PART FOUR
WHO IS THE BATMAN? (IS THAT A TRICK QUESTION?)
10
UNDER THE MASK: HOW ANY PERSON CAN BECOME BATMAN
Sarah K. Donovan and Nicholas P. Richardson
So, You Wanna Be Batman?
Well, do you? If so, you cannot believe that there is any real depth to who you are as a person. You must accept a world without religion or a higher power of any sort. You must surrender any moral code that you have that is based on religion or God. You must believe in your heart of hearts that you are wholly and completely alone in determining your fate. You must live among criminals. You must dress like a bat, in tights with underwear over them. If you’re on board—or if you’re at least curious—then read on. (If not, read on anyway—you already paid for the book!)
We’ll be looking at three works that demonstrate Batman’s construction of himself in his early, mid-, and late career: Batman: Year One (1987), Arkham Asylum (1989), and The Dark Knight Returns (1986). Drawing on Friedrich Nietzsche’s and Michel Foucault’s views of identity and power, we’ll see that Batman’s identity and reality are constructed, and that a hero of the night must be aware of this construction and embrace it.
Will the “Real” Batman Please Step Forward?
But before we can start giving you the information you’ll need to become a dark knight, we need to set up a few ground rules based upon the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)1 and Michel Foucault (1926-1984).2 We will also look at one of the branches of philosophy that they are criticizing: metaphysics, which deals with that which is beyond what we can touch, such as God, the soul, objective moral values, or purely rational, absolute truths.
We can sum up Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s ideas by listing a few short points. They do not believe humans have souls that determine who we are or what we will become.3 There is no God or afterlife—you die with your body. Neither biology nor genetics properly explains or determines what you will call your identity (or self, or personality, or subjectivity—choose your own favorite label because they are all irrelevant now!). Who you are is a product of both your environment and how you understand and create yourself within that environment. There is no deep meaning to your life (some of you may have already realized this). You are nothing more than the multiple (and sometimes conflicting) identities that you live, or become, each day or even moment to moment. According to Nietzsche and Foucault, our day-to-day grind numbs us to these truths, and this lack of insight limits and constrains our freedom. But Batman is able to lift the veil and embrace these truths.
Let’s stop for a second and clear up a language issue. When we talk about Bruce Wayne creating Batman, we are not claiming that Batman is Bruce Wayne—we are simply using this language because it’s the easiest way to understand what we’re talking about. Hypothetically, Batman could have created Bruce Wayne, so that Batman would be no more Wayne than Wayne is Batman. Following Nietzsche and Foucault, we think that both Bruce Wayne and Batman are performances. We are rejecting the idea that there is some “true” self underneath Wayne or Batman that connects them. Obviously the two identities overlap and are aware of each other through memory, but there is much more to it than that.4
As Foucault demonstrates in books such as The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, identities, bodies, and knowledge do not exist in a pure state outside of history and power relationships. We are not born with identity; identities are products of power (this could be the power of a state or society) or power relationships (such as the relationship between Batman and the Joker). Foucault challenges us to understand all aspects of our lives in terms of a very specific “definition” of power. In particular he focuses on how we are unwittingly controlled by rules, laws, and social norms.
Many of us follow rules without questioning them, or even knowing that we are following them. Even more interesting is that individuals create rules without questioning why they are doing so. Turning to the world of Batman, we can consider the example of Two-Face, who makes decisions based on the flip of a coin. In Arkham Asylum, when Batman returns the coin to him, Two-Face uses it to decide Batman’s fate, and even the Joker follows the rule. Looking at the same graphic novel, the Joker lays out the rules for Batman when he is in the asylum, giving him one hour to hide, and Batman follows this arbitrary rule. According to Foucault, following rules leads to the construction of a person’s identity.
