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“Bruce Wayne’s Traumatic Past and Batman’s New History: Ego-Ideal and Ideal Ego in the Batman Origin Myth”

Kelly Duquette Honors Thesis, Spring 2010 Director: Terry Harpold Reader: Donald Ault

CONTINUOUS AND COMPLEX CHARACTERS

The continuous and yet episodic nature of the superhero comic genre requires characters and storylines that can withstand the test of time. A caped, tight-wearing crusader with an affinity for theatrics can only protect the fictitious population of an equally fictitious city for so long. Eventually, storylines dry up and the hero’s sensational qualities are exhausted, unless an element of more profound significance is added which can take the character and storyline in a new direction. The modern Batman is a prime example. A handsome billionaire’s benevolence and bravery is no longer—if perhaps it ever was—enough to keep the contemporary reader interested. Such a storyline may be renovated with extreme and supernatural elements,1 but a basic problem remains: to ask the contemporary reader to continue to accept that a grown man dresses in a bat costume for altruistic reasons alone (to “fight crime,” “save his city,” etc.) is an unreasonable demand. The superhero must, like the reader, evolve over time, leaving some qualities behind and taking up new ones: the world the contemporary reader lives in, much like

Gotham City, is too gritty and too complex to accept an unchanging hero. To keep readers engaged in the form—that is, to continue to generate the drama of the comic book hero—the

1 The Batman universe is home to various supervillains; for example Killer Croc, a humanoid lizard with massive strength (Detective Comics #523, 1983), or Solomon Grundy, a zombie creature who returns from the dead after being murdered and thrown into the swamp (All-American Comics #3, 1941). 2 hero needs a complex psychological past much like the backstory Frank Miller recreates for

Bruce Wayne in Batman: Year One (March–June 1987). Miller reinvents a Batman origin myth that revamps Bruce Wayne’s violent, traumatic past and gives Batman a motive for his actions that is inexhaustible: the tragic slaying of young Bruce’s parents in front of his eyes is a traumatic event in Bruce’s young life that will be replayed over and over again in Bruce’s adult consciousness.

BATMAN’S RETROACTIVE HISTORY

Contrary to conventional comic book form, Batman creator Bob Kane and writer Bill

Finger decided to stray from tradition by omitting the typical “elaborate explanation of the hero’s background” in the first Batman issue of Detective Comics (Daniels 31). Six months after

Batman’s introduction in Detective Comics #27, Kane and Finger released the Batman origin story in Detective Comics #33, in a narrative titled “The Batman and How He Came to Be”

(Daniels 31). This two-page preface to the main adventure of the issue, “The Batman Wars

Against the Dirigible Doom,” relates that as a boy Bruce Wayne was orphaned by the senseless murder of his mother and father by a street thug, thus providing a scenario sufficiently traumatic to make it plausible for a crime fighter to dress “like a bat because one flew in his window”

(Daniels 31). 3

The origin myth of Batman: Year One is fundamentally similar to the 1939 backstory; however

Miller reinvents the significance of the story with a few elemental additions. As Batman historian Les Daniels writes, Miller’s “principle change was one of tone” making Gotham City less of a “playground for colorful psychotics” and more a “bleak site colored by corruption”

(Daniels 157). Furthermore, Batman: Year One marks the first appearance of Officer James

Gordon, on honest policeman who moves to Gotham City at the same time that Bruce Wayne returns home after twelve years abroad. Miller’s darker, bleaker, and deeply psychological redirection of the origin myth opens Batman up to new generative effects, and to more significant analysis and interpretation. 4

PSYCHO-ORIGINS: BRUCE WAYNE’S TRAUMATIC REPETITIONS

In Miller’s re-creation, Bruce’s inability to understand his parents’ senseless murders prompts him to leave Gotham City in search of answers and a purpose for his shattered life.

Bruce’s mission is already clear—he will avenge his parents’ deaths by fighting Gotham’s criminals—but he does not arrive at the proper method of doing so until he returns home and assumes his Bat persona. In this essay, I will draw on Cathy Caruth’s psychoanalytic study of trauma, Unclaimed Experience, to analyze how the traumatic genesis of Bruce Wayne–Batman establishes an inexhaustible new beginning for the narrative arc of the Caped Crusader, and one that is capable of generating further character and narrative complexity. I will show, moreover, that Freud’s concepts of the ego and the ego-ideal, and Lacan’s theories of the mirror stage and the relation of ideal ego to ego ideal, can be used to explain why Bruce Wayne unconsciously continues a life in the costumed form of Batman.

According to Caruth, trauma, in its general definition, is “the response to an unexpected or overwhelming violent event or events that are not fully grasped as they occur, but return later in repeated flashbacks, nightmares, and other repetitive phenomena” (91). The senseless murders of Thomas and Martha Wayne in the presence of their young son marks, clearly, a traumatic event for Bruce Wayne in this sense of the term. The event is both unexpected and overwhelmingly violent. An unidentified criminal approaches the Wayne family in a dark alley outside the theater and shoots Thomas and Martha Wayne from point blank range, leaving young

Bruce alone next to the lifeless bodies of his parents.2

2 Batman #47 identifies the criminal as Joe Chill, a petty mugger and later small-time crime boss. Joe Chill reappears in Miller’s Batman: Year Two (1987) and Christopher Nolan’s film Batman Begins (2005) as the criminal responsible for the Wayne murders. Tim Burton’s film Batman (1989) identifies the killer as Jack Napier/the Joker (Jack Nicholson). 5

Bruce Wayne kneels, stunned and motionless, next to the bodies of Gotham City’s beloved philanthropists, unable to grasp what has occurred. His inability to comprehend the experience not only establishes this initial episode of the history of Batman, but also and more importantly guarantees a structural basis for Bruce Wayne to begin and carry on a life as the Caped Crusader of the Batman canon. This becomes clear if we compare elements of this beginning to the models of traumatic experience and response proposed by Freud, Lacan, and Caruth.

