Edwards and Monnet 2Nd Pages.Indd

6 “I’ll Be Whatever Gotham Needs Me to Be” Batman, the Gothic and Popular Culture Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet Batman fi rst appeared in 1939, close on the heels of the recently created and hugely successful Superman. The young comic book industry, just emerg- ing as a separate medium from the newspaper comic strip, and hitherto mainly defi ned by men in suits, now demanded more visually appealing (i.e. costumed) characters. Batman was born as a darker and more complex variation on the red-caped superhero: he is Superman’s Gothic dou- ble.1 Although many superheroes were created in the 1940s and since then, Batman has remained the darkest and most problematic, not least because his powers come not from a magical source but from the brooding inten- sity of a childhood trauma. Over seventy years later, Batman has grown to become bigger than ever, eclipsing even Superman in recent decades. Why has this been the case? And how did this happen? In addressing these ques- tions, I want to suggest that the main reason for the success of Batman in the twenty-fi rst century—a multi-billion dollar Batman industry—has been Christopher Nolan’s return to the darker roots of the Batman story. Like any enduring Gothic fi gure, Batman’s regenerative cultural power depends on his ambivalence, his ethical complexity and moral ambiguity. On a formal level, this ambivalence plays itself out in the tension between Bat- man’s camp aesthetics and the Gothic characteristics of the fi gure; that is, between the campy smirk of the “Caped Crusader” and the furrowed brow of the brooding “Dark Knight.” Historically, whenever Batman is camped to its limit, the Gothic creeps in, returning the character to a darker and more complicated fi gure within the narrative. Batman, though, is not a single character—not even a complex or evolv- ing one. He does evolve, certainly, but more importantly, he multiplies. For the fi gure of Batman appears in a wide range of texts and media: concurrent comic book titles (up to six diff erent series running simultane- ously in the 1970s), a television show (1966–1968), an animated television series (1992–1995), several animated fi lms (in the 2000s), graphic novels (so called one-shots, most of which are aimed primarily at adult readers), and at least seven feature fi lms. The Batman franchise now also includes over two dozen electronic and video games, including the highly acclaimed recent Arkham Asylum and Arkham City for Playstation, Xbox and PC. T&F Proofs: Not For Distribution EEdwardsdwards aandnd MMonnetonnet 22ndnd ppages.inddages.indd 9966 33/10/2012/10/2012 22:35:12:35:12 PPMM “I’ll Be Whatever Gotham Needs Me to Be” 97 In all its multiple variations and forms, we must pause and ask what the phenomenon of Batman can teach us about popular culture. And, to pose a slightly diff erent question, what can the Gothic tell us about Batman? Here, I focus on the recent fi lms directed by Christopher Nolan, Batman Begins (2005) and The Dark Knight (2008).2 The success of these two fi lms is based, I suggest, on Nolan’s thoughtful use of the Gothic mode and also relates to the political ambiguities of these popular cinematic texts (another reason for its signifi cant mass audience appeal). Batman is, fi rst and foremost, a commodity. He is nobody’s disinter- ested brainchild, but a product to satisfy the demand for caped superheroes within a, sometimes struggling, comic book industry. Consequently, his relationship to the marketplace and to his audience is direct; however, the interpretive implications of this relationship are neither simple nor transparent. In the fi rst Batman stories, for instance, Batman is a character who has no qualms about killing villains; he even displays a decidedly hard-boiled attitude towards their death. In one story, he snaps a villain’s neck with his foot (DC Comics n. 30). In another, Batman “socks” a scheming businessman into a tank of acid, and comments drily, “A fi t- ting end for his kind” (Batman in the Forties 15). Such scenes inspired a public morality campaign against the excessive violence of comic book characters and resulted in a “code of practice” within the industry (similar to the Hays code in US cinema) that “banned” superheroes from killing villains or carrying guns (Brooker, Batman Unmasked 60–63). These restrictions—initially adopted due to outside pressure on the industry— had a profound impact on Batman, and most writers and editors have respected this “code” even after such restrictions were no longer necessary. The writer most closely associated with Batman’s Gothic turn in the late 1960s and 1970s, Dennis O’Neil, fi rmly asserts that “Batman never kills” and he even includes this injunction in his Bat-Bible, a guidebook for DC writers (Brooker, Batman Unmasked 277). By contrast, Tim