One of the main problems Batman has had from the outset of his career as Feudal Lord crime fighter is that he cannot find a Lady of the Manor to stand at his side. Most of the women he encounters — Vicki Vale, Silver St. Cloud, Rachel Dawes, and even the heiress Julie Madison —find his desire to reshape the modern, democratic world into a neo–Medieval society highly questionable at best, if not outright delusional. Catwoman understands his motivation, and is sympathetic to it, but believes that marrying him and becoming, func-tionally, a Disney Princess in a castle in “New York” is a betrayal of her feminist sensibilities.
Several Justice League and Trinity adventures indicate that Wonder Woman, a socialist princess with superhuman powers, is attracted to Batman, but believes that men are fun-damentally sexist and incapable of a romantic partnership of equals. Also, as a pacifist, she finds Batman’s methods too violent. The only woman who has a truly Medieval world view, and who wants to marry Batman and work to reshape the world in a new, better image, is
Talia, the amoral daughter of Ra’s al Ghul, who hopes to become feudal lord of the entire world. In Batman: Tales of the Demon (1971, 1991) and Son of the Demon (1987), Batman does indeed marry Talia, and she becomes pregnant with his child, but when Talia realizes that Batman will make an overprotective, controlling husband, she fakes a miscarriage and ends their relationship.
Talia notwithstanding, Batman has been, thus far, incapable of finding a woman to marry and be the mother of his child. Consequently, he has resorted to “adopting” young men and women as wards so they can be the heirs to his feudal empire and keep his dreams alive once he becomes too old to continue being Batman. His first ward, Dick Grayson, was a circus acrobat whose parents were killed by the Mafia. Since Grayson was touched by the same violence Bruce was, Bruce felt a kinship with Grayson and functionally adopted the boy. To the world at large, Grayson was Bruce Wayne’s ward, while Dick’s alter ego, Robin, was Batman’s crime-fighting partner. This legendary “Dynamic Duo” is the most well known of the Batman and Robin partnerships, but not the only one. Grayson was the first of several of Batman’s children to serve as a partner and successor-in-training, including substitute Robins Jason Todd, Tim Drake, and Damien Wayne (Bruce’s recently revealed, now-ten-year-old son with Talia al Ghul), and Terry McGinnis, who becomes Batman in a cyberpunk future (Batman Beyond).
Most contemporary fans of the Batman saga are uneasy about the character of Robin, because he interferes with their “willing suspension of disbelief ” when reading a Batman story. They do not believe it is realistic that Batman would drag a young child into battle with him, as Robin can be anywhere between eight and eighteen years old, depending on the story. (Amusingly, Christian Bale has threatened to handcuff himself to a radiator and not go to work if producers propose to insert Robin into one of his Batman films.) Fans also associate the Boy Wonder with campy exclamations of surprise at the levels of nefari-ousness the Batman rogue’s gallery is capable of, often to the effect of “Holy Giant Killer Robots, Batman!” And then, of course, there is another controversy at the core of the Bat-man/Robin relationship: are they lovers?
As Brooker has written, many fans who are invested in Batman being a heterosexual, tough-as-nails woman-hater have no patience for a funny, possibly homosexual Batman.
The homosexual subtext of the Batman comic books, and superhero comics in general (see Chapter Eight), was pointed out as early as 1954 by psychiatrist Dr. Fredric Wertham in Seduction of the Innocent, in which he argued that children could be harmed by the homo-erotic aspects of the Batman/Robin relationship. DC Comics discourages portrayals of Bat-man and Robin as a gay couple, as in August of 2005, when it pressured the Kathleen Cullen Fine Arts gallery in New York to remove artwork by Mark Chamberlain depicting Batman and Robin kissing in varying states of undress.18Despite the suppression of this particular exhibit, Robert Smigel’s “Ambiguously Gay Duo” cartoons featured on Saturday Night Live remain a well-known comedic riff on the taboo romance.
