Is it Time for Us to Retire the Batman?
A friend and colleague that I worked with in the past, used to say, “Let’s start with our Bona Fides to make sure we all understand why we are having this conversation and what I bring to the table.” So let me begin with that.
I am a big fan of Batman. The photographs included with this essay are of collectible Batman items that I own. I have been reading Batman comics since the 1980s and subscribed to monthly comic titles including::
Detective Comics
Batman
Batman and the Outsiders (vol 1 - from 1983 to 1986, and vol 2 - from 2007 to 2011)
Superman/Batman
Batman Confidential
Batman and Robin (vol 1 - 2009 to 2011, and vol 2 - 2011 to 2015)
Batman Incorporated
Batgirl
Catwoman (vol 4)
Detective Comics (vol 2)
A poster from the author’s personal collection.
In addition, I have collected a number of mini-series or one-shot graphic novels such as Hush, The Dark Knight Returns, The Long Halloween, Dark Victory, Year One, Battle for the Cowl, Arkham City, The Killing Joke, Earth One, Batman and the Monster Men, Batman/Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Unfortunately), among many others.
I have watched most of the television and animated movie adaptations, including:
Batman (1966 - 1968)
Batman: The Animated Series (1992 - 1995)
Gotham (2015 - 2019)
The Batman (2004 - 2008)
Batman Beyond (1999 - 2001)
Batman: The Brave and the Bold (2008 - 2011)
Year One
Under the Red Hood
The Dark Knight Returns (Part 1 and Part 2)
Batman vs. Robin
Batman: Bad Blood
Batman: The Killing Joke
The Lego Batman Movie
Among many others including Justice League movies.
Concerning the live-action film titles, I have seen every one, including:
The Burton/Schumacher Series: Batman, Batman Returns, Batman Forever, Batman & Robin (Despite how unwatchable this last film is)
The Dark Knight Trilogy (Christopher Nolan): Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises
DCEU: Batman v Superman, Justice League (2017)
Along with other related movies.
Items from the author’s personal collection.
Finally, I collect and own several Batman cold-cast statues (mainly from the Black & White Series) and Action Figures still in their original boxes unopened. My favorite set of figures coming from the Arkham Asylum video game, series 1 of the action figures. And, if you are wondering, yes—I have played the Arkham Asylum video games and was an active DC Universe Online Player several years ago.
It is safe to say that I am invested in Batman.
I am here to make the case that it is time for us to retire the Batman. Perhaps not forever, but at least for the foreseeable future. I am making the case based on two assertions:
The stories that needed to be told, have been told.
That Batman reflects an outdated notion of what we need as a society right now.
The Stories Have Been Told
I am going to begin here by using the movies, primarily, to make my point. In the last decade, we have seen Batman’s death and his Rebirth. This, in my opinion, is usually a device used by comic creators when they have run out of good ideas.
I would like to focus on the cinematic versions of Batman, beginning with the Burton/Schumacher series, and ending with the Matt Reeves’ version titled “The Batman,” starring Robert Pattinson and Zoe Kravitz, scheduled for release in 2022. The latter has been plagued with rumors about Pattinson’s behavior and attitude on set making the film a challenge to finish.
The cinematic versions have given us plenty of insight into what motivates Batman, how he becomes Batman, and the key villains and people who shape the character and his story. As we look back now, the original Burton version of Batman was certainly campy, but we can argue that it gave us a Batman that many people who are not familiar with the comics could appreciate. The Nolan trilogy gave us excellent story-telling, fantastic performances, and a visual treat of a Batman that somehow still felt real. While the DCEU may have been a miss, we did get an older version of Batman and got to see his interaction with members of the Justice League and the super-powered.