The original meaning of the Greek word trauma is “wound,” referring originally to “an injury inflicted on a body” (Caruth 3). In Freud’s work and in subsequent psychoanalytic and psychiatric literature, the term trauma is more broadly understood, as a “wound inflicted not upon the body but [also] upon the mind” (Caruth 3). The night Bruce Wayne witnesses his parents’ murders his mind suffers a permanent wound in this sense. The infliction of the traumatic wound, according to Freud, is experienced too soon and too unexpectedly to be “fully 6 known;” in young Bruce’s case, the significance of this formative event will not become available to conscious understanding; rather, the trauma imposes itself as a brute event, returning in repeated nightmares and flashbacks (Caruth 4). His nightmares, flashbacks, and memories of the murders recur throughout the Batman canon, suggesting that what returns to haunt Bruce is

“not only the reality of the violent event but also the reality of the way that its violence has not yet been fully known” (Caruth 6).

Examples of Bruce’s recurring nightmares, flashbacks, and memories are evident in other texts of the Batman canon, such as Grant Morrison’s Batman: Arkham Asylum (1989) and Sam

Hamm’s Batman: Blind Justice (1992). In Arkham Asylum (1989), a hostage situation elicits a dark memory for Batman. As the Joker holds a gun to one of Arkham Asylum’s doctors,

Batman flashes back to the scene of his parents’ murders. In Morrison’s interpretation, Batman first remembers embarrassing his parents by crying during the movie Bambi when Bambi’s mother is shot (30). Bruce’s recurring nightmares are also illustrated in Blind Justice (1992).

The first chapter, titled “The Sleep of Reason,” begins with Bruce asleep in bed. Though Bruce is “the master of his body,” at times he cannot control the “horrors” that “come to light” and the

“old demons that reemerge” in the last “fitful seconds before consciousness” (Hamm 2). A nightmarish collage of images, including a gun, Martha Wayne’s pearl necklace, and young

Bruce’s stunned face, fill the panel as Bruce “must once again confront the smiling fiend who has destroyed his life—the fiend he has become” (Hamm 2). Miller’s Batman: Year One

(March–June 1987) and Jeph Loeb’s Batman: Dark Victory (1999–2000) offer evidence of the unexpected and overwhelming nature of the Wayne murders, specifically in the form of the structure of repetition that is characteristic of trauma. 7

In nearly every Batman origin story the murder of Bruce Wayne’s parents is re- experienced in nightmares or flashbacks. More precisely, the original event is depicted almost exclusively in the flashbacks; the Batman reader is rarely shown the murders as they occur chronologically in Bruce’s life. In this way, and crucially for my argument, Batman readers only know of the traumatic events of Bruce’s history through his psychic repetitions of them. Miller’s influential origin story illustrates this repetitive structure. Year One follows Bruce back to

Wayne Manor after venturing into Gotham City’s red light district on a “reconnaissance mission” (Miller 8). Contrary to his efforts to “avoid combat,” Bruce returns home bruised, stabbed, and shot (Miller 8). Near death, Bruce sits in the study staring broodingly at a statue of his father. A jump in the episode, from color to black and white, signals a flashback to “The

Mark of Zorro” and the fateful “walk that night” (Miller 21). The use of black and white expressly situates the memory in a medial past, in that illustrating the memory in this style, reminiscent of black and white film, appears to establish the Batman myth not only as part of

Miller’s storyline, but more profoundly as a “throwback” to the era of black and white film, signaling the longevity of the psychogenetic scene (Bruce’s parents’ murdered in front of him) in the entire Batman canon. The series of black and white images depict Bruce’s repetition of the violent event. The first panel shows Bruce and his parents in the theater, the second panel shows

“the man with hollow eyes” pointing a gun at Thomas Wayne, and the third and fourth panels depict the shootings of Thomas and Martha Wayne, respectively (Miller 21). Since the murders occurred too unexpectedly to be made available to Bruce’s consciousness at the time of the event, they are repeated in the flashback following Bruce’s close encounter with death. Bruce’s confrontation with violence (Bruce is shot by policemen in the East End) and his consequent near-death experience at Wayne Manor cause him to reflect on his life. His hovering thoughts of 9 death, impatience, and waiting, “Father… I’m afraid I may have to die tonight. I’ve tried to be patient. I’ve tried to wait,” suggest an ultimatum that is implicitly shaping his actions (Miller 20).

Bruce’s thought, “I’d rather die… than wait… another hour,” demands an answer; he can either die or discover in this moment what to “use… to make them [criminals] afraid” (Miller 20). The ultimatum and the impending uncertainty of death flash his life before his eyes, culminating in the epiphenomenal, genetic scene.

Following the initial prologue, the first chapter of Jeph Loeb’s Dark Victory titled “War” begins also with a black and white flashback to the horrific killings of Bruce’s parents. Bruce remembers feelings of loneliness while staring at the lifeless bodies and afterwards when family friends offer him empty condolences at the funeral. The first image of the story illustrates young

Bruce Wayne shocked and wide-eyed in the dark with the phrase, “I am alone” appearing above him (Loeb 17). The use of past tense in the following voiceover narration is evidence that the 10 murders are represented here as a repetitive memory and are not occurring in chronology with the events of the storyline. Bruce’s recollection of the violent event is vivid and detailed:

I still remember how loud the gun sounded. How bright the gun flare was. Then,

not knowing what to do. If I should run. If I could somehow stop him… but it

was too late. And all at once, I was alone. (Loeb 18)

This depiction of the murders supports three important elements of Caruth’s trauma theory.

