5
GOVERNING GOTHAM
Tony Spanakos
Can somebody tell me what kind of a world we live in, where a man dressed up as a bat gets all of my press? This town needs an enema!
—The Joker, from the 1989 movie Batman
Gotham Made Me Do It
Defeating freaky bad guys, using cool gadgets, and leaving “Ka-Pows” in your wake is pretty impressive. But what is most compelling about the Batman is how and why he took up tights and evening prowls in the first place. The story of Batman’s origin has been retold many times and many ways, but it always focuses on the child who witnesses the murder of his parents and grows up to become a crime-fighting bat.
Most analyses of the Batman’s actions and motivations—including the movie Batman Begins (2005)—focus on the psychological impact of this event on Bruce Wayne/Batman. In this chapter, we’ll take a different approach, arguing that Gotham, particularly its government, is the source of Batman’s angst. Thomas and Martha Wayne were murdered because the state was incapable of maintaining law and order, and Bruce Wayne’s response was to become the crime-fighting Batman, trying to correct the lack of order in his city. Though extreme, this reaction is not unique. Nearly all of the major characters in the Batman pantheon are reacting against a state that is perceived as either too weak or too restrictive. Batman and Jim Gordon have a more nuanced vision of public safety in that they support the state but reject its exclusive authority in the area of security. This highlights the precarious nature of political rule, and it also explains why the Batman (and, periodically, Gordon) has such a problematic relationship with the state.
Do We Need Any Stinking Badges? Legitimacy and Violence
“Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound . . .” These and other powers have always allowed Superman to serve the greater good, justice, and the American way. He is an orphan from another planet, whose loyalty to the country in which he was raised is unquestioning. Superman equates the greater good with the American way like the good citizen/soldier he was drawn to be some seventy years ago. Because of his love for his adopted country, Superman recognizes the authority of the state, and it, in turn, authorizes him to act on its behalf. When Superman saves Gotham City from a nuclear warhead in The Dark Knight Returns (1986; henceforth DKR), his use of force is licensed and therefore “legitimate” because he is an agent of the state. The crime-reducing activities of the Batman, however, are not licensed and legitimate.
This produces an interesting tension, which Frank Miller explores in DKR. Miller’s Superman is a golden boy who has decided to play nice with humans and their government. He struggles to understand Bruce Wayne’s quip “Sure we’re criminals. . . . We’ve always been criminals. We have to be criminals.” Bruce is a friend, but he understands order, crime, and the world very differently. Despite their friendship, Superman has no misgivings about who to support when the confrontation between the state and the Batman is made clear. He first warns Bruce candidly, saying, “It’s like this, Bruce—sooner or later, somebody’s going to order me to bring you in. Somebody with authority.” Later, as a government representative, he kills (or so he thinks) the Batman.
German sociologist Max Weber (1864-1920) defined the state as the institution that holds a monopoly on the legitimate use of coercion in a given territory. Through the police and military, the state—and only the state—may enforce authority. The use of violence by nonstate actors (terrorists, revolutionaries, criminals, vigilantes) occurs, and may even be understandable on occasion, but it can never be legitimate. Most superheroes, even unintentionally, play a subversive role because very few are officially licensed or commissioned by the state to use coercion to guard public order (except during World War II and the Cold War, when heroes such as Captain America and the Justice Society of America worked with the U.S. government to fight off Nazis, Soviets, intergalactic aliens, and other hobgoblins).1 Batman, however, is particularly subversive, especially in his “Dark Knight” incarnation (in the earliest stories, and again after 1986), because his concept of order and the good goes beyond the state; his use of violence is in addition to, though not in coordination with, the state. The challenge to the state’s monopoly on the legitimate use of violence is seen most clearly in Miller’s depiction of Batman in contrast with Superman and Commissioner Yindel.
The return of the Batman in DKR corresponds with a rise in violent crime in Gotham City (coincidentally, Miller’s story debuted in 1986 as crime was cresting in New York, the model for Gotham). The mayor is depicted as a poll-watching, weak politician who has no position on Batman’s activities until one is imposed on him by an aide. When the time comes to choose a successor for the retiring Commissioner Gordon, the mayor selects Ellen Yindel. Yindel had a brilliantly successful career fighting crime in Chicago, but Chicago is not Gotham. Yindel’s inability to understand Gotham underlies her relationships with Gordon and Batman. She correctly realizes that she is inheriting a situation where there is virtual anarchy. But her effort to impose order depends on a “black and white” interpretation of the law that sees the Batman as a vigilante and, by definition, a criminal. She justifies this position, saying, “[d]espite Gotham’s plague of crime, I believe our only recourse is law enforcement. I will not participate in the activities of a vigilante. Therefore, as your police commissioner I issue the arrest order for the Batman on charges of breaking and entering, assault and battery, creating a public menace.”
