Going Behind the Trauma: Desiring Batman in Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy
Posted by matthewhelmers on July 05, 2012 in Dr Matthew Helmers, Guest Blog tagged with Batman, Eve KosofskySedgwick, Henry James, horror and trauma, masculinity, queer.
On July 20th, Christopher Nolan’s much acclaimed Dark Knight Trilogy will come to its conclusion with the already-in-the-bank blockbuster The Dark Knight Rises. So much critical ink has been spilled about the first two installments, from the deployment of gothic anti-hero tropes to the atmospheric return of a grayscale Gotham City watched over by a brooding Wayne Manor, that it hardly seems necessary to preemptively trod these worn paths again. In fact, there is a wonderful interrogation of Heath Ledger’s Joker and the narratives of trauma done by Catherine Spooner on this blogsite [July 2008], as well as a brief assessment of the iconography of the Joker and villainy in March, 2008. So why return to a text that seems to so obviously offer up its analytic relevance to Gothic studies in the very name of its city limits?
Indeed, the first two films play out like an Easter egg hunt for Gothic tropes: the empty manor house, the decadent rich nobleman with a haunted past, the journey to the Orient, a deadly love triangle based around secrets and lies, and a mentor turned villain whose name ‘Ra’s al Ghul’ is homophonic for Raj meaning Hindi royalty and ghoul (king of the ghouls) and Arabic for ‘Demons Head’ in a stunning moment of over-signification (an entire post could be written about the villain, undead, supernatural, Orientalism links in his name alone!). So where amidst this superficially available narrative intertextuality do we find a place for critical understanding not already precluded by the operational metaphors of the film? What could the introduction of the Gothic to a film already self-consciously obsessed with the Gothic possibly gain us?
I’m glad you asked.
It’s the ease of this metaphor that troubles me, how quickly Nolan’s Dark Knight seems to slip into a transparently Gothic understanding. In my Foucauldian fashion, these moments of clarity always throw up greater questions about what technologies of power are facilitating these convergences: what systems of knowledge must be in place in order to make sense of the metaphoric relation between the Gothic and the Dark Knight. To illustrate what I mean here, I want to dip in to the cinematic world of Batman Begins and The Dark Knight to examine their central metaphor: Bruce Wayne is Batman.
It seems simple enough, and not too much of a spoiler if you’ve encountered the Batman mythos before (apologies if you havent’!), and yet within its clarity hides complex questions of relationality. What do I mean when I say that Bruce Wayne is Batman? Are they two separate people who share one body? Are they two identities of one conglomerate subject? Is one the actor and one the persona? Can Batman be other than Bruce Wayne? Can Wayne be other than Batman? Already we have returned to the Gothic grounds of doubleness, doppelgangers, secrets and masks in which the answers to these questions arrange themselves in constellations of performance, persona and split-psyches. So let’s bring these questions into sharper contrast through working through the fraught male-male relations so prevalent in Gothic fiction, in which like the Devil of Gil-Martin in James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner, the other man often appears to me as myself, taking my visage so that I am him, and he is me: Wayne is Batman, Batman is Wayne.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick will famously show how these moments of the other male becoming visually identical to the male protagonist in Gothic fiction evinces Western culture’s growing paranoia over male-male relations in the 19th and 20th centuries. The blurry boundaries between identification with other men, and desire for those men, leads to a violent policing of the border between homosocial and homosexual. This slipperiness between identification and desire also seems to be every introductory film student’s go-to moment of analysis, usually by invoking the tension that seems to arise in a lingering mid-shot that frames the semi-nude male body. The Dark Knight Trilogy provides us plenty of these moments, allowing us the space to gaze upon the muscled physique of Christian Bale’s Wayne:
However, in Nolan’s trilogy, the cinematic conventions of desire seem to move (unfortunately for some) swiftly over the shirtless male figure. We are given Bale’s body, yet unlike the golden-era female whose halting or arresting of cinematic action allows us to understand her as an object of desire, Bale’s shirtlessness harkens back to a 1980′s trope of shirt-removal as the moment of finally ‘getting things done,’ the jump-starting of the cinematic action from its more feminine stillness and reflection. This is not a body that we will be allowed to linger on, but a collection of potential energy soon to be transformed into kinetic via quickly-cutting, blurrily focused fight scenes. If anything, Wayne’s body is held up for us as a plot device.
