Warren Hedges, English Dept. Southern Oregon University 11/97
[This is a script to a slide show presentation. I'd have images of the slides online, but Warner Brothers would sue me.]
SLIDE OF BATS IN DUMP
I'll be illustrating points about men's studies by talking about Batman today because I thought he'd draw a bigger crowd than Henry James. I'm not sure if this will end up being more Batman or more Men's Studies. I gave you handouts on both so you could read more about whatever caught your interest. I should also say that although I'm a fan of Batman, I'm no fan of misogyny or homophobia, and I think my track record is pretty good about those issues.
So far as men's studies paradigms go, I'll begin with the language of new historicism.
What interests me about The Batman graphic novels from a new historicist viewpoint is the way that they reflect the concerns of younger men. And if you've read my handout, you'll notice that one thing men's studies tries to do is discuss men in very historically specific ways.
I'm skittish about discussing men younger than myself, so my graphic novel examples will come from the late 80s, when they were primarily produced and consumed by what used to be called "Generation X," before the suits in marketing started applying it to people far younger than myself. But if you go back to it's origin, Douglas Coupland, the guy who coined the term is my age. Whatever we want to call it, there is a group of white people aged about 25 to 35 who are culturally distinct from Baby Boomers and who have a sense of diminished expectations and lack a sense of entitlement--an expectation that the media and the marketplace will reflect our concerns. We're followed by a larger group of people younger than ourselves who face similar economic challenges, but have their own cultural practices.
Let me zero in on that demographic a little further with a few personal examples. I lived in the Kennedy administration for thirteen days. I was in Kindergarten instead of Woodstock, and the first Lollapalooza was really exciting, although I was one of the older people there. Most of us expected to be blown up by Ronald Reagan.
Although these "adult comics" are aimed at an older audience than comics were in the past, I believe that they perform many of the same functions for young men that comics directed at boys do: they explore questions about who has power, when it's legitimate to use it, how this relates to the state, and what type of traits are desirable, or at least safe, for men. What, in short, should men police in themselves and in others, and how does this police action relate to larger narratives about society? In fact, I would argue that one reason older boys and younger men are reading the comics is because they don't have access to the kinds of "adult" power and economic flexibility that men, or at least white straight men, have traditionally viewed as a birthright.
DARK KNIGHT RETURNS
I'm going to use examples from three popular, highly successful Batman books, The Dark Knight Returns (1986), The Killing Joke (1988), and Arkham Asylum (1989). What do they tell us about how many young men viewed themselves and the world in the 1980s?
SLIDE OF ROBIN HOLDING ONTO BATS
First of all, it's a world where baby boomers and their values aren't trusted, so young people look back to grandfather figures as a source of authority and effectiveness. While I find this misinformed simplistic, it was many people's view of the prior generation.
In the Dark Knight Returns, Batman, now in his fifties, comes out of retirement to combat gang warfare that civic government can't stop. In Gotham City's youth culture, Batman becomes one of several competing cult figures. Robin, in this case a young woman (she's the 3rd or 4th Robin--I lose track) looks to him as an alternative to her parents, ineffective, drug-smoking, and nostalgic.
This slide also underscores an important point about women in this book: all the women, at least ones who aren't victims, are men. They act like men, learn how to use force from men, and don't shy away from using violence.
SLIDE OF BATS & FLAG
If the old heroes retain their power, the civic authority which once legitimated their violence has vanished. Politicians are seen as spineless functionaries whose only goal is to perpetuate their own privileges. In The Dark Knight Returns, although the year must be around 2000, Reagan is still president. In another novel, Nixon remains in power after using super heroes to win in Vietnam.
TWO SLIDES OF SUPES BLOWING UP PLANES
Here we see Superman fighting the Russians in a fictional South American island called Corto Maltese. And it's very much a Cold War, comic, although written from the despair of a generation that believes they'll probably be blown up. Enoch Scott, a former student of mine, suggested to me that the dividing line between X-ers and younger people is whether they grew up expecting the world to fall apart from external causes (the Bomb) or internal ones (gangs, drugs, in short a lack of infrastructure). Or as Frank Miller, author of The Dark Knight Returns said of Batman's popularity, "We live in very dark times. It fits that this would be our hero" (46).
SLIDES OF SUPES AFTER BOMB
Here he is suffering the after-effects of a Russian warhead which he diverted from the U.S. mainland.
Given this kind of world, vigilantism, force for it's own sake merely to ensure any kind of order, however fascistic it may be, is an option explored to the hilt.
BRAKKK
The Batman who returns in these comics isn't the campy one of the sixties TV show or the boy scoutish hero of fifties' comic-code censorship, but a figure much closer to the original Batman of the early forties, a man in a gritty, uncertain world and who kills without hesitation.
