All posts tagged ‘Batman’

Why Do Supervillains Fascinate Us? A Psychological Perspective

What drives our seemingly endless fascination with supervillains like Joker?
Image courtesy DC Comics

Why are we fascinated by supervillains? Posing the question is much like asking why evil itself intrigues us, but there’s much more to our continued interest in supervillains than meets the eye.

• Don’t Blame The Dark Knight Rises for Theater Massacre

• A Voice of Reason on the Dark Knight Rises Tragedy in Aurora

• Why Batman Believes in Gun Control

Not only do Lex Luthor, Dracula and the Red Skull run unconstrained by conventional morality, they exist outside the limits of reality itself. Their evil, even at its most realistic, retains a touch of the unreal.

But is our fascination with fantastic fiends healthy? It’s a question that’s bubbled beneath the surface of the public consciousness ever since a masked gunman — who reportedly identified himself as Batman’s nemesis the Joker after police apprehended him — went on a shooting spree at a Colorado screening of The Dark Knight Rises last week.

From a psychological perspective, views vary on what drives our enduring interest in superhuman bad guys.

Shadow confrontation: Psychiatrist Carl Jung believed we need to confront and understand our own hidden nature to grow as human beings. Healthy confrontation with our shadow selves can unearth new strengths (e.g., Bruce Wayne creating his Dark Knight persona to fight crime), whereas unhealthy attempts at confrontation may involve dwelling on or unleashing the worst parts of ourselves (as the Joker tries to get Batman and Harvey Dent to do in The Dark Knight).

Wish fulfillment: Sigmund Freud viewed human nature as inherently antisocial, biologically driven by the undisciplined id’s pleasure principle to get what we want when we want it — born to be bad but held back by society. Even if the psyche fully develops its ego (source of self-control) and superego (conscience), Freudians say the id still dwells underneath, and it wishes for many selfish things — so it would love to be supervillainous.

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Why Batman Believes in Gun Control

Since 1940, guns have mostly been off-limits for Batman. And that should never change.
Image courtesy DC Comics

Anyone who knows anything about Batman knows his parents were gunned down outside a theater. This is why the Dark Knight has rarely used guns in more than 70 years of comics history. And why he almost never kills anyone, even when the urge to do so reaches critical, maddening mass.

The times Batman crossed that line occurred mostly before 1940, when he was a shadow of The Shadow. Later lapses include his bare-handed murder of Joker in Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns.

Miller’s influential graphic novel opened the field to Tim Burton’s films, and the rest is pop history. Through it all, Batman has doggedly retained his distaste for guns.

“This is the weapon of the enemy,” he says in The Dark Knight Returns. “We do not need it. We will not use it.”

Miller brought his hard-boiled Batman back to darker shores, but even he didn’t cross the line when it came to guns. From DC Comics’ 1940 Bat-edict on gun control to Batman’s declaration to Selina Kyle in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises that there should be “no guns, no killing,” the superhero’s surprising pacifism with regard to firearms and capital punishment remains sacrosanct.

Then comes Friday’s horrific news of 70 wounded, 12 fatally, during a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colorado — a mass shooting by a gunman wearing body armor and a gas mask, and armed with a Glock, an assault rifle, a shotgun and incendiary devices. All the weaponry was apparently legally obtained by the alleged shooter, a neuroscience dropout named James Eagan Holmes, who was arrested at the scene.

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Don’t Blame The Dark Knight Rises for Theater Massacre

A memorial ribbon circulating on Twitter in the aftermath of the Colorado tragedy.
Image: Unknown artist

Nobody should blame the movies for Friday’s horrific killing spree during a screening of The Dark Knight Rises at a theater in Aurora, Colorado.

At this point we know little about James Eagan Holmes, the 24-year-old Colorado man who allegedly donned a gas mask and body armor before sneaking into the Century 16 theater in Aurora and firing into the crowd during a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises. Holmes is being questioned by police, and who knows what they will discover.

Was the alleged shooter a comic book fan? A gun nut or a gamer? A Batman devotee?

If anything, the final chapter of Nolan’s Batman trilogy delivers an anti-gun message, including an obvious scene in which a good cop defends himself by shooting a pair of criminals, only to instantly lament the fact that he’s got nobody to interrogate. The movie’s most brutal sequence — an intense smackdown between Batman and supreme bad guy Bane — takes place without weapons. The hero’s pyrotechnics, designed to frighten street thugs, have zero effect on the hulking supervillain, and the fighters rely on nothing but their brute strength and martial arts training as they battle. Even a climactic confrontation between Gotham’s cops and Bane’s minions turns into a giant fistfight.

But here’s the thing: It’s pointless to question the cultural influences of a sick mind. The location of any massacre has little to do with the violence that took place, even if it means something to the deranged killer. If the attack had occurred at a farmers market, would we now be breathlessly pondering the dangers of organic produce? No, we would not.

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9 Unintentional Dark Knight Rises Lessons

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Review: The Dark Knight Rises Breaks the Bat-Mold, Whether You Like It or Not

Christian Bale dons the cowl for the final time in The Dark Knight Rises.
Photos: Ron Phillips/Warner Bros. Pictures

How do you top The Dark Knight, the most powerful and realistic superhero movie ever made? By crafting a film that’s bigger, bolder and better than its predecessor.

The Dark Knight Rises clears the first two hurdles, but fails the crucial third. How could it not? The wild success of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight in 2008 — on an artistic level as well as at the box office — set the tone for comic book movies to come.

That tone was dark, and the movie’s gritty realism served as one of The Dark Knight‘s main calling cards. Propelled chiefly by Heath Ledger’s lip-smacking turn as The Joker, the tensely coiled film gave us a memorable and unsettlingly believable tale of a psychopath that only a head-case billionaire dressed like a bat could contend with. It also set the bar for how high a superhero movie could soar.

(Spoiler alert: Minor plot points follow.)

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