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| Title Screen from Batman: The Animated Series |
Total Mileage: 5,230
Song of the Day: Nirvana . . . just like, all of Nirvana. After all, I am in Seattle.
Book of the Day: The Purpose Driven Life (Rick Warren)
In preparation for my visiting Saddleback in a few weeks, I’ve been listening to the audiobook of The Purpose Driven Life over the past few days, and I quickly realized that, through an upbringing in the church, I had already learned most of the lessons the book had to offer. In fact, in my post from Salt Lake, I even described the experience of reading this book as “drowning in an ocean of baby formula.” I didn’t mean that to be derogatory; rather, The Purpose Driven Life is a great primer on Christianity-- like a slightly more spiritual/less academic version of Mere Christianity. In fact, Rick Warren references C.S. Lewis so often that the book is practically a love letter to the British theologian. Peppered with useful Scriptures, The Purpose Driven Life is a good introduction to Christianity for a new Christian, but I really feel like it doesn’t bring a lot to the table if you’ve spent your whole life in the church, so the descriptor of baby formula seems appropriate. If you’re new to the faith, it’s a great tool for transitioning yourself into deeper study, but unless you’re just really looking to reexamine the bare basics, it’s not exactly engaging reading for someone pretty familiar with how our religion works. There are much more thorough theologies out there and much more specialized reading material to be enjoyed by growing Christians.
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| "I am vengeance. I am the night. I am Batman." |
And then there’s where I developed a lot of my worldview: Batman cartoons. Look, I may have gone to Vacation Bible School every year and attended Sunday School every week and gone to a ton of youth activities and camps and all that, but I take no shame in admitting that much of my theology has been informed by Batman cartoons. As my youth group can tell you, superhero cartoons from the mid-1990s are still my preferred vehicle for teaching theology, and here’s why:
Okay, a quick summary first. Something of a modern Hamlet, billionaire Bruce Wayne saw his parents gunned down by a mugger right before his eyes at age 8. Seeking to keep any child from ever having to share that experience, he made a vow to fight crime as the one creature that he was afraid of: the bat. Using strictly non-lethal methods and a vast arsenal of gadgets and skills, Bruce Wayne becomes Batman and strikes fear into the hearts of criminals as he brings them to justice.
Batman and Moral Absolutism
Right out of the gate, this is probably the most interesting issue to arise from the Batman universe of characters. At first glance, Batman is a character who appears to see the world in black and white, good and evil, light and darkness. The bad guys are bad. The good guys are good. Everyone else is just an innocent bystander to be protected. The end. Period. Nothing more to it.
This is not actually the case though. There is something much deeper going on in Batman’s world. After all, Batman is a character who represents goodness and order, yet he clothes himself in garments that inspire fear, bearing an almost demonic visage. By contrast, Batman’s arch-nemesis, The Joker, embodies absolute chaos and evil, pure id, yet he clothes himself in the festive garments of a clown, which ought to inspire joy and celebration. Batman hides in the shadows, while the Joker’s blanched white skin stands out anywhere. Batman is meticulous and conscientious and compassionate, while the Joker is spontaneous and maniacal and disregards all around him. Batman is heroism cloaked in fear, while the Joker is villainy disguised as joy. You will not find two more perfectly matched foils in any other comic book. While Batman comics carry with them a theme of absolute good and evil, this contrast reveals an underlying theme that appearances can be deceiving. Sometimes the greatest evils can result from something that looks attractive, while sometimes the greatest good is something that must be grasped for in the darkness. Bound to be a proverb about that somewhere.