Likewise, Bruce Wayne’s constructed identity reflects his affluent life. As a child he was sheltered from the grim realities of life in Gotham, lived with parents who loved him, and clearly had a carefree childhood. But Wayne soon becomes a victim of circumstance—the murder of his parents woke him up to the nature of the vicious and senseless world around him. In Batman: Year One he describes that day as the day that “all sense left my life.” As we see in Arkham Asylum, the young boy who saw his parents murdered and who would eventually become Batman lost faith in rules and civilized society. As an adult, Wayne decided to stop being afraid and to create his own order.
Building a Batman
In Year One, we watch as Batman comes into being. Wayne’s creation of Batman is telling. Batman is not some sort of heroic force inherent to Wayne that emerges in times of need. Let’s consider three examples from Year One that show Wayne’s conscious decision to create the identity of Batman.5
First, when Bruce Wayne is training on his family estate before creating Batman, he says, “I’m not ready. I have the means, the skill. . . . I have hundreds of methods. But something’s missing. Something isn’t right.” Second, after his first failed attempt to defend a young girl from her pimp, he starts to put his finger on what is missing. As he thinks about his missteps during the evening, he says, “God . . . fear of God . . . fear . . . I have to make them afraid.” And as he sits seriously injured in his home and wonders how to incite fear in others, a bat crashes through his window, and he says, “Yes, Father, I shall become a bat”—the idea of Batman is born. Third, Wayne begins to don the costume and practice being a Dark Knight. As Police Commissioner Jim Gordon remarks, Batman works “his way from street level crime to its upper echelons, from junkie mugger to pusher to supplier—and along the way, to any cops that might be helping the whole process along.” We still sense Wayne’s hesitation when he crashes a party at the mayor’s mansion in order to incite fear in corrupt politicians: “The costume—and the weapons—have been tested. It’s time to get serious. Chauffeur by chauffeur, I make my way toward the Mayor’s mansion.”
Wayne’s actions construct the identity of Batman. Both Nietzsche and Foucault would agree that identity is always under construction and therefore capable of radical reconstruction. When Wayne witnessed the murder of his parents, he had the financial means to leave Gotham forever. However, he chose to remain and to reconstruct himself physically, mentally, and emotionally as Batman.
Arkham Asylum and the Construction of Truth
If you’ve made it this far into the chapter, then you really are serious about becoming an avenging force. We now must reveal another key piece of information: there is no absolute truth. Nietzsche and Foucault criticize historical philosophers who insist that there are absolute truths about the way the world really is, who we are as individuals, and how we ought to live. For both philosophers, people with power determine what counts as truth. As Nietzsche says in Philosophy and Truth, “What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms.”6 In the same way that Nietzsche believes that Christians made God in their image but then said that it happened the other way around, Nietzsche believes that humans create truths but then pretend that truth exists outside of our minds to be discovered.
Agreeing with Nietzsche’s basic insight about truth, Foucault applies this analysis to social issues.7 Foucault argues that we divide our experiences into normal and abnormal. Normalcy is constructed, and it cannot exist without the “abnormal” (which is also constructed). Abnormal must be sustained in order to bolster the “normal.”
Let’s take Foucault’s logic about the constructed and mutually dependent relationship between categories such as normal and abnormal, and apply it to Arkham Asylum, replacing the categories of normal and abnormal with “sane” and “insane.” Accepting that sane and insane are both constructed and therefore inherently unstable categories, let’s focus on how these two categories construct the identity of both the Joker and Batman respectively. While most people consider the Joker insane and Batman sane—we did say most people—Arkham Asylum questions this, highlighting the larger themes that both identity and reality are constructed.
In Arkham Asylum, the inmates have literally taken over the asylum. In a bargain to release the hostages, Batman enters the asylum and faces the criminals, the most famous of whom he bested and busted. Some of the asylum staff voluntarily stays, and psychotherapist Ruth Adams explains to Batman the treatments that villains like Two-Face have undergone. When Batman points out that therapy has had no effect on the Joker, Adams says that it may not be possible to define the Joker as insane. She says,
It’s quite possible we may actually be looking at some kind of super-sanity here. A brilliant new modification of human perception, more suited to urban life at the end of the twentieth century. . . . Unlike you and I, the Joker seems to have no control over the sensory information he’s receiving from the outside world. . . . He can only cope with that chaotic barrage of input by going with the flow. . . . He has no real personality. . . . He creates himself each day. He sees himself as the lord of misrule, and the world as a theatre of the absurd.
