“So we'll hunt him. Because he can take it.”
“Because he’s not our hero.”
Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy is marked by Batman’s ever shifting reputation
— transforming him from a mysterious figure in the night, to hero, to villain, to legend
and myth.
It's a fitting story for a character
whose cultural identity is always
in flux.
Batman a far more mutable character than any of his peers.
But what kind of hero is he exactly?
In this video and the next one, I’m going
to look at 6 heroic archetypes and parse out the many literary influences that have been
melded together to form what we think about as Batman.
Batman as a Classical Hero
Now, of course, when asking the question “What kind of a hero is Batman?” the obvious answer
is “um, duh, he’s a superhero.”
But, of course, the superhero didn’t spring fully formed out of the minds of Jerry Seigal
and Joe Shuster detatched from every kind of character that came before.
When crafting Superman, Seigal said that he based his character on “Samson, Hercules and all
the strong men I have ever heard tell of rolled into one.
Only more so.”
Samson and Hercules are what we’d call Classical Heroes and most superheroes are extensions
of their classical predecessors.
These are characters known for their strength and their ability to perform great deeds,
usually monster hunting.
A key feature of the classical hero however is that they are flawed, often foolish.
Samson is overly trusting, and Hercules accidentally murders his family.
In making Superman like these characters “only more so,” Seigel and Shuster ironed out these imperfections.
Superman’s only weakness, kryptonite, is external, not internal.
In Batman we have a more human version of the Classical hero, but the kinds of flaws
he exhibits, especially in the Nolan trilogy, more closely align with another type of protagonist
that is just as old as the classical hero: the Tragic Hero.
Batman as a Tragic Hero
Superheroes are often have a tragic backstory.
Dead parents.
Dead uncle.
Exploded planets.
There are few characters who experience as much tragedy as Batman does.
But that bad things happen to him does not necessarily qualify Batman as a tragic hero.
For that, we have to turn to the ancient greek philosopher, Aristotle, who defined the character
type in his book, Poetics.
The character type often overlaps with
the classical hero.
But the essence of what makes a character tragic, according to Aristotle, is when they
cause us to feel both pity for them, and fear for ourselves.
Okay, so!
How does that happen?
Well, to figure that out, Aristotle outlines a few kinds of characters that DO NOT accomplish this.
So, if we watch a perfect man fail, it is not tragedy.
“It merely shocks us.”
If we watch an evil man succeed.
“Nothing is more alien to the spirit of tragedy."
If we watch an evil man fall, we will feel morally satisfied, but not pity or fear.
Here’s the key bit:
“Pity is aroused by unmerited misfortune, fear by the misfortune of a man like ourselves.”
So the tragic hero should not be perfect, otherwise we won’t relate to him, but he
should be better than most men, more capable and more moral.
Tragedy will strike only because he makes “errors in judgement” or because of his
“frailty.
In other words, their downfalls have to come as a result of their own actions, and often
as a result of actions they thought were morally correct, as opposed to vices.
And the punishment has to be worse than the crime.
Hamlet is a good example here.
He's a good, clever, respected nobleman whose fatal flaw or Hamartia is not that he contemplates murder, but that he contemplates murder
for too long.
Had he killed Claudius immediately, he would have avoided catastrophe, but in waiting,
in attempting to make absolutely sure he was acting morally, a bunch of other people die, including
himself.
Nolan’s version of Batman, at least in The Dark Knight, owes a bit of a debt to
Hamlet, and not just because they have a dead parent or two.
The deaths of Thomas and Martha Wayne is the most glaringly obvious tragic moment in Bruce’s
life,
but it is just the start of his story, and tragic heroes are
really defined by their endings rather than their beginnings.
The Aristotelian error of judgement that cements Bruce a tragic hero happens right here...
"Come on, come on, hit me, hit me! Come on, hit me, hit me!
Bruce’s fatal flaw is his refusal to kill.
A choice that will cause the death of Rachel,
Harvey Dent,
and the persona of the Batman as we know it.
Often, tragic heroes, like those in Shakespeare, will die at the end of their stories, but
not always.
Oedipus, for instance, who Aristotle calls the most perfect version of the tragic hero survives the play he is most known for, and doesn’t die until
its sequel, Oedipus at Colonus.
What’s more important, and perhaps even more tragic than a physical death, is a total
and complete spiritual and emotional death.
THAT is what Bruce experiences at the end of The Dark Knight.
When we are reintroduced to him in The Dark Knight Rises, he is practically a dead man,
a hermit unable to enjoy life.