There is first, the repetition of the trauma through flashback, second, the unexpected and overwhelming nature of the event, and third, feelings of shock and a radical exclusion of the event from consciousness. Unlike the flashback of Year One, the memory in Dark Victory literalizes the traumatized individual’s feelings of shock and inability to communicate the event or to bring it into consciousness. Bruce’s feelings of “not knowing what to do” and of being “too late” suggest that the event happened all too quickly for him to take in its significance in its historical setting (Loeb 18).

Bruce’s feelings of being “too late” to stop or even respond to the violence, Freud suggests, is a “breach in the mind—the conscious awareness of the threat to life” (Caruth 62).

Freud writes that this breach, however, is not caused by the “pure quantity of stimulus” but by

“fright,” or the lack of preparedness to “take in a stimulus that comes too quickly” (Caruth 62).

What stuns Bruce and leaves him frozen in the scene is not that his parents’ or his own life have been threatened, but that the threat is recognized in his mind “one moment too late” (Caruth 62).

Thus, his shock, or his psychic relation to the threat of death, is not a direct experience of it, but the “missing of the experience,” according to Caruth’s formula (62). Young Bruce Wayne’s failure to directly experience his parents’ murders—reinforced by the comic author’s framing of the event as a flashback, paradoxically, forms the basis of subsequent “repetition[s] of the 11 nightmare” of the event (Caruth 62). When the adult Bruce-Batman experiences these repetitive memories, as illustrated in Year One and Dark Victory, they figure his attempt to “master what was never fully grasped in the first place” (Caruth 62).

Caruth points out that not having truly known the threat of death in the past, “the survivor

[of trauma] is forced, continually, to confront it over and over again” (62). Bruce Wayne, having survived the threat of death but never having truly processed it, must continually confront the horrific scene, which becomes thus a model for his actions and agency in the future (62).

Because his psyche cannot directly grasp the possibility of his own death, his survival becomes, paradoxically, an endless testimony to the impossibility of living (62). What Freud and Caruth suggest is that “what one returns to in the flashback is not the incomprehensibility of one’s near death, but the very incomprehensibility of one’s own survival” (64). Repetition, in other words, is not simply the attempt to grasp that one has almost died but, more fundamentally and enigmatically, the very attempt “to claim one’s own survival” in the wake of the trauma (Caruth

64). If Bruce Wayne’s subsequent history—as Batman—is to be understood as the history of a trauma, it is best grasped in this light, as an endless attempt to assume the burden of his survival in his own way and on his own terms.

A TRAUMATIC BREAK: BRUCE WAYNE’S DEPARTURE AND RETURN TO GOTHAM

Before Miller’s darker twist, and even still today, the psychogenesis of Batman has become oversimplified in fan culture. Many contemporary Batman enthusiasts attribute the creation of Bruce Wayne’s alter ego to simple vengeance. Though these details are objectively true, the origin of Batman is more complex than a simple revenge narrative, i.e., a young man’s desire to wage war on Gotham City’s criminals in return for his parents’ murder. The 12 misreading of Batman’s motives in this case stems from the fact that Bruce Wayne’s history and

Batman’s history are one and the same. These two histories, (Bruce’s traumatic past and future as Batman) however, are not continuous. The continuity of Bruce’s ostensibly happy childhood is violently interrupted by the tragic slaying of his parents, turning a potentially peaceable narrative into a deeply traumatic one; the Wayne murders not only end Bruce’s blissful childhood but also instill in him the need to leave Gotham. More accurately, Bruce Wayne’s departure and his return to Gotham City twelve years later marks a simultaneous break and a new beginning in Bruce Wayne’s life.

Discussing Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, Caruth emphasizes Freud’s observation that histories of populations and individuals alike can be histories of trauma. Freud’s book centers on the history of the Jews, emphasizing that the Hebrews’ exodus from Egypt and return to Canaan was not simply a return, but was more importantly, a departure (Caruth 13). Caruth observes

Freud believed the reason for the Hebrews’ return to Canaan was not the “preservation of

Hebrew freedom, but of the monotheistic god; that is, it is not so much the return to a freedom of the past as a departure into a newly established future—the future of monotheism” (14). In

Freud’s rethinking of Jewish origins, Caruth explains, “the future is no longer continuous with the past but is united with it through a profound discontinuity” (14). The “exodus from Egypt,” she points out, shapes the meaning of the Jewish past and is a departure that is both “a radical break and the establishment of a history” (14). The Hebrews’ captivity and return to Canaan initiates their history as Jews, and this beginning of a Jewish history is thus “available to them only through the experience of a trauma” (15). The Jews’ experience of trauma, the “forgetting

(and return) of the deeds of Moses,” constitutes the link uniting “the old with the new god, the people that leave Egypt with the people that ultimately make up the nation of the Jews” (15). 13

Freud’s suggestion of the possibility of history in the nature of traumatic departure can, I propose be applied to the similarly interrupted history of Bruce Wayne, and the genesis of Batman in

Bruce’s dramatic departure from Gotham City after his parents’ deaths.

Following Freud’s model of the historical logic of trauma, it becomes apparent that

Bruce’s traumatic experience and traumatic departure from Gotham City are analogous to

Freud’s account of the Jews’ exodus and return, both in structure and function. Miller’s Year

One begins with twenty-five-year-old Bruce Wayne’s return to Gotham City after twelve years abroad (3). His thought, “Mother. Father. It’s good to be back,” establishes the framework of

Bruce’s departure and his subsequent return to home in Gotham City (Miller 4) as elements of the same (dis)continuous historical arc; this opening apostrophe is evidence that Bruce identifies

Wayne Manor with his parents—which is to say, with both their absence and presence in memory. For Bruce, returning home to Wayne Manor is “good” because it is his symbolic reunion with them, but it must also be disturbing, as the reunion can only be symbolic.

