BOOK REVIEW OF: The Many Lives Of The Batman

John Anderson

Northwestern University
<jca@casbah.acns.nwu.edu>

 

The Many Lives of the Batman: Critical Approaches to a Superhero and his Media. Edited by Roberta E. Pearson and William Uricchio. New York: Routledge, 1991. 213 pp.

 

The essays in this collection offer different kinds of assistance to a reader trying to interpret the multiple versions of Batman and the recent (now receding) flurry of Bat-hype. The essays chart the movement of competing “Batmen,” and attempt to give an account of the intertextual and extratextual dimensions of this network of alternatives. Some of the essays have an anthropological focus, as they investigate the behavior of the communities that produce and consume images of Batman. Others focus on the meanings of these images, although the interpretations of specific artifacts never lose sight of the multiple and interconnected nature of the various Bat-phenomena. It is in their accounts of this multiplicity and interconnection that the essays make their most suggestive contributions to the practice of cultural studies.

 

The best of these essays are extremely sophisticated in their adaptation of critical methodologies to the new multiple and changeable forms of the Batman narrative. The essays by Jim Collins and Eileen Meehan are most striking in this regard, combining detailed information about the phenomena with penetrating analyses of the narrative (Collins) or economic (Meehan) processes at work in contemporary representations of Batmen. The article by Uricchio and Pearson, on the other hand, serves as a kind of introduction to critical issues for contemporary Bat-scholarship by examining the serial nature of the Batman character, and calling attention to the tension between multiplicity and coherence in the production of popular culture. The three articles that deal directly with audience responses–Parsons, Bacon-Smith and Yarborough, Spigel and Jenkins–demonstrate specific models for cultural studies that are interactive, and do not write over the meanings produced by the audiences. However, of the contributions to this collection, Andy Medhurst’s essay is perhaps the most controversial and critical, as it addresses and explores issues of camp and sexuality in ways that challenge “official” interpretations of Batman. Medhurst’s framing of the competing bat-discourses as the struggle to establish “legitimacy” or “deviancy” sharpens and specifies the issues at stake in preferring one version of Batman over another, and suggests that homophobic resistance may account for the insistence, made by both artists and fans, on particular definitions of the Batman character’s masculinity.

 

The essays that are less self-reflective about their own practices are nonetheless useful in helping familiarize a critical reader with the kinds of information necessary for a study of Batman. For example, Bill Boichel’s brief history of the Batman’s manifestations in comics, film and television provides the pertinent names, dates, and titles to readers unfamiliar with the comics industry. But despite the promise of its title (“Batman: Commodity as Myth”), Boichel’s article fails to do more than describe the changes in the character of Batman since its first appearance. The collection also contains two interviews, one with DC editor Denny O’Neil, and one with writer/artist Frank Miller. These are informative, and give one the sense of being privy to inside information, but they do not exhaustively probe the issues they raise. However, for readers not familiar with the formation of the Batman canon, the articles set up the collection’s more detailed analyses by introducing the history of conflicting interpretations through the personalized “voices” of comics expert (Boichel), professional arbiter and editor (O’Neil), and artist (Miller). Thus, these three essays serve in part to highlight the movement in the other essays away from explanations based on authorial intention, and towards models that examine the effects of larger communities–audiences, populations of fans, and corporations–in the construction of meaning.

 

One consistent trend in the collection is the rejection of a passive model of cultural consumption. In the words of Patrick Parsons (“Batman and his Audience: The Dialectic of Culture”), study of the audiences for superhero comics reveals that “Contrary to the assumptions of some in both the popular and scholarly community, the impact of readers on content may be greater than the impact of content on readers” (67). Readers and viewers build their own “Batman” out of their personal experience with the character, resulting in differing but equally active interpreters who use Batman in different ways. For example, Parsons charts the multiple American audiences for superheroes, and examines historical development of a specialized and sophisticated readership for the growing field of underground comix, independent comics, and graphic novels. Different audiences practice different interpretations and manipulations of the signs bearing the label “Batman.” Parsons goes on to examine the direct influence of fans on the production of comics. Spigel and Jenkins, on the other hand, examine the significance of the Batman character to less-specialized audiences (“Same Bat Channel, Different Bat Times: Mass Culture and Popular Memory”). Based on interviews with a number of people about their memories of the Batman television show (1966), the article demonstrates the ways in which people “use and reuse media in their daily lives” (144). The personal and transformative nature of popular memory thus suggests to Spigel and Jenkins that a more dialogic relationship between the oral historian and his or her subjects will reflect a better understanding of the processes of memory and narration that people use to make sense of cultural artifacts.

 

Camille Bacon-Smith and Tyrone Yarborough (“Batman: the Ethnography”) also acknowledge the active role of audiences in constructing meanings. By questioning different audiences for Tim Burton’s film Batman (1989) in their “native habitats”–movie theaters, comic book shops, a fan club, and a comics convention–the writers set out to learn from Batman audiences rather than simply analyze or characterize them. The encounter between researcher and researched is posed as an encounter between different but equally valid discourses of interpretation. Thus, while able to account for the significant influence of newspaper reviews, advertising, and marketing strategies in shaping audience approval or disapproval, the writers avoid a model of popular culture that imagines consumers to be a homogeneous or unreflective mass. On the contrary, the article demonstrates that a large scale cultural phenomenon like the release of Batman becomes the occasion for active, dialogic exchange among audience members. Meaning-making is shown as a variable process that takes place at a proliferation of specific sites, not a homogeneous activity performed by a uniform audience.