Comic fans might be shocked by this, but it is a highly rational response, especially from a representative of the state who prides herself on “law and order.” Our problem, as readers and fans, is that we know that law and order are not perfectly correlated. Sometimes there is so little order that the law does not work well, and that is precisely why we need the Batman in the first place. But Yindel, at least until the end of DKR, is blind to this because she understands the state as the only location of law and order. If only the state can legitimately enforce the law, and use violence in the process, logically any other violence is illegitimate and criminal, regardless of whether it produces good results. After all, even if Gotham is safer because of the Batman, it is no more “orderly,” since it has explicitly accepted the idea that one individual can use violence legitimately. This opens the possibility for copycats with lesser abilities and questionable motivations (as DKR shows through the “sons of Batman”).
From Crime Alley to Sin City: Hobbes and Gotham
Young Bruce Wayne learns about the need for someone to enforce order in Crime Alley, beneath a solitary streetlamp, between the corpses of his parents Thomas and Martha. Like the rest of us, he had assumed that the state would keep order, that it would prevent criminal elements from individual and lawless pursuit of their own interests. But the robbery-turned-double homicide changes everything. The Batman is born in a city where the state fails at its most basic responsibility of maintaining public safety, where the “social contract” between citizen and state is most essential. Life in Gotham is scary, tenuous, and cheap; danger lurks everywhere. Of course, no government can prevent all crime, but Bruce knows the government cannot, on its own, ensure order. In 1987’s Batman: Year One, Miller retells the origin of the Batman. The story opens with Lieutenant Gordon arriving in Gotham by train and Bruce Wayne returning to Gotham by plane. Both know they are entering a fallen city, where government has lost control over crime, and it becomes their personal challenge to solve that. Over the course of Year One each will learn how his personal efforts require cooperation with the other, sometimes ignoring, or even challenging, the state.
Without a state to enforce order, life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”: that’s what Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) argued in Leviathan, published shortly after nearly a decade of civil war in Britain.2 Hobbes imagined a world that existed before government. In it, humans have unlimited liberty, but they are guided by passions, and liberty soon becomes license, and the state of nature becomes a war of all against all. Then there is neither order nor the possibility of justice. It is so oppressive that man will cede virtually all of his liberties to a sovereign so that order can be established. That, according to Hobbes, is the origin of government.
Most Batman stories begin with Gotham being ungovernable, a place where society has broken down into Hobbesian disorder. Various characters in the Batman series give us insight into how the fall of the state allows disorder and how they individually seek to overcome or exploit this. For instance, when Gordon arrives in Gotham in Year One, he is greeted by Detective Flass, a happy-go-lucky cop on the take, who takes him to meet Commissioner Gillian Loeb, who runs the police as an old-boy protection network for powerful city elites, politicians, and drug dealers. When Gordon refuses to take a bribe from a priest, Flass and a few other officers, in disguise, jump and beat Gordon. Later, Gordon returns the favor to Flass and is grateful to Flass for teaching him what it means to be a cop in Gotham City. When Batman first appears, Gordon sets traps to try to catch him, but the commissioner tells him that there is no need to be concerned with Batman: after all, he is reducing street crime, which does not disturb Loeb’s racket. Only after Batman raids a private dinner of Gotham’s elites (including Loeb) and threatens them does Loeb make catching Batman his number-one priority.
Rather than establishing order, Loeb’s state perverts it. The impact is so extensive that even Gordon is affected. Personally, he cheats on his very pregnant wife Barbara with a fellow officer, Sergeant Sarah Essen. Professionally, he is conflicted by an order that he cannot understand, especially once he sees and learns more of Batman. He lies in bed, hunched over, stares at the gun in his hand while Barbara sleeps, and thinks:
I shouldn’t be thinking . . . not about Batman. He’s a criminal. I’m a cop. It’s that simple. But—but I’m a cop in a city where the mayor and the commissioner of police use cops as hired killers . . . he saved that old woman. He saved that cat. He even paid for that suit. The hunk of metal in my hands is heavier than ever.