The crucial flashback scene occurs when Bruce is in the Wayne Manor study. He broods over how long he has waited to find the best means by which to fight crime in Gotham City. He reflects that he has waited eighteen years, the length of time that has passed since his parents were murdered (when he was seven years old). This reflection elicits a flashback to the dark alley where his parents were murdered, causing him to relive the trauma in memory (Miller 21).

We learn from this timeline that Bruce left Gotham City at the age of thirteen, six years after his parents’ murder.

The reason for Bruce’s departure is not made explicit in Miller’s text but is hinted at on a number of occasions. As he descends into Gotham City by airplane he regrets not having taken the train so that he can “see the enemy” (Miller 2); literally before he has even set foot on 14

Gotham soil, he already has a goal set in place and an enemy in mind. Bruce’s thoughts soon after, while practicing combat skills, also suggest a new mission and future for him: “I’m not ready. I have the means, the skill—but not the method…” (Miller 7). His determination to take up the new role as a crime fighter is further evidenced by his “reconnaissance mission” into the dark corners of Gotham City (Miller 8). In these exercises, Bruce inches closer to a new beginning as Batman, but still is not ready; he has not discovered a way to secure his

“anonymity” given that the murder of his parents is “a matter of public record” (Miller 8). This suggests—somewhat unconvincingly—that his chief reason for donning a disguise is to disconnect the death of his parents, in the past, from his actions in the present: Batman as the stereotypical anonymous agent of vengeance. But it must also be a simple alibi for making “a change in clothing and complexion” and to wear a mask as Batman; in other words, to assume a new persona that responds, specifically to the traumatic event of his childhood (Miller 8).

Bruce’s decision to assume the Batman identity is, fundamentally, an illogical response generated by his childhood trauma; there is nothing inherent in that event in the distant past that battling Gotham’s underworld in the present can address. Yet, that there appears to be a causal connection—for Bruce—suggests a strong, yet complex link between the childhood trauma and the genesis of the Batman identity; Bruce’s departure from Gotham was a result of his trauma, and his new mission to fight crime upon his return links his future as Batman to his past as traumatized Bruce Wayne. In other words, the link operates entirely within Bruce’s psychic economy, and not in an objective criminal or policial order.

The link, however, is not continuous. Following Freud’s logic in his rethinking of Jewish beginnings, we see that Bruce’s future as a costumed crime fighter, Batman, is no longer continuous with his traumatic past but is united with it through a profound psychic discontinuity. 15

Bruce’s departure and absence from Gotham, during which period he learns combat skills and methods, marks both a “radical break” from the historical continuity of the pre-Batman Bruce

Wayne, and the subsequent history of Batman. Bruce’s absence and return to Gotham City cultivates the history of Batman; his twelve years abroad afford him the required time to learn and practice combat. However, his absence and return are “precisely available” to him only through the experience of trauma (Caruth 15). Put in simpler terms, it is the trauma of witnessing his parents’ murders that causes Bruce to leave Gotham and allows him to return twelve years later. The childhood trauma of losing his parents constitutes the link that unites the old Bruce Wayne with the new one as Batman. The paradoxical logic of the traumatic beginning is this: the event that connects the two lives of Bruce Wayne, before and after his parents’ deaths, and in- and out of costume after their deaths, is a disconnection, which the twelve years’ absence merely makes plain.

This (discontinuous) link connecting Bruce’s childhood trauma and the Batman identity takes is expressed in the Batman comic universe in an inexhaustible, cyclical form; Bruce’s recurring memories, nightmares, and flashbacks as a result of traumatic experience feed

Batman’s motivations, and the costumed Batman identity, conversely, serves Bruce with a constant reminder of the childhood trauma. Jeph Loeb’s story, Batman: The Long Halloween

(1996-1997), offers abundant evidence of this vicious cycle. Loeb’s story concerns primarily a well-established Batman who after years of crime fighting still bases his understanding of his mission on a “promise” that he attaches to a traumatic origin:

I made a promise to my parents that I would rid the city of the evil that took their

lives. No matter what that evil looks like or becomes. I believe someday I will

make good on that promise. I have to. I believe in BATMAN. (Loeb 364–5). 16

In the naïve vengeance model, this may seem a reasonable—if violent—wager.

However, Bruce’s promise is merely his own rationalization of continuing a life as Batman.

Psychoanalytic theory has already begun to explain the actual reason why Bruce is entrapped in a cyclical double identity. It is important to reemphasize Caruth’s theory of “missing the experience.” Seen from this perspective, Bruce is not motivated—or not motivated chiefly—by feelings of vengeance; he actually continues a life as Batman because it affords him an endless number of opportunities to (re)grasp the traumatic event of his parents’ murders. Since young

Bruce did not take the traumatic experience in as it occurred, as an adult he looks for a way to grasp it—without, however, exhausting its significance (this is fundamental to the logic of trauma as Freud and Caruth define it). Donning the bat suit and acting out violently against fearful criminals allows Bruce, not to revenge his parents’ murders, but to reenact the scene of his own trauma over and over again. Though Bruce claims he must continue on as Batman because of a promise, the Batman identity truly persists because it is a repetitious response to trauma.

