Joe Carter:
The Rev. Edward Casaubon had a handsome, intelligent wife, but squandered his marriage---along with his health and his life---in a futile attempt to write his masterwork, The Key to All Mythologies. When she wrote Middlemarch, George Eliot probably intended for readers to scoff at the dusty and deluded scholar-cleric trying to unlock the secrets of ancient myth. But I can relate to the good reverend. Like other film and comic book geeks, I've wasted hours trying to find the key to some modern folk mythology when I could have enjoyed time with my bright, beautiful bride.
But unlike Casaubon, I have actually found a key. Not to all mythologies, of course, but to one of the most intriguing---Christopher Nolan's series of Batman films.
The interpretative key to the Batman films is obvious once you notice what is missing.
Batman Doesn't Know Jesus
Of course, you might say, Jesus is absent from almost all mainstream films. True, but not wholly true. While direct acknowledgement of Jesus is rare in movies today, there are few epic trilogies set in modern times in which allusions to Christ do not appear at all. Yet during the entire 456 minutes of the Batman series, thousands of characters appear in a diverse urban landscape, and not a single image or symbol alludes to an awareness of Jesus. There are no priests or nuns, no Bibles or churches. In the one funeral scene in the film, the reading is not from Scripture but from . . . Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities.
Nolan has scrubbed all references to Jesus---intentionally I believe---in order to present a pre-Christian pagan universe, a world in which Christ's earthly ministry has not yet begun.
Read the rest here.
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