The stories that have been told have been, on the whole, satisfying and rewarding. Beyond the movies, we have been left with plenty of material in the comics and television (animated and live action) that we can revisit and enjoy. Whether you are a fan of Cesar Romero’s Joker or the most recent rendition by Joaquin Phoenix, there is no shortage of great performances of Joker to revisit. This extends to all of the characters in Batman’s universe. I confess that I have only read a small portion of the comics and graphic novels that make up the Batman’s universe and look forward to continuing that journey in the years ahead.
The truth is, we have said as much as we can say about Batman and his world, through the stories we have now in all their different forms. What comes next only serves to tarnish a strong legacy—while not always well executed—of who we know the Batman to be. The new stories will be walking the same path that we have already walked over the years and won’t add value to the insight, history, or mythology of this character. I will definitely see the Matt Reeves version of Batman when it comes out. But the larger question I need to ask is, do I really need to?
The answer, if I am honest with myself, is no.
Not the Hero We Need
What drove me to write this article was reading both about the rumors surrounding the Matt Reeves movie along with the murder of Sarah Everard and the events that followed with the vigils and the police response. While it may not seem that those two news items are related, I would argue that they very much are.
For those of you who don’t know much about Sarah Everard, she was—at least as it is alleged, based on what is known—abducted and murdered while walking home from a friend’s house in south London after 9 PM on March 3. It is now alleged that an off-duty police officer is the person behind the murder and may have committed the crime with an accomplice. Initially, the police said that women should stay at home for their safety. This prompted outrage by women across the UK because, they believed (as I do), women should have the right to feel safe no matter where they are, not matter what time of day it is, and no matter what they are wearing (full disclosure, this wasn’t at issue in this case, but has often been used in “blame the victim” strategies when things like this happen). Women, and some of their allies, took to the streets for a candlelight vigil that resulted in police trying to disperse and, ultimately, arresting women at the vigil. The irony is, almost, too much to process.
As the British people begin to grapple with patriarchal norms and attitudes that have been in place for more than a thousand years, we must also acknowledge that there is no hero for Sarah Everard. There is no white knight—or dark knight for that matter—that will swoop down and save her on the most terrible night of her life.
This is the connection I am making to Batman and what he means to us. For far too long we have clung to the notion that those in power somehow represent our salvation. Bruce Wayne is described as a generational Billionaire (inherited wealth from several generations prior), white male, standing six feet two inches tall, a genius in intellect, and a master of many martial arts (reportedly over 127 different types). He is the embodiment of male dominance in both the physical and business arenas. His darker sides can be forgiven because they are driven by his own quest to beat the demons that helped bring about his creation: the guilt and trauma from witnessing the murder of his parents.
The world in which we live is not about good and evil. It is not about truth, justice, or how values and a code might drive us to better outcomes. The legacy of power is one where the powerful do not protect the weak, but rather abuse it for greater gain. Or, worse, power looks the other way—choosing to not acknowledge the face of human suffering. Where “what’s good for me” is always the priority for those in power.
We know that the scions of wealthy families—like royalty—who have known wealth and privilege for generations, become similar to the photocopies of an original photograph. Each version further degrading from the one before it. As Americans, we have only just begun to process what those with the entitlement of financial wealth and political power have done, and are still doing, to the vast majority of us. The so-called “billionaire’s” of our modern age do more to protect their own interests than to help those in need (one might argue Amazon fits neatly into this category). I can’t help but wonder if Bruce Wayne’s vast fortune could have been used to create programs to lift people out of poverty, provide stable jobs, and provide adequate housing and food for the citizens of Gotham. Perhaps solving the root cause of the problems that created the criminals that Batman felt he needed to fight.
When the character of Bruce Wayne was developed, he was the ideal altruist. The white male vision of supremacy and the reason why being rich, white, male, and physically superior to your peers was better than any other alternative. But the rich white male has let us down.
