Batman: Impotent Justice

I’ve been a fan of superheroes all my life. As a child I had the action figures and playsets, as a young adult I had some of the comics, and now, almost thirty, I own a large number of DVD’s featuring some of the classics as well as the contemporary animated presentations. I could never understand how or why adults grew out of superheroes…until I saw “Batman: The Dark Knight”. It was then that I realized that many adults lack the naïve idealism and ignorance needed to appreciate and justify the actions of mainstream superheroes. While I appreciated the production values, visual effects, and performances in “Dark Knight”, I found myself leaving the theater with a supreme frustration at the ineffectiveness of what America seems to accept as ideal justice. Looking back, I can see this same impotence permeating the comics and cartoons I used to enjoy, and I now find myself viewing them with spite.

The essence of a superhero, the only thing that supposedly separates him or her from the villains, is their unwillingness to take a life. Time and time again, variations of the cliché, “If you kill them, you’re no better than they are” are uttered whenever a hero comes close to homicide. The result of this belief is a rotating door where the hero puts the villain behind bars, only to have said villain escape later on and unleash more death and carnage before being brought back to “justice”. Then the cycle starts all over again. No matter how many times the villains escape, they are always spared so that they are forced to live with their crimes; “I won’t let you get off that easy”, is yet another cliché used to justify the hero’s refusal to put a true end to the villain’s menace.

In the past, this golly-gosh-gee-darn attitude didn’t come off as weak or unrealistic because the villains were much less malevolent. They captured and kidnapped people instead of killing them, they were melodramatic and colorful, and their schemes were entertaining and creative. The Adam West Batman could be humorous and comical because the Joker and his lax-brained minions were too. At the end of the show, no one got hurt, and the bad guy was thwarted with the promise that he’d return to menace the city again someday. There was no need to kill the villain because he or she did little except annoy the fair people of Gotham.

Almost twenty years ago, Michael Keaton portrayed a version of Batman that was distinctly different than the one people had watched on TV and read about in the comics. He was dark and brutal, able to strike fear into the criminal element of Gotham city. The citizens were no longer “fair”; they were corrupt, vindictive, pessimistic and oppressed. The Joker was a psychopathic gangster who took lives and showed no compassion or any evidence of morality. Batman was still the fisticuffing, Batmobile-riding hero of old, but his mentality was adjusted to his new world. When the Joker took villainy to a new level by killing citizens and working his way to mass murder via chemical terrorism, Batman responded in kind with two attempts to rid Gotham of the Joker for good. He understood that the Joker had bought a large portion of the police, and that taking him to jail would be a waste of time. Added to that was the fact that the Joker was the one who murdered his parents and had yet to atone for that crime. In the end Batman sent the Joker to his death, achieving justice for the lives the Joker stole and freeing the city from fear. When the credits rolled, no one was thinking, “Wow, Batman became just like the Joker. What he did was uncalled for. Batman should have put him in handcuffs and taken him to jail where he would be able to think about his evil deeds”. Batman was not a villain, but he operated outside the confines of the law, and that made the difference.

Keaton’s Batman was more real and gritty than West’s was, but the interpretation only worked because it failed to address the full scope of reality. When Batman nabbed a mugger at the start of the movie, it was just assumed that the criminal eventually wound up behind bars; but without any evidence against him and no authority backing Batman, the alleged mugger wouldn’t have even spent one night in jail. When Batman commanded the other mugger to tell his friends about him, it looked really intimidating and threatening. But if you think about it, what would the mugger say? “There’s a guy in a bat mask who will rough you up if you commit a crime. He’ll turn you over to the police…and they’ll let you go. So we should be scared because we don’t want to get roughed up”.

As much as 1989’s “Batman” brought Gotham and its villains and heroes closer to reality, it still left out the subtle details that would make Batman and his life’s work seem utterly meaningless. “Dark Knight” makes no such omissions.

Early on, Gotham’s justice system is shown to be broken and compromised. Known criminals are released for lack of evidence, or because the people willing to testify against them are slaughtered. The law enforcement is inadequate and corrupt, unable or unwilling to stop the rampant violence that plagues the city. In “Batman Begins”, prosecutors eagerly compromise justice so that they can get a murderer to testify against another, bigger murderer—and they see such a compromise as laudable!