In mimetic relation to this body stands the body of Batman, carved out of a seemingly skin-tight rubber that must itself mirror the physicality of Wayne’s kinetic-energy pecs and abs:
In this hyperbolic recycling of Wayne’s own body now in an appropriately Gothic black and bronze, desire is again deflected: the suit means business, business means action, action means movement, and movement is antithetical to scopophillia. Yet, for me, something haunts this mimesis, the ghosting logic of the Gothic metaphor in which the proximity of being and wanting place a paranoid question mark over male-male relations. To paraphrase Sedgwick, does Bruce Wayne want to be Batman, or does he simply want Batman?
When we stop following the movie’s tantalizing deflections of the erotic pleasure of looking at men, we reintroduce the (auto-)erotic desire between Batman and Wayne that the film works so hard to gloss over: those moments when we get to look at Wayne looking at Batman and experience that odd admixture of desire and identification:
To think this through, I’m going to unfairly and instrumentally rip Henry James’ concept of ‘going behind’ as the term for the author taking over or, more suggestively, entering the character in order to present what s/he thinks and believes. Wayne routinely goes behind the mask of Batman, being and, I’m suggesting, wanting the unproblematic union of Wayne into Batman. This unmediated relationship between men, the threat of homosexuality according to Sedgwick, is thrown into contrast each time Wayne goes behind Batman. It is therefore in Batman that we get the compensatory performance of manhood, the reassertion of violent vigilante justice and gravelly voice, eschewing the threatening effeminacy of the decadent businessman Bruce Wayne whose own performances of masculinity are framed as inauthentically parodic, as in when he pulls up to his party in a gaudy convertible with two scantily dressed and characteristically mute female supermodels.
If the interiority of Batman is Wayne, so that we spend the movie watching Wayne going behind Batman, then we also witness the movie’s unfolding along traditional origin-narrative lines as a going-behind Wayne. In the exteriorized interiority of the Gothic, in which the landscape evinces the psyche of the character, the tropes of the Gothic multiply around an internal dynamic between the protagonist(s). We can therefore read the hypertellic Gothicness of these films as the externalized symptoms of the disowned erotic potential in Wayne and Batman’s relationship, the rejection of the longed for (auto-)erotic reintegration of the two male protagonists into a singular primal scene.
It is the erotics of trauma that I find most compelling in the trilogy, especially as those erotics turn towards and away from an auto-erotics. The metaphor Bruce Wayne is Batman, read through the paranoid Gothic, attempts to erase the possibilities that Bruce Wayne wants Batman. If we deny the metaphor, and reinvigorate the elided homosexual desire, how does this change our understandings of to the melancholic primal scene so oft-replayed in Nolan’s trilogy, a primal scene that seems to involve numerous screen memories from an alleyway shooting of his parents, to the falling-down into a well, to the destruction of the Gothic house, to the murder of his ‘true love’ Rachel Dawes. Like Sedgwick, I’m not suggesting the erasure of this tension via another overly simple metaphor that Bruce Wayne is gay for Batman; instead, I am suggesting that the Dark Knight trilogy brilliantly evinces the persistence of the Gothic obsession with the binary in/out as it relates to the desire for a lost (imagined) wholeness. In maintaining this tension, we see how becoming Batman and wanting Batman are already bound up with each other in a way that continually defers the homoerotic potential of two male characters sharing the same body. Is it any wonder than that, like the female member of the Sedgwick’s triangular model of desire, Batman’s love interest Rachel Dawes is nearly as two-dimensional as the furniture in Wayne’s apartment? Or that the trilogy will conclude through the allegorization of Wayne/Batman’s self-love through the introduction of another doppelganger in the form of Kyle/Catwoman?