That film is thematically a resurrection of Bruce Wayne, and in order for something to be resurrected,
to rise, it needs to have been dead and fallen to begin with.
The classical and tragic heroes are enduring and pervasive.
And it’s really not until the early 19th century that we start to talk about heroes
in other terms, with the emergence of the Romantic Hero.
Batman as a Romantic Hero
Now, don’t let the name fool you.
This term does not mean the hero of a romance story.
No, it comes out of Romanticism, a movement that emphasized emotion and individuality
and which produced literary heroes that broke the mold of what we typically considered heroic.
In contrast to classical and tragic heroes, who were often characters at the center of
their societies — kings,
leaders and warriors — the romantic hero is typically an outsider, a rebel.
Someone who is waging war on society itself, its systems of justice, its materialism, its
hypocrisy, etc.
The character is a reflection of the social disintegration, violence, urbanization and upheaval that
defined the early 19th century as a result of the French and Industrial Revolutions.
Literary critic Northrop Frye wrote that this version of the hero is someone “who is placed
outside the structure of civilization and therefore represents the force of physical
nature, amoral or ruthless, yet with a sense of power, and often of leadership, that society
has impoverished itself by rejecting.”
You can see the outline of Batman in that description.
The Nolan trilogy really emphasizes that final part of the character, since Gotham is clearly
a poorer place when it doesn’t incorporate Bruce's ideas.
In the Romantic Hero, those ideas come from someone who is engulfed in a sea of psychological
struggles.
They are moody and unpredictable,
“They are brooders or visionaries.”
"The centers of intense mental activity." Who does that sound like?
There is something, some idea or emotion, that this character has that sets them apart
from the world, and as a result of this separation, they are introspective, melancholic and often
wandering, wayward men.
You can see all of these characteristics seep into the portrayal of Bruce Wayne throughout the
Dark Knight trilogy, but especially in the early parts of Batman Begins where his dissatisfaction
with Gotham’s systems of justice sends him adrift in the world, on a journey
that begins aimlessly.
His return to Gotham and and his subsequent war on crime mimics Edmund Dante’s transformation into the Count
of Monte Cristo or Heathcliff’s return to Wuthering
Heights after mysteriously acquiring great wealth and both of their battles with the people who had wronged them.
All of these characters are clever and intelligent, a necessary quality for someone who has diagnosed
the world as lacking, a quality that isn’t as necessary for classical or tragic heroes.
But there is a key characteristic that separates Batman from the Romantic heroes.
Batman is not misanthropic.
He's altruistic, not egoistic.
One of the earliest Romantic heroes appears in french writer Honoré de Balzac’s, Le Pere
Goriot.
In it, a young man named Rastignac declares war on the cruelty of Parisian society. Raney Sanford says that “the limitations
of Rastignac as hero are readily apparent.
The rebel who deludes himself that to plunder and exploit make him somehow different from
those who with whom he contends can only be an adolescent figure.
Without self perception, he sees all the irrational demonic forces in the world as outside himself
— a delusion that perhaps is the most limiting quality of the typical romantic rebel.”
We run into a bit of a catch 22 here.
The character who thinks of society as corrupt without analyzing himself will also act in an immoral manner.
But if they recognize the potential damage of their own actions, they can rise above that
darkness.
This happens in the Count of Monte
Cristo when Dantes begins to regret his relentless pursuit of revenge and redeems himself
by helping others.
That moment of self-revelation happens much earlier in Batman Begins
when Bruce regrets nearly killing Joe Chill himself.
For the Romantic Hero, salvation comes not when they recognize the mutual goodness between
themselves and the rest of society, but when they recognize the potential for evil in both,
and thus the need not to just wage war against something, but to produce something new as
well.
In rejecting Ra’s Al Ghul, Bruce Wayne essentially rejects being a Romantic Hero.
The quest of the Batman — to rid Gotham of crime — is too big and too fundamentally
good to fit fully into the mold of the flawed rebel as seen in Romantic literature.
So we may say that, in Nolan’s interpretation of the character, Batman has the personality,
the moodiness and darkness of a Romantic hero, as well as the outsider status, but that he
has a more traditionally heroic set of values.
At the same time, he accomplishes great feats of strength like a classical hero, and faces
terrible consequences for his errors in judgement like a tragic hero.
But we’re not done yet.
In part two, we’ll dive into other archetypes of heroism in literature, and take a look
at how they’re used in some of Batman’s comic book portrayals.
Until then, thanks for watching.
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