A dark night: Disaster capitalism in ‘Batman Begins’
Batman saved Gotham from total annihilation, but why was the city on the brink of collapse in the first place?
Introduction
“The Shock Doctrine,” Naomi Klein’s book published in 2007, traces the origins of the neoliberal economic ideology and its rise to world dominance in the era following World War II. “Batman Begins,” Christopher Nolan’s film released in 2005, ushered in a new era of superhero origin stories on the big screen and reimagined the genre as the opening act of a dark, rugged, giant-sky-beam-less Batman trilogy. Though released two years before “The Shock Doctrine,” “Batman Begins” brings to fictional Gotham an all-too-real phenomenon detailed in Klein’s work: disaster capitalism.
What is the Shock Doctrine?
Coups, natural disasters, and terrorist attacks present excellent opportunities for scheming disaster capitalists to exploit “Shocks” to a society in order to push through unpopular policies (usually economic) as people remain too stunned or afraid to fight back. Klein defines disaster capitalism as “orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events, combined with the treatment of disasters as exciting market opportunities” (6). These Shocks work in tandem on both a micro and macro level to ensure Shocks bring their desired end-results: once a Shock hits a collective society, any dissident to the subsequent policies face the Shock of torture, disappearance or murder, instilling fear which spreads throughout the society these individuals make up to paralyze resistance.
As Milton Friedman, architect of the free-market doctrine known as neoliberalism, writes:
“only a crisis –– actual or perceived –– produces real change. When the crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable” (7).
Klein adds, “Some people stockpile canned goods and water in preparation for major disasters; Friedmanites stockpile free-market ideas” (7). Thus, the emergence of neoliberalism did not come naturally or peacefully.
Though the CIA carried out their first covert coup operations in Iran in 1953 –– when Mohammed Mossadegh nationalized the nation’s oil supply, previously controlled by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now British Petroleum) –– and Guatemala in 1954 –– when moderate land reform threatened the profits of the United Fruit Company –– the term neoliberalism and the template for future coup Shocks came from the 1973 coup of Salvador Allende in Chile. Fearing the loss of U.S. business control of the country’s rich copper mines and bountiful telecommunications infrastructure, President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger teamed up to overthrow President Allende, replacing him with military dictator Augusto Pinochet. The privatization of the nation’s key industries inspired a backlash from workers, but mass executions in soccer stadiums and disappearances by the police made sure the clear breach of national sovereignty for the mass-profits of select businessmen could be carried out.
To create these profits, three steps –– which soon became the core tenets of neoliberal policy –– were required: privatization, deregulation and cuts to social spending. Once accomplished, a handful of now-rich businessmen enjoyed “something approximating complete freedom –– to ignore national borders, to avoid regulation and taxation and to amass new wealth” at the cost of death and destitution for so many” (62). In Chile, the CIA-funded Chicago Boys –– named for their indoctrination with Friedman’s neoliberal agenda at the University of Chicago, where the economists studied just outside of downtown Chicago, incidentally where Gotham was shot in Nolan’s Batman trilogy — began ramming through their economic plan while Pinochet and his police rounded up dissidents.
The reinforcing Shocks ensured success for Pinochet and his U.S. (and U.K.) backers and for future Shocks. Klein sums up the three-pronged approach to the Shock Doctrine:
“how countries are shocked –– by wars, terror attacks, coup d’état and natural disasters. And then how they are shocked again –– by corporations and politicians who exploit fear and disorientation of this first shock to push through economic shock therapy. And then how people who dare to resist these shock politics are, if necessary, shocked for a third time –– by police, soldiers and prison interrogators” (30).
These Shocks, from the coup initiated September 11, 1973 in Chile to the aftermath of the terrorist attacks September 11, 2001, eerily resemble the plot hatched on Gotham by the League of Shadows in “Batman Begins.”
Shocks in Gotham
Bruce Wayne, and later, Batman, as individuals, exemplify the effect of Shocks on a micro level. When Joe Chill kills Wayne’s parents, he is sent reeling, lost without his parents. He becomes a common criminal in an attempt to redefine himself. Such was the ostensible intent of MKUltra, the CIA’s torture program: if agents could wipe a subject’s mind clean, they could create it anew. Bruce Wayne sought a new life after the death of his parents; the CIA allegedly were looking for the ability to literally brainwash people. However, the CIA’s actually intended to develop methods of torture. Klein explains:
“The [CIA torture] handbook claims that if the techniques are used properly, they will take a resistant source and ‘destroy his capacity for resistance.’ This, it turns out, was the true purpose of MKUltra: not to research brainwashing (that was a mere side project), but to design a scientifically based system for extracting information from ‘resistant sources.’ In other words, torture” (47).