The Joker is an extreme and undesirable example of the previously discussed theory about identity. However, Dr. Adams’s analysis of the Joker shows that the label “insane” is constructed from society’s definition of insane. Joker is insane only because Gotham’s rules (which are constructed truths) have labeled him as such. As Adams hints, in a society with vastly different rules from our own, he might be considered sane.
Your Turn, Batman!
In the same way in which Joker’s insanity is called into question, so is Batman’s sanity. (Imagine that!) Arkham Asylum begins with the following epigraph from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, “‘But I don’t want to go among mad people,’ Alice remarked. ‘Oh, you can’t help that,’ said the Cat: ‘We’re all mad here. I’m mad, you’re mad.’ ‘How do you know I’m mad?’ said Alice. ‘You must be,’ said the Cat, ‘or you wouldn’t have come here.’” Note that this is another example of a constructed rule, where madness is defined based upon location. What we find in Arkham Asylum is that Batman, like Alice in Wonderland, enters only because he is ultimately similar to the criminals. According to the theories of Nietzsche and Foucault, whether we recognize it or not, we all have the potential to be classified as “insane.”
We can demonstrate that the sanity of Batman can be called into question if the rules are changed. First, Batman ultimately knows that he shares traits with Alice when he remarks before he goes in to the asylum, “I’m afraid that the Joker may be right about me. Sometimes I question the rationality of my actions. And I’m afraid that when I walk through those asylum gates. . . . It’ll be just like coming home.” This is not the first allusion to Alice in Wonderland in these three graphic novels—in The Dark Knight Returns, Wayne falls into the cave while chasing a rabbit!
Second, Arkham Asylum is not just the story of Batman confronting his enemies. It also chronicles the life of Amadeus Arkham, which eerily parallels the life of Bruce Wayne. Both left Gotham and their family estates and returned after twelve years. Both returned to try to bring order to Gotham (Arkham in the form of an asylum for the mentally ill, Wayne as a vigilante who fights crime). Both Arkham and Wayne feel guilty about the deaths of their mothers (Arkham because he killed her, and Wayne because he was the reason that his parents left the movie theater that fateful night). Both of them went through the shock of their family members being murdered. And both saw visions of a bat. However, Arkham was classified as insane, and Wayne created Batman to fight the criminally insane. In the context of Arkham Asylum, these direct parallels encourage us to consider who should be classified as sane and insane. They also challenge us to question Arkham’s construction of himself as opposed to Wayne’s construction of himself.
Finally, at the end of the graphic novel, we read notes written by all of the inmates, including Batman. Of interest are the following lines: “Mommy’s dead. Daddy’s dead. Brucie’s dead. I shall become a bat.” Batman has constructed his own identity and considers himself to be different from Bruce Wayne—or at least Brucie Wayne—who he may feel is dead.
So if you do decide to become Batman, please be aware that you may very well be labeled insane for running around in a costume at night, but once you’ve created a cadre of villains as your foes, society’s definition of sanity will be expanded to include you and exclude the villains.
How Batman Sees Through the Lies about Identity and Reality
You’ve made it this far—congratulations! You’ve accepted that identities are constructed, and that even truth is constructed. So what’s the next piece of the puzzle to complete your transformation? The key to cracking this part of the puzzle resides with Nietzsche. We read Batman: Year One, Arkham Asylum, and The Dark Knight Returns as a chronology of Batman’s life, and if you want to become a Batman yourself, you must embrace Nietzsche’s philosophy—as Batman has.
