Eighty years old.
That’s how old Batman is this year. He’s been through World War 2, Korea, Vietnam, both Iraq wars and the Cold War. Born at the tail end of the Great Depression, he’s survived half a dozen recessions and the global economic meltdown of 2008. He’s older than Captain Kirk, James Bond, Doctor Who, Optimus Prime and the entire Star Wars franchise. He’s survived countless ret-cons and revisions, he’s been subject to horrible stories at hands of horrible writers and survived both the creatively bankrupt 90’s and the collapse of the entire comic book industry at the turn of the millenium.
He’s seen social upheaval and constantly shifting cultural trends. He’s been copied and imitated countless times, watching pop culture flashes in the pan come and go, trending one minute but gone the next. Not only has Gotham’s Dark Knight Detective seen all that, endured all that, but after eight decades he’s still perched at the top of the world’s entertainment food chain. Sales of his books have often kept DC comics’s doors open while he has commanded TV, video games, animation and movies for years.
He is by far the world’s most popular hero, but he’s transcended being a mere superhero. He’s become an icon, a modern myth we brand on everything we can find. All of which begs one question; what is it about the Batman that has captured our collective imagination on a global scale for nearly a century?
His morality-or more importantly his refusal to kill-has been seen as obsolete by many for years. He can’t perform miracles and he doesn’t possess any flashy powers. And while he has a vast arsenal of weaponry and gadgets, he has primarily used the same weapons for nearly his entire existence.
So what is it about the Bat that keeps us so enthralled?
it’s often been argued that one of the reasons the DCEU has failed is that their big screen adaptations fail to understand their heroes; they fail to grasp the narrative centre that has connected them to audiences and fans for generations. While he is the archetypal warrior, a single brave fighter standing against impossible odds in the name of a noble cause, Batman is also a mortal. He isn’t a messiah like Superman or Wonder Woman. He isn’t a god like Thor or a living weapon like Wolverine. But he isn’t merely a soldier like Captain America or a simple killing machine like the Punisher either.
Batman embraces his mortality as a strength. He doesn’t shy away from it or hide it or consider it a weakness. He acknowledges his humanity and still fights against and alongside gods and monsters anyway, levelling the battlefield with discipline, resourcefulness, an indomitable will and resources beyond most people’s imagination.
But that isn’t his secret either. No, its the contradictions at his core that make him so appealing.
Batman fights for justice instead of vengeance and he considers the law infallible. Yet he operates outside the law he embraces so obsessively and is by definition a criminal himself (crimefighter may sound catchy in newspaper headlines but district attorneys and judges have another word for it: vigilante). He knows full well that the law, even in the fantasy realm of comic books, is often heartless and corrupt and unreliable. One of the reasons Bruce Wayne adopted the cape and cowl when he began his crusade against crime was because every level of Gotham City was infected by greed and corruption, from the lowest beat cop right up to the mayor.
Crime was an institution in Gotham and conventional law enforcement was powerless to affect change. It needed someone outside the restraint of Gotham’s legal system and using fear as a weapon to force change.
Even in the make believe world of Gotham, the fact that the wealthy and politically powerful enjoy a different legal standard is a fact of life. And yet Batman still harbours an unwavering faith in the rule of law, as dubious and flawed and one-sided as it is. He sees it as civilization’s sole mechanism of justice. It’s worth wondering how he would deal with the significant racial and social disparities that exist in the real world as well (a story DC could never tell in today’s politically hyper-partisan environment). Reconciling the truth with his ideals is a constant battle.
(And what if one day Gotham adopted the death penalty to cope with it’s seemingly uncontrollable crime? How would the Dark Knight deal with putting criminals on death row as well as behind bars? What if the sanctity of Gotham’s courts was dubious at best when it began sending people to the gas chamber? Now that’s a Batman story.)
Then there his refusal to kill, and the self awareness behind his conviction. The Dark Knight has been pushed to the brink of homicide in the past (both Superman and Catwoman have had to prevent him from killing the Joker on separate occasions) but he knows full well that once he starts, once he gets a taste for murder and how easy and final it is, he won’t be able to stop. There is always the whole “if I kill a killer then there will still be same amount of killers in the world” equation, but the truth of it is that Batman knows full well that once he starts he won’t be able to stop. And once on that road, he would become the greatest monster the world has ever seen.
Batman is the ultimate pragmatist; a cynic who chooses to live his life in the shadows and prefers the darkness to the light. Yet he clings ferociously to ideals that, deep down, we all admire. He is unflinching order in the face of relentless, infinite chaos. And much of that chaos is his own. Batman is often his own worst enemy, a truth he is well aware of (one of the reasons he has a family of sidekicks is to anchor him to his idealism, to prevent him from drifting too far into the hungry dark).
And it’s those contradictions, as reluctant as they sometimes are, that have not only seen him survive so much change over the lion’s share of a century, but thrive during all of it. He is the better angel we wish we had on our shoulder while we stare into an unforgiving night.
He is the warrior that faces the world’s collective monsters without flinching while refusing to be compromised. His courage and conviction are as timeless as they are unquestionable. It’s something most of us could never do and it’s why, even eighty years and oceans of change later, we admire him so deeply.
Image via DC comics