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| Harvey Dent (a.k.a. Two-Face) |
By the same token, good and evil often exist simultaneously in individual characters in Batman’s universe, and the conflicting natures within Batman’s villains are often what make these stories so compelling. A prime example would be Two-Face, the duality-obsessed former district attorney who became a crime boss following a psychological and physical scarring that left half of his face badly burned. Even prior to his scarring, Two-Face (better known by his real name, Harvey Dent) struggled with psychological issues, particularly a form of dissociative identity disorder that had developed in response to persistent childhood bullying. A gang boss hoping to take Dent out of an upcoming election hunts for dirt on the DA, and when an associate suggests that Dent’s background is sterling, the boss assures him, “The brighter the picture, the darker the negative.” The episode seems to hint that people will always put up masks for the public and hide their secrets, but ours is a faith that acknowledges the value of confession and public addressing of sin. Dent is an example of what can occur when hatred and anger are allowed to fester within a person rather than being vented in healthy ways: he literally develops two faces, and his psyche becomes fractured. Every human being has both good and evil drives within them, and in the case of Two-Face, they manifest as diametrically-opposed personalities rather than as a single soul deciding between good and evil. The dichotomy is so strong that all of Two-Face’s decisions must be governed by the flip of a coin rather than through discernment. To borrow Julian’s language, all of us are a mixture of weal and woe, and acknowledging this, rejoicing in it, and working through it are all a part of the human condition that we see corrupted in Two-Face. No person can be totally good or totally evil-- at some point, we all have to make decisions, and Two-Face has lost his ability to do so.
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| St. Thomas Aquinas had a surprisingly large comic collection. |
Of course, many of the Batman villains’ neuroses actually result from the corruption of positive attributes. While Two-Face’s coin-flipping compulsion is the result on a fixation on universal justice, other characters have similar compulsions that get taken too far. For example, the Mad Hatter (a Lewis Carroll-obsessed psychological researcher named Jervis Tetch) initially begins his spree of kidnappings and brainwashings over an unhealthy fixation on his coworker, Alice. A strange little man's innocent crush gives way to jealousy and anger and eventually crime. A more noble affection becomes twisted into obsession and abuse. Just as Aquinas talked about every virtue having a flipside that was a vice, many Batman villains’ criminal careers start with an initial altruistic desire, but I’ll speak more to this a little later.
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| Batman and Catwoman |
And then there’s Catwoman. In spite of the nuances in appearances and motives described above, most Batman cartoons still offer a pretty clear delineation between good and evil, but what do we do about Catwoman? This is a character intentionally designed to set Batman’s world on its ear. Sometimes she acts altruistically. Sometimes she acts selfishly. Sometimes she works with Batman and Robin. Sometimes she works with criminals. Sometimes she’s good. Sometimes she’s bad. The only thing consistent is her constant flirtation with Batman. In Batman’s black and white world, she is solid gray. In 1992’s “The Cat and the Claw,” Catwoman is introduced as an animal rights activist who assists Batman in taking down a terrorist cell. She uses methods that are barely legal, and she also supplements her income though burglary (particularly jewelry and art theft), so even though her actions are heroic, Batman must ultimately hand her over to the police. While other Batman villains seem to toe a line between good and evil, Catwoman completely blurs it, proving that seeing good and evil as diametrically-opposed forces isn’t exactly how the world works. After all, this is what the Manichees believed, and they were deemed heretical.
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| "I sure do hate them Manichees." --Saint Augustine |
As odd as it seems, one of the salient themes of Batman seems to be that people are not simply good or evil, but rather, there is a mixture of good and evil in all people, and we then make choices and decisions to pursue righteous or unrighteous paths. It would seem that every character in this universe aims for the good, but as their understandings of good and evil stem from flawed (or psychotic) interpretations of reality, they fall short and become villains.
Bruce Wayne and the Social Gospel
As the Dark Knight, Batman uses fear and intimidation as his primary weapons against crime, but as Bruce Wayne, he uses money and charity and seeks to be involved in crime prevention, not just crime fighting. The contrast between these two approaches is extreme and sometimes causes tension for Batman as he questions whether charity efforts or brute policing is the best tactic to ensure a better world.
