Another evening spent watching The Dark Knight Rises. While the last chapter of the saga shows the end credits, I rewind the tape on Batman Begins. An era ago, we watched the series inaugurated by Tim Burton in 1989 (Batman). It started with the couple Micheal Keaton and Jack Nicholson, then Danny DeVito and Michelle Pfeiffer (Batman Returns, 1992), Val Kilmer, Tommy Lee Jones and Nicole Kidman (Batman Forever, 1995, directed by Joel Schumacher) until the unwatchable episode played by George Clooney and Chris O’Donnell. It was Batman&Robin and the only bright spot was Uma Thurman‘s performance in Poison Ivy. The movie was made with an exceptional cast that gave us Alicia Silverstone in the Batgirl and Schwarznegger who lent himself to the figure of the antihero Mr Freeze, too weak to trigger among 
the audience even the slightest intolerance. But…it was 1997: Bill Clinton accepted the second term at the helm of U.S., Dolly the sheep shook the world of ethics, Tony Blair installed himself in Downing Street after 18 years of a Conservative government. Gianni Versace died in Miami under the bullets of Andrew Cunanan. A few weeks later and the world would start crying for Princess Diana, passed away in a tragic car crash. Mother Teresa of Calcutta died. In Italy, Umbria and Marche trembled: I was returning from a trip there, we had stopped in a small restaurant in Gualdo Tadino and still today I cannot remove from my mind the picture of this place in rubble. The failing Protocol of Kyoto was voted. Titanic came out and totaled more than 600 million of dollars…Clooney & co. did not do better than 107 millions. It was the end of the first Batman era, until Christopher Nolan donated us The Dark Knight.
The world is still thankful to the production team for having opted for Christian Bale avoiding the miserable temptation of giving the role to Ashton Kutcher (Ashton Kutcher??? Justin Bieber would have been better). Here is the new Batman, this time a real Dark Knight. A problematic character, anxious, always torn between the reason of state and the personal needs of a life always fought without a personal happiness.
Across the movies Christian Bale has grown up: from the arrogant blind bachelor of Batman Begins, in the early scenes a bit Tom Cruise in All the Tight Moves (1983), to the Dark Knight.
– Crowd: «Deshi basara! Deshi basara!»
– Bruce: «What does it means?»
– Prisoner: «Rise!»
And he has risen in three movies in an epic crescendo that teaches us many things. Everyone can be Batman, it is enough to be Bruce Wayne, not small detail. Batman Begins laid the foundations in 2006, then…the apotheosis with The Dark Knight with an unforgettable and unfortunately damned Heath Ledger, magically disguised as Joker:
«Come here. Hey! Look at me. So I had a wife. She was beautiful, like you. Who tells me I worry too much. Who tells me I ought to smile more. Who gambles and gets in deep with the sharks. One day, they carve her face. And we have no money for surgeries. She can’t take it. I just want to see her smile again. I just want her to know that I don’t care about the scars. So… I stick a razor in my mouth and do this… ..to myself. And you know what? She can’t stand the sight of me! She leaves. Now I see the funny side. Now I’m always smiling!»
A real Joker, this time…let’s forget Jack Nicholson, pure incarnation of absolute evil that feeds himself with the monster hidden in each one of us. Joker’s universe turns around the idea that everyone can be a potential criminal. He tempts Gotham city, he lets Gotham taste his end for self-destruction, and, finally, he kills Batman’s human side. Bruce chooses to save Harvey: «Because you were the best of us! He wanted to prove that even someone as good as you could fall.»
Harvey falls in Joker’s plot, he who was supposed to be the good hero plunges in the abyss. Joker has created his fetish. Batman stays alone. He is not like Spiderman or Iron Man: he is a lonely hero, as his alter ego, the eccentric billionaire collector of apparent vanity.
– James Gordon jr.: «Batman? Batman! Why’s he running dad?»
– Lt. James Gordon: «Because we have to chase him. Because he’s the hero Gotham deserves, but not the one it needs right now. So we’ll hunt him. Because he can take it. Because he’s not our hero. He’s a silent guardian. A watchful protector. A Dark Knight.»
