The Personality of Batman - Case Study Example

We must work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. We’ve got to spend time in the shadows.” Dick Cheney on Meet the Press, September 16, 2001 There’s a moment in the newest incarnation of the Batman narrative — The Black Knight — in which Lucius Fox (played by Morgan Freeman) stands transfixed and horrified in front of a machine that will allow him to essentially spy on all of Gotham City, recording their conversations and actions. “Spying on 30 million people is not part of my job description,” he says. But despite his initial reluctance, Fox ends up using the technology just as Batman intends: to violate Gotham City’s privacy and in doing so, to catch the Joker, who has been terrorizing the city. That the plan works — that this intense violation of privacy and its success in apprehending and stopping the mad terror that has been rampant in Gotham — makes it clear that the politics of Batman continue to echo the dark side of politics in America. Batman has been one of the most interesting of the superhero comic since his inception since, as we’ve pointed out, he’s a hero without super powers. He’s a regular guy thrust into extraordinary situations — much like politicians, who are rarely faced with issues of clear right and wrong. Unlike other superheroes, Batman’s world is full of moral ambiguities. He must often make unpopular decisions to support policies and politicians with whom he doesn’t agree because it’s the right thing for the city. And unlike other superheroes, whose difference from mere mortals moves them to an uncontested ethical sphere where political leaders essentially play a secondary role, Batman is very much a player on Gotham’s political scene — and not just because his alter ego happens to be a billionaire capitalist. Ultimately, though, Batman’s socioeconomic status probably impacts his political stance, which has historically skewed heavily toward the conservative side of things. One of the most interesting things about The Dark Knight is that in it, Batman’s strong and stated desire is to get out of politics and be an ordinary billionaire. But he’s forced by his internal desire for justice to interfere in the affairs of Gotham City, even though he know that doing so is problematic — Batman’s existence and the fact that he’s successful at shutting down crime seems to bring out the crazy in the criminals of Gotham City. “As we looked through the comics, there was this fascinating idea that Batman’s presence in Gotham actually attracts criminals to Gotham, attracts lunacy,” said Christopher Nolan, the director of The Dark Knight. (Halbfinger) It is much the way Americans felt after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, which left many people feeling that America had attracted the hatred of the world simply by virtue of being strong and successful. And in much the same way that the new President George W. Bush found himself facing political upheaval, Batman must make decisions about how to deal with the chaos around him. Describing his character, Christian Bale who plays Batman, says, “And now you have not just a young man in pain attempting to find some kind of an answer, you have somebody who actually has power, who is burdened by that power, and is having to recognize the difference between attaining that power and holding on to it.” (Halbfinger) The villain of The Dark Knight is not a conflicted bag guy driven to evil by problematic circumstances. Jack Nicholson’s Joker in Tim Burton’s take on Batman was tossed in a vat of acid to die by corrupt politicians, so while his citywide romp of chaos was disturbing to say the least, it at least made sense: The Joker was getting back at the criminals who hid behind their political masks by showing them how fragile their positions and their powers really were. The Dark Night’s Joker, played with terrifying glee by the late Heath Ledger, is no such rational creature. He is pure, senseless, undirected evil. “Some men arent looking for anything logical, like money. They cant be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn,” Alfred, the Wayne family butler says, suggesting that the Joker’s reign of terror is stoppable by no conventional methods. And, indeed, the film goes to great lengths to make it clear that the Joker is a terrorist: To fight anarchy is to lose ones bearings, and to move ones own soul dangerously close to evil. Ah, but such is the price of superhero-dom—or, as The Dark Knight would also like us to believe, the War on Terror. The Joker is repeatedly referred to as a “terrorist,” and he is made to resemble the men and women the United States calls terrorists. He captures police officers, tortures them, and then forces them to explain his own purpose on camera, much like the video of Daniel Pearl made by Khalid Sheikh. The Jokers goal is to spread chaos amidst liberal civilization, to show the cultivated that their wealthy ideals can vanish when confronted by evil such as his. (Saval) And so, Batman — like Bush — is confronted with a situation in which rationality and fair fighting are utterly impossible. Indeed, as Spencer Ackerman points out, every time Batman fights fair, the Joker uses it against him, manipulating him into making tragic decisions while encouraging him to embrace the Joker’s frenzied nihilism as the only philosophy that makes any sense. Batman is put in a position where he cannot make morally acceptable choices. And so he makes what we would think of as immoral choices. In a side plot, he flies to Hong Kong to apprehend a Chinese banker working for the international Mafia because said banker has fled Gotham City’s jurisdiction, in a physical attack that is clearly illegal. Batman beats the Joker to extract information from him, combating violence with violence to get the information he needs. He lies to the people of Gotham about the death of Harvey Dent, pretending that the former DA has died because he believes that knowing how the Joker has turned him toward evil would have a negative impact on the citizens, choosing — like God