Nietzsche states that we are instinctual creatures and our identity is constructed out of our desires for survival and power. Nietzsche coins the phrase will to power to describe these desires.8 A companion concept to this is the eternal recurrence (also known as eternal return of the same). This is the ability to welcome both the highest peaks and the deepest, darkest valleys of our individual lives. Nietzsche praises the person who fully embraces these concepts.
In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche poetically captures the essence and the difficulty of the eternal recurrence in “On the Vision and the Riddle” when he describes the following scene as a vision and a riddle to be deciphered:
Among the wild cliffs I stood suddenly alone, bleak, in the bleakest moonlight. But there lay a man. . . . A young shepherd I saw, writhing, gagging in spasms, his face distorted, and a heavy black snake hung out of his mouth. Had I ever seen so much nausea and pale dread on one face? He seemed to have been asleep when the snake crawled in his throat, and there bit itself fast. My hand tore at the snake and tore in vain; it did not tear the snake out of his throat. Then it cried out of me: “Bite! Bite its head off! Bite!” Thus it cried out of me—my dread, my hatred, my nausea, my pity, all that is good and wicked in me cried out of me with a single cry. . . . The shepherd, however, bit as my cry counseled him; he bit with a good bite. Far away he spewed the head of the snake and he jumped up. No longer shepherd, no longer human—one changed, radiant, laughing! Never yet on earth has a human being laughed as he laughed.9
Nietzsche believes that life is full of real suffering (as represented by the snake in the riddle) and joy (as represented by the triumphant bite of the shepherd and his subsequent laughter). Most people “sleep” through their lives (as the shepherd is doing when the snake bites him), but an individual who lives according to Nietzsche’s philosophy of the eternal recurrence can embrace both suffering and joy. This person loves life so much that he or she does not regret or wish away even the most painful moments. In the same way that no one could save the shepherd except the shepherd himself, we are all the captains of our own lives.
Much like the snake in the vision, in the world of Batman the bat is a symbol for everything frightening, tragic, and ruthless in life. Only Batman is able to confront the bat, embracing it and overcoming the despair that it symbolizes. Others have also witnessed the bat; when they fail to embrace the bat, they have two options: one, they may pursue a life of crime or evil deeds (this may include criminal insanity), or two, they may be utterly terrorized and become withdrawn.
To see a failed encounter with the bat, consider in Arkham Asylum when Amadeus Arkham chronicles his own descent into madness and also the insanity of his mother. After his family is brutally murdered, he uncovers a repressed memory in which we once again see the vision of a bat. Arkham recalls that he visited his mother before her death. His mother is frightened and tells him that something is there to take her. At first Arkham thinks that she is mad, but then he says, “But God help me, I see it. I see the thing that has haunted and tormented my poor mother these long years. I see it. And it is a bat. A bat!” Arkham murders his mother in order to save her from the bat. Recollecting this, he says, “I understand now what my memory tried to keep from me. Madness is born in the blood. It is my birthright. My inheritance. My destiny.” Here the vision of the bat terrorized both Arkham and his mother.
Dr. Cavendish similarly descends into madness upon reading Arkham’s journal. He frees the prisoners of Arkham Asylum and forces Batman to read the passage from Arkham’s journal in which he speaks of a bat. He accuses Batman of having a partnership with the “hungry house” in which he supplies the asylum with “mad souls.” Cavendish says, “I’m not fooled by that cheap disguise. I know what you are.” He suggests that Batman is a mystical force when he says of Arkham that he “studied Shamanistic practices, and he knew that only ritual, only magic, could contain the bat. So you know what he did? He scratched a binding spell into the floor of his cell.” Arkham died once the binding spell was complete. While Cavendish does not literally see the bat, the vision conveyed to him by Arkham’s journal drives him to madness.