It isn’t clear if the root of the objection to the Batman and Robin relationship is generally inspired by homophobia, pure and simple, or if the discomfort stems more from the sizable age gap between mentor and protégé, which suggests incest or pedophilia. Sig-nificantly, the straight-to-DVD film Mystery of the Batwoman (2003) hints strongly that a similarly taboo romance blossomed between a mature Batman and a possibly sixteen-year-old Batgirl. In the “real world” State of New York (where Gotham City is located), even
“consensual” sex is considered third-degree rape when someone over 21 has intercourse with someone under 17, and carries penalties of up to four years in prison.19In theory, those who
are not perturbed by their age difference, or Batman’s Lolita complex, should not be bothered by the May/December nature of a Batman/Robin romance. Addressing this contentious issue, longtime comics editor Denny O’Neil has stated that, officially, Batman is attracted to women but doesn’t act on that attraction (Brooker 1999). This position implies that, in O’Neil’s eyes, a celibate Batman has had sex with neither Robin nor Batgirl. But O’Neil is not the final word on the subject, and certainly Vivid Video’s Batman XXX: A Porn Parody (2010), suggests that Batman has had plenty of sex, and once participated in a threesome with Robin and Catwoman.
On the other hand, the women in the Joel Schumacher films are mainly background characters. In Batman Forever, Dr. Chase Meridian (Nicole Kidman) shamelessly throws herself at a distant Batman, and seems to win him over, but Roger Ebert observes that the most romantic scenes are between Bruce and Dick Grayson. Meridian does not return for the next film, a theme taken up by online slash fiction in which Batman breaks up with Meridian so he can focus on his sexual relationship with Robin. Julie Madison (Elle Macpherson), Bruce Wayne’s fiancée in Batman and Robin, is featured in only two or three scenes, and Batgirl (Alicia Silverstone) pales in comparison to the more psychologically complex Barbara Gordon of the comic books (see Batgirl: Year One, Showcase Presents:
Batgirl, and the Birds of Prey trade paperback library). Also, the seductress Poison Ivy (Uma Thurman) is most threatening when her pheromones are strong enough to briefly turn Robin’s attentions away from Batman.
While many fans disliked the Schumacher Batman films specifically because of their homosexual subtext, the films also happen to be garish, poorly written, poorly acted, and poorly directed. They seem more like spoofs of Batman than adaptations. As Virginia Postrel observed in “Superhero Worship” (2006) in The Atlantic, the best superhero movies have
“engaged their subjects without emotional reservation.” She specifically notes that “campy mockery exemplified by the Batman television show or Joel Shumacher’s disastrous Batman & Robin, featuring a smirking George Clooney in the lead” (140–141), failed in this respect. In contrast, the Tim Burton films, Batman and Batman Returns take some impor-tant liberties with the comic books, especially by allowing Batman to kill and by presenting entirely new interpretations of clas-sic villains (especially Cat-woman), which resulted in initially negative fan reac-tions that didn’t prevent the films from being financial blockbusters and pop cul-ture phenomena. In fact, From left to right: Robin (Burt Ward), Batgirl (Yvonne Craig), and
Batman (Adam West) from the television series Batman (1966). man is rumored to have had relationships with both Robin and Bat-girl, although DC Comics’ official position is that he has been romantically involved with neither.
the Burton films also romanticize the Joker, Catwoman, and the Penguin in a manner that is sometimes subversive and progressive in a positive sense, and sometimes morally ques-tionable. The films are inspired, if flawed, and offer intriguing commentaries on the Batman universe. What makes Burton’s films both interesting and uncomfortable to watch is that they invite audience sympathy with Batman while dwelling on his flaws — especially his alienation from women and his investment in preserving a flawed social order. As such, they deconstruct the Batman myth in an intelligent manner, rather than content themselves with mocking the surface silliness of the Batman stories, as the Schumacher films do.
In Batman (1989), Keaton’s Dark Knight and Nicholson’s Joker battle to the death for control of Gotham City. Both men are presented as funny, theatrical, anti-social, and dis-turbed, hearkening back to the overstated comic book catchphrase that they are “two sides of the same coin.” However, the film is most concerned with exploring their mutual fear of women and their different reactions to this fear. The Joker’s main targets in the film are women. Nicholson’s Joker blames his girlfriend for his disfigurement in an accident at a chemical plant, so he disfigures and murders her in retaliation. When he plots to poison the inhabitants of Gotham with deadly laughing gas, his first step is to taint cosmetics prod-ucts, claiming two supermodels and a
female newscaster as his first victims.
