Metropolis/Batman as "Squash": Chapter 5 Part 4 of

THE BIG PICTURE: A POST-JUNGIAN MAP OF GLOBAL CINEMA

by James Whitlark, Ph.D.

METROPOLIS (1926)/BATMAN (1989)

Whereas the modern city was manifestly based on a hierarchical logic of binary opposition (an ordering principle predicated on the repression of difference and the subordination of heterogeneity to a single, positively valorized term …), the postmodern city is witness to the flattening of such hierarchies and the implosion of such opposites. —Marcus A. Doel and David B. Clarke, “From Ramble City to the Screening of the Eye: Blade Runner, death and symbolic exchange”

Being a flattening and implosion of binary oppositions makes cinematic depiction of the postmodern dependent on its predecessors for the antitheses to complicate and squash. Despite the seventy-three years between Metropolis (1926) and Batman (1989), consider, for instance, the following sequence:

Metropolis (Cathedral Scene) Batman (Cathedral Scene)

In a parade the mad villain's robot In a parade, the mad villain's machines
is feted by an enthusiastic crowd. are feted by an enthusiastic crowd.
Mob panic and violence ensues near Mob panic and violence ensues near
the gothic Cathedral. In it, the neo-gothic Cathedral. In it,
villain and heroine mount villain and heroine mount
a staircase, where as a result of a staircase, where as a result of
the struggles, an enormous bell the struggles, an enormous bell
rings. The eccentric hero rings. The eccentric hero
and villain fight, and villain fight,
the two teetering between the two teetering between
gargoyles. Finally, hero and gargoyles. Finally, hero and
villain fall, the latter villain fall, the latter
continuing all the way to continuing all the way to
the ground; hero embraces heroine. the ground; hero embraces heroine.

The images that the two films have in common are cinematic clichés; however, there being so many in the same sequence may owe something to the fact that a largely restored edition of Metropolis, with rock soundtrack added, screened shortly before work on Batman began. Alternatively, since the Cathedral Sequence in Metropolis itself has predecessors, e.g., The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Batman may have other (or additional) sources for that sequence, perhaps traceable all the way back to the cultic processions, ritual combats, and fertility rites once used to consecrate urban spaces in ancient anticipations of Bandler and Grinder’s psychological techniques.

At any rate Metropolis and Batman serve as examples of a relatively early and late cinematic use of integrating patterns. In both the battle atop the cathedral functions as a swish. The villains fall away, thereby becoming to view small and evermore distant, whereas the preferred image (Freder or Batman) is left in a bright close-up. In both, the conventional kiss is at least a token squash. Additionally in Metropolis, Freder, according to the title cards, acts as “heart” to join his father (the “head”) to the foreman Grot (the “hands”). The implication is that this squash can only occur if the “heart” first expels Rotwang, personifying a scientific, mechanical, ultimately insane view of the world that has alienated head and hands.

Being both swish and squash, the movies decrease the psychological effect of both, because the two cancel each other out. Total integration is antithetical to rejecting a part. This loss, though, is much more obvious in Metropolis than in Batman, since scientific/technological though (unique to Rotwang in the former movie) is essential to the survival of the modern city. If, as implied, Freder succeeds his father and marries Maria, “heart” and “hands” may join but in a headless or at least relatively mindless body. Metropolis has often received criticism for offering no more than an emotional metaphor to resolve the divisions within industrial capitalism. Actually, the film constitutes not even a very satisfying metaphor of union, especially since the edifices of technology form a great backdrop in the final scene, dwarfing the cathedral. For the concluding moral to be convincing, the audience must forget them.Instead, the actual reception of the movie focused on its futuristic architecture as in the science-fiction magazines it inspired in America or as in Luis Buñuel’s review of the film, a panegyric to its skyscrapers (Metropolis CD).

In contrast, Batman valorizes technology as the source of its protagonists “wonderful toys.” Both hero and villain are inventors or, more precisely (like Rotwang with his pentagram and medieval laboratory), mad wizards with pseudo-scientific tricks. In other words, they have regressed from the stage five at which they began (Wayne fabulously rich and the Joker pursuing crime for profit not psychosis). At lonely times, that regression slips all the way to one, but leaves them their stage-five skills, a stage-four battle between good and evil, as well as the stage-three struggle: villain versus hero. more than with most comics, Batman’s chthonic imagery (e.g., the fanged bat winging its dark way amid stalagmites) suggests even deeper-buried strata. By his name and addiction to deception, the Joker has a connection to the Trickster of stage two—a broken stage for both Joker and Batman—one to which they return as if to establish a trusting, loving family or tribe, but with limited success (Alfred, various girlfriends, and eventually Robin for Batman; diverse malls and gangs for Joker), since success would end the series.