If this bricolage of Henry James, James Hogg and the Dark Knight seems to hang together only in its flirtatious attachment to Sedgwick’s homosocial hypothesis, I offer as coda that what I have been trying to write about is ‘Gothic’ masculinity. My scare-quotes denote that I’m not suggesting a pernicious teleological trajectory in which the archetype of the Justified Sinner finds its way to Batman via Henry James, but rather that the parameters for thinking these three texts (and thousands more) that we might quarantine into a historical Gothic past might itself be a paranoid moment of identification and desire, projection and incorporation. To say that our Gothic Batman continues the legacy of their Gothic Justified Sinner is to ignore that both Batman and Justified Sinner are already incorporated into a critical trajectory that falls from the present to the past. In this auto-erotic encountering of a past that we want to make present, the ‘going behind’ of the Gothic, we touch the strangeness of that historical moment that is both desired as alien other, and identified with (me-connaissance/méconnaissance) as our own mask.
References
Batman Begins. Dir. Chistopher Nolan. Perf. Christian Bale, Michael Caine, and Ken Watanabe, 2005.
The Dark Knight. Dir. Christopher Nolan. Perf. Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, and Aaron Eckhart, 2008.
The Dark Knight Rises. Dir. Christopher Nolan. Perf. Christian Bale, Michael Caine, and Gary Oldman, 2012.
Hogg, James. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Ed. John Carey. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969.
James, Henry. “Pref. to Lady Barbarina.” The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011. 198-216.
Lacan, Jacques. “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience.” Écrits. Trans. Bruce Fink, Héloïse Fink and Russell Grigg. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999. 75-81.
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks. Revised Edition. Eds. Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas M. Kellner. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006. 342-352.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1985.
−−−. The Coherence of Gothic Conventions. London: Methuen & Co., 1986.
−−−. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley, CA: The University of California Press, 1990.
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I enjoyed this! But while I agree with most of the points raised above, is it really the case that these films are ‘self-consciously obsessed with the Gothic’? In the discourse surrounding them, ‘realism’ seems to have been the watchword of the films’ producers, marketers, critics, fans, et al. Will Brooker wrote about these ‘discourses of realism’ – in relation to Batman more generally, and Chris Nolan’s films in particular – in ‘Hunting the Dark Knight,’ which came out just last month, analysing all that’s been said by Nolan and other cast and crew members in relation to ‘realism.’ ‘The notion that Batman has no superpowers and works within the conceivable bounds of human potential’ is the most straightforward definition of ‘realism’ as it relates to Batman, but the word is also associated with the character’s portrayal as ‘a flawed and tormented character, driven by rage and fire, with a grimness and grittiness to him.’ There is, Brooker argues, ‘a barely perceptible segue from the “realism” of Batman’s lack of supernatural abilities to a set of more specific values; Batman is not just a person, but an angry, conflicted, serious, committed person. The discourse has shifted, very subtly, from identifying Batman’s essential humanity to associating him with a certain type of masculinity’ (91). Buzz words like ‘grim’ and ‘gritty’ supplement and sometimes replace ‘realism’ when this depiction of masculinity gets exaggerated to absurd, patently unrealistic proportions. Beginning in the late 80s, superhero comics had become saturated with representations of meaty muscle men, encompassing heroes and villains alike (see the work of artist Rob Liefeld). Beyond Grant Morrison’s fantastically and self-consciously queer ‘Flex Mentallo’ (1996) there was an amusing, if downright odd lack of self-reflexivity regarding these developments. Writers and readers would often insist that this was simply comics being ‘serious.’ Any resemblance to the work of Tom of Finland was purely coincidental – but for those who recognise such allusions, difficult to see beyond.
The Mindless Ones’ ‘Amypoodle’ has written an excellent piece on Bane as part of their series of ‘Rogues Reviews’ (http://mindlessones.com/2011/01/25/rogues-review-3-bane/). Writing about the Knightfall saga on which the new film is partly based, Poodle suggests that ‘Bane’s obsession with destroying the Dark Knight has something of a fetishistic, erotic, quality. The process of slowly chipping away at our hero until virtually nothing of him is left before steaming in and giving him a spinal has a ritualistic, masturbatory element to it. Bane needs to soften Batman up, make him weak and compliant, and only then, like some demented lover, can he establish true “intimacy”, true ownership over his body. And by the time Bane invades his cave, Batman’s as soft as a baby.’ It’ll be interesting to see just how much of that translates into Nolan’s film.