or the government — the information that he believes they should have. And he goes Bush’s Patriot Act one better by building the sophisticated surveillance system that will allow him to track the conversations and movements of every single citizen of Gotham without their knowledge or consent. This behavior goes along with a theory moral philosopher Michael Walzer proposed back in 1973 that he called the “dirty hands” theory. The theory purports “that the key to engaging in morally dubious activities, like torture, during times of emergency is to acknowledge their heinousness and, once the emergency passes, accept legal sanction for the burden of saving the world.” (Ackerman) And for Batman, this works out. His heinous behaviors do save the city, though some sacrifices must be made along the way, and it’s clear in the movie that without Batman’s ethical violations, the Joker would have continued his reign of terror and ultimately destroyed the city. Batman’s actions were regrettable but necessary to save the city of Gotham. It’s worth noting, too, that Batman is able to end his morally questionable actions within a period of hours, setting his surveillance system to self-destruct after the Joker’s successful vanquishing and moving back to the shadows to fight the good fight for the city, saving other champions like Harvey Dent from the destructive knowledge of the dark side. For Americans caught up in the often troubling political landscape of the post-911 world, The Dark Knight is a reassuring morality tale, assuring us that the graphic images of war and torture in the media, the scary violations of civil liberties we’ve endured, are temporary, that they will end and things will go back to normal. Though we know the political scene is less conveniently scripted that a bit of commercial cinema, Batman captures our sense of moral struggle, as we seek to make sense of the world in which we live. Dark times call for dark films. But Batman has always been a reflection of political currents in America. In fact, when the Joker was introduced in 1939, it was because a new, young illustrator for the comic series thought Batman needed a super villain nemesis, that the evil he battled needed to be specifically personified in an individual. And so the Joker was born, and considering the timeline, it’s hard not to draw parallels between the birth of the Joker and the rise of Adolph Hitler in Germany as part of the American consciousness. And it’s important to remember that Bruce Wayne, more than any other super hero with the possible exception of Tony Stark (Iron Man), exemplifies the American ideal of success. He is the chief stockholder of the very successful multinational conglomerate (in almost every incarnation of the Batman narrative, he must occasionally put his battle against crime on hold to ensure that his company continues to make a great deal of money), he dates beautiful women, usually more than one at a time, and he always has the newest, best, most interesting gadgets. The same political overtones exist in Frank Miller’s hard-bitten, nihilistic Batman of the 1980s, born into the world of Reganomics and capitalist realism. The political philosophy of the time acknowledged self interest as the first, best goal of mankind, making it impossible for any individual to achieve true happiness or for real justice to exist. In the morass of the Iran-Contra affair, the birth of yuppies and the first “made-for-television” Presidency, Miller’s Batman emerged from the shadows only to find himself in more shadows. He embodied the political mores of the time, fighting crime not because he wanted to secure the greater good but because he liked it. He may be cruel, violent and autocratic, but at least he is (a little) better than the criminals he puts away. In much the same way, elections of the period began to revolve around not so much who the better candidate was but who the least bad candidate was. Instead of touting their own strengths, politicians focused on the negatives about their opponents. The nightly news became gradually more and more sensationalistic, reflecting a growing cultural preoccupation with violence, tragedy and death. Even in Batman Begins, Nolan’s first take on the Batman narrative, also starring Bale as the Caped Crusader, politics play an important role. During the economically challenged period, Batman begins lauds the “good” corporation, which the film implies Bruce can create by driving out the old, corrupted capitalist forces from his father’s company and embracing “new” capitalism. The film presents a clear contrast between “good” capitalism and bad “capitalism,” suggesting that capitalism as a political system has not failed but rather the people who practice it have become corrupted. New, young leadership — with capitalistic sympathies — is the solution to the problems facing America. Batman’s political implications are strong and reflect the changing nature of the American political landscape, though they do tend to veer toward the right in their political messaging, Overall, the “big bad bat” can be seen as the ultimate 20th century political discourse, reflecting America’s views of war, social responsibility and wealth. The Dark Knight is only the latest incarnation of Batman’s political allegory. Works Cited Ackerman, Spencer. “Batman’s ‘Dark Knight’ reflects Cheney policy.” The Washington Independent. July 21, 2008. Brooker, Will. Batman Unmasked: Analyzing a Cultural Icon. Continuum Publishing. September 2001. Eco, Umberto. “The Myth of Superman.” The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts, trans. by Natalie Chilton. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1979. Halbfinger, David. “Batman’s Burden: A Director Confronts Darkness and Death.” The New York Times. March 9, 2008. Parsons, Patrick. “Batman and his Audience: The Dialectic of Culture.” The Many Lives of the Batman: Critical Approaches to a Superhero and his Media. Roberta Pearson and William Uricchio, eds. New York: Routledge Press, 1991. Saval, Nikil. “Review: The Dark Knight.” n+1. August 6, 2008. Read More