We are now able to understand the significance of the delayed formation that constituted

Bruce’s training as Batman. His departure from Gotham City is a metaphor of the disconnection that shapes the identity that he will later assume as Batman. He spends the eighteen years following his parents’ murders and twelve years abroad planning and training to become a symbolic agent that can take on Gotham’s criminal elements. Yet, though Bruce has the mission in mind upon his return, he is not yet ready to become the desired symbol of justice because

“something’s [still] missing” (Miller 7). This missing element occurs to Bruce as he stares at the statue of his dead father in their shared study at Wayne Manor. In Miller and Mazzucchelli’s rendering, the scene situates Thomas Wayne in effigy to the left and Bruce sitting in a chair to 17 the right, a thick, dark line of windowpane separating them as a mirror image. A frightening figure of a bat crashes through the window just then, interrupting Bruce’s flashback to the scene of his parents’ murders. The dark creature (conveniently) lands atop the statue of Thomas

Wayne, enveloping the human form with its wings.3 The new image, both bat and man, stares back at Bruce, provoking him to affirm that he, too, “shall become a bat” (Miller 22). Bruce’s assumption of the Batman persona follows after an image of Bruce’s bloody hand ringing a bell for Alfred. It is important to note that the assumption of the new Batman identity occurs because the bat provides Bruce with symbolic meaning. The bat’s arrival in and of itself means nothing; it is just as empty as the gesture of dressing up in a cape and mask and fighting a criminal underworld, ostensibly in response to a wrong committed long before. However, the bat supplies

Bruce with the signifier he requires to name his new history and his new identity. Of course

Bruce does not literally transform into a bat; the bat is merely the symbol he applies to his new crime-fighting persona. The bat, functioning as signifier, designates a new historical continuity, giving a proper name, Batman, to Bruce’s new subjectivity. The reflecting images of Bruce and his father paired with the assumption of a new identity recall elements of Jacques Lacan’s

“Mirror Stage” scenario. Lacan’s model of the nascent subject’s affirmation of bodily and psychic integrity explains how Bruce Wayne’s assumption of the Batman image situates a new, post-traumatic ego for Bruce Wayne, and the formation of the ideal-ego in the figure of the

Batman.

3 This scene shares obvious similarities with its antecedent in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven;” the poem’s narrator comes to believe that he has received a kind of message in the figure of the Raven, of his future state of being in the wake of the loss of his beloved. 18

THE BAT IN THE MIRROR: BATMAN AS IDEAL EGO

Lacan describes the mirror stage “as an identification… namely the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes [assume] an image—an image that is seemingly predestined to have an effect at this phase” (4). In the genetic scene of the mirror stage the child looks into the mirror and recognizes the image as her or his own reflection. In an attempt to acquire control over the image—in other words, to join together the two entities it confronts in the scene, its own fractious body and the mirrored double—the child enacts a “series of gestures in which he playfully experiences the relationship between the movements made in the image and the reflected environment, and between his virtual complex and the reality it duplicates— namely, the child’s own body, and the persons and even things around him” (Lacan 3). Lacan proposes that the identification, transformation, and assumption of the reflective image typically takes place around the age of eighteen months when the child succeeds in recognizing the image in the mirror as her or his own and “jubilantly” assumes the image, eliding thus the real difference between the body and its reflection (Lacan 4). The assumption occurs with jubilation because the child sees an image in the mirror that is whole, cohesive, and perfect, and is therefore happy to find to be her or his own. The child assumes the image as the I, “precipitated in a primordial form, prior to being objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other, and before language restores to it, in the universal, its function as subject” (Lacan 4). In this respect, the assumption of the mirror image as identical with a presumed—but illusory— integrity of the real body, serves as the foundation of an (imagined) original state of being.

Lacan calls the cohesive, unified form the “ideal-I” because it situates the “agency of the ego” and because its form is so idealized in the imagination of the subject that it can never be 20 truly attained (Lacan 4).4 The ideal form, or the ideal-ego appears to the subject as “the contour of his statue that freezes it and in a symmetry that reverses it” (Lacan 4). The statuesque form opposes the “turbulent movements with which the subject feels he animates it” (Lacan 4). Lacan explains that these two aspects of the subject’s appearance in the mirror, its statue-like quality and the movements he feels animate it, compose the “gestalt” of the emerging subject (4). The gestalt symbolizes the I’s “mental permanence” and at the same time prefigures its “alienating destination” (Lacan 5). More interestingly, the gestalt, according to Lacan, is “replete with the correspondences that unite the I with the statue onto which man projects himself” and “the phantoms that dominate him” (5). Simply put, the gestalt is filled with correspondences that unite the subject with the idealized image, onto which it projects itself and with the internal disturbances that control it in an (for Lacan, illusory) unified form.

The events leading up to Bruce’s decision to assume the Batman identity can be considered to correspond to the period of Batman’s infancy, during which, in the mirror stage scenario, he has yet to assume the image of bodily-psychic integrity. When Bruce returns to

Wayne Manor after his twenty-block descent into Gotham’s hellish East End, the identity known as the Batman has not yet been formed—literally, it has not yet been seen and named, as it will be seen (and named) in the fusion of the bat and the bust of his dead father. Bruce enters the red light district dressed in casual clothing; his only method of disguise is a fabricated scar on his cheek. He will not discover the proper disguise (cape and cowl) until after he returns home from this “reconnaissance mission.” Crucially, Bruce does not see the bat until it crashes through the window of his study and only names the new crime-fighting identity Batman after he takes in the symbolic meaning of the bat.

4 Lacan would soon drop the term “Ideal-I”, in favor of “ideal ego” [le moi idéal]. 21

However, as Caruth’s model suggests, Bruce’s traumatic departure from Gotham initiates the fundamental turn, or infancy, of Batman’s history, in that it marks a disconnection between the two histories. The Bruce Wayne (or Batman in the infantile stage) that visits the “enemy camp,” much like Lacan’s infant of six months, attempts to acquire control over his image— fractured by the trauma of his parents’ deaths—by enacting gestures to try and understand the relationship between the movements of his own image and the movements reflected to him in his environment. During his tour of the Gotham underworld, Bruce tries to assert control over his new crime-fighter image by provoking pimps and prostitutes. These gestures are aggressive and violent, and they represent pre-Batman Bruce Wayne’s way of understanding his actions in relation to the movements around him. Of course this attempt to control the pre-Batman image

(merely an aggressive, rich guy in casual clothing, playing a crime fighter) is unproductive; it leads him back to Wayne Manor banged up, bruised, and badly wounded.