The 1992 episode, “The Forgotten,” provides a unique insight into Bruce Wayne’s charitable psyche. Batman is stricken with amnesia while working undercover as a homeless man. He had been investigating a crime boss who was abducting Gotham City’s homeless population outside of a downtown soup kitchen, and after a blow to the head, found himself abducted as well, transported to a mine outside of town to work in slave conditions. Still in disguise and unable to remember his identity as either Bruce Wayne or Batman, he begins having dreams in which he sees himself clad in a business suit as Bruce Wayne and surrounded by homeless people. Bruce begins pulling money from his wallet and handing it out indiscriminately. Money begins raining down around him, but hungry and unsatisfied hands continue to reach up to him, and he finally gives up, hanging his head and shedding a tear. While Bruce seems to see his mission to help the poor through charity and social organizing as almost a bit futile, he persists, just as he persists in his role as Batman.
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| Batman as Bruce Wayne |
It would seem that, for Batman, the fight against crime must be two-pronged. While Batman undermines the criminal element with his constant war on gangs and villains, Gotham City also needs responsible citizens like Bruce Wayne who will seek to change the world through alleviating poverty and eliminating the need for crime at its root. Though this often seems like an uphill battle as well, Batman reminds us that we must be as persistent in caring for the poor as in fighting crime and that this is what can really make a city great. Batman knows the heads of local charities around Gotham and checks in with them regularly, seeing if Bruce Wayne’s money can help make more of a difference than Batman’s fists. He even adopts the orphaned Dick Grayson (the first Robin), proving that it is a concern for people, not just a search for vengeance, that motivates his war on crime.
Often, the “Villain” Is Really the Victim
The primary antagonists of the first few seasons of Batman: The Animated Series were not actually the supervillains that Batman is so famous for fighting (The Joker, The Penguin, Mr. Freeze, etc.). Rather, they were often greedy industrialists looking to increase their profits or gangsters looking to expand their turf, and the costumed villains were just byproducts of their efforts-- often innocent people who got caught in the crossfire and sought revenge for the wrongs against them. For example:
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| Mr. Freeze |
The Riddler was a hotshot computer programmer who went off the deep end when his videogame design was stolen by an ambitious rival, putting him out of a job in the process. Riddler sought compensation, but he also wanted violent vengeance, and Batman and Robin had to intervene.
Mr. Freeze was a scientist working on a cure for a rare disease when a greedy CEO cut the funding to his experiments, killing Freeze’s wife in the process and causing the accident that would require him to wear an insulated suit for the rest of his life. Freeze sought to ruin the CEO’s reputation as a humanitarian and bring the truth to light, and while Batman wound up bringing the CEO to justice, his personal code of ethics would not allow him to let Freeze take the man’s life.
Poison Ivy was an environmental activist who turned terrorist. Clayface was the victim of unethical medical experimentation now looking to bring a cosmetics company to justice. Killer Croc was a circus freak trying to compensate for his low intellect by making a name for himself in the criminal underworld. Two-Face was even something of a crime-fighter, seeking only to bankrupt and supplant the gangster who had scarred his face and ruined his political career.
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| Four traditional Batman villains: Killer Croc, Penguin, Joker, and Two-Face |
These are just a few examples of the villains in Batman cartoons whose real crime was trying to take justice into their own hands, rather than trusting outside forces to take care of it. With the exception of The Joker (who is pretty much just chaos incarnate), every Batman villain has one thing in common: their psychoses always stem from grudges over wrongs committed against them by real villains. Even the Joker is trying to settle the score with Batman, since the Dark Knight played a part in the villain’s mutilation at the Ace Chemical Plant years ago. The costumed supervillains were always the byproducts of a corrupt society (corrupt political and corporate structures), not just crazy people doing crazy things. For that reason, these characters were always sympathetic, and the show suggested that the real villains of our society are not individuals, but systems.
