Note for Batman Day

 This week was alright, but I fully expect that next week will be much better! I am currently reading To Shape a Dragon’s Breath, and after that I think I’ll get to re-reading Pyramids? Still doing Discovery Tour, learning about mummies and shiz.

National Hispanic Heritage Month began yesterday, but today is BATMAN DAY so we’re going to talk about BATMAN today.

Note for Batman Day

There is this common idea that comes up in Internet Discourse, asserting that Batman is Bad, Actually, because he could just throw his money at Gotham City and fix it instead of fighting crime. That the city’s institutions are usually depicted as incredibly corrupt, and that plenty of versions of the Batman mythos explicitly show us Bruce Wayne donating to, fundraising for, and advocating for different charitable and humanitarian causes–this is all conveniently ignored to make the point that Bruce Wayne is Rich, so we Hate him, and he should throw all of his money at the problems to fix it.

I’m getting flashbacks to John Green’s “I Kind of Hate Batman” video.

To be clear, I think that there are legitimate criticisms we can make. The one that comes up a lot lately is the depiction of police–though I think it’s also worth noting is that Batman stories acknowledge that corrupt and violent cops Are A Thing, which is more than a lot of superhero stories do. There are other things we can question and criticize, though. That’s fine! There’s a huge difference between that and what I’m talking about.

This all came to a head with the publication of the comic Batman: White Knight, an alternate continuity story. The basic gist of it is that Joker gets cured, and then fixes Gotham City by proving that Batman is an obsessive, incompetent weirdo, running for office, and reforming the police by throwing money at them and convincing Batman’s supporting cast to join a special police task force–because vigilantes are BAD, guys! All of Gotham’s problems are actually because of Batman’s obsessions driving him out of control, and the Joker never actually killed anyone, so when he becomes sane the people of Gotham are easily convinced that he’s on their side, and they vote him into office as a city councilman.

This comic is… not as smart as it thinks it is.

Part of it is that in order to make the story work, it changes so much of the mythos and characters. Batman being so stupid as to publicly, physically attack Joker, on camera, is a really dumb move for the World’s Greatest Detective, and the notion that Joker never killed anyone is laughable (no pune intended?) with what we’ve seen of the character in popular culture.

The other part of it is that this story fundamentally does not get this key part of Batman. According to White Knight, the System is Just Fine, we just need to play by the rules, and it’ll all mostly work out. Which we know isn’t true–not in Gotham City, and not in real life, the System is not Just Fine. Batman, when written well, is the acknowledgement that the System very often doesn’t work, and so someone steps up and tries to do what he can to fix its problems, while helping others get through their own failures in the System. He wants to help the villains he fights, but they won’t let him, and neither will the society that produces them. It’s not that he doesn’t try to fix that system, it’s that the tragedy of Gotham is that it won’t be fixed, or if it is, that’s when Batman as a story ends.

[Unless we’re talking about, like, spin-offs and superhero crossovers and stuff.]

This misunderstanding is caused by bad Batman stories. Those certainly exist–stories where Batman is just the hammer to hit villains with, because no one really gets what Batman is supposed to be doing other than that. That, and the lack of ending of a comic book hero–comics just go on and on, so it’s hard to figure out what to do with a hero trying to fix a city when the city just keeps existing as corrupt as before, and none of the villains consistently develop in a direction that shows they’ve learned anything.

I suppose the pop cultural obsession with pitting Batman and the Joker up against each other doesn’t help matters, either.

But we can do better than this, can’t we? We can understand what Batman is supposed to be–and of course, criticize when he, or the story’s he’s in, fails to live up to that ideal. Batman isn’t meant to only be vengeance–his war isn’t on individual criminals, it’s on crime. It’s on injustice. Batman doesn’t want to beat up all the criminals, he wants criminals to stop doing crime–that’s why he uses fear so heavily as a deterrent as Batman, and works to fix the city as Bruce Wayne. 

The core of Batman is that he’s a hero. One of the greatest. I don’t mind when writers play with it–I would love to see more of evil Batman stories, after seeing him as the leader of the resistance in so many evil Superman stories. But that would be a massive aberration, and a corruption of Batman wouldn’t be someone who never cared about the city, or was incredibly stupid about appearances or hurting the people around him.

Batman is someone with privilege who sees everything wrong with the world, and instead of using his wealth to stay away from it and live comfortably, dedicates his life to trying to fix the world he lives in.

And that’s pretty darn awesome.

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