When the Joker sees a possible soul-mate in photojournalist and fellow artist Vicki Vale (Kim Basinger), he demonstrates his love for her by alter-natively flirting with her, kidnapping her, and trying to burn her with acid.
Bruce Wayne is also attracted to Vale, and the only way he knows how to act on this impulse is to have sex with her on their first date and then never call her again. He has learned to keep women at a distance because he sees them as a distraction from his mission to bring law and order to Gotham. However, his aging butler, Alfred, coaxes him to pursue the rela-tionship with Vale, warning him that without a woman to love Bruce was functionally as dead as his parents. As a matchmaker, Alfred is intrusive in the extreme, betraying his fears that his master is too far gone to woo a woman without being coerced into it.
Alfred even takes it upon himself to reveal Bruce’s double-life to Vale by allowing her access to the Batcave. By the end of the film, the Joker is killed and Wayne finds himself open to romantic love for the first time since
Dina Meyer as Barbara Gordon in the television series Birds of Prey (2002). Barbara’s career as Batgirl was cut short when she was raped and crippled by the Joker in The Killing Joke (1988). She then became Oracle, internet researcher and combat tactician to Batman, the Justice League, and the Birds of Prey.
becoming Batman. He appears ready to work on the relationship himself, without any further prompting from Alfred. However, as Batman Returns reveals, Vale leaves Bruce because she is too disturbed by his need to continue being Batman to remain in the rela-tionship.
This depiction of the romance with Vale reflects the comic book source material. As a child-man, Wayne has never fully learned to understand women or communicate with them. For example, Batman is clearly attracted to Catwoman, but her unpredictable actions and morally grey worldview deeply disturb him, no matter how good she is at heart. In fact, Batman appears to equate female sexuality with danger and death, possibly because he blames his parent’s violent ends on his mother’s alluring pearl necklace, which attracted the murderous mugger’s attention. These secret Oedipal fears manifest themselves most dra-matically in the elfin form of Poison Ivy, an insane environmentalist who can hypnotize or kill men with one kiss, and who lives in greenhouses populated by giant, wet, toothy Venus Flytraps. A previously underutilized villainess who gained prominence during the age of AIDS, Poison Ivy foregrounds all of Batman’s worst fears about all women.
In Batman Returns, Bruce Wayne is confronted with grotesque doubles of himself as a corporate mogul and as an American aristocrat. He suffers a crisis of faith that causes him to wonder if his naïve aspirations to heroism have any place in the dark, film noir world he inhabits, in which everyone is corrupt to some degree.20The main villain, Max Shreck (Christopher Walken), is a real-estate tycoon, department store owner, and investor named after the star of F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu. Shreck publicizes a bogus energy crisis to gain support for an unnecessary power plant, but Bruce Wayne and Gotham City’s mayor squash his schemes. Shreck retaliates by funding a recall campaign to replace the mayor in the wake of a sudden outbreak of urban chaos, which Shreck is secretly orchestrating through his underworld connections. Shreck’s candidate for mayor is the Penguin. In a cynical com-mentary on the American political process, Shreck’s campaign savvy makes the grotesque Penguin — who was born disfigured thanks to aristocratic inbreeding — attractive to the vot-ing public, who see him as an aristocrat returned from exile who has heroically forgiven the wealthy parents that forsook him. The film’s plot, which seemed ludicrous in 1992, in ret-rospect appears to have predicted many of the events leading up to California’s 2003 recall of Governor Gray Davis, especially the state’s electricity crisis (2000–2001) and Enron’s behind-the-scenes role in the affair.21
By the end of the film, Wayne succeeds in exposing the Penguin as a fraud using hi-tech recording and broadcasting devices to disrupt one of Penguin’s press conferences. Wayne also temporarily thwarts Shreck’s plans to build a power plant. However, he does not find a way to decisively defeat Shreck, or strip Shreck of his wealth and power. Therefore, the film suggests that Shreck is above the law and beyond the reach of both Bruce Wayne and Batman. Shreck even claims to be as permanent and unassailable as Gotham City itself. “I am the light of the city and I am its mean and twisted soul,” he says. Like Bruce Wayne, who is part Donald Trump, part vampire, Shreck is contemporary patriarchal capitalism.