Although the Joker jests that he is a healer delivering a therapeutic enema to the city, the actual healer is of course Batman. In the graphic novels that inspired the movies, his similarity to a shaman (stage-two) occasionally becomes quite explicit. For instance, in Dennis O’Neil’s Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight: Shaman (Nov. 1989-March 1990), the title character first adopts his costume after being cured by the priest of an Amerindian bat god. Without the mask, Wayne finds himself ineffective as a crime fighter but with it he can perform a miraculous cure: “WHEN THE MASK HIDES HIS FACE, HE FEELS SOMETHING SURGE—[He tells a sacred healing myth about the bat god]. . . . [his patient’s] BREATHING IS REGULAR. . . . SHE IS ALIVE.” (Feb. 1990, 6-7). Although this episode goes the furthest to identify the series as curative stories, all the Batman graphic novels center on his need to make both himself and the city whole; nonetheless, as close as he comes to this at the end of each episode, he continues to ride a roller coaster from crises to triumphs and back.


Ups and Downs

The place is Gotham City. The time, 1987—once removed. The city of tomorrow....crowded as if hell had erupted through the sidewalks.... —The First Draft of Batman

Lang first envisioned Metropolis upon seeing New York’s skyscrapers hanging like a gigantic backdrop “in order to dazzle, to diffuse, to hypnotize….” (As quoted in Enno Patalas, “The Metroplolis Case on the Metropolis DVD by Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung). In his own film sets, he exaggerates the overpowering effect further, making the buildings into much larger metal mountains, which the film compares to Babel and to Babylon in the Book of Revelations. Musically through quotation of the Marseillaise during the worker revolt, he evokes Paris and the bloody French revolution.

Batman’s hellish locale also owes most to New York high-rises and subways (including a name—from its “Gotham” state). Nervous that his sets might appear derivative, the director Tim Burton told Adam Pirani: “We try to lock into a concept, our own concept, taking the idea of New York, scrunching it together, going more extreme with it” (Pirani 1990, 40). The “scrunching” tends to a “squash,” while the “going more extreme” does the opposite, widening the gap between the polarities; thus, even the settings are simultaneously integrative and divisive metaphors.
About the batcave, for instance, Burton remarks: “[It] is basically the underground of Paris. It's a guy hiding behind a mask, it's a guy who has internal scars as opposed to external, and its all of those themes, very classic stuff” (Pirani 1990, 40). Behind this conflation is a common, high/low antithesis: surface versus subterranean as consciousness versus subconsciousness. Unlike Freder’s temporary madness, the depths are an intrinsic part of Batman and his city.

Unlike Freder with his Christ-like cry of “Father, Father” as he lies crucified on the clock in the depths, the underground/subconscious in Batman is not merely a source of pain but of power. As soon as a fall disorients Catwoman (in the first sequel), she stops being a frowzy middle-aged secretary and becomes more athletically gifted than any gold-medal gymnast. Similarly, Bruce Wayne’s absent-mindedness is not meant as a pose but as what he is like until donning a mask. That mask gives shape and expression to a preconscious energy—what (albeit not in such supernatural abundance) a squash releases by freeing the force dividing the parts. Tumbles in Batman bring regressions, but could lead to eventual progression. Indeed, over the years, the Batman series has actually increased in complexity.

Bob Kane’s original comic-book version remained largely at stage four—a deputized, law-enforcement official, someone consciously formed through exercise and training contrasted with lazy criminals. As the series developed, however, the previously contrary patterns became more problematic and complementary, culminating in the depth psychology of the Dark Knight graphic novels that particularly influenced the movies.

Metropolis’s use of vertical contrasts comes closer to being literal. Admittedly, to some extent, that film associates together the subterranean, subconscious, and magical. In Rotwang’s house (allegedly built by a wizard), underground passages reach down to the catacombs. It is marked with a star-of-David (following an anti-Semitic conflation of Judaism and the occult). The house’s present owner, Rotwang keeps there a statue of his lost love “Hel.” In the underground factory, Freder has a demonic delusion. Unlike Bruce Wayne, though, he receives no power from the rise of libido. All the energy of Metropolis does ultimately come from the depths—the proletariat, but this subterranean power remains political and economic, never fully internalized by Freder, who, wherever he goes, remains a handsome scion of the elite.


Champion and Villain

The gangster is the man of the city… —R. Warshow, The Immediate Experience, 131

The words “champion” and “villain” derive from contrasting (but complementary) locales, the former from a countryside “field” (champ) of chivalric battle, the latter from the village, clustered buildings, precursors of city squalor. Rich, handsome, young Freder is first seen in the Edenic parks and open spaces of Metropolis. His older, lower-born opponent, the crazed inventor Rotwang, maimed in a technological accident, lives in the shadow of the urban sprawl, where he plots mass murder—a perennial terror of the crowded city. In Batman, the “Dark Knight,” Bruce Wayne, occupies a suburban mansion while his older, lower-born opponent, the crazed inventor Joker, deformed in a technological accident, is a city criminal, likewise bent on mass murder.

