The Riddle of the City

provoked by "The Batman"

I.

Batman is an orphan, he inherits great wealth which protects him from the decay of the city, strikes down at the petty criminals. He is solitary, he is aloof and upper class, he does not inspire anyone except Riddler. Riddler is an orphan, and comes from an orphanage, strikes up at the ruling class, inspires men to band together to make a stand against the city, which is out to get them.

The city of this story is in decay, and the few and the many are poised against each other. The mayor and the police chief are assassinated; the few display their mourning, while the many take up the symbol of the assassin. Gotham is in a state of siege, internally.

Man is a political animal. A man who can live outside the city must either be a beast who cannot live with others, or a god who does not need others. The city comes into existence for mere life but exists for the sake of the good life.

II.

In this story, I call the robbers, the murderers and such rabble petty criminals committing petty crime, while the ruling class I call grand criminals committing grand crimes. Petty criminals replicate the conditions outside the city, or how the city acts with foreigners and other cities, inside the city itself, themselves being a parody of warriors and governors, both looking only as behaving as parasites instead of establishing a just peace.

Petty crime a symptom of decay: immediately, the police are not doing their job suppressing the petty criminals, but originally, life is not good enough that the peace of the city in its decay is acceptable. What belongs to this is both material security and sense of respect. Those among the lower classes either accept their lot or become predators preying on their own kind. This appears to be the primary concern of Batman, to terrorize petty criminals, and vindicate the small lives of the lower class. But the people were not destined to be so weak, they are made into easy prey because of corrupt officials. Petty criminals are an imitation in smaller size of the grand criminals.

III.

Politics concerns the distribution of the honors, offices and wealth of the city. Officials are given office, honor and money in return for benefitting their city. Being corrupt, instead of glorifying themselves by benefiting the city, they aggrandize themselves by harming it. The suffering they cause gives birth to their nemesis when Riddler transforms himself into their enemy through an act of great souled pride. This is because he has different aims than the ruling class, who are small souled. He and the men he befriends are not concerned with small aims of self-aggrandizement. By this I mean animal and social pleasures such as money, sex, and displaying money and sex to get satisfaction from being envied by others. The perfect symbol of such small souls is the nightclub. The ruling class, which in this story is the police and the politicians, turn corrupt when they merge with the most successful of the petty criminals. It is no coincidence that their headquarters for purposes of the drama is the nightclub.

A uniform is like armor for the psyche. It expresses an idea while suppressing individuality, more precisely expressed, while suppressing the origins of the individual who is acting in it, through it, and for it. Riddler kills the corrupt, because he is not corrupt, he acts for the punishment of the criminals, and does not possess their small aims.

Cities in speech can be in static and perfect, a city in motion will have wrongs and crimes, by necessity. When they decay, they will be in stasis of civil strife. Problem of justice is that to take revenge as a party to dispute lets anger universalize and absolutize your demands, but you would not have demanded the punishment of the guilty without your anger. Yet, it being universal and absolute, your targets have no reason to submit rather than to fight you as long as they are able; and the family of each person killed being dragged into the feud means permanent warfare, destruction of the city, extinction or exhaustion of life. Inability to submit to a partial solution necessarily makes the demand for annihilation necessary.

IV.

The birth of the grand criminals, which is the union of those who rule the city government of the city and the petty criminals, is the seemingly apolitical donation of one billion dollars. Attempt to be apolitical, or bring an apolitical solution causes the worst political disaster for the city. Because the stronger write the laws in addition of ruling, and they can bless their own actions, without looking at divine patterns or human things for right and wrong, as good and just, and force others to do as well, and the judges and the newsmen will praise them in order to rise up in their ranks. The power of praise and blame is the most powerful tool of government, it is essentially what the founders do. The criminal rulers confiscate the apolitical donation and declare it to be just, a new deluge of crime and corruption engulfs the city.

With great power comes great responsibility. It is this desire or idea that the most powerful men can live outside their city, although their city with her laws and her people brought them to their estate and the leisure and power they enjoy, is the cancer of the city.

V.

When the ills the people are suffering have their source at the tyrants at the top, punishing the fighting instinct of the poor that turn to crime will not cure the disease.

The habit of Spartans to have their ephors declare war against the Helots was as useless as it was cruel. And since this city killed its orphans, its orphans had every right to kill the city.

At the end of the movie, nobody learns anything.

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