BATMOBILE AT DUMP
Part 2: Deconstructive
ARKHAM IS A LOOKING GLASS & WE ARE YOU
In such a world it becomes extremely difficult to maintain oppositions between heroes and villains. Both use force, heroes to maintain order simply for order's sake, villains to subvert order simply to celebrate chaos. And both villains and heroes are driven by compulsions they can neither name nor control. As the Mad Hatter tells Batman in this panel from Arkham Asylum, a deconstructive text if I ever saw one, "Arkham is a looking glass" SLIDE "and we are you" SLIDE
So there you have it, a perfectly deconstructive moment. As Gerald Graff puts it
Part 3: Queer Theory (Note how sexuality is discussed in Semiotic terms)
JOKER WITH LIPSTICK
One result of this deconstruction between heroes and villains is a overt exploration of the eroticism between the two. Here we see the Joker putting on lipstick in The Dark Knight Returns, a book where he usually refers to Bats as "darling" and "my sweet." In Arkham Asylum, set with the original, male, Robin, a jealous Joker accuses Batman of pederastic intentions. A few, perhaps token, heroes have been coming out of the closet in some comics from mainstream publishers. Now the important thing to keep in mind about queer theory is that it doesn't view representation as a function of sexuality (i.e. Batman and the Joker are "latent" homosexuals) but views sexuality as a function of representation (straight and gay is an inherently unstable opposition).
JOKER, FLOATING OVER DEAD CROWD
But if the Batman rags explore homosexuality, we also see the same Joker spreading a plague-like death which kills with pleasure and leaves grinning corpses. In an interview, Frank Miller came right out and said that "In a way, the Joker is a homophobic nightmare," and that he never had sex with one of his female henchmen because "sex is death to him. Put more accurately, death is sex" (37).
Also, as is almost always the case in American pop culture, when two men are locked in a struggle, if a woman is in the vicinity, the men's struggle is played out across the surface of her dead or maimed body, as in The Killing Joke,
COMMISSIONER GORDON, BOUND, WITH JOKER IN BACKGROUND
Where the Joker tries to drive Commissioner Gordon insane by shooting his daughter, the erstwhile Batgirl, and then subjecting Gordon to her images as he whirls through a sadistic funhouse.
BARBARAAAA
SLIDE OF THE JOKER, IF POSSIBLE
Part 4: French Feminism
TWO-PAGE, MAXIE ZEUS SPREAD
In both form and content, the graphic novels I'm working with portray a man's identity as a contingent, unstable entity because it exists only in opposition to other men, oppositions which always threaten to collapse, just as the sharp divisions and clean linearity traditionally associated with comics often now collapses into other mediums and a more painterly style.
JOKER, "LET'S PRETEND IT'S BEEN AN HOUR"
Females, to the extent that they exist as different from men, are almost entirely absent from the text, or are victims of men, or are indistinguishable from men. Now, while Catwoman and other Silicon sirens crop up in Batman titles, I still think its true that in general, they are less of a presence than in other comics, at least at this point.
However, it's also the absence of women, of a particular woman, that anchors Bruce Wayne--anchors him to Batman--in the moments where is identity is most likely to dissolve into the villains he struggles against.
WOUND 1, 2
In the moment of his greatest confusion in Arkham Asylum, Bruce Wayne seeks to escape the series of oppositions in which he finds himself by grounding himself with physical pain. He stabs himself in the hand with a glass shard.
WOUND 3, 4, 5
Yet this physical pain, perhaps an attempt to become self-referential, existing only as self-sensation, depending on no oppositions to define the self. As if he can thus escape the shifting representations around him. But this only recovers a deeper pain, the loss of his mother. The panels reveal that his deepest identity is structured around this loss, incessantly displayed by traumatic memories of the death of his parents, the starting point of his compulsion and of his career as a crime fighter. And this portrayal of parents death, especially his mother's, is almost always recurs as a reference point in recent strips.
WOUND 6, 7
In panels which depict this death, the father almost always dies first, and it's the later image of his mother's violent end which drives Bruce Wayne from pain into compulsion.
So, to sum up. In a historical context that makes the opposition between heroes and villains overtly unstable, Batman must compulsively distinguish himself from villains, along with the homoerotic perils they carry. Riven by an overtly divided subjectivity (Bruce Wayne/Batman) he grounds his identity with a sense of loss.
Now, if we bracket the violence and drama, doesn't this describe many young whanglo men in the 1980s?
Hard to distinguish between heroes & villains (Regan, Ollie North)
Perhaps intrigued by ways gender is changing (what I understand some kids call "gender hacking") but scared by homophobia, AIDS, and a sense that any deviation from traditional gender roles will make them even less powerful.
Riven by a divided subjectivity (what some would call the postmodern subject).
Grounded by a melancholy sense of loss. A perception, accurate or not, that any chance of a "normal," happy life has past and is irretrievable.
Yeah, it's Wagnerian, but I think it pretty well sums up how many saw the world then. Now it seems to me, that one response to the kind of dead end that this view creates is camp, that form of irony whose pleasure isn't so bitter. Now I see it creeping back into the movies, and I see it on Saturday morning with The Tick, but whether that's a defining point for a new generation of readers, I can't answer.