Batman and-Well, Uh, You Know-Bats
The vision of the bat has an effect on Bruce Wayne that is different from its effect on the others who have seen it. While Batman’s sanity is called into question in Arkham Asylum, none of the other graphic novels causes us to seriously doubt that there is a moral distinction between his actions and those of criminals such as the Joker. We read about Bruce Wayne’s struggles to come to grips with both the vision of the bat and his identity as Batman. This is a Nietzschean struggle to face the madness and suffering that is a part of life. At the end of The Dark Knight Returns, we see Bruce Wayne finally come to terms with the bat.
Bruce Wayne and Batman have four significant encounters with the bat in the three graphic novels. First, in The Dark Knight Returns, Wayne dreams about a childhood experience in which he sees a bat. While chasing a rabbit, Wayne falls into the rabbit hole and into what will later become the Batcave. Here he encounters what he describes as an ancient bat. He says, “Something shuffles out of sight . . . something sucks the stale air . . . and hisses . . . gliding with ancient grace . . . unwilling to retreat like his brothers did . . . eyes gleaming, untouched by love or joy or sorrow . . . breath hot with the taste of fallen foes . . . the stench of dead things, damned things . . . surely the fiercest survivor—the purest warrior . . . glaring, hating . . . claiming me as his own.” When the adult Wayne awakens, he finds that he has been sleepwalking and is in the Batcave. In this graphic novel, he recounts the dream as if the childhood experience determined the course of his life—even though he would not understand the significance of seeing the bat for many years.
Second, Wayne sees the bat crashing through the window of his study at the Wayne Manor on two occasions that mark a birth and rebirth of Batman. In Batman: Year One, the vision prompts him to create the identity Batman. In The Dark Knight Returns, the vision incites him to come out of retirement and once again don the mask and become the Dark Knight. As he says soon thereafter, dressed in his Batman costume, “I am born again.”
Third, in Arkham Asylum, if we follow the visual cues of the artist, Batman is the vision of the bat as seen by Amadeus Arkham and his mother. Batman is consistently drawn as a shadowy figure, almost always without a face. Here, Batman himself is the walking vision of the bat.
Finally, in The Dark Knight Returns, Batman sees the bat, drawn in the exact same manner as it is drawn from his childhood memory when he looks at Two-Face (compare pages 19 and 55 of the graphic novel). This reinforces the earlier idea we suggested, in which exposure to the bat can lead to one’s becoming a hero if the bat is embraced, or a villain if the bat is rejected. Just like Nietzsche’s shepherd has embraced and overcome the snake, Batman has embraced and overcome the bat.
Can You Face the Bat?
So having accepted that your identity is constructed, that truth and reality are constructed, and then going so far as to fully embrace these concepts, you have the philosophical underpinnings to become Batman yourself. But if you follow the steps we have outlined and, instead of becoming a Batman, you become a Joker or a Two-Face, we assume no liability whatsoever. For this is the risk one must take on the road to becoming the Bat.
NOTES
1 With regard to Nietzsche, our citations and references are from Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Penguin, 1966); On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Penguin, 1967); Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for None and All, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Penguin, 1978); Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870’s, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale (New Jersey: Humanities Press International, 1995).
2 With regard to Foucault, our citations and references are from Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1977); The History of Sexuality. Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990); Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1995).
3 As Foucault says, “The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body” (Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 30).
4 We should also consider a point made by Judith Butler, a philosopher influenced by Nietzsche and Foucault. She said that just because identity is a performance does not mean we can change it like a pair of tights. For example, you cannot wake up one morning and decide to be Batman; rather, you must rehearse the performance. See her book Bodies That Matter (New York: Taylor and Francis, 1993).
5 Keep in mind that by saying that Wayne creates Batman, we are not implying that Wayne is any less constructed than Batman. We might refer to Batman as the construction of a construction, as Bruce Wayne is himself a construction.
6 Nietzsche, Philosophy and Truth, 84.
7 Foucault’s essay on Nietzsche entitled “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” (included in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice) demonstrates Foucault’s understanding of Nietzsche’s genealogical approach to truth.
8 Nietzsche discusses the will to power in books such as Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morals, and Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
9 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 159-160.