Christopher Nolan’s rendition of the Batman universe in his movie, Batman Begins, is not only packed with entertainment value, but upon closer inspection reveals great room for interpretation using religious themes. In this context, the film promotes the belief that fear is a person’s worst enemy and can be used as a weapon by the proponents of both good and evil to achieve their means. This belief in turn is supported by the visual culture of Batman Begins.
Drawing on concepts about religious creative expression from Ken Derry’s “Indigenous
Traditions,” I will analyze the ways in which masks in the film function as devices for externalizing and exploiting people’s fear, as well as the role that the Batcave plays in helping
Bruce Wayne use his childhood phobia of bats to his combative advantage. Additionally, I will draw on both Foucault’s concept of the panopticon, as well as Derry’s notion that with religious objects what you see is not what you get, to show how both bats and the blue flower function as weapons of fear.
The belief of Batman Begins is two pronged: on the one hand it hints at the disastrous effects fear can have on people’s lives and on the other it shows how this vulnerability to fear can be exploited. The first fifteen minutes of the movie establish the paralyzing effects fear has on the protagonist, Bruce’s, life. After falling down a well and being attacked by a hoard of bats,
10 year old Bruce acquires a fear of those creatures in spite of being assured by his father that the bats attacked him simply because they themselves were afraid. Not much later, Bruce accompanies his parents to the opera where the actors dressed as bats invoke his deep set fear prompting him to ask his parents to leave early and involuntarily facilitating their murder at the hands of a street criminal. It can be argued that Bruce’s