Batman Begins and the Birth of Christopher Nolan as Blockbuster Auteur

It’s no coincidence that Tenet will likely be the film leading the charge back into cinemas this summer. Its director, Christopher Nolan, is a staunch defender of the cinematic experience, and perhaps the only true blockbuster auteur: a man whose films, love them or hate them, are designed to be experienced on the big screen. 

They thrive on an obvious sense of spectacle and theatricality, but Nolan also crafts them with an equally grandiloquent feel for theme and narrative content. His seductive ability to weave philosophy into genre confections makes him the prestige multiplex figure for the masses.

Nolan’s style hasn’t actually changed that much, even since his debut film Following (1998). His visual and thematic ambition was evident right from the start,  but it was only as the apparatus available to Nolan expanded that the canvas of his films could reflect the scale of his vision.

Courtesy of: Warner Bros.

It is perhaps Batman Begins (2005), Nolan’s fourth feature film as director and one that celebrates its 15th birthday this week, that marked Nolan’s transition to Hollywood’s top table. With a budget of $150 million – or three times that of his first three films combined (Following cost $6000, Memento $9 million, and Insomnia $46 million), Nolan finally had the tools to build the worlds he’d been dreaming of.

The deep pockets and sheer scope typical of the superhero genre allowed Nolan to explore his clear interest in tech, action genre conventions, and to establish his general militaristic aesthetic. Where Tim Burton and Joel Schumacher’s previous iterations of Batman from 1989-97 had pushed the character further down the cartoonish and pop art route, Nolan imagined the genesis of Batman within a realistically rendered universe. Whereas there’s no real sense of how Michael Keaton’s Bruce Wayne in Batman (1989) ever acquired the physicality to become the Caped Crusader, Nolan uses almost the first hour of Batman Begins to chart how Wayne weaponises himself physically and psychologically. With his hallmark chronological gymnastics, Nolan interlinks Wayne’s hardening under the murky influence of the League of Shadows with how he was forced to fortify in the first place: the seminal murder of his parents.

Courtesy of: Warner Bros.

It is in Wayne’s return to Gotham City to begin his Batman project that Nolan’s militaristic aesthetic is most obvious. There’s the necessity of reintroducing the comics’ lesser-known Q-like character, Lucius Fox, to quite literally arm Wayne, and the austere sleekness of the first Bat costume (it’s more like advanced military armour) is a hugely informative juxtaposition to the kinky nipples Schumacher applied to Batman and Robin’s outfits in Batman and Robin (1997). Then Nolan imagines the Batmobile, whose very name lends itself to spoofing (as Margaret Atwood did with her ‘birthmobiles’ in The Handmaid’s Tale), as a straightforward tank that Wayne wryly enquires if it might “come in black”.

To be fair to Nolan, Batman Begins is not just an exercise in indulging some kind of boys’ toys fetish; he also uses the story to realise one of the best graphic novel cityscapes of recent times. Where The Dark Knight (2008) was unquestionably the best crime thriller of the trilogy, and The Dark Knight Rises (2012) the most exhilarating spectacle of the three, Batman Begins is comfortably Nolan’s finest comic-book imagining of Gotham City. In particular, The Narrows – the island borough of Gotham City that hosts Arkham Asylum and marks the centre-point for the narrative climax – is beautifully rendered in expressionistic, noirish designs.

Courtesy of: Warner Bros.

Nolan’s reverence for tech and his militaristic proclivities have seen some commentators tag him as something of a right-leaning filmmaker. While there is some superficial value in the assertion – especially with the close-to-satirical corporate aesthetic of Inception (2010) – a greater probing of his thematics reveals a much more nuanced politic in his films.

Batman Begins is an ideal place to explore this as the very essence of the film – Bruce Wayne’s conception of the Batman project – is an explicit discourse on the determination of one’s political ideology. It is relevant to remember that the film came out in the slipstream of 9/11 and the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; I even saw the film in London on the very same day that the July 7 Underground bombings happened. 

There is some grim prescience in the film’s ultra-serious opening section, which functions as an allegory on radicalisation, with the League of Shadows’ leader Ra’s al Ghul trying to mould Wayne’s searing sense of injustice into a tyrannical, avenging force.

Courtesy of: Warner Bros.

Wayne’s refusal to blindly follow this ideology and essentially become an anarchist is cleverly imagined in a pivotal scene where, instructed to behead a prisoner at the behest of Ra’s al Ghul, Wayne revolts. At this moment, Wayne clearly chooses to position himself as a more benign cleanser of injustice and a mere assistant to the apparatus of the state. 

Of course, Wayne has benefitted from the training a terrorist organisation can provide, and it certainly helps that he is a multi-millionaire with access to military equipment, but there’s nothing to suggest his ideology is inherently authoritarian. Certainly no more than the superheroes from the MCU anyway. Yes, Nolan unquestionably worships at the altar of tech, and yes, he employs a pounding aesthetic throughout the trilogy, but his Batman puts his wares to the collective good, and actually liberates Gotham City from nihilism (in the form of Ra’s al Ghul and the Joker) and fascism (in the shape of Bane).

Present-day viewers may even detect in Batman Begins’ narrative some circumstantial echoes of current socio-political controversies. With the potential death of hundreds of thousands of people via a respiratory disease, the need for quarantines and antidotes, and a stand-off between police and protesters, it underlines at the very least that Nolan’s Dark Knight films are inherently topical. 

Some commentators, myself included, may prefer Nolan films that veer away from the action fetish to focus on more transcendent content: the deconstructionist machinations of Memento (2000), the quest for perfection in The Prestige (2006), and the emotional resonance of temporality in Interstellar (2014). But Batman Begins is certainly a worthy staging post in the inescapably compelling career of Christopher Nolan, and stands the test of time some 15 years after its original release.