These films are not serious art, they just pretend to be.
And Batman, "in his base", is not dealing with serious issues. Batman is dealing with a world in which, as I laid out above, crime is like a 'social disease' unconnected to economics, a terrorist is like a "dog chasing cars", etc. This is intellectually dishonest. Batman is not dealing with reality.
Batman is dealing with this:
Why do you think these films are being made?
They're not being made because Warner Bros and the Nolans really wanted to tell a story about a man who was orphaned and who "wants his vengeance" and who is "foolish enough to go on some damned crusade for retribution". That's a million stories, none of which necessarily involve that man dressing up in a rubber batsuit. How that arbitrary and dramatically illogical action would contribute potency to the examination of that otherwise fairly relatable scenario is beyond me.
No, these films are being made because Batman is a cash cow. That's always why a Batman film will be made. Why are they being made in this style? There's few reasons. One is that the Batman world lends itself to such a treatment (and not because of some deep-seated reservoir of seriousness that has as yet gone untapped, but because of the general iconography; the bat, the cave, the clown,
Gotham City, rampant 'crime', etc). However it only does so if certain less pliable or amenable elements are omitted. As such, you will not see Robin, the Penguin, Mr Freeze,
Tweedledum & Tweedledee,
The Ventriloquist or
Madhatter in any of these films. So it's very selective; and when you have to sedulously avoid three-quarters of the material you're adapting because the silliness of it is just
too far off the charts to fit with your vision, maybe you have some serious artistic questions to ask yourself... or, indeed, maybe you
don't.
Another reason these films are being made is that there's been a trend of 'maturation' in the world of comic books over the last 20 years, and the Batman comics were among the first to get all grow'd up. Due to the above fact, I suppose.
And yet another reason is that the Nolans' Batman is very consciously, on the part of all involved, a
post-Schumacher Batman. Warner Bros and the Nolan Bros, echoing the desires of the fans, are defining this series as a reaction against Schumacher's films (in the same way that the Daniel Craig incarnation of the Bond character is very much
post-Brosnan).
None of that is artistically serious in the least.
Yes, but you're not getting it. This Batman series aspires to be taken seriously as psychological drama, when the character psychology is completely unbelievable.
Well, firstly, you can't know that. You can't know that the nurse wasn't standing in the adjoining bathroom, or just outside the door, or whatever; the staging of the scene is very abstract and solipsitic.
But if it were conclusively impossible for anyone to have heard him (if he'd died alone in the wastes of a giant glacier or something), that'd be a plothole, not an implausibility. An insurmountable plothole that I wouldn't overlook, incidentally.
But regardless, it has nothing to do with character psychology, so it's irrelevent here.
A terrorist can't be bought or bargained with. But a terrorist isn't a "dog chasing cars" either. Yes, terrorism is frightening, but it's also complex. Terrorists aren't "pure evil", which is how Nolan describes his Joker. That's facile and vacuous. Terrorism is the result of objective social conditions.
The decisions he forces people to make are about as sophisticated and morally provocative as the ones the victims in the
Saw series are forced to make. In fact less so. What is the meaning of the outcome of the sequence with the bombs on the two boats? The criminals sacrifice themselves. So... they ought to have? they're not so bad afterall? crime
isn't a 'social disease'? Then what is it? The film has nothing of significance to say. Except explicitly arguing in favour of institutional authority.
Hypocrisy of what people? The people on the civilian boat? What hypocrisy? That they would kill the prisoners? How can you expose anyone's hypocrisy in such a heightened, contrived, artificial, arbitrary and hermetically isolated moral dilemma? It's dumb. It's as dumb as
Saw.
And if these are the things the Joker is trying to do, then he's not like a "dog chasing cars" at all. Or "pure evil" (what is that supposed to mean?). If these are the Joker's goals then the entire premise of the character is false.
The film is ideologically incoherent. It's all mannerism.
I can't understand the Joker (neither can you; you just said so), but he doesn't frighten me, because he's such a load of nonsense. The character doesn't mean anything, relates to nothing real, and represents nothing serious.
But I do understand what the Joker
is, why he's being portrayed the way he is. And I refer you to the part of my post about why these films are being made.