Like Superman and Yindel in DKR, Loeb and his henchmen in Year One impose an order onto Gotham City. But unlike Superman and Yindel, their intentions are hardly praiseworthy, and as agents of the state, they not only fail to prevent the use of violence by people other than the police, but they use violence in a profoundly illegitimate way. More important, though they have the ability to enforce law, establish order, and protect citizen life, they allow a state of license to prevail in Gotham because it allows cover for their activities. Rather than the state ending the chaos of the state of nature, as Hobbes hoped, the state itself is a participant in the war of all against all.
“Two” Little Security
The failure of the state to maintain its most basic responsibility provides an explanation for the origin of the Reaper, the villain in Batman: Year Two (1988). His beginnings very obviously mirror Batman’s: Judson Caspian and his wife and daughter were assaulted years ago on their way back from the opera, and his wife was killed. The failure of the state to provide order leads Caspian to become the Reaper and his daughter, Rachel, to eventually enter a convent. (We will focus on the Reaper here, but it is interesting that both he and his daughter seek to bring order to a world of sin and license, and both do so outside of the government.) The Reaper starts his career by killing four muggers, telling the intended victim of the mugging, “You have naught to fear. Tell the world that the Reaper has returned . . . and will save this city—with its consent, or without.” A fallen city is in need of saving, and rather than engaging in collective action or political mobilization, Caspian takes up arms to begin a one-man war.
The similarities and differences between the Reaper and Batman are made explicit when the Batman appears as the Reaper goes after a prostitute: “The Batman, eh? They say you continue the fight I began. If so, prove it now—stand aside.” Batman refuses because the Reaper seeks “wholesale slaughter” whereas he seeks justice. The Reaper then targets Big Willie Golonka, a mobster in protective security, whom he kills along with his security detail. The state that failed to protect his wife is now protecting a mobster. This is incomprehensible and unacceptable. The police, as agents of the state, “must learn—those who knowingly protect evil . . . must suffer the same penalty as those who commit it!” The state, as the Reaper sees it, has turned the world upside down and forgotten that it exists to prevent a war of man and against man. His “job” is to reestablish order in a Hobbesian world, but he does so as a self-appointed Leviathan. Hobbes’s Leviathan, on the other hand, solves the problems of the state of nature through a collective social contract, not brute individual force.
Another one of the most interesting Batman villains is Harvey Dent, otherwise known as Two-Face. Dent is a passionate and incorruptible district attorney who supports Batman and goes after Gotham’s greatest criminals, even the politically connected ones (see Year One, for instance). When he has acid thrown at him by a mobster during his trial, Dent’s face is disfigured and he takes on the new identity of Two-Face. It’s not just that half his face is now distorted, but also who he is has changed. This is not simply a case of Dr. Jekyll trying to suppress the id and creating the conditions for its irrepressible emergence as Hyde. Harvey Dent cannot bring the world to order through the law. Being a public prosecutor has, in fact, made him a target and turned him physically into the half-monster he is.
Two-Face is yet another Batman character who responds to the failed state’s degeneration into a Hobbesian state of war of all against all. In each case, the Hobbesian Gotham is not met by effective state authority. In Loeb, the state consciously chooses predatory action, ushering in a state of war. The Reaper is the individual’s brutal and unmeasured response to the failure of the collective security that the state is contracted to provide. And Harvey Dent was a faithful but ultimately ineffective agent of the state. It is the state’s incapacity to act, perceived from within, that turns him into someone who tries to bring order through criminality.
The Anti-Batman: Nietzschean Rebellions
Weber’s and Hobbes’s understandings of the state assume that it is a legitimate institution that brings security, that it is “good.” Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), however, sees the state as a threat to individual self-expression and self-overcoming. The state obsessively tries to change its citizens in its own image. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche has the state say, “On earth there is nothing greater than I: the ordering finger of God am I.”3 The Nietzschean state constitutes a “new idol,” one that is no less repressive than its predecessors, as it defines good and evil for, and hangs a “sword and a hundred appetites” over, the faithful.
No Batman villain sees this as clearly as Anarky, a teenager seduced by anarchist thought in 1999’s Batman: Anarky. Anarky aims to bring “freedom” to the people who are enslaved by an order perverted by politics, religion, and capitalism. Like the Reaper, Anarky emerges by combating unpopular figures—a drug dealer, a polluting corporate type, and a big bank that has demolished and cleared an area once inhabited by the homeless. Alfred points out the similarities between Anarky and Batman to Bruce Wayne, who responds quickly, “I know, I know—my own methods aren’t always legal, either. But there is a difference, Alfred. . . . I only use violence when it’s absolutely necessary, not as a form of punishment . . . not lately, anyway!”