Bruce still has not reached the identification, transformation, and assumption experienced by the jubilant infant in Lacan’s model when he arrives home. It is evident in his constant reference to his dead father, as if he were speaking directly to him, that Bruce has still not separated himself from the parental image. He is constantly seeking guidance and approval from the father figure as he stares at the face of Thomas Wayne’s statue:

Father… I’m afraid I may have to die tonight. I’ve tried to be patient… But I have

to know. How, father? How do I do it? …yes, father. I have everything but

patience. (Miller 20)

Bruce’s apostrophe illustrates that he has not assumed an image of his own as he implores the father to direct his actions. However, the jubilant assumption of the image does occur once the bat violently crashes through the window of the study. The bat, which frightened Bruce as a boy, 22 positions itself atop the statue of Thomas Wayne. The resulting composite, half bat and half

Thomas Wayne, stares back at Bruce as if the mourning son were looking into a mirror.

Moreover, the composite resembles the peculiar half-solution of the disconnection as a kind of connection—the image of the hybrid bat-man provides the signifier that joins the two halves of

Bruce’s disconnected history, and a name for—but not an explanation or resolution of—his trauma. It is significant that the glaring image is a hybrid body—a bat-man—because it simultaneously symbolizes both an Oedipal fear of the father (signified in the frightening form of the bat) and an Oedipal identification with the father (in the statue of Thomas Wayne). The last apostrophic claim, “…yes. Father. I shall become a bat,” signals his jubilant assumption of this new, integral image, part bat, part man, as his own and—importantly—by virtue of a signifier that he takes on in the place of his father—an image that is no longer in direct relation to his father (Miller 22).

Bruce identifies with the Batman image as his own and agrees to become it, assuming the image and transforming into Batman two panels later, in line with Lacan’s model. The unified form of

Batman, following Lacan’s line of thought, becomes for Bruce Wayne, the “ideal-I.”

Batman is the idealized, integral ego of Bruce Wayne, unencumbered by the emotional and psychical trauma that haunts the pre-Batman Bruce. Bruce’s history is a traumatic one, but

Batman’s history is not; rather it emerges from trauma as a solution to the unfinished psychic business of the traumatic event. The assumed identity functions as ideal ego, also in that it combines traits of the idealized father figure, and the fierce, fear-inspiring figure of the bat. As previously mentioned, Lacan points out that the ideal form occurs to the subject, here Bruce

Wayne, in “the contour of his statue that freezes it and in a symmetry that reverses it” (4). In

Miller’s origin story, Bruce’s reflection or ideal form is literally the statue of Thomas Wayne and bat that stares back at him. The stillness of the bat atop the statue creates a contour, as Lacan suggests, that Bruce can “freeze” and reverse back onto himself (4). It is also interesting to note

Lacan’s interpretation of the gestalt, or the irreducible unified whole that the subject presumes to coincide with its physical and imaginary body. The gestalt simultaneously symbolizes the I’s

“mental permanence” and “prefigures its alienating destination” or more eloquently, signifies the

“correspondences that unite the I with the statue onto which man projects himself” and the

“phantoms that dominate him” (5). The ideal-I, Batman, both symbolizes Bruce’s psychic coherence and continuity as crime fighter and prefigures the alienating destination of Batman, i.e., Batman’s future as Gotham’s masked vigilante-outlaw. Furthermore, the Batman identity, using Lacan’s terms, is the form that unites Bruce (I) with the statue (literally) onto which he projects himself and the “phantoms that dominate him.” The image of the bat atop the father, the mirrored double of the newly-assumed Bat-man, is the simultaneous imaginary projection of the 24 bat that frightened Bruce as a boy, his traumatic history of losing his parents, and the Thomas

Wayne-like hero and image he would like to become.

In Lacanian terms Batman is Bruce’s “ideal-I” (ideal ego), which Lacan insists, is distinguishable from the psychoanalytic concept of the ego-ideal. The ideal ego originates in the

“specular image of the mirror stage” and is a promise of “future synthesis towards which the ego tends, the illusion of unity on which the ego is built” (Evans).5 In other words, the ideal ego is the source of an “imaginary projection” or the illusory image of a unified body, on which example the assumed integrity of the ego is constructed. According to Lacan, the ego-ideal, on the other hand, is the “signifier operating as ideal, an internalized plan of the law, the guide governing the subject’s position in the symbolic order, and hence anticipates secondary

(Oedipal) identification or is a product of that identification” (Evans). The ego-ideal, put another way, is a “symbolic introjection” corresponding to the influence of the father’s authority on the subject (Evans). In the Bruce Wayne/Batman scene of origin, the irreducible image of Batman

(the dark figure with cape and cowl) is the ideal ego, or, the imaginary, illusory image of unity that Bruce sees when he puts on the bat suit. The ego-ideal is the internalized moral code

Batman follows; it is the symbolic representation of justice that governs his actions. Simply put, the ideal ego is the terrifying, fear-inspiring, and just image of Batman, and the ego-ideal is the ethic of Batman, or the bat code that is the philosophical basis of his agency. In this system, the bat functions as the signifier corresponding to the ego-ideal which Bruce introjects so as to anchor his fantasy of ego-integrity. By designating the bat as signifier of the assumed identity’s strict moral code, Bruce extends the fantasy of the ideal ego’s integrity, i.e., Batman’s ethic is sound, strong, and indomitable, and therefore his image is cohesive and permanent as well.

