Reconfiguring the Medieval Knight in Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins Sarah T. N. Koki College

Batman Begins, the first installment of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Trilogy, offers a Batman that that reflects all the moral complexity and ambiguity of Gotham City’s society. Compared to the Batman of previous films, Nolan presents a darker side of the “superhero” mythos in an effort to bring the humanity, and thus fallibility, of such figures to light (Johnson, 952). Indeed, the 2005 remake rejects much of the “traditional” Batman archetype and encourages novel interpretations of the vigilante’s motivations against the standard grain of thought (952). Similarly, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a critique of the English romance, its ideals of chivalry, and all its attendant ethics. Two categories of medieval knighthood are of particular interest: a man’s armor and his chivalric code. In Batman Begins,theconcept and significance of the Batsuit is not an update to the armor of the medieval knight because both function in the same manner. Moreover, if the medieval knight for comparison is Sir Gawain, Batman can be viewed not so much as a modernization but a more flexible expression and application of a personal code of ethics.

On a practical level, Nolan’s Batman is a reiteration of the late medieval and early...