Anarky’s need to order the world is seen in his long letter explaining to his parents who he “really” is, his teaching anarchism to other juvenile delinquents, and his dream at the end of the graphic novel. In the dream, Anarky tries to “de-brainwash” Gotham, so that its citizens can see the real Gotham, “[w]here administration bigwigs view the world from stretch limos, while families sleep in cardboard boxes—corrupt businessmen flourish, while honest men beg in the gutter—crime explodes. While decent folk are afraid to walk the streets their taxes pay for. All human life is there—from the best to the worst, the kings in their fortresses to the scum in their sties. And all of them believe that it has to be that way. I’m going to show them that it doesn’t.” In his dream, Anarky creates a dystopia in which there is no state to order things, where politicians flunk a “parasite test” and are interned in ghettoes for being “enemies of the people,” and where the people—in the absence of a state—become nasty and brutish. The moral of the tale is that the anarchic order that Anarky tries to impose is worse than the one he tries to replace. His search for an organizing principle that is less repressive than the state fails.
In contrast, the Joker’s goals are not nearly as political, but they are nonetheless linked to order. The ultimate Batman enemy is conceived in DKR as being a playful harlequin whose vicious acts of crime belie his motivation for lawbreaking: the need to disrupt a boring and restrictive order. The state imposes this order not so much politically as socially, and the Joker responds by trying to undermine any order. In DKR, the Joker is content to play small-scale pranks in Arkham Asylum until he learns that the Batman has come out of retirement. The return of the Batman necessitates the Joker’s return. Batman is too boring, brings about too much order. The Joker has to go back into Gotham to temper the Batman’s effect. The duality of the Batman—who is obsessed with order—and the Joker—who needs to challenge order—is best seen when the Joker, speaking of his victims, tells the Batman, “I never kept count, but you did, and I love you for it.”4
The Real Dynamic Duo: Batman and Gordon
Batman: Year Two opens with the newly appointed Commissioner Gordon being interviewed on television:
Interviewer: You seem to be on good relations with Gotham’s
official police force, but many have questioned your relationship
with this masked vigilante, the Batman.
Gordon: My department’s relationship with the Batman is
strictly—
Interviewer: Many feel that the Batman is no better than
the costumed lawbreaker who stalked Gotham’s streets
twenty years ago, calling himself the Reaper.
Gordon: That comparison has been made, yes, but unfairly.
Interviewer: Some say it was the Reaper’s abrupt departure
from Gotham that plunged our city into the maelstrom
of crime and police corruption from which it’s only just
emerged.
Gordon: If I can finish: I can’t speak for the department of
twenty years ago, but the Batman works with the police
force, not against us.
Interviewer: And is this “Batman” an authorized representative
of force?
Gordon: No, he operates strictly on his own. But he’s offered
me his services.
This dialogue is a microcosm for the Batman-Gordon understanding of an order that goes beyond the state. The state is not the only agent that can legitimately use violence (as Weber held), and it does play a constructive role in providing order (against Nietzsche). But society also has a role to play in providing security: Batman symbolizes and inspires that, and Gordon knows it.
At the same time, Batman’s actions are not wholly legitimate. When Bruce Wayne distinguishes himself from Anarky, he says, “The fact is, no man can be allowed to set himself up as judge, jury and executioner.” And, indeed, even though it often seemed silly in the early comics or the television series, Batman always beat the bad guys and tied them up so that the police could imprison them. He regularly surrendered the Penguin, Poison Ivy, the Joker, and so many others to Arkham Asylum, knowing that they would soon walk right out that revolving door. Batman has the ability to pronounce justice and to punish, but he refuses to do either. This speaks volumes about the place of the state (and society) in establishing order and justice.
In DKR, the state is weak, infiltrated by touchy-feely organizations and specialists who claim to speak for society but who are entirely alienated from what most people think. The Council of Mothers asks the mayor to arrest Batman as a “harmful influence on the children of Gotham,” and the Victims’ Rights Task Force demands protection for the victims of the Batman’s violence. A psychologist even calls Batman a “social fascist” because of his effort to reorder society in his own image. After considerable fence-sitting regarding the danger of mutants, the mayor says, “This whole situation is the result of Gordon’s incompetence—and of the terrorist actions of the Batman. I wish to sit down with the mutant leader . . . to negotiate a settlement.” Three pages later, the mayor is killed by the mutant leader in his prison cell after the mayor insisted on having no police protection. He dies because he does not understand the reality of Gotham.