Thank you first for helping to flesh out my rather impoverished bibliography around Batman. I must admit I find myself under-read in his mythos outside of the feature films and the video-game franchise, and so appreciate your insight into these longer trajectories of representation.
While I’ve yet to read Brooker’s book (and have eagerly added it to my queue), I am fascinated with how quickly Realism and verisimilitude conflate in these arguments so that by maintaining certain tropes of ‘the real world’ (physics, aggressive masculinity, no superpowers) we can access a verisimilitudinous depiction of the real that sloughs off the derivations of representation and mimicry in favor of purportedly direct access. What I want to suggest in contrast is that when we say ‘real,’ we mean Gothic; and that Realism or realism stand as a deflection away from the recurrent ‘self-conscious obsession with the Gothic.’
What attracts me to this conflation, and indeed haunted my previous post, is the ways in which our understandings of ‘the real’ are bound within those tropes that would be considered authentically Gothic. That is, the hero described as ‘realistic’ (“Batman is not just a person, but an angry, conflicted, serious, committed person”), could as easily describe a Gothic/Romantic anti-hero in any good dictionary of literary terms. In the Batman ouvre and elsewhere, it is camp and play that become the derivative, performative, secondary, unvalued aspect of the binary; and the affective, sensorial, bound, violent male body that become the real privileged aspect of the binary. For me, this focus on interiority, on the male body, on violence and violent bonds between men, on grit, dirt and grime as accoutrements of the real smacks of a pervasiveness of the Gothic as our contemporary definition for the real.
In essence, in order to make a representation read as real, I need to invoke doubles (Batman/Wayne), paranoid interconnection (the globally spanning ‘League of Shadows’ from Batman Begins), a touch of the supernatural (Scarecrow’s psychedelic drug), and have interiority and the psychic realm as a central theme. So that when the producers/directors affirmed that they wanted to make something ‘real’, what they are affirming is the pervasiveness of Gothic tropes as the touchstone for any verisimilitudinous undertaking.
If I had to trace this historically, I might affirm the pervasiveness of Freud and his own obsession with the Gothic, alongside a resurgence of these tropes in the 1980′s via the mythopoetic men’s movement’s infatuation with Adler, coupled with Die Hard (which for me serves as the strongest predecessor for Nolan’s Batman trilogy), as well as the contemporary emphasis on sexuality, interiority and paranoia as the key modes of relation in a world becoming governed by words like ‘net,’ ‘web,’ and ‘link.’
That said, perhaps the obsession with the Gothic masked as an obsession with the real takes the films away from being self-consciously obsessed and, in that most oblique of psychoanalytic parenthetical plays, makes them self-(un)consciously obsessed? And again, by obsession I mean less an active process of interest and more a traumatic return to a singular point on unknowing, the circling around a systemic definition of ourselves in the Gothic which is perpetually disavowed and yet continues to govern our representations (principally of relations between humans).
This proximity, between the Gothic depictions on screen and the relations of the real, are writ large when a tragedy like that of Aurora, Colorado occurs. The media are quick to point out the verisimilitudinous motions of the cinematic and its ability to engender mimetic responses from ‘impressionable’ patrons. Within the reporting, there is a pervasive pathologization of James Holme as psychotic, unbalanced, unstable. There are similar binary pulls to either a) support the efforts of vigilante justice through the wider distribution of firearms or b) eliminate the symbolic violence of relations between men from becoming real violence through the curtailing/elimination of the right to bear arms. In most cases, the discourses of these reports are again governed through an understanding of the human, and the male, that could have been found 200+ years ago. It is my belief that, rather than offering a window into the real, Gothic tropes have so fully constituted the contemporary real, that for us to understand the impasses in relationality in these seemingly ‘contemporary’ forms of both artistic representation and cultural artifact, impasses that prompt an understanding of Holme’s acts as terroristic expressions of a neurotic/psychotic individual, we need to turn to those antiquated moments we wish to quarantine in the past.
Finally, I must also admit to having not yet seen Nolan’s conclusion to this trilogy. My tickets to the world’s largest Imax theatre here in Sydney are booked for next Thursday, after the spectacle of which I should have more to respond to your intriguing comments!
Very interesting article. I would love to hear about the impression that the recently premiered film had on you. I haven’t seen it yet, but planning to do so soon!