In business he pays himself vast sums of money in forms that enable him to pay far less in taxes than the rest of us—proportionally speaking. The business white male does not hold his government accountable with his power and influence to make sure that all “others” have equal access to food, housing, and healthcare. Instead, he blames those same “others” for not working as hard as he did while supporting laws and systems that prevent the “others” from having the chance to be as successful as him. And when it comes to accountability, he buys his way into access and out of trouble for himself, his friends, and his own descendants. Without ever being self-aware enough to know that the fact that he CAN buy his way, means that the systems and institutions that surround him and prop him up are, inherently, corrupt and broken.
The political white male, unfortunately, closely resembles his business counterpart. The more vain, corrupt, and self-interested he is, the greater chance he has at success. He uses political power to his benefit, admonishing those who come after him to “put in their time” and to respect his accomplishments. His power can be absolute at times often leading to his own cognitive dissonance when it comes to how he conducts his own actions. If the allegations prove to be true, we see Andrew Cuomo as the poster-child of this version of the privileged white male. According to the allegations, he used his office, and his power, to use women in the worst way possible while expressing outrage at the people who were doing exactly the same thing.
The white male in power enjoys the best of all aspects of life including his entertainment, his food, his travel, and his possessions. And yet, in all the centuries he has been in power, he has not been able to address systemic racism, sexism, inequality, rape, abuse, or even just access to affordable quality healthcare (One would think that the last one is a pretty low bar … one would think). But his children attend the best schools, he enjoys larger and larger homes, drives the most expensive cars, and continues to enjoy the best that life has to offer.
Unfortunately, this is what Batman represents today. He is the reason why someone in power can publicly lie about anything—to serve his own interest—and suffer no repercussions. What’s worse, he has convinced the large majority of white males, who don’t enjoy his privilege and power, that his entitlement should extend to them. Absolving them from being better men and perpetuating unhealthy stereotypes about what it means to be male in modern society. In truth, we are witnessing a Batman that has morphed into the Joker, a psychopath, in a Batman costume.
Item from the author’s personal collection.
The idea that this white man in power can save us is ludicrous. He cannot save himself. If the allegations prove true, the white man with power—in the form of a police badge—was not the hero of Sarah Everard’s story. He was the villain. The white man in power—in the form of President of the United States—did not make this country great. He instead chose to divide it further and create a society where people live in two very different realities while he benefitted personally at the taxpayer’s expense. The white man in power—in the form of business leaders—have prospered in an unprecedented rise in stock market values through a pandemic that saw the death of more than half a million people, high unemployment, evictions of the most vulnerable populations, and setbacks to classes of Americans that will take decades to recover from.
This is what the Batman now represents.
At the end of the Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, a comic that is “widely considered to be one of the greatest and most influential Batman stories ever published,” Batman fakes his death and bands together with a group of followers to continue to right the wrongs of society. The message, to me, is that power is not in the hands of one man. Specifically, one rich, white man. But it is in the people that are willing to band together to fight for what is right. Those are the women who turned out in London and were forced to disperse by the London Metropolitan Police and, by extension, the British Government. The women who were arrested by those police who were supposed to be protecting Sarah Everard.
The success of our way of life does not rest in the hands of the very few rich, white, and powerful men who have held on to power at the expense of women, people of color, and everyone who doesn’t fit their very narrow version of normal or ideal. Adolf Hitler attempted that experiment and, thankfully, failed miserably. However, we must acknowledge that his experiment is still influencing our society today. Almost 100 years later.
Power belongs in the hands of all those who continue to fight for equality, fairness, justice, and safety. The power of diversity in race, ethnic background, gender, sexual identify, and socioeconomic status is what we need now. The power to tear down established norms that have been sexist, racist, and exclusionary. The power to make society safe—both psychologically and physically—for those who are not male, white, rich, and physically powerful. The power to continue to hold those wielding it accountable.
The Dark Knight is not the hero we deserve nor the hero we need. Everyone who is NOT rich, white, male, or physically dominant are the heroes we deserve and need right now.
- M
This essay represents the opinion of the writer and should be considered as such. Any thoughts or statements about persons real or imagined are opinions.
Copyright © 2021 - Malcolm Bolivar. All Rights Reserved.