In the opening scene of Frank Miller's classic Batman graphic novel, The Dark Knight Returns,
Bruce Wayne nearly kills himself trying to win a race.
There is no altruistic reason for him needing to win.
No criminal to stop or civilian to save, he's doing it purely for the adrenaline high.
Having given up super heroics a decade earlier, this older version of Bruce Wayne is a dead man with a death wish.
Regularly telling us "This would be a good death." When he becomes Batman again, Millar
constantly reminds us that Bruce is at least partially in it for himself. "I'm born again."
he thinks and he repeatedly throws himself into dangerous
situations with no regard for whether he lives or not. This version of Batman is a
self-destructive maniac. In literary terms, he's a Byronic Hero.
Batman as a Byronic Hero
The term is named after Lord
Byron, an English nobleman and poet of the Romantic period. This guy was every 19th century woman's
dreamboat. Female authors loved to base their leading men off of him. Mr. Darcy,
Mr. Rochester and Heathcliff are the Edward Cullen's of their generation but times a billion and they all are based off of Lord Byron.
He was famously called mad,
bad and dangerous
to know.
The Byronic Hero is a heightened version of the Romantic Hero that I talked about in the last video.
Basically all of the qualities that make up a Romantic Hero are turned up to 11!
Not all Romantic Heroes are Byronic Heroes though. For a modern example,
you can call Harry Potter a Romantic Hero, but even at Order of the Phoenix levels of teenage moodiness,
he doesn't begin to exhibit the levels of psychological torture
Byron and his literary descendants do. Snape does though. The Byronic archetype is born out of one of
Byron's most famous works, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, which is about a young man
who wanders Europe after growing weary of his life of meaningless pleasures in England. Where other sailors
wept when the reckless gales of the rough sea nearly sinks their ship, Childe Harold remains silent as if he is unconcerned
with living or dying. Another Byronic hero, Captain Ahab in Moby Dick,
exhibits the same kind of recklessness in the face of annihilation.
Leading his ship towards destruction to satisfy his own desires and his own ego. In addition to their self-destructive tendencies,
Byronic Heroes are also defined by their cynicism, their arrogance and their lack of integrity.
Qualities which Batman usually does not have. As we talked about in the previous video, he is typically idealistic.
Wholeheartedly believing in the ability for society to improve. When we meet Bruce in the Dark Knight Returns,
he's become a cynic, uttering a phrase we'd never hear him say anywhere else. "I walked the streets of this city
I'm learning to hate." A line
which echoes Childe Harold saying that he loathes to dwell in his native land. Miller's Batman is also a more amoral
depiction of the character. A key scene of the story has him in a tank-like
Batmobile with his guns set on the leader of the mutants the new head of crime in Gotham.
Usually Batman struggles with the urge to kill criminals because doing so would prevent future crime, but that's not what's going on here.
He considers killing the mutant leader because of the satisfaction that he'd get from doing it. It's not a moral calculation,
it's a selfish one. He actually only decides to not kill him because he revels the chance to fight such a formidable opponent
hand to hand. Ego, and arrogance permeate his character in every scene. This next part isn't
absolutely necessary for a Byronic Hero
but Northrop Frye notes that stories with this character will often feature some
variant of the struggle of brothers theme. In the Bible, you've got pairs of brothers that are in conflict with one another. Where one
represents the established order and the other represents the force of nature and change. But in the conventional
interpretation of the Bible, the figures of the social establishment, Isaac and Jacob, are the accepted ones. With
Romanticism, there comes a transfer of sympathy to their exiled
brethren.
You can see this in Wuthering Heights where our sympathies are, at least for a time, with Heathcliff, the wilder character
associated with nature. He's up against a foster brother, Hindley, who embodies the establishment and social decorum of 19th century
England. A kind of figure Frye says seems unheroic and spoiled by a softer decadent civilization.
It's fitting then that Miller casts Batman's former brother-in-arms, Superman, as a man of the establishment.
He's lost all semblance of heroism and has become the flunky of a misguided government. Against his mindless
servitude, our sympathies can only be with the wilder brother. The lack of this dynamic in Batman v
Superman is one of the factors that saps that fight of its energy and resonance.