And similarly, as Bruce Wayne develops Batman, his alter-ego, he turns Shock against criminals himself, though for nobler aims. Batman operates solely at night –– like a bat would –– incorporating the fear he once felt falling into a bat-infested well in his childhood against street mobsters, just as “prisoners are captured in the most jarring and disorienting way possible, late at night or in early-morning raids” in the various countries disaster capitalists terrified in the real world” (49).
In “Batman Begins,” Scarecrow, a psychiatrist in Arkham Asylum, devises a plan more akin to what the CIA accomplished in their MKUltra experiments. He develops and tests a hallucinogen found in a rare blue flower on subjects in the asylum, and later, on others outside of it. Once Scarecrow develops his toxin, he works with Carmine Falcone, a powerful mob boss in Gotham, who himself controls judges, attorneys, and police officers, to sell the drug, revealing another of Gotham’s ugly truths: the city’s political infrastructure is wildly corrupt.
When Wayne meets with Falcone in a crowded restaurant, Falcone shuts down Wayne’s moralizing about the misery in the city, saying, “Look around you, you’ll see two councilmen, a union official, a couple off-duty cops, and a judge. Now, I wouldn’t have a second’s hesitation of blowing your head off right here and right now in front of them. Now, that’s money you can’t buy; that’s the power of fear.” Indeed, the fear of a mob boss, one who rises above the law, who creates the order of the city, requires Shocks powerful enough to keep even the city’s prince from thinking of pushing for a better world.
The final act of “Batman Begins” sets two foes against each other — Ra’s al Ghul, head of the League of Shadows, and Batman, Gotham’s royal vigilante. Though al Ghul trained Bruce, molding him into what would become Batman, a fundamental split sent the two men their separate ways. Al Ghul demanded Wayne kill a man who previously killed a farmer out of desperation; Wayne refused. Now, in Wayne Manor, al Ghul tells a tale similar to Klein’s, one that connects the dots of scattered events to form a more linear history. In this world, the CIA sponsored coups throughout South America –– in Chile, Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay –– and in Indonesia, where between 500,000 and one million people were killed; big business capitalized on natural disasters in Sri Lanka and New Orleans to create and sell luxury living spaces; and the Russian apartment bombings and the 9/11 attacks in the U.S. were used as a pretext to consolidate and privatize state power.
Al Ghul recites the history of the League of Shadows, saying, “We sacked Rome, loaded trade ships with plague rats, burned London to the ground. Every time a civilization reaches the pinnacle of its decadence, we return it to restore the balance.” This brings us to the plan set to unravel in “Batman Begins.” Al Ghul continues: “Over the ages, our weapons grew more sophisticated. With Gotham, we tried a new one: economics. But we underestimated certain of Gotham’s citizens, such as your parents –– gunned down by one of the very people they were trying to help. Their deaths galvanized the city unto saving itself, and Gotham has limped on ever since.” Al Ghul’s plan would bring that limp to a standstill.
Ra’s al Ghul: Gotham’s Disaster Capitalist
Gotham’s economic situation resembles the post-Shock societies of our real world because Ra’s al Ghul mirrors our world’s disaster capitalists. There is extreme wealth inequality in Gotham –– the movie includes soaring establishing shots of a sprawling metropolis overshadowing an underbelly of slums –– and the police are highly militarized for when force is required to keep the classes apart. Wayne Manor plays host to high society schmoozing just before Wayne and al Ghul face off. The efforts of the benevolent Wayne family cannot alter this intentional structuring of society, and upon their death, Wayne Enterprises shifts their focus to weapons manufacturing, ironically allowing Wayne to have his pick at the finest equipment –– such as Batman’s suit and the Tumbler –– to fulfill his hero fantasy while leaving Gotham’s streets destroyed in his wake throughout the action sequences of the film. Just as Shocks around the real world allowed a select few to live in luxury at the expense of the many wallowing in death or despair, Gotham’s rich benefited from the economic weapons that the League of Shadows unleashed upon the city. Much of the city would benefit from a transformation of their society –– but not the transformation al Ghul is planning.
Ra’s al Ghul’s ideology matches that of real-life disaster capitalists and their vision of a new society. Klein writes that “Disaster capitalists share this same inability to distinguish between destruction and creation, between hurting and healing” (57). Furthermore, Friedmanites view economics as a study like other hard sciences, with natural states that need to be found. Of this neoliberal view, Klein explains:
“In the truly free market imagined in Chicago classes and texts, these forces existed in perfect equilibrium, supply communicating with demand the way the moon pulls the tides. If economies suffered from high inflation it was, according to Friedman’s strict theory of monetarism, invariable because misguided policy makers had allowed too much money to enter the system, rather than letting the market find its balance” (61).
