Plato's Republic and Nolan's Gotham, Part II

[I have a theory that Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Trilogy is influenced to some degree by Plato’s Republic. At the least, the two texts would make for good conversation partners. Plato draws correspondences between the just or unjust city and the just or unjust soul, and the films are as much about the struggle for justice in Gotham City as they are about Bruce Wayne’s struggle to become a just man. In this series of posts, I point out some potential links between the book and the films that occurred to me while re-reading Republic recently.]

Second, are the actions of the League of Shadows in Batman Begins a parody of the Allegory of the Cave?

In Republic Book VII Socrates illustrates how the future rulers of the just city must be educated for public service by likening them to people who have lived all their lives chained in a cave, backs turned to the entrance. All these prisoners can see are shadows cast by a fire behind them. Consequently, “the prisoners … believe that the truth is nothing other than the shadows” (p. 187 in the 1992 Grube & Reeves translation). When a prisoner is freed, he learns—with painful difficulty at first as his eyes adjust to the light—that the two-dimensional shadows were cast by three-dimensional objects that are quite different from what he thought them to be, and that—what is even more startling and disorienting—there is a whole world outside the cave, illuminated by a gigantic sun, of which the fire in the cave was but a pale imitation. In the same way, the future ruler must be led away from ignorance and mistaking opinions for knowledge. Then, after being taught how to rightly perceive “the visible realm” (inside the cave) with his senses, he must be taught how to rightly perceive “the intelligible realm” (outside the cave) by the “the form of the good” (the sun) (189). Finally, after the “founders [of the city] … compel the best natures … to make the ascent and see the good,” those fortunate few must be compelled “to go down again to the prisoners in the cave” and lead them by the wisdom they’ve received (191).

At the beginning of Batman Begins, Bruce Wayne is likewise held in a prison, where he is found by the League of Shadows’ spokesperson, Henri Ducard. Bruce wound up in prison because he was seeking to understand the nature of justice by practicing injustice, but Ducard tells him this method has caused him to lose his way. Instead, Ducard tells him he should “devote [him]self to an ideal”—that is, he needs to seek the form of the good, the form of justice. Bruce is released from the darkness of his cell and journeys upward into the mountains to be trained by Ducard in the (mostly martial) arts needed to pursue what is advertised to him as “true justice.” Then, at the completion of his training, he learns that the League wants to send him back to Gotham. He was selected for this task, they say, because he is “Gotham’s favored son.” Like one of the select cave-dwellers, he was freed of his chains and brought into knowledge so that he would return to the people he left behind in the state of ignorance. However, the League’s charge to Bruce is that he help them destroy Gotham, not save it.

Not surprisingly, the League of Shadows’ definition of “true justice” is much narrower than what Socrates and his interlocutors determine in the Republic. In Book IV, justice is a balance of moderation, courage, and wisdom. Ducard also says, “Justice is balance,” but only of the retributive, eye-for-an-eye variety. (“You burned my house and left me for dead. Consider us even.”) But even on that front the League’s conception of justice is actually imbalanced. If according to Socrates justice is each one doing his own duty and each one’s rights being maintained, then the League presuming to have a prerogative to destroy a whole city, both the guilty and the guiltless together, is unjust. So although the League gave Bruce the impression that they could lead him all the way out of the cave and into the sunlight to behold the form of justice, they’ve only led him to where the fire is—or worse, to just another dead end inside the cave—trying to pass off their malformed understanding of justice as the real thing. Realizing their error and the threat they pose to the justice they claim to champion, Bruce’s right response is to use their own fire against them—literally. Their mountaintop castle explodes.

At the end of the film, Ducard and the League of Shadows reappear to carry out the mission Bruce refused—and their planned method for destroying the city again recalls the allegory. They use a device called a microwave emitter to release a fear toxin into the air that causes people to have waking nightmares and attack one another. Microwaves are along the same electromagnetic spectrum as visible light. So, the League of Shadows uses light to cast figures on the cave wall that would terrify the cave’s prisoners into self-destruction. Instead of descending into the cave to free the prisoners and show them that the shadows are not the reality, they descend into the cave to torture them by taking advantage of how, as Ducard puts it, “Men fear most what they cannot see.” 

Bruce, by contrast, takes Ducard’s original advice to pursue an indestructible ideal, which he does by creating Batman, an indestructible symbol to represent the ideal of justice. With that symbol he seeks to draw the eyes of Gotham out of the darkness of the cave and into the light. Fittingly, Gordon’s bat-symbol beacon is a moonlike mix of light and shadow in the night sky.