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What's up, guys?
Helen here to talk about your favorite
brooding masked crusader.
Yep, Batman's back,
complete with the film noir inspired aesthetic to go
with all his emo feelings.
Fittingly, "The Batman" is all about playing
with lightness and darkness, both visually and thematically.
Specifically, it's exploring which of Gotham's
hidden truths are exposed to the light
and which remain shrouded in darkness and lies.
So pull out those AA batteries and get your flashlight ready
for this Wisecrack quick take on "The Batman."
How much truth can one society handle?
And, of course, spoilers ahead for the new Batman.
But before we get into it,
I wanna tell you about this video's sponsor, Raycon.
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Now, back to the show.
Now, "The Batman" shows Gotham as a city where
lies and concealment are so common,
they're practically part of the infrastructure.
On a most obvious level,
there's Batman's steadfast refusal to view his identity
to anyone, even to a fellow leather enthusiast.
- Who are you under there?
- But the shadowy edges of Gotham
are brought into sharp focus by the film's
also masked villain, The Riddler.
He repeatedly states his grand project,
to shine a light on all the city's lies.
He's targeting the rich and powerful
for their various deceits,
which range from funding sketchy nightclubs
to faking a giant drug bust.
And the most egregious deceit is also the most widespread.
The city's elite have straight up
looted the Gotham Renewal fund,
which the Wayne family established to help
clean up the town.
And by the time we get to the film's final, big reveal,
that a mafia-esque kingpin is puppeteering
Gotham's entire government,
it's clear that these widely accepted lies
go all the way to the top.
All this deceit from the city's rich and powerful
made us think of Plato's concept of the noble lie.
As explored in a controversial paragraph of his book,
"The Republic," he explains that rulers will need a throng
of lies and deceptions for the benefits of the ruled.
Basically, a noble lie is an untruth
that a society's leaders use to persuade their
citizens to fall into line,
all in the name of keeping their society functioning.
A common noble lie is that a given country's land
inherently belongs to its people,
even if that land was actually stolen.
A simple way of thinking of a noble lie is the way parents
might be dishonest with their child for their own good.
Plato basically thought that such lies could be justified
if they served moral ends and means.
Modern philosophers like Leo Straus have endorsed noble lies
as necessary for social cohesion.
It's good to keep people united in their ideology,
even if that ideology is falsely constructed.
And we see a pretty perverted version of the noble lie
in "The Batman" where a government filled with apparently
good, honest leaders is revealed to be a giant masquerade.
These leaders have long pretended to be genuinely invested
in Gotham's Renewal, when in actuality,
the Wayne funds were treated as a cash grab for corruption.
The not so noble why, that Thomas Wayne's funds
are being used to help the city flourish,
couldn't be further from the truth.
Gotham's politicians get to blame the city's
criminal underworld for all the crime
and economic problems, while all the while,
working alongside those very criminals to ensure
that they're both making money hand over fist.
And it's effective.
The smoke and mirrors of the Gotham Renewal Project and the
lingering specter of the criminal underworld
have kept the people distracted while the select few
continue to enjoy their money and power.
The lie has arguably fostered social cohesion,
although probably not as effectively
as, say, actually investing in your city's infrastructure
and social services, but hey, I digress.
And throughout the movie,
we see more noble lies, but on a smaller scale.
For example, we learned that Batman's dad went
to great lengths to maintain his wife's reputation.
Eventually, this led him to send a seedy crime boss
to intimidate an investigative reporter who was
gonna publish a story about the less savory details
of his wife's personal history.
As usually happens when you hire your local crime boss
for a freelance gig that this resulted in murder,
all of which is sounding not super noble.
In tandem with this revelation,
we also see that Batman's vision
of his father as the ultimate pinnacle
of human goodness has too been a noble lie.
Alfred admits that he didn't tell Batman the truth about his
father because he knew little Bruce
desperately needed to believe in his
dad's unimpeachable greatness.
Here, it's worth noting a choice that strikes us
as the movie's biggest shortcoming,
its refusal to double down on sullying
the image of Thomas Wayne.
See, at first, Batman thinks that his dad intended to
have the reporter killed,
a horrifying prospect that would tarnish Thomas's legacy.
However, he quickly learns that all Thomas wanted to do was
scare the reporter, rather than kill him,
all in the name of protecting his wife.