Al Ghul is no different. He wants to restore Gotham to a natural state, saying, “Only a cynical man would call what these people have lives, Wayne. Crime, despair –– this is not how man was supposed to live. The League of Shadows has been a check on human corruption for thousands of years…. Every time a civilization reaches the pinnacle of its decadence, we return it to restore the balance.” Though Gotham is rife with decadence, al Ghul’s Shock would create an even more unequal society.
For Ra’s al Ghul, just as Gotham will be destroyed, so too will the balance between creation and destruction. This brings us to the thesis of macro level Shock administrators. According to Klein, “the Chicago School strain of capitalism does indeed have something in common with other dangerous ideologies: the signature desires for unattainable purity, for a clean slate on which to build a reengineered model society.” Ra’s al Ghul, not satisfied with Gotham’s arrangement, seeks to finish off Gotham as Wayne knows it by unleashing a bioterrorism attack on the city via its waterways by exposing all its residents to the organic compound Scarecrow weaponized. Solidifying his place ideologically alongside the most ruthless disaster capitalist our world knows, al Ghul says, “Tomorrow, the world will watch in horror as its greatest city destroys itself. The movement back to harmony will be unstoppable this time.” Batman, who by now has undergone a few test-runs with his powers, faces his former mentor to save the city from complete destruction.
Batman/Bruce Wayne: Prodigal Son, not Savior
Though Batman prevents the terrorist attack from going through completely, he does not save Gotham –– he merely prevents the situation from becoming even more unbearable. In fact, Wayne continues living among Gotham’s ruling class following the snuffed-out attack. He uses resources of Wayne Enterprises to upgrade Batman’s arsenal, appoints Lucius Fox –– the overseer of the forgotten department Wayne borrows military equipment from to create Batman –– as head of the company and continues to use his inherited fortune to fund his lavish lifestyle. Wayne and Batman don’t oppose Shocks — the Prince of Gotham and the Dark Knight depend on the consequences of Shocks to be relevant at all –– they just need to be the ones in control, perhaps operating with more noble intentions even if much of society lives comparably with or without a billionaire vigilante lurking.
The disparities evident in Gotham –– and in all major U.S. cities –– require force to keep the status quo in order; these cities are the result of corporatism run amok. As Klein writes:
“[The corporate state’s] main characteristics are huge transfers of public wealth into private hands, often accompanied by exploding debt, an ever-widening chasm between the dazzling rich and the disposable poor and an aggressive nationalism that justifies bottomless spending on security. For those inside the bubble of extreme wealth created by such an arrangement, there can be no more profitable way to organize a society. But because of the obvious drawbacks for the vast majority of the population left outside the bubble. Other features of the corporatist state tend to include aggressive surveillance (once again, with government and large corporations trading favors and contracts), mass incarceration, shrinking civil liberties, and often, though not always, torture” (19).
Bruce Wayne and Batman rule this sort of city-state. Wayne Enterprises built the city railway –– the one Batman and Ra’s al Ghul fight on in the film’s climax –– and Wayne Enterprises parallels Lockheed Martin or Raytheon. The rich live overlooking the poor masses in the city. Though we do not get a look at the whole world, al Ghul calls Gotham the world’s greatest city, so there is an assumed exceptionalism these ruling class figures place upon the city ––not unlike the American exceptionalism former President Barack Obama believes in. In “The Dark Knight,” the next installment of the trilogy, Batman and Fox create a surveillance system “required” to fight the Joker and his pawns; it doesn’t take a great imagination to compare Batman’s contraption with the surveillance state birthed by the Patriot Act following 9/11. Like in the U.S., mass incarceration is present in Gotham as the ever-increasing chasm between rich and poor forces desperation upon the masses. Batman plays fast-and-loose with civil liberties himself throughout the trilogy. As for torture, the lines are blurred — as they were by the Bush administration and normalized by President Obama. (Batman’s treatment of the Joker in a holding cell certainly wasn’t peaceful.) Only chance destines Bruce Wayne to fame, wealth and power while countless others toil in misery, so he creates Batman to rationalize his own existence.
Conclusion
Batman exists as a result of previous Shocks –– those that created the extreme wealth inequality the League of Shadows thrusted upon Gotham –– but prevents a devastating Shock that would wipe out Gotham entirely. As an individual, he cannot transform society, though he does strike fear in the mob bosses by the end of “Batman Begins;” they turn to the Joker in desperation in The Dark Knight. A result of corporatist Gotham himself, Batman manages the city — playboy by day, vigilante by night –– making sure the chaos does not rage out of control without making fundamental changes that address the reason for chaos in the first place.