Not only do Batman and the Joker personify two sides of the Gotham area, but they also act like two halves of the same person. In an interview with Pat Jankiewicz, Walter Skaren, one of the script-revisers, remarks on his adding a scene where the Joker murders Bruce Wayne’s parents: “I did that because, psychologically, the Joker and Batman create each other” (Jankiewicz 48). Near the end of the movie, Joker makes precisely this claim, that they have made each other, but it does not prevent him from trying to murder his Doppelgänger. In the graphic novel, Batman: the Dark Knight Returns, an over-enthusiastic psychiatrist speculates: “Batman's psychotic sublimative/psychoerotic behavior pattern is like a net. Weak-edged neurotics ... are drawn into corresponding intersticing patterns. You might say Batman commits the crimes... using his so-called villains as narcissistic proxies” (Miller, Janson, and Varley 4).

Although this takes the interrelationship of hero and villain somewhat too far, neither Batman nor Joker is very sane and their mental problems are connected. Burton comments on the hero: “I was just very worried about Batman in the sense that, it's such a weird idea, I felt that you had to get somebody who you could see was kind of nuts, not in a good or a bad way but just had a gleam in his eye. . . . Batman's an archetypal character” (Pirani 33, 36). As what Jung called “archetypal” patterns often involve paradoxical religious imagery (i.e. opposites squashed together), so also with the “archetypal” imagery of Metropolis and Batman, but, whereas the paradoxical aspects of mediating characters should make them into bridges on the developmental road, both movies spin in strange loops, reveling in their divisions, including their understanding of the reel/real.

Flesh and Celluloid

Where is the cinema? It is all around you outside, all over the city, that marvelous, continuous performance of films and scenarios. —Jean Baudrillard, America

Garet Stewart writes: “When the treacherous scientist Rotwang sets about to simulate in his laboratory the heroine of the subjugated lower orders in the film’s future totalitarian state, he converts a steel robot into her image in a blast of galvanic voltage that also involves the openly cinematic superimposition of the womanly image on the angular metallic mannequin. This artificial creature is thus generated in the form not of a fleshly android so much as a ‘celluloid,’ an illusory dea ex machina sent to subvert the revolutionary discontent of the masses” (Stewart 166). “Celluloid” is thus evil, an illusory god(dess) or idol. This insight of Stewart can be extended. In Metropolis, the robot performs a lavish Salome dance typical of silent-era screen goddesses and is idolized thereafter. Freder’s father tyrannizes partly through video communications. Having lost touch with the reality of the city, he devotes his life to images. Freder struggles with religious hallucinations of a demon, personified sins, and memento mori, tricks of the camera, contrasting with the more realistic style of the rest of the film.

In Batman, cinematic self–consciousness extends further. Cameras are visible almost everywhere, spying, distancing characters from one another, guiding them toward conflict. News cameras invade one scene after another and the Joker takes over the news, using it in his nefarious schemes. Wayne’s love interest, Vicki Vale, is a celebrated photographer, considered by Joker as a virtuoso complementary to his own rôle as a “homicidal artist.” She records death; he creates it--blasphemously. He tells Viki Vale, “I live for beauty....You know the saying. ‘In his image...created he them?’”

Relevant to this deadly aesthetics, the art director Anton Furst conjoins the urban opposites: neo–barbarism and high–tech civilization: “I wanted the Batmobile to look timeless.... I went for the most brutal expression of a car, an image which also suggests sex and violence” (Marriot 71). Timeless beauty equals brutality, sex, and violence—not a common idea in ordinary life, but movie makers seem to take it for granted, as if it came from the nature of cinema itself: moving pictures massively turn flesh into non-living, eternal images.

This process, however, is only deadly if left in overly simple form. To understand this, consider one more of the psychological concepts Bandler and Grinder draw from cinema: the distinction between what they call “first, second, and third camera.” Looking at the work of one camera, a viewer eventually forgets about it and thinks that he or she is witnessing life. If, however, people look through a second camera at the first, they cannot escape awareness of the artificiality of the filming. During such scenes as Rotwang’s creation of the “celluloid” robot or Freder’s hallucination of the skeleton Death, Metropolis’s special effects remind the viewers of an artificiality that the film implicitly censors. Elsewhere, Lang presumably expects the viewers to be at first camera, for if they were constantly at second camera they would also condemn the movie itself as artificial.

Batman, however, adds touches of third camera (the perception of a perception of a perception). In contrast to Freder’s stylized actors, Bruce Wayne’s lets the viewers see his becoming aware of his mental processes so that he can change them. Freder merely has emotional—or in a few cases—hallucinatory experiences— immediate reactions that do not require him to look at himself looking. Largely through the gentle guidance of Alfred, Wayne reconsiders his responses and changes to the point that he can reveal himself to Vale.

The second camera moments in Batman, such as our seeing Wayne photograph his guests, are times of coldness and dissociation: we are observing the first camera and thus the selective, distorting nature of observation. At third camera, however, the audience notices that the second camera could re-change deliberately what the first camera has changed accidentally—adjusting, correcting, choosing the shape of experience. And in his introversion, Bruce Wayne has presumably thought this far or further, adding perspectives Only by adopting mentally the third-camera position did Bandler and Grinder recognize that people could be taught such techniques as swishes and squashes. Third camera notices the self-conscious control in feedback cycles that constitute the very stuff of life itself—indeed, is part of that organic, integrative process.

Continue to THE BIG PICTURE Chapter 5 Part 5

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