Batman

Plot synopsis
The film opens with a street robbery - the victims are two adults accompanied by their son. This attack is an echo of the attack on Bruce Wayne and his parents when Bruce was a child, which resulted in the deaths of Bruce's parents. However, before things get too out of hand, Batman (Michael Keaton) appears from nowhere to stop the robbery and take care of the criminals, demonstrating Batman's super hero credentials immediately.

The film then switches focus to the election of Harvey Dent as District Attorney. Dent gives a tough sounding speech about the crackdown on crime that will mark his time in office. This tells the audience that Gotham has a serious crime problem - as has been demonstrated in the first scene - or else there would be no need for a crackdown and no need for Batman. Another aspect of Gotham's crime problem is then revealed to the audience - corrupt cops who are in league with organised crime - we see Eckhardt taking a back hander from Joker Jack (Jack Nicholson).

The first tangible result of DA Dent's crackdown on crime is felt when the mob get word of a police raid on Axis Chemicals. Jack has been having an affair with the crime Boss's wife, and Jack mistakenly thinks the boss doesn't know about it. However, suspicions are aroused when Carl places Jack in charge of a pre-emptive raid on Axis Chemicals to destroy incriminating evidence before the police get their hands on it.
Jack's raid on Axis is disrupted by the appearance of the police and also Batman, who has left his own house party, where he first meets Vicky Vale (Kim Basinger). In the ensuing melee at the chemical factory, Jack falls into a chemical vat, which dyes his hair and skin, and thus, the Joker is born.


The return of the Joker spells the beginning of an unprecedented crime wave in Gotham, leading the city leaders to postpone the city's 200th birthday celebrations. Instead, the Joker throws an alternative party where he offers free money to the participants. This is a ploy to draw Batman into the open for a final showdown "mano-et-mano", in the Joker's words. As the result of a previous encounter between Batman and Joker, Batman has worked out that Joker is the man who murdered his parents, giving him extra motivation to win the final duel. Needless to say, Batman ultimately wins out by sending Joker crashing down from the top of the tall, gothic cathedral. The film closes with a shot of Batman, alone on a roof top, guarding his city.


Why is this film a neo-noir?
A big-budget super hero film might seem an unlikely place to find a neo-noir, but probe further, and much of the noir aesthetic can be found. Firstly, if we examine the character of Batman, we find a man whose entire life and identity has been shaped by others. He truly is man who is unable to escape his past. He has been moulded by the murder of his parents by Jack outside the Monarch Theatre all those years ago. Bruce Wayne's alter-ego of Batman is, ultimately, Jack's creation.
The film plays out a number of scenes in the area of the Monarch Theatre to plant in the viewer's mind the significance of this location even before we learn that this is the place where Batman's parents were murdered. The use of this location several times shows how the past cannot simply be buried, and that the past shapes the present.

The wealth, power and lifestyles of the two crime bosses - Grisholm (Jack Palance) and Jack shows how crime does pay for those at the top end of the scale. Jack's reign of terror forces the elected leaders of Gotham to postpone the city's birthday party - demonstrating their powerlessness and showing Jack's strength. The covert power of organised crime becomes the overt power, and a power greater than the forces of democracy - a black, black world indeed.

As with other noirs, but perhaps more so here, the city itself is a character here. The city in this film is the fictional Gotham City - a city that has it's skyscrapers but also has older buildings too - like the enormous deserted gothic cathedral which hosts the final scene. The gothic cathedral and the industrial decay of the Axis Chemicals plant show there is more to Gotham than the gleam of the city centre. This fictional Gotham is a metropolis that stands for the industrialised cities where most of us in the western world live. As a fictional city, it could be anywhere, it could be your city. This nocturnal city is not a pleasant place to live, work and play - it is a place where danger lurks around the corner - as the we see at the very start of the film. Gotham City stands as a sign of the malaise that afflicts all industrialised societies.

One of the odd things about this film is the way that the groups of characters dress - the gangsters look like the hoods that were around in Al Capone's day, Knox the journalist, similarly has a 30s look, while his colleague, Vicky Vale and Bruce Wayne dress contemporary. The presentation of the criminals is a conscious echo of the representation of criminals in the early gangster movies and films noir, designed to show how little things have changed since this period. Again, the film shows how the past shapes the present, true to the noir ethos of fatalism and pessimism. This device also helps to identify the film as a conscious neo-noir.

The single most noir-ish element of the film is the sequence where we see the killing of Bruce Wayne's parents. The lighting, the camera angles and the presentation of the characters all ooze noir. Also, film noir partly has it's roots in the pulp fiction that Detective Comics (where Batman first appeared in the late 1920s) was a branch of. Here, with this film the present meets the past, and this contemporary film meets it's antecedents.

While ultimately more uplifting than most noirs, this film still manages to pose many awkward questions about the kind of societies we live in, and a such, stands fit to join the neo-noir pantheon.