Batman: What's With His Voice?

OK, so I liked the movie. Heath Ledger was a great Joker, and it was entertaining. Maybe I'm old, but it was a bit long for me, though.

The thing that bugs me is that voice that Christian Bale uses as Batman. It's really lame.

It sounds like he just ran a marathon and he's trying to relay important information to someone in the aftermath. Or like he ate a really hot pepper and he's trying to recover. Or something.

I'm a big fan of the movie Memento that the Batman director made a few years back. I think it's one of the best movies ever, for real. I also like what Christopher Nolan has done with the first two new Batman films - they're raw, brutal movies that have the feel of both the natural and the supernatural. I feel like Batman and Bruce Wayne aren't that different - and that's the point of the voice, I guess. A separation. But all I get from it is breathlessness.

I like the idea of both Batman and the Joker being a millisecond from you and me. Like the potential that we all have is for both madness and heroism. Because I believe that's true. Whatever the real story is behind the Joker's scars, he was obviously running from the past and had become crazy because of the emotional scars that matched the incident. Batman is doing the same thing, as we saw in the Batman Begins movie. Two guys with similar reasons and excuses to do messed up stuff, but one chooses a good path and the other evil. It's classic stuff, but it is compelling nonetheless.

Maybe the two natures that Paul discussed in Romans is running here - we are all caught in a trap of wanting to do one thing with ourselves and then doing another. We are all drawn to darkness in our weak moments and compelled by the light in our best moments. The catch is when we swap the end result for the one that doesn't match in normality.

The story that the movie franchise is going forward with now - Batman kind of inexplicably chooses to take the blame for the bad stuff that went down, becoming a fugitive even though he's a hero - that mirrors another outlaw that was innocent. We'll see if the parallel holds up, but it's pretty interesting for now ...