Burton has Jack Napier fall into a chemical tank in the 1989 Batman fi lm, referencing the fi rst Batman comic strip of 1939, while also making disturbingly clear that Batman does this deliberately. Comic books are, similar to fi lms, collaborative works created by teams of writers, illustrators, artists and editors.3 The complex negotiation between the producers-fi nanciers, the distributors, the market, and an aggregate creative and technical team moves the comic book from its most basic level—script-writer, illustrator, colour artist and series editor—into a form of cultural production that highlights the complexities of artistry, authorship and market-forces in late capitalism. Likewise with cinema. For even if an auteur fi lm foregrounds the artistic vision of the director, the label cannot simply erase the complex team of collaborators that have contributed to the fi nal product and, in many respects, the director is irrelevant in studio fi lms in which the production company authorizes its own postproduction editors to create a defi nitive version. In order to remain sensitive to these T&F Proofs: Not For Distribution EEdwardsdwards aandnd MMonnetonnet 22ndnd ppages.inddages.indd 9977 33/10/2012/10/2012 22:35:12:35:12 PPMM 98 Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet complexly collaborative forms of cultural production, the following discussion will focus on several artists, writers and directors, particularly Dennis O’Neil, the script-writer for the 1970s DC Batman, Frank Miller (one of O’Neil’s protégés), Grant Morrison, a Scottish comic book writer who has written several notable Batman graphic novels since the 1980s, and the Nolan brothers, who cowrote the screenplays for the two recent Batman fi lms, and especially, Christopher Nolan, who directed them. Any discussion of Batman as a cultural phenomenon must take into account the fact that the fi gure exists in a variety of texts and media. As such, we cannot identify character coherence, but we can speak of “continuity,” a word that is paradoxically intended to account for its exact oppo- site, the lack of continuity between texts featuring a character with the same name. Although editors can defi ne the parameters of a character, there are no rules for writers of one-shot graphic novels or fi lm versions. In 1989, for instance, Grant Morrison’s graphic novel Arkham Asylum, the Tim Burton fi lm and the DC Batman comic book series all depicted very diff erent visions of the Batman fi gure. Moreover, some texts, such as the 1960s Batman TV series, are never meant to become part of the Batman continuity, and they exist in their own separate sphere (Reynolds, Super Heroes 43). Cultural analyses of a phenomenon like Batman run the risk of ignoring—or even eliding—the question of continuity and, instead, shoe- horning one theory onto a select group of accommodating texts while also asserting ahistorical or noncontextual generalizations. Cultural critiques of popular culture have ranged from viewing popular culture as a mirror of capitalist ideology to seeing it as a mirror of popular desire.4 In contrast, commentators from within the industry tend to see the content and power of comic books as drawing on deep cultural wells, something like Joseph Campbell’s argument in The Hero With a Thousand Faces (1949). Campbell proposed that the hero narrative is an archetype, a “monomyth” universal to human culture and grounded in universal human psychic structures. Similarly, Shirrel Rhoades, former executive vice president of Marvel Comics, argues that comic book fi g- ures refl ect universal archetypes (Comic Books 102–110), explicitly cit- ing Campbell as well as Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment to assert his point. Along the same lines, comic book writer Grant Mor- rison asserts that people consciously or unconsciously “respond to deep mythical patterns” in comic books (Arkham Asylum 51). Frank Miller unabashedly refers to Batman as a “folk hero” (Sharett, “Batman and the Twilight of the Idols” 41). Industry workers, in other words, see the comic book as disseminating mythological archetypes or folk culture rather than just commercial entertainment. This may, in part, arise out of a semantic slippage surrounding the word “mythology,” which is the term used to refer to the rules of the fi ctional world of comic book series (now used for television series), and which evokes an association with mythology in the anthropological sense of the term; but this does not entirely T&F Proofs: Not For Distribution EEdwardsdwards aandnd MMonnetonnet 22ndnd ppages.inddages.indd 9988 33/10/2012/10/2012 22:35:12:35:12 PPMM “I’ll Be Whatever Gotham Needs Me to Be” 99 explain the consistent claim that comic books express deep cultural and psychological structures.

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