Still, the mayor correctly fingers Gordon as fundamental to the Batman’s freedom to pursue his crime-fighting activities. Unlike the mayor, Gordon understands Gotham and he understands Batman. In DKR, he tries to explain this to Yindel, but she begins to see this only after she gets a real sense for the kind of crime that predominates in Gotham, and how Batman is a very necessary response to that. Gordon’s sympathy to the Batman is rarely perceived as what it is, a significant deviation from law enforcement and dereliction of duty. Very few comic books address this, and none so directly as Dark Victory (2001), in which a young, beautiful, liberal, and misguided district attorney named Janice Porter directly confronts Gordon. Referring to a criminal that Batman roughed up, she tells Gordon, “Batman did quite a number on him. In what way weren’t his civil rights violated? And from what I understand, you were not only there at the time of his arrest—you stood by and allowed this to happen.”
Batman always violates criminals’ civil rights, since he has no authority to act as an agent of the law, and Gordon knows that, but he does not place rights and the law before justice and order. You need rights to have justice, but as Lana Lang says in her defense of the Batman in DKR, “We live in the shadow of crime . . . with the unspoken understanding that we are victims—of fear, of violence, of social impotence. A man has risen to show us that the power is, and always has been in our hands. We are under siege—He’s showing us that we can resist.” Throughout Dark Victory, Gordon is under pressure because Porter tries to keep him from inappropriate contact with the Batman. This disturbs a fundamental aspect of the Batman mythos, which requires this linkage between the just man inside the legal system and the just one outside of it.
The personal, informal relationship between Gordon and the Batman is essential. Batman will not mete out punishment, and Gordon cannot rely on his police to maintain order and to rein in supervillains. In the process, they install and maintain a precarious order that the reader believes is legitimate. We know that only Batman can handle men in tights with riddles that only a thirteen-year-old former Communist chess master can solve. At the same time, we know Batman ultimately cannot enforce justice, even on Joe Chill, the murderer of his parents. We may cheer for the Batman’s righteous revenge, but we pull back and we want him to pull back. As longtime Batman editor Dennis O’Neil says, killing “is not something . . . [Batman] does.”5
But while this order comforts readers, and lets us know that we can sleep at night because someone is watching over the prowlers in Crime Alley, it is very threatening to the state. The state believes it must monopolize the legitimate use of violence. And more than the villains he fights, it is Batman, and to a lesser extent Gordon, who is a threat to the state, for it is Batman who challenges the state’s monopoly over the legitimate use of violence. This is why he is hunted in DKR and Year One, and why his actions are challenged in Year Two and Dark Victory. The irony of the Batman’s relationship with the state is that the more he reduces crime and contributes to public order, the more he challenges the state, as it becomes obvious that the state’s use of violence is ineffective. That makes Gordon necessary to prevent the Batman from being a complete threat. Batman trusts Gordon and will turn over criminals to him, and in return Gordon recognizes him as the exception to the state’s monopoly.
Theorizing Government
We may wonder to what extent we, as fans, are capable of imagining a gap between order and law. No state can claim that it can guarantee both flawlessly all of the time. Batman and Gordon hold together a world that eludes our sense of logic and justice, and although all characters attempt to impose some sort of order on Gotham, it is the tandem team of Batman and Gordon who do it most legitimately. This renders the state precarious, shows how society must participate in its own defense, and points out how very important personal relationships and trust are in establishing the line between the just use of violence and the proper enforcement of law. Of course, it is possible to theorize about the state, justice, and violence without discussing the Batman, but as the Joker would say—“Why bother?”6
NOTES
1 For a more recent exploration of this issue, see how the “Superhuman Registration Act” has influenced the Marvel superhero community in the recent crossover events “Civil War” and “The Initiative.” I am grateful to Mark White for suggesting this reference.
2 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (New York: Penguin Books, [1651] 1985), xiii.
3 Walter Kaufman, ed., The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Penguin Press, 1976), 161.
4 For more on Nietzsche and Frank Miller, see Peregrine Dace, “Nietzsche contra Superman: An Examination of the Work of Frank Miller,” South African Journal of Philosophy 26, no. 1 (2007): 98-106.
5 Roberta E. Pearson and William Uricchio, “Notes from the Batcave: An Interview with Dennis O’Neil,” in a book they edited, The Many Lives of the Batman: Critical Approaches to a Superhero and His Media (New York: Routledge, 1991), 19. For more on Batman’s refusal to kill, see Mark D. White’s chapter in this book.
6 I would like to thank Rob Arp, Mark White, Michel Spanakos, and Photini The for the suggestions they gave that strengthened this chapter.