1 “Bruce Wayne's Traumatic Past and Batman's New History: Ego
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1 “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 Figure 1. From Detective Comics #33, by Bob Kane and Bill Finger, © 1939 DC Comics. 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 Figure 2. From Batman: Year One, by Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli, © 1987 DC Comics. 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 Figure 3. From Batman: Arkham Asylum, by Grant Morrison and Dave McKean, © 1989 DC Comics. Figure 4. From Batman: Blind Justice, by Sam Hamm, Denys Cowan, and Dick Giordano, © 1989 DC Comics. 8 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.