What's more, Thomas was racked with guilt in the aftermath
of the murder.
In fact, Alfred even says that Thomas was planning to go to
the police and that this may have been the reason
he himself was killed.
This felt like a bit of a cop-out and a missed opportunity
to really complicate the Wayne legacy in an interesting way.
Importantly, making Thomas Wayne a capital B bad guy
would've created some nice mirroring in the two threads
of the plot.
We'd have to watch Batman personally reckon
with the same thing the city of Gotham is on a larger scale,
the fact that the people they admired most were
actually super sus and blatantly immoral.
Instead, it's like everybody else got
Santa spoiled for them while Batman just found out
that Santa made one really bad choice in the '80s.
So, what happens when noble lies become intrinsic
to a given society's functioning?
Kind of like your increasingly elaborate explanation
about why you got home late from school,
which had nothing at all to do with the eight
bong rips at Cory's house.
Lies tend to beget more lies.
A lie then about the city's biggest drug bust
then begets another lie,
that the busted drug ring has been shut down,
when in actuality,
it's continued to flourish by bribing public officials.
And as The Riddler reveals the total dishonesty
of each public figure,
he starts to show how this cycle of deceit has eaten
away at the foundation of Gotham's civil society.
By the end of the film,
we learned that just about every powerful person employed
by the city of Gotham has accommodated the lies
and corruption necessary to maintain their of power.
So, obviously, the rich and influential are
super duper guilty, although certainly not deserving
of having their faces devoured by rats.
But by the end, The Riddler becomes even more radical,
suggesting that all of Gotham is culpable for blindly
accepting the lies fed to them by politicians
and thus are complicit in the creation of this
deceitful society.
The film itself reflects some sense
of communal responsibility,
showing the solemn beginning of a funeral for the mayor
where presumably nobody was planning to mention
those leaked photos of him
with a young woman who had been battered.
But when Riddler escalates his attack
to target the entire city of Gotham,
things start feeling a little religious,
and not just because the song "Ave Maria"
pops up at least twice in the film.
See, by the Riddler's estimation,
the sense of the city's leaders, and consequently,
its people are too heinous
for Gotham society to ever be redeemed.
That's why he decides to flood the whole place, ironically,
by destroying some of the city's
actually functional infrastructure.
This can't help but make us think of the Old Testament
God and the whole flooding the goddamn world
because people were behaving immorally thing.
As if it wasn't harsh enough,
God additionally rained burning sulfur
on the city of Sodom specifically
for the reason The Riddler floods Gotham.
It was a corrupt place that failed to use its
resources to take care of its most vulnerable citizens.
These evocations are anything but subtle.
And don't even get us started on the whole sins
of the father theme throughout the movie, too.
But, back to The Riddler.
He's a bad guy for a reason.
Where he sees an unredeemable society
or an unredeemable family,
Batman sees something else entirely.
To understand, let's track Batman's personal arc
in the film.
He starts off really stoked on the idea of vengeance,
believing that the best way to keep people safe is
by A, giving them something to fear, and B,
making sure people are held accountable
for their actions with violence.
He might not be drowning an entire city,
but this approach is not unlike
the Riddler's Old Testament vibes.
But throughout the film,
this approach to making society a better place
is called into question,
not the least of which when The Riddler tells Batman
that he has been an essential player
in the villain's deranged plot
and even says that they are basically teammates.
But the validity of vengeance as a guiding moral compass
is called into question most explicitly when Batman
faces off against The Riddler's snipers
who have been shooting into a crowd.
One of the snipers, when asked his name, replies vengeance,
thus mirroring Batman's ideology back at him.
Obviously, sharing the same mantra as a banana's group
of snipers isn't a good look,
so it's no surprise that our hero ultimately settles
on a different view.
He decides that rather than needing someone to fear,
the people of Gotham really need someone to believe in,
someone to inspire hope.
And as he saves people from The Riddler's giant flood,
Batman becomes that guy.
In the process, he also reads kind of like a Jesus figure
to The Riddler's Old Testament God,
the brave guy willing to make enormous sacrifices
and even risk death in order to redeem a world
filled with sinners,
someone who wants justice more than he does vengeance.
- The answer's justice
- But what do you guys think?
Can noble lies be a justifiable way to keep any given
society humming along?
Would you rather not know just how deeply corrupt
the rich and powerful are?
Let us know in the comments.
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Peace.
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