5 As Evans observes, Freud does not always appear to distinguish between ego-ideal and ideal-ego. Lacan’s contribution to these concepts is in claiming that they are clearly distinguishable in the manner that I outline here. 25

PARADOXICAL (DIS)INTEGRITY: BATMAN’S DOUBLE FUNCTION

An interesting characteristic of the ideal ego or “ideal-I” as Lacan refers to it in the

“Mirror Stage” essay, is its fundamentally illusory nature. As Batman, Bruce projects an image that is unified, that represents justice, and that is “able to strike terror” into the hearts of criminals.6 In the reality of the comic universe, Batman’s image on paper is, however, not cohesive, or is inconsistently cohesive. As in other Batman comics, Miller’s Batman: The Dark

Knight Returns (1986) adorns Batman with a multitude of gadgets, many of which are special- purpose tools. The utility belt, containing an array of single-function tools, is a contradiction in and of itself. By being special-purpose and fitted to only one function among many possible functions, they betray any fantasy of a more general, cohesive “utility.” Both The Long

Halloween and Dark Victory depict, moreover, a Batman body that appears broken up in a different way, by bulging, hypertrophied muscles.

6 In the original, pre-Miller origin story the “terrorizing criminals” aspect is the one that Bruce claims as the reason for the bat costume: “Criminals are a superstitious cowardly lot so my disguise must be able to strike terror into their hearts.” (Detective Comics #33, 1939). 26

There is a psychoanalytic explanation for this inconsistency. In Lacanian terms, the mirror stage establishes a “relationship between an organism and its reality” or between the Innenwelt [the inner world] and Umwelt [the outer world], respectively (Lacan 6). In Bruce Wayne–Batman’s case, the paradoxical (dis)integrity of his body—enclosed in a hard carapace, but spilling out in muscles and one-off tools—expresses the relationship between the idealized, unified Batman (a fantasy associated with the Innenwelt) and the tormented, fragmented reality of Bruce Wayne

(the damaged, inconsistent reality of the Umwelt). Furthermore, Lacan refers to the mirror stage as a “drama whose internal pressure pushes precipitously from insufficiency to anticipation” where the subject gets “caught up in the lure of spatial identification” and turns out fantasies that

“proceed from the fragmented image of the body” to constitute an “orthopedic” form of its totality and finally to the “donned armor” of an “alienating identity that will mark [its] entire mental development with its rigid structure” (Lacan 6). In the bat version of this process, Bruce 27

Wayne has been caught up in a lure of identifying himself with the idealized image of Batman and therefore turns out fantasies that proceed from the fragmented image of his own body as

Bruce Wayne (fragmented because of his traumatic past), in turn projected onto the illusory (if internalized in fantasy) form of totality, the suited-up Batman. The illusory form, Batman, then becomes the “donned armor” of an “alienating identity” that rigidly grabs hold of and lends support to Bruce Wayne’s divided psyche so long as he acts as Batman.

Bruce’s projection of fragmentation onto Batman, as mentioned, results in a Batman body that is fragmented in shape by outlandish muscularity and excessive gadgetry. The illusory form,

Batman, therefore is a walking contradiction; it is meant to radiate strength and cohesion, but falls short, as it is fundamentally an exaggerated amassment of muscle and weaponry. The outward appearance of paradoxical (dis)integrity is matched internally, as well. Images of Bruce in partial disguise depict the paradoxical (dis)integrity of the Bruce Wayne/Batman identity. In

Jeph Loeb’s Dark Victory, Batman returns to the bat cave after his interrogation of the Riddler while investigating the “Holiday” murders. An underground discussion with Alfred, Bruce’s faithful butler, reveals Bruce/Batman’s mistaken suspicion that Harvey Dent/Two-Face is responsible for the murders. As Bruce removes the cowl from his head, he admits to Alfred that he was “nearly ready to tell Harvey” just before his “accident” the truth about “who I was… about my parents… all of it” (Loeb 75).7 Bruce/Batman, half-in, half-out of the bat costume expresses guilt for not having trusted Harvey. Bruce dismally speculates the possibility that if he had revealed his identity to him, Harvey may not have “pushed himself so hard – he might have trusted me more, if I trusted him…” (Loeb 75). Bruce/Batman’s self consciousness in this transitional moment casts doubt on the integrity of the ideal ego, Batman. Shown in half-

7 The Long Halloween, the prequel to Dark Victory, attributes Harvey Dent’s transformation into the villain, Two- Face to a gruesome “accident” when crime boss Salvatore Maroni throws acid into Harvey’s face. 28 costume in these scenes, Bruce/Batman is neither Bruce nor Batman; he cannot completely embody the psyche of either persona; he is stuck in the “in between” fighting back and forth between his two identities. Bruce/Batman’s self-doubt in this situation suggests the ideal ego’s fragility and paradoxically-unstable (dis)integrity. Lacan’s use of the phrases “donned armor” and “alienating identity” thus appear especially relevant to the Bruce Wayne–Batman situation.

These terms seem to describe Batman’s costume perfectly; he dons literal protective armor and a multitude of gadgetry; the Batman identity is specifically alienating in that it serves only the purpose of fighting crime and affords no other satisfactions. Year One, The Dark Knight

Returns, and The Long Halloween all offer images of Batman that are fragmented, but in which he seems to be trying to appear cohesive by way of his “donned armor.”