The angry tone of the film suggests that, in the real world, businessmen are more like Shreck, and “trust fund goodie goodies” like Bruce Wayne exist only in the realm of fiction. But Bruce Wayne is too invested in the system as it is — his feudal variant of benign capital-ism — that he does not see that he is, arguably, as much a problem as Shreck is. Wayne cannot see that the roots of society’s evils can be traced to inequalities built into the unac-knowledged American class system and in its imbalanced capitalist economy. So the moral of Batman Returns is that “problems cannot be solved within the mindset that created them.”
The born-to-the-purple Bruce Wayne is very good at fighting street crime or foreign enemies with his impressive arsenal and cool Batmobile, but he is clueless when it comes to combating the real evils of capitalist society. Therefore, Wayne has no real understanding of poverty, racism, or the inequalities suffered by women in a male-dominated system. Ironically, while Shreck is decisively dealt with at the end of the film, it is not by Batman, but by Shreck’s personal secretary, the lower-middle-class Selina Kyle, who is in a better position than Wayne to know just how evil men like Shreck are.
Kyle, played by a frumpily costumed but still quite gorgeous Michelle Pfeiffer, lives in a run-down Gotham City apartment, alone except for the stray cats who visit her for food and shelter. Romantically frustrated, financially strapped, and nagged by the mother she doesn’t call enough, Kyle is eager to impress her boss and graduate from secretary to personal advisor and confidant to Shreck. Researching Shreck’s business ventures to better advise him, she stumbles across evidence that his power-plant plans are an attempt to drain power from Gotham, rather than provide power to the people. When Shreck realizes that Kyle has found him out, he kills her by pushing her through the window of his high-rise office building. What Shreck doesn’t anticipate is that the many stray cats that Selina has been caring for discover her broken body in the alley below and mystically breathe life back into her, granting her nine new lives.
Back from the dead and furious, Kyle returns to her apartment and destroys her doll house, stuffed animals, and pink clothes, effectively cleansing herself of girlhood. The scene is powerful as Kyle destroys these symbols of passivity and domesticity that brainwashed her into investing in a man like Shreck. Selina then uses her domestic arts to sew herself a black leather costume. Then she arms herself with a low-tech bullwhip, which she adopts instead of the too-phallic alternative, a gun. Reborn as Catwoman, Kyle launches an extended campaign against Shreck by attacking him where it will hurt the most — his wallet.
She breaks into his department store after closing time, chases the useless guards away, and blows up the store using an aerosol can, a microwave, and a gas line. (A nice, no-frills approach.
No C-4 for Catwoman.) These weapons are low-tech in comparison to Batman’s, but are just as non-lethal. The
explo-sion is an act of revolution, carried out mercifully, when no guards, customers, or Shreck employees are still in the store; but it brings down the wrath of Batman, who tries to bring her to justice for property damage and domes-tic terrorism.
She evades capture long enough for Batman to get to know her — both in her Cat-woman and Kyle identities — and to fall in love with her.
When he discovers that her ultimate goal is to assassinate Shreck, he tries to dissuade her to save her from her own
In Batman Begins (Warner Bros., 1992), Michelle Pfeiffer plays Cat-woman as an anti-hero who understands far better than Bruce Wayne does that white-collar, corporate criminals are the most dan-gerous after all, and the most in need of being brought to justice by any means necessary.
darkness. Catwoman isn’t interested in being dissuaded, however. She says, “Don’t give me a killing-Max-won’t-solve-anything speech, because it will. Aren’t you tired of this sancti-monious robber baron coming out on top when he should be six feet under?” Batman responds by declaring that she doesn’t have the right to kill him, asking, “Who do you think you are?”
At the end of the film, Catwoman captures Shreck and is about to kill him when
At the end of the film, Catwoman captures Shreck and is about to kill him when