 

Eileen Meehan (“‘Holy Commodity Fetish, Batman!’: The Political Economy of a Commercial Intertext”) provides the most thorough and suggestive account of the way this multiplicity has been managed for profit, examining the function of “Batman” as not only name, but brand name as well. Through a detailed examination of WCI’s activities, Meehan shows how the different versions of the Batman produced by DC Comics and Warner Brothers, culminating in the release of the motion picture and the licensing of the bat logo, are all components of a marketing campaign designed to penetrate a range of different markets. The result is to ground the multiple versions of Batman, and their enjoyment by a large and diverse population of consumers, in the fact that “text, intertext, and audiences are simultaneously commodity, product line, and consumer.” The “contradictions” among the various reproductions of Batman are completely in synch with the promotion of the movie and its attendant products: The commercial intertext that results from this combination of advertising and licensing intermixes old themes with new, camp motifs with grim visages, cartooning with live action, thus generating a rich and often contradictory set of understandings and visions, about justice and corruption in America. And it does this because of manufacturers’ perceptions about acceptable risk, potential profit, and targeted consumers. (58-59) For Meehan as for the other writers, audiences are by no means a passive, homogeneous mass. The point of her economic analysis is not, as she puts it, that “evil moguls force us to buy Bat-chains” (48). Nonetheless, her article concentrates on revealing the constraints imposed on popular culture by corporate decisions because, in the everyday experience of popular media, “this complex structure is generally invisible to us” (61). Within the context of this collection, Meehan’s essay performs the valuable function of reintroducing more directly economic concerns into the discussion, illustrating how the current multiplicity of Bat-representations can coexist quite comfortably with immense and diversified corporations capable of orchestrating the release and promotion of objects in a number of different media, for a number of different markets.

 

Jim Collins (“Batman: The Movie, Narrative: The Hyperconscious”) also highlights the referentiality and intertextuality of the contemporary additions to the Bat- canon, but focuses on the interplay of specific artistic techniques rather than corporate economic strategy. If Meehan emphasizes the corporate imperatives motivating WCI’s diverse marketing strategy, Collins identifies an aesthetic imperative in the diversity found in the imagery and language of individual texts: Texts like Batman: The Movie, The Dark Knight Returns, and Watchmen which feature narration by amalgamation suggest the emergence of a new type of narrative which is neither a master narrative that might function as a national myth for entire cultures, nor a micro-narrative that targets a specific subculture or sharply defined community. The popularity of these texts depends on their appeal not to a broad general audience, but a series of audiences varying in degrees of sophistication and stored cultural knowledge (i.e. exposure and competence). As aggregate narratives, they appeal to disparate but often overlapping audiences, by presenting different incarnations of the superhero simultaneously, so that the text always comes trailing its intertexts and rearticulations. (179-180)

 

In his exploration of “aggregate narratives,” Collins’ work on Frank Miller’s Dark Knight is the most thorough and persuasive of any in the collection. Especially good is his analysis of Miller’s use of panels, and of the apparent resemblance between the techniques of the graphic novel and those of cinema: the juxtaposition of different sized frames on the same page, deployed in constantly changing configurations, intensifies their co-presence, so that the entire page becomes the narrative unit, and the conflictive relationships among the individual images becomes a primary feature of the “narration” of the text, a narration that details the progression of the plot, but also the transgression of one image by another . . . the tableaux moves the plot foreword but encourages the eye to move in continually shifting trajectories as it tries to make sense of the overall pattern of fragmentary images. (173) As Collins’ explications of particular pages demonstrate, it is inadequate to call Miller’s work cinematic because the frames of the graphic novel are able to mimic the visual styles of more than one medium. It would be more accurate to say that Miller builds his narrative from a montage of references to the conventions of different media: television, various kinds of cinema, “conventional” comic books, Japanese comics (Manga), and others.

 

New versions of Batman like Miller’s thus require interpretations that are adequate to the intertextuality and self-referentiality of the new narratives. The effect on criticism is to expand the definition of a text’s “action” to what was previously considered extra-diegetic. One of the reasons why the Batman phenomenon has attracted the attention of the writers assembled in this collection is the sense that at least some of the representations of Batman–and the contexts of cultural production and fandom–share common perspectives and concerns with recent writing on theory and cultural studies. For Collins, the effect is to generate dialogue between the discourses of scholarship and popular culture. For example: The producers of Dark Knight and Watchmen orchestrate textual space and time, but in doing so they also emphasize (through different but related means) that to envision textual space is to envision at the same time the cultural space surrounding it, specifically the conflicting visual traditions that constitute those semiotic environments. (172) Collins’ essay thus provides an insightful model for writing on popular culture because it works through the linkages between theory and popular cultural, specifies the ways in which texts embody alternative modes of narration, and acknowledges the ways in which the texts simultaneously represent and interpret the traditions to which they belong.