In that instant, fueled by the excellent soundtrack branded Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard – yes, Hans Zimmer, the composer that has made us jump on our couches yelling: «My name is Maximus Decimus Meridius, commander of the Armies of the North, General of the Felix Legions and loyal servant to the TRUE emperor, Marcus Aurelius. Father to a murdered son, husband to a murdered wife. And I will have my vengeance, in this life or the next!»- at this point we would stand up, try a few moves of a martial art unknown in the world, some rash somersault and everyone, even for a second, believes to be Batman. It is hard to return into reality.
It would have been hard, after two movies, to keep the attention high: but… The dark knight rises marked the triumph of the trilogy with 632 million dollars and some coins, it entered the top ten of the highest-earning movies of all time. It was worth it waiting four years to see the rebirth of Bruce and the Bat. Now there is more on the plate: the apocalypse of Gotham through the recovery and reintegration of the League of Shadows. What Ra’s al Ghul had begun, Talia al Ghul tries to finish. Destroy Gotham that had been cleaned up through the Dent decree. Gotham is a city that, even when it tries to do justice for the common good, it fails, because everything is based on the lie of an immaculate Harvey, seen like a champion in the fight against crime.
The movie is a real resurrection of Batman. After he looses Rachel, he is free of any human bias. He is a victim of the double game of a great Marion Cotillard, alias Miranda Tate, and of the bitter truth of the eternal Micheal Caine, or Alfred. Bruce throws himself into a suicidal despair which shows the weakness of the Knight, and of Bruce. It is the fragility of who has no fear, because he has already lost everything.
In the well-prison Bruce rises thanks to the doctor and to an inscrutable character: the blind prisoner source of immense truths, as only an Oriental can and knows how to be.
-Blind Prisoner: « You do not fear death. You think this makes you strong. It makes you weak ».
– Bruce: « Why? »
– Blind Prisoner: « How can you move faster than possible, fight longer than possible without the most powerful impulse of the spirit: the fear of death. »
– Bruce: « I do fear death. I fear dying in here, while my city burns, and there’s no one there to save it. »
– Blind Prisoner: « Then make the climb. »
– Bruce: « How? »
– Blind prisoner: « As the child did. Without the rope. Then fear will find you again.»
The Dark Knight may be a renovated hero only through the fear. During all films Christ-Catholics quotes hide behind the mouth of good and bad. How not to notice the similarity between Bane’s speech at the stadium and the famous speech of the pope Giovanni XXIII?
– Bane: «Return to your homes, hold your families close, and wait. Tomorrow you claim what is rightfully yours ».
Batman can, once again, save Gotham from the ashes, only if he encompasses the death’s fear; only if he begins to believe in life as a gift, not only for others, but also for himself. So, when he understands, the film touches the apogee. In Evil there is good, look at Bane’s transformation, from a masked and redubbed brute, to a male doll in the hands of Miranda. Look at Selina Kyle, finally the perfect incarnation of Catwoman after all previous failures from Michelle Pfeiffer to Halle Berry’s role. Selyna surrenders to Batman « There’s more to you than that ».
I could go on, but maybe my Batman’s apology would end up as a simple copy paste of the scripts. This article comes from the desire to share what Batman is for me. I could be accused of living in a comic book, in a fantasy world, but, perhaps, this is the key. There is too much reality in our lives, too many stories gone bad, too few heroics. Let’s save ourselves through evasion, for real life we will always find a room. That is why, and I step to another movie-book Life of Pi, if you ask me which of the two stories of Piscine Patel sounds to be truer, I do not hesitate to believe in the story of the tiger. Yes, Richard Parker, with that wonderful Anglo-Indian pronunciation, was the tiger and eventually left his Robinson Crusoe without any glance. There is too much brutality in our lives, let us, at least for an hour or two, be persuaded that Gotham might be saved thanks to Batman and that he does not die; that each of us can be the Dark Knight and that Piscine Patel has truly shared his raft with a fierce tiger.
Eco12 