Holy Ancient Heresies, Batman!

The Batman is joyous because he absolutely nailed that drawing!

I am a Batman fan. And just so you know, I was a Batman fan before it was cool. In fact, I have five children and their names are Barbara, Bruce, Wayne, Alfred, Jim and the baby we are expecting will be named Selina. (Of course I'm joking; we plan to name her Rachel.)* Now that I have established my bonafides, let me clue you in to a problem I have had with The Batman and his myth. I have deep-seated fears that it may be a Manichean myth that has so captivated me.

What do I mean by Manichean? Ah, what a delicate question you have asked; one that, in the hands of a more careful expositor than I, would take many, many pages to explain. Even after this, you would likely be left scratching your head. So allow me to mix metaphors, cut to the chase and paint with a very broad brush; the Manicheans were a group of folks living circa the 5th century A.D. (You guessed it, they were a big splinter in the spiritual eye of St. Augustine during his youth.) Theirs was a gnostic cult that centered on the idea of dualism. For them, good and evil were separate and equal forces vying for control of the universe. So, to recap, we have a group of people who taught that the world was in a precarious balance between equally powerful forces of good and evil and that balance was always in danger of being upset.

Even Batman gets bored with his own drawings sometimes.

So what in the world does any of this boring nonsense have to do with Batman? Let's start with the big man himself, Bruce Wayne. Or do I mean Batman? It's a fun middlebrow exercise to ponder which of these is the "mask" that hides the other. Does Bruce Wayne put on a Batman mask so he can protect his identity and continue to live as "normally" as possible while he carries out his self-imposed mission to rid the streets of Gotham of crime and corruption? Or is it that Bruce Wayne is merely the mask that Batman puts on in the daytime; the mask that provides cover for his obsession with nocturnal crime fighting? The comics are certainly not forthcoming on this and an argument for either position could be made using them. So it seems that Bruce/Batman is in an ever constant tension about his own true identity.

A hero needs an anti-hero. And Batman has one of the all-time best antagonists in the Joker. I say this not because the Joker is cool or interesting, but precisely because he is not those things. In Batman, we have a hyper-rational, logical man who has definite goals he wishes to attain. In the Joker, we have none of those things. He is the opposite of Batman in every way. He doesn't seek to commit crimes in order to get anything or control anything. He only works against Batman. In fact, it seems that the Joker wouldn't exist if Batman didn't exist. There is nothing to the Joker, he is blank, he has no "secret identity", he has no definable motives. Some of you with an Augustinian bent would be tempted to say Joker doesn't exist properly speaking, he is merely the privation of Batman.

I bring two authorities to confirm this. First is Frank Miller in The Dark Knight Returns from 1986. This is a story that takes place about 10 years after Batman has retired. It is a world without wither Batman or the Joker. When Batman finally comes out of retirement, we see the Joker slowly emerge from his catatonic state. It is implied that the Joker has neither acted nor spoken since Batman disappeared 10 years previously. My second piece of literary evidence comes from a Legends of the Dark Knight story called Going Sane from 1994. In this story the Joker believes he has killed Batman. In short order he loses his memory, gets a name (Joseph Kerr!), a job and a girlfriend. He lives a normal, prosaic life. That is until Batman reappears at which time the Joker also reemerges.

So here we have two equal and opposite forces - both of which seem to be invincible and immortal (they've been fighting since 1939!). If this is true, then Batman cannot hope to "win", he can only ever balance out the evil committed by the Joker. 

It seems that Bruce Wayne/Batman is divided internally in his own person and externally against the Joker. In neither instance is he complete without his other half. What is Bruce without Batman? Is Batman even necessary without the Joker? Could Batman even exist if it weren't for Bruce? 

These are the questions that cause me to fear for the orthodoxy of my favorite superhero. Must I, like St. Augustine before me, shun this gnostic heresy? Must I  move my loyalty to the gnostic Christ of Superman (again with the heresies!)? Is there a possible solution that will satisfy; one that we can cling to as we stumble around the dark streets of Gotham? I think so, but we won't get there today. We have one more villain to deal with who is even more deeply and irrevocably divided than Bruce before we get to our resolution.

See you next time for part two.

*I'm not really that much of a nut. My kids all have real, non-comic book based names.