 

All of the writers in this collection draw attention to the contradictions that have been manifested in one or another version of the Batman. A crimefighter whose activities are often illegal, a defender of justice who is also (as millionaire Bruce Wayne) the symbol and defender of wealth, Batman’s relationship to authority and the status quo have been portrayed and understood as conflicted, uneasy, and anxiety-provoking. Andy Medhurst’s essay (“Batman, Deviance, and Camp”) deserves special attention because of its straightforward discussion of the role sexuality has played in constructing and construing Batman’s relation to authority, power, and masculinity. Medhurst, like others, emphasizes the multiple versions of the character, and argues that the camp sensibility of the television series undermines attempts to take any version of the Batman seriously. But Medhurst is specific in attributing the anxiety demonstrated by audiences over these multiple versions (which is the “real” Batman?) to sexual anxiety: the “Batmen” rejected by the hard-core fans are those that admit even the slightest homoerotic sensibility, or any parody of the character’s definition as an obsessively self-serious crimefighter. In this rejection, Medhurst asserts, bat-fans mirror the assumptions about masculinity and homosexuality held by Frederic Wertham, the psychiatrist who first suggested that Batman might be gay. Medhurst exposes Wertham’s panicky, outdated, homophobic arguments as fallacies (an “elephantine spot-the-homo routine”), but he is no less sparing of the bat-fans’ shrill disgust levelled at Wertham: “The rush to ‘protect’ Batman and Robin from Wertham is simply the other side to the coin of his bigotry. It may reject Wertham, cast him in the role of the dirty-minded old man, but its view of homosexuality is identical” (152). Wertham’s insinuations about Batman and Robin, his claims concerning the harmful effects of comics on young minds, and his instrumental role in bringing about the Comics Code authority, have made him the most important “supervillan” that the fans of Batman and other comics have ever had. Like the Joker, his image reappears again and again, a threat to “authentic” interpretations of the Batman character. But Medhurst boldly claims a piece of Wertham’s argument, in order to legitimize his own advocacy of a “deviant” interpretation of Batman: Wertham quotes [the remarks of a patient who had been aroused by the idea of having sex with Batman in the “secret Batcave”] to shock us, to tear the pages of Detective away before little Tommy grows up and moves to Greenwich Village, but reading it as a gay man today I find it rather moving and also highly recognizable. What this anonymous gay man did was to practice that form of bricolage which Richard Dyer has identified as a characteristic reading strategy of gay audiences. Denied even the remotest possibility of supportive images of homosexuality within the dominant heterosexual culture, gay people have had to fashion what we could out of the imageries of dominance, to snatch illicit meanings from the fabric of normality, to undertake a corrupt decoding for the purposes of satisfying marginalized desires. This may not be as necessary as it once was, given the greater visibility of gay representations. Wertham’s patient evokes in me an admiration, that in a period of American history even more homophobic than most, there he was, raiding the citadels of masculinity, weaving fantasies of oppositional desire. (153) Like other writers in this volume, Medhurst shifts the focus from the cultural icon to its reception and reinterpretation by its audiences. Moreover, he uses his argument for the “legitimacy” of a gay Batman to reveal tendencies that function textually and intertextually in the current Bat-canon. But unlike some of the other commentaries on Batman in this volume, Medhurst’s is the one almost certain to be resisted by the arbiters of official bat-taste. Medhurst targets this resistance as the collective homophobic core of the new bat-discourse: the change from the 60s “camp crusader” to the snarling Dark Knight of the 80s thus represents a “re- heterosexualization” of the character, carried out by artists, marketers, moviegoers, comic fans, and others (159). What Medhurst brings to our attention is that despite the recent proliferation of bat-signifiers in popular culture, some interpretations of the multiple retellings of the Batman narrative remain more equal than others.

 

As a result, it is Medhurst’s essay and perhaps Meehan’s that are most searchingly critical of the recent resurgence in Batman paraphenalia. Their “unofficial” versions of the new Batman–as masculinist homophobe; as corporate intertext–play a crucial role in retaining the oppositional status of criticism in Batman-studies, as represented by this collection. Any book on Batman is likely to be both energized and limited by the character’s current popularity. The presence of the name of the bat in the title may attract the attention of audiences already sensitized to it. However, as Meehan might point out, even the most diverse objects produced by third parties can be enlisted to advertise the central commodity, if they bear the sign of the bat. No scholarly “licensing” of the name and logo can take place without also enlisting scholarship as an endorsement of bat-products–in this case, an endorsement for the significance and interest of at least one “new” genre, the graphic novel. Given this relationship, it is perhaps fortunate that DC Comics refused to grant the editors the rights to the images for use in illustrations, dust jackets, etc. “[DC] did not feel that this book was consistent with their vision of the Batman” (vi). What better reverse endorsement could DC have given to bat-criticism, and its attempts to emphasize the failure of any single interpretation to account for Batman’s history?