[LINK] "Batman, Broken Windows, and the Uncanny Valley"

[rfmcdonald]

Over at his blog love and fiction, Clifford has just posted the second part of an intruiging essay in two parts, "Batman, Broken Windows, and the Uncanny Valley" (1, 2). Tim Burton brought the Batman franchise memorably to film in two films which borrowed heavily from the aesthetics of the 1930s and a cartoonish sense of reality; Christopher Nolen is famed for its gritty realism. Why do they differ? It comes down, in Clifford's contention, to the very different environments of crime in the late 1980s when Burton began filming and now.

Let’s look at New York City, the real-life Gotham. In 1977, Howard Cosell could casually remark at a baseball game: “There it is, ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning.” Violent crime increased dramatically after the 60s, peaking in the late 80s and early 90s. New York City was a very unsafe place; its crime rate was 70% higher than the country’s average. The people that lived there were afraid to go outside and felt helpless about it. Oh, so someone put a knife in your face and took your wallet? So what? It happens all the time. People around would put their heads down and walk past. The police would tell you to fill out a form, get in line.

In 1984, Bernard Goetz blasted a bunch of would-be muggers on the subway who had asked him for $5. He was largely acquitted of wrongdoing at trial. Although it was portrayed by some as a racial issue (Goetz was white, the muggers were black), the year before the Goetz trial, a New York City grand jury refused to indict a black man who shot and killed a white youth who accosted him on the subway. Professor James Wilson noted: “It may simply indicate that there are no more liberals on the crime and law-and-order issue in New York, because they've all been mugged.”

However, the crime rate has since plummeted. Central Park is safe, the subways are clean and well-maintained, and they drove the hookers out of Time Square. There are as few muggers and panhandlers in Manhattan as Disneyworld. Visitors from Toronto could be forgiven for wondering: where are all the hobos? Did they get sent to labour camps in Alaska? Eaten by C.H.U.D.s? It’s creepy.

Of course, this means that we can now afford to feel much sorrier for muggers than we could back then. We no longer desperately feel that somebody needs to do something about street crime. So who wants to see Batman absolutely kick the shit out of some poor drug addict? If you’ve been mugged a couple of times it might be cathartic, but if not, it just seems regressive.

This has led to a change in comics. Instead of grim vigilantes, who beat up common criminals with their fists, comic book heroes have become elite strike forces, who spend are too busy duking it out with other costumed villains to wait around for and break up petty crimes. And that’s why, in Batman Begins, Batman targets the crime lord Carmine Falcone, instead of lurking around on rooftops waiting for someone to scream for help.

Nolen's Bruce Wayne, Clifford argues, is more interested in changing the culture of his Gotham City than in fighting individual criminals, and sees the symbol of Batman is more powerful than Bruce Wayne the man could be. The strategy of Nolen's Batman is not necessarily a realistic way of doing things, full of potential unexpected consequences (encouraging the growth of supercriminals in place of regular crime). More to the point, our identification of Nolen’s Batman as realistic rests on our own prejudices.

[I]n some ways, Nolan’s Batman feels less plausible than Burton’s. It’s similar to the concept of the "uncanny valley" in robotics and computer animations. As a robot (or a cartoon) has a more human appearance, we feel more empathy towards them. But when they look almost (but not quite) human, our empathy drops significantly. We start focusing on the differences between the human and the simulacrum, and not the similarities. I think movies have the same issue. We enjoy realism, to a point. But when we get too close, but not quite close enough, some of the enjoyment can be lost. We all appreciate Batman swinging from rooftops and punching the Joker. And we appreciate it when he does so in a more “realistic” fashion. But eventually you’ll butt up against the fundamental implausibility of the character. In the end, you have to let Batman be Batman. I’m not sure if Nolan really does that.

Burton made Batman in a time where it was acceptable to have Batman beating up muggers. Nolan had to make his films connect with audiences in a time where we didn’t want to see a vigilante brutalize petty criminals. Why does a man dress up like a bat and act as a vigilante if he isn’t acting out our fantasy? Nolan looked to the “broken windows” theory to provide an answer. But that decision (along with the others; it is safe to say that Burton is more content to simply be weird that Nolan) means that Nolan’s films have to fundamentally move away from the basic nature of the character.

Go, read.