The Byronic Hero has influenced literature for more than
200 years and it also overlaps with another hero archetype. Which brings me to...
Batman as an Antihero
The Byronic Hero is the Antihero version of the Romantic Hero.
But there are also a ton of other types of Antiheroes, from immoral cowboys to jaded detectives to the alienated
protagonists of
existentialist novels.
But there's little that binds them all together. The only way to define the character type broadly enough is to go to the dictionary
definition and say that they are
protagonists who lack conventional heroic attributes.
But does that definition even include Batman? It certainly does for the character as he was originally conceived.
Emulating pulp heroes like The Shadow and The Phantom, and who in his earliest appearances killed criminals.
But it feels off applying it to his comedic portrayals and sometimes even to his animated iterations like the one in Bruce
Tim's DC Animated Universe who often is as traditionally heroic as Superman.
He's clearly an antihero when he's blase about killing, but even when he doesn't kill, he's almost always okay with...umm...
let's call it enhanced interrogation.
"I swear to God!" "Swear to me!"
Batman is anti-heroic when he rides the line of what is moral.
He is relegated to the shadows because he doesn't represent our morality,
he questions it. It's this quality that also aligns him with folk heroes.
Batman as a Folk Hero
In the graphic novel,
Batman Year 100, Paul Pope imagines a
feral and demonic version of the Batman, still cleaning up the streets of Gotham a hundred years after the character's
inception. Whether this is Bruce Wayne or not is
unknown.
But with him hidden behind the mask for the duration of the story, the novel is emblematic of an idea that ripples throughout Batman's
stories. That the Caped Crusader is bigger than one man. That he is more of an idea than a person.
I like to think that his monstrous and surreal
depiction here is more in line with how Gotham thinks of Batman based on the stories that spread about him rather than as he actually
is. And because of that, the legend behind the Batman is just as powerful as anything the character can
physically accomplish. Such iterations of the character like this one or
Nolan's Batman when Bruce passes the torch off to Robin, tap into some of the most important influences on the character:
Folk Heroes. Now, Folk Heroes usually apply to
historical or pseudo-historical figures. People like Joan of Arc or King Arthur who embody the values of a culture.
But it also refers to fictional characters, two of whom are important here, Robin Hood and Zorro.
It's a looser category of hero than the other ones
we've talked about so far
but it has a lot of common and unique qualities. The Robin and Zorro school of Folk Hero is the
vigilante working against a corrupt central power.
So in year 100, Batman fights against a police state as opposed to street criminals as usual. What also unites them is the emphasis
on the stories and legends that build up around them within the world of the narrative that are often exaggerated.
They are heroes, which the people hear about but don't see. Compare that to Superman. This phrase,
"Look, up in the sky!" "It's a bird!" "It's a plane!" "It's Superman!"
"Yes, it's Superman!" is one of the most famous phrases in the Superman canon.
He's a hero
you can see directly.
Spider-man publishes pictures of himself in a newspaper and The Flash has a museum dedicated to him and appears at public events.
But typically Batman and Robin and Zorro remain obscure to the very people they serve. In The Dark Knight Returns,
Miller uses media reports to distance us and the public from the character.
We're not seeing him directly only hearing about him.
And we're rarely hearing the truth. "An animal snarled and growled...a werewolf, for sure!" While he's in retirement in the Dark Knight Returns,
young people begin to think that he's a myth.
And that's exactly what he becomes when the city of Gotham builds a statue to him in The Dark Knight Rises.
He's a Folk Hero for both Gotham and for us. A constant manifestation of America's struggles with crime,
urbanization, corruption and more. He emerges from the collected characteristics of generations of heroic
characters. From Samson and Hercules, Achilles and Hector, Oedipus and Hamlet, Mr. Darcy and Mr.
Rochester, Lord Byron and Childe Harold, Robin Hood and Zorro,
writers have shaped him into every kind of character
we are familiar with. Borrowing traits and excluding others as they see fit, forever changing him to match the times or put another way...
"I'm whatever Gotham needs me to be."
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