Everyone Is Entitled to a Fresh Start
One of the most poignant episodes of The New Batman Adventures was 1998’s “Old Wounds,” which details the famous falling out between Batman and Dick Grayson (the first person to bear the mantle of Robin). Now using the name “Nightwing” and working solo, Dick spends the episode telling the story of his fight with Batman to the new Robin, a preteen named Tim Drake. Dick relates the story of how he and Batman were breaking up a robbery one night, and the two of them followed the robbers’ lookout back to his apartment to interrogate him. While Dick advocated sitting the scared man down and reasoning with him, Batman brutally beat him for information right in front of the man’s wife and son. Furious at Batman’s disregard for the trauma he was causing, Dick walked out. Throughout the episode, the tensions between the two deepened, resulting in Dick eventually removing his mask and cape and punching Batman in the jaw before storming off into the night-- he had had it with the “hero” and his brutal methods.
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| Robin (left) and Nightwing (right) |
At the end of the episode, Nightwing and the new Robin catch a mugger and recover a stolen wallet, and Nightwing is shocked to see that it belongs to the same man that Batman had beaten up for information years before. When Nightwing and Robin return the wallet, the man informs them that he turned his life around that night after the encounter with Batman, and it was only a few days later that he had gotten a job offer from none other than Bruce Wayne himself. Nightwing says with a knowing smile, “Bruce Wayne is a good man.” Though his attitude toward law enforcement might be virtually draconian, Batman is a believer in forgiveness and in rehabilitating criminals. In fact, many of the later episodes of the series were devoted to Batman shadowing reformed criminals to make sure that they stayed on the straight and narrow, often having to return them to custody with the hopes that they could still lead normal lives after more time with the therapists at Arkham Asylum. Even the Joker, perhaps the most brutal and menacing criminal ever to cross Batman’s path, has a right to rehabilitation. All of this squares with the Christian premise that no sin is beyond forgiveness if people will simply submit themselves to God.
We Can’t Do It Alone
In the 1992 episode “I Am the Night,” we see Batman’s world fall apart when Commissioner Gordon is shot in a botched sting operation. Batman had been paying his respects at the location of his parents’ murder and was late to the operation. Blaming himself for the incident and struggling with grief and guilt over Gordon’s injury, it becomes clear that the crime-fighters with which Batman has surrounded himself are very much a surrogate family. Alfred even makes the astute observation that Commissioner Gordon is approximately the same age that Bruce’s father would have been, cementing that Gordon is something of a surrogate father figure to Batman whether he realizes it or not. Batman becomes unhinged as he wrestles with the guilt of Commissioner Gordon’s injury, and he must rely on a network of support (particularly Alfred and Robin). Even though Batman is the pinnacle of human achievement --a brilliant mind in a disciplined body with a completely indomitable will, all of it sans-superpowers--, the episode is a reminder that we all need our systems of support, and for Christians, that’s where the church comes in.
Of course, things get even more complicated when Batman begins working with the Justice League. The League features heroes from quite a few different walks of life, some even from other planets or dimensions. Though Batman prefers to work alone or with allies that he himself has trained (Robin, Nightwing, Batgirl, etc.), he sees the League as a force for good and, as one of the League’s only non-superpowered members, he sees it as his job to keep them firmly grounded in reality and caring for everyday people. The League is certainly not a perfect institution. Superman is arrogant. The Flash is sarcastic. Hawkgirl has anger issues. Green Lantern likes to bark orders at people. Still, they cooperate and try to use their gifts to better the world. They support one another in spite of their differences, and it is those differences (both in range of powers and in personalities) that make the League strong. For more on this, see Ephesians 4:1-16.
So yes, there’s not much that The Purpose Driven Life teaches that can’t also be conveyed through a nice helping of Batman cartoons. The lessons of the Christian life are available through a surprising number of outlets in popular culture if we will only just watch for them. In particular, superhero cartoons have a way of speaking to the human condition by showing us that even these costumed, empowered individuals still struggle with the moral dilemmas that we all face on a daily basis. Good and evil aren’t always quite so well-defined as they appear at first glance, and we often have to trust to a force outside ourselves when trying to discern the difference.
There is a lot more ground I could cover on this issue, but this is a nice intro. For now, I’ve got a Mark Driscoll book to read and some sites to see in Seattle and an old friend to catch up with, so I’m going to go take care of that.
Peace and Blessings,
Tom
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