Nolan’s trauma boys
In the wake of some insightful comments by two smart young women regarding INCEPTION I have started thinking about the entire corpus of Nolan films.
And what an odd group it is.
I deeply disliked MEMENTO, which seemed both unpleasant and pretentious, as well as being needlessly difficult to follow. The tattooing of the male body was a strange, unsexual, un-beautiful visual experience whose meaning, I did not – at the time—understand.
But I loved BATMAN BEGINS. BB does perhaps one of the best jobs ever in contemporary cinema in framing and expressing the experience, performance, and working through of trauma. We get the whole trauma megillah, as it were: the imagery of falling into a dark pit to be attacked by the small dark, biting things that scare us most, the primal scene-esque murder of the parents, and the evil psychiatrist who brings a drug-induced version of the trauma back on just when you least expect it. The film is filled with scary father figures, who bedevil the hero, as though he lived in a hall of mirrors; everywhere he looks, he sees the traumatic loss of the parents, and his fall into the pit somehow re-enacted. And he is continually having to confront and fight in the middle of the traumatic experience. He never has the time and space to recover.
As a PTSD survivor, I can tell you that trauma really does work like this. Trauma triggers are everywhere, and for the trauma survivor, the world is filled with archetypes who reenact over and over again the primal terrors and humiliations which you are desperately trying to overcome. In a way, the trauma survivor is always taking the awful practical test in that scary ninja school in Bhutan, or wherever it is supposed to be from BB. BATMAN BEGINS also presents a compelling version of the difficulties of working-through to traumatic recovery, and the temptation to just reenact, not deal with. Consequently, I appreciated the highlighting of the acting-out portion of traumatic recovery. “I become what I fear,” says Batman at one point. Most trauma survivors do. Because, in a terrible way, trauma is always with us. We must always ask the eternal Batman’s Father question “why do we fall?” And we must always find in ourselves the inner doctor-parent who heals us, and gets us back up on our feet to try again.
DARK KNIGHT fascinated me, primarily because of the performance of the late Heath Ledger. But my goodness, what an odd, almost—but-not-quite drag, performance of masculinity THAT is. But what is being said in that film actually? David Denby may be right when he talks about the film as a disturbing celebration of terror for the purposes of commodification.
He notes “The Dark Knight” has been made in a time of terror, but it’s not fighting terror; it’s embracing and unleashing it—while making sure, with proper calculation, to set up the next installment of the corporate franchise."
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2008/07/21/080721crci_cinema_denby#ixzz0v1neAgde
So where does all this trauma talk leave us? Taken together, the films display traumatized heroes whose woundedness is marked by the erasure of sexuality, replacing sexual longing/activity with bats, gizmos, whirling tops, machines, and capers. This fact does not make the films less interesting, but it does – and here I think I agree with my female cohorts -- point to their limitation – the ways in which they don’t seem to “know “what it is they are saying. Perhaps this is why BATMAN BEGINS remains my favorite. A story about trauma and masculinity, it knows what the story is about, and it recognizes – in a way the other films don’t – the price of being a person who would heal a wounded world, all the while teetering on the brink of the traumatic abyss.
Thank goodness...I feared I was the only person who thought Batman Begins was the better of the Nolan Batman films. Surely darker than The Dark Knight (and yes, less focused on continuing the series).
ReplyDeleteWhat's really interesting to me, though, is your description of trauma and its effect on character. I'm close to completing the rewrite of a novel in which the main character is a victim of some traumatic experiences. I'm happy to see his narrative path is consistent with what you've written, since I didn't really research that aspect of the story.
I am so grateful for this treatment of the films, because I think most people laud Dark Knight for its creativity and oddity (a la heath Ledger) and somehow miss the last ten minutes of the movie, which (1) justifies the Patriot Act, (2) reinforces a paternalistic media that infantalizes citizens, and (3) offers yet another Christian model for sacrifice. While I did like Batman Begins, I had a problem with a scene in it that grew even stronger with Inception: Nolan offers situations of grave moral weight, without discussing the moral choices made. In BB, Batman, who is famous for not killing people, allows Ras to die on the train. "I don't have to save you," he says, and it's clear in the film that this is different from killing, to him. Morally, I think many might disagree, and it seemed flippant to allow Batman no moment of confusion or remorse. In Inception, the basic moral question about invading someone else's unconscious world was barely even mentioned. We get a sort of amoral scientists' glee at what the extractors are capable of, with no bigger picture. Are they working for a capitalist, or are they working to dismantle a monopoly? It's actually unclear. This kind of thing is, in the movie world, unimportant--a great story need not deal with moral questions outside of personal relationships. But it bothers me when a director like Nolan BRINGS the bigger questions in, and then doesn't address them.
ReplyDeleteGreat blog. Make that four of us now who prefer Batman Begins. I think you are right about its excellent account of trauma. I have a suspicion that this broaching without really engaging moral questions is precisely what attracts mass audiences to Nolan. This is our current default version of 'deep': presenting quandaries. I will be more interested when we embrace films that move diligently through these quandries.
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