It is this decrepit system that Batman has to rely on to administer justice to the criminals he brings in. He refuses to be an executioner, going out of his way to not to kill murderers and thugs so that he can turn them over to the courts for justice. But the legal system has gaping holes that put the criminals back on the street days after they are incarcerated, making his efforts little more than futile. The fact that he knows this and still persists is more tragic than heroic. It’s entertaining to see him beating people up and using his many gadgets to perform daring deeds, but it all amounts to nothing when all is said and done. The bad guys get injured, a small percentage go to jail for awhile, and the rest go back to business as usual. Meanwhile Bruce gets battered and exhausted and makes very little difference at all.

While Batman’s reliance on a grossly inadequate justice system is more than enough to reveal his ultimate powerlessness, there are three distinct moments in “Dark Knight” that drive the point home even further.

The first moment is when Batman tries to intimidate a high-level thug into giving him information. The thug simply points out the glaring truth that nothing Batman is willing to do will be as bad as what the men the thug is protecting will do if he betrays them. Up until that scene, it was always assumed that Batman was able to threaten and bully criminals into doing what he wanted; their fear of him would make them behave and tell him anything he wanted to know. But the fact is that Batman won’t kill or subject people to any torture that would be considered inhumane. All he can do is talk gruffly, maybe break a few bones, and leave the criminals for the crooked cops to pick up. Any criminal with a brain is going to happily take what Batman gives them instead of risking the wrath of men who will show no mercy.

That one scene, that one moment of realistic defiance is enough to show that Batman is a useless icon. The whole point “Batman Begins” made about Batman becoming a symbol that would terrify evildoers—about him becoming more than a man—is utterly destroyed. He no longer strikes fear into anyone because he cannot do what is necessary to make evil minds cower. His humanity is very apparent, whereas the humanity of his opponents is frighteningly lacking.
But it gets worse.

Near the end of the film, Batman is on his Batcycle headed for a collision with the Joker. The Joker has destroyed property, targeted hospital patients, sadistically taken many lives, shown himself to be without reason or compassion, and placed the city in a state of panic. Batman has a chance to eliminate him, to bring an end to the violence that the madman has stirred up. But at the last minute the would-be hero balks, yanking his cycle off its path and sending himself crashing to the street. For all intents and purposes, the choice he made was to let himself be killed instead of taking the life of a serial killer; had Commissioner Gordon not arrived when he did, Batman would have been slain by the Joker as he laid incapacitated on the asphalt. Perhaps an audience is supposed to find that admirable, but it comes across as absolute foolishness that borders on insanity.

Could you see the eulogy? “Batman was a nice guy who played by the rules. He never took a life, and we admire that. Still…he’s gone now, unable to protect anyone anymore. His nemesis however, is still at large and has killed sixty people since felling our hero. Batman didn’t die for nothing. He died so that a terrorist and murderer might live. We should all be so courageous.”

The final moment that really brings Batman’s inadequacies out is when he is interrogating the Joker at police headquarters. His entrance is intimidating, and he holds nothing back as he pummels the Joker around the room, but his actions are ineffective. Infuriatingly ineffective. It’s hard to get a sense of satisfaction seeing the good guy whoop up on the bad guy when the bad guy is mocking the good guy the whole time. Seeing Batman lose control in fit of helpless fury is very disheartening, as is understanding that the only reason he got the information he wanted was because the Joker wanted to give it to him. The Joker held all the power in that whole scene, and in fact for most of the movie. It takes a far-fetched, impossible, and depressingly laughable demonstration of human decency on a pair of ferries to finally foil the Joker on any level.

Those three moments brought with them painful disillusionment that leveled my respect of the superhero genre. As if they weren’t obvious enough, the final minutes of the film emphasize them with a twist of misguided irony. In the end, it is said that Batman was not a hero—he was what Gotham needed. While it’s true Batman was not a hero, it’s equally true that a hero is exactly what Gotham needed.

