possibleworldz.com

Batman begins today and all the reviews have been glowing. Manohla Dargis in the New York Times hones in on the characterisation in a way that mirrors much of the discussion on the human/superhero duality that was explored at last weekend’s conference:

What Mr. Nolan gets, and gets better than any other previous director, is that without Bruce Wayne, Batman is just a rich wacko with illusions of grandeur and a terrific pair of support hose. Without his suave alter ego, this weird bat man is a superhero without humanity, an avenger without a conscience, an id without a superego. Which is why, working from his and David S. Goyer’s very fine screenplay, Mr. Nolan more or less begins at the beginning, taking Batman back to his original trauma and the death of his parents. With narrative economy and tangible feeling, he stages that terrible, defining moment when young Master Wayne watched a criminal shoot his parents to death in a Gotham City alley, thereby setting into motion his long, strange journey into the self.

This notion of the “strange journey into the self” ties in with much of my new thinking about my thesis which I am now conceiving as about the “remediation” of both apocalypse and self. This is not merely the traditional story line of self discovery of inner strength in moments of crisis. New modes of fragmented or plurivocal selfhood - the nomadic self - are archetypally appropriate for the apocalyptic moment. This self is always in danger of fragmentation but survives in a dance with apocalyptic forces which are always potent but always di(a)verted.