In Miller’s origin story, for example, elaborate images of flying contraptions and mechanized wings allow Batman to soar above Gotham City. The hang-glider contraption appears to be an unnatural extension of Batman’s body. Batman’s upper body is strapped into an apparatus of articulated joints using his arms to propel the large, bat wings. Mechanized joints extend across the wings of the contraption, giving it a bat-like skeletal frame. An extensive rod supports the elongation of Batman’s back, supporting him like a spine. The entire winged contraption, with mechanized skeletal frame and spine, encase Batman in an additional skeletal body. 29

Another of Miller’s Batman stories, The Dark Knight Returns, places Batman inside an armored tank, clad with harnesses, ear and mouthpieces, and even eyewear. This armor is evidence of

Bruce’s feelings of fragmentation and his attempt to hide them behind the armored carapace and alienating identity of Batman. Similar to the bat glider of Year One, the mechanized tank suit straps onto Batman’s body. The harnessed gadgets that allow Batman to maneuver the tank are unnatural augmentations of his body and are imperfectly joined to him. 30

Figure 11. From Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, by Frank Miller, Klaus Janson, and Lynn Varley, © 1986 DC Comics. The Dark Knight Returns also illustrates a monstrous Batman body, broken up by bulging calves, enormous quadriceps, rippling abs, and segmented shoulder and chest muscles. The infamous utility belt and bladed gloves draw attention to the essential artifice of the costume.

Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale’s Batman is similarly hyper-muscular, nearly to the point of caricature.

The Batman of their stories, The Long Halloween and Dark Victory, has both massive upper body and lower body muscles that connect to a disproportionately small waist.8

Figure 13. From Batman: The Long Halloween, by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale, © 1998 DC Comics. All of these images portray a Batman body that is effectively fragmented by the extremity of his muscular development, or overlayered by the gadgetry and armor that cover the body. The musculature of the Batman image is thus a sign of an artificial body, and the exaggerated overflow of muscle is similar to that of a bodybuilder’s: hyperbolic to the point of outlandishness. The muscular extremity of the Batman body signals the irreality of Bruce’s fantasy of bodily-psychic integrity. In more precise terms, Batman’s extreme physique reveals

Bruce’s unrealistic, psychic expectations of bodily cohesion. Though Bruce imagines Batman’s body to be an ideal, unified image of power, justice, and terror, in reality Batman’s image is just

8 The interesting problem posed by this hypermuscular Batman, in which the rippling muscles appear to be his actual body, and not, say padding or artifice: how is Bruce Wayne’s body depicted? How would he ever find (normal) clothes that would fit him if he really had a body like that? When Bruce “changes” into Batman—in the sense of changing costumes—he also seems to change bodies. 32 as fragmented and turbulent as Bruce feels internally. In an effort to mask his traumatized and broken past, he therefore tries repeatedly to encase himself in a bulging suit of armor9 and excessive gadgetry, signally thus both an imaged cohesiveness and a return of a repressed chaos.

THE INEXHAUSTIBLE CHARACTER OF THE BATMAN IDENTITY

The Bruce Wayne that leaves Gotham City in search of a posttraumatic psychic integrity never truly returns. A new identity is cultivated in response to the traumatic departure, and the man that returns to Wayne Manor is not simply Bruce Wayne or simply Batman, but an inconstant aggregate of (at least) two subjects: the boy who watched his parents die and the man who chooses a position of alienation from his actual historical condition by donning armor and gadgetry in an attempt to become something cohesive and whole. In the genetic scene, Bruce, despairing and near death, recognizes in the bat perched atop the statue of his dead father the form of a cohesive (if also inconsistent) being, an idealized subject unencumbered by a traumatic past. In this fusion of Thomas Wayne’s strength and justice with the terror and relentlessness of the bat, and in an attempt to control his phantoms and to shut off the chaotic world around him,

Bruce assumes this idealized subject position and becomes the Batman. As I have observed, however, the deeper irony of this moment of assumption is that it also designates the impossibility of the resolution of his genetic trauma. No matter how perfect the Batman image may be taken to be, the man underneath its cape and cowl is tragically tormented by an irreparable disconnection. Bruce’s efforts to overcome his unresolved disturbances cause him to project fragmentation onto the Batman image. In this respect, the Batman body has a double

9 Bruce Wayne’s efforts to mask a traumatized past with the Batman disguise may explain why the films of Batman devote a great deal of time to the suiting-up ritual. The scenes which show Batman donning all of his armor in extreme closeness may be interpreted as Bruce’s rehearsing of the assumption of the Batman image’s solidity and cohesion. 33 function for Bruce and, by extension, for the comic universe that contains him; it signals both the fantasy of integrity and the emergent chaos of the wounded psyche. Furthermore, in precisely the manner of the traumatic return of the missed episode, the dual-functioning Batman image continues to signify this chaos. Every time Bruce puts on the cape and cowl and becomes

Batman, he signals a perpetual return of the missed moment that is the genesis of his new, forever unresolved, persona. For Bruce the Batman identity will never, can never, go away.

Since the traumatic death of Thomas and Martha Wayne is an experience that Bruce has never been able to, and can never, fully grasp, he is destined to relive the experience over and over again in an attempt to grasp it, by reliving violent experiences that in some respect repeat the genetic moment. Bruce’s repetitious responses to his originary trauma, paired with his unconscious attempt to become the illusory, idealized image of Batman, guarantee the inexhaustible character of the Batman identity.

Works Cited

Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore, MD: Johns

Hopkins University Press, 1996.

Daniels, Les. Batman The Complete History: The Life and Times of the Dark Knight. San

Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books, 1999.

Evans, Dylan. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge,

1996.

Hamm, Sam. Batman: Blind Justice. New York, NY: DC Comics, 1989. 34

Lacan, Jacques. “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I As Revealed in

Psychoanalytic Experience.” Ecrits: A Selection. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York:

New York, 1999. 3-9.

Loeb, Jeph. Batman: Dark Victory. New York, NY: DC Comics, 2001.

Loeb, Jeph. Batman: The Long Halloween. New York, NY: DC Comics, 1998.

Miller, Frank. Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. New York, NY: DC Comics, 1986.

Miller, Frank. Batman: Year One. New York, NY: DC Comics, 1987.

Morrison, Grant. Batman: Arkham Asylum. New York, NY: DC Comics, 1989.