A hero is someone who does what it takes to get something done. That might mean a few moments of inconvenience while you stop to help someone change a flat tire, or it might mean throwing yourself over a grenade to protect the rest of your company. In any situation, anything less than what is needed results in something less than heroism. Calling 911 to have an officer change the tire isn’t anything heroic, neither is trying to toss the grenade when you know it’s going to blow before you can release it. Sacrifice is the key to being a true hero, and Batman simply wasn’t willing to make the necessary sacrifices to protect the citizens of Gotham.

The reason Batman cannot do what is necessary is because of a very simplistic and ignorant view of justice. The belief he clings to is that killing someone makes him a villain, but that addresses only one aspect of the action: someone died because of something he did. But there is a considerable difference between killing a murderer to protect other people and killing an innocent person because they looked at you wrong. Bruce Wayne obviously makes no distinction between a stranger holding a knife to someone’s throat and a stranger holding the door open for someone. Killing either of them is wrong, regardless of the fact that one is about to take away another person’s right to live. With his distorted mindset, there is no difference between a soldier and the Joker. They both kill people, after all.

Of course the reality is that there is a difference. Using an enemy’s tactics, ruthlessness and tenacity does not make someone just like their enemy, because their targets, motives, and results are completely different. If Batman kills criminals, he does it to protect innocent people. If he succeeds, people don’t walk the streets in fear and the city prospers. If the Joker kills people, families are torn apart, the city is destroyed, and the survivors fear for their lives. Unless Bruce were to start targeting citizens for some reason, he would never become the Joker, no matter what tactics he uses or how merciless he becomes.

The task Batman took upon himself was to save Gotham from evildoers. To be a hero, he would have had to do whatever it took to save lives. He didn’t. From the moment he let the Joker go, the blood of Rachel, Harvey and everyone else who was killed by the Joker after that moment was on his hands. He had the chance to end evil and he did nothing. The Commissioner too, failed to do his job. He knew how dangerous the Joker was. He knew what the Joker was capable of doing and how impossible it would be to get him convicted in the corrupt court system. Yet he simply arrested him, putting him in the perfect position to destroy headquarters and take even more lives. The cost of being unwilling to take the life of a criminal was the lives of many innocent people.

If someone knows that a killing is going to take place and does nothing, they are considered an accessory to murder because they had an opportunity to stop the event from taking place but they chose to let it happen. Contacting the police with the knowledge that they won’t get there in time is just as bad. In the eyes of the law it might not be considered being an accessory, but the bottom line is that person didn’t do all they could to prevent it.
Maybe a normal person shouldn’t be expected to intervene and prevent the loss of an innocent life at any cost. But a hero certainly should be.
“Batman: The Dark Knight” struck a cord because the reluctance to distribute the ultimate punishment for crimes has had effects in the real world too. Hitler was put in prison for treason in 1923. He was released nine months into a five year sentence, and less than 20 years later launched the world into a war costing millions of lives. Napoleon was defeated and exiled. He escaped and waged another war that spanned five battles, the last one alone costing over 50,000 lives. Those are lives that were needlessly lost because of a notion that killing a dictator would be wrong.

In the year 2000, 129 children in 15 states were molested by criminals who had already been sent to prison for child molestation. That same year in those same states, 6,802 victims were raped by criminals who had already served time for rape. 3,265 people were murdered by felons who had been in prison for murder.
The same mentality that allowed the Joker to continue to take lives and harm innocent people in the fantastic city of Gotham allows the same travesties to happen in real life. The simplistic and idealized concept that playing by a villain’s rules makes the hero become a villain is illogical and harmful, and it makes the forces of good ineffective and powerless.

In the light of reality, Batman is completely impotent. He can not and will not do what it takes to deter crime, to instill terror, to become a symbol that makes criminals cower. The movie itself admitted as much; crime had not dropped since Batman’s appearance. A revolving door, a corrupt court, and an altogether genteel version of crime- fighting ensured that no real lasting good could be done.
When the credits rolled, I found myself perplexed and upset. The Joker had won. He’d shown me that the heroes I grew up admiring, including this new version of Batman, were nothing more than a very weak joke.

The only bright side was that before the movie, I saw a preview for “The Punisher”. It came as no surprise that after “Dark Knight”, I decided I would feel much safer having my city guarded by someone dedicated to the elimination of crime, instead someone who was more concerned with saving the life of the criminals than the lives of my friends and family.