Back on the Couch
Bat-Therapy, Part 2
(Editor's note: Last issue, The Captain began his interview with Robin S. Rosenberg, PhD, a psychotherapist, textbook writer, book author, lecturer, and the author of What's the Matter with Batman? An Unauthorized Look Under the Mask of the Caped Crusader. She is also series editor of the "Superheroes" line at Oxford University Press and editor of the anthologies The Psychology of Superheroes and The Psychology of the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo -- and a major Bat-fan.)
Captain Comics: On page 39 you quote a great line from Batman Begins where Wayne says of his parents’ death and survivor’s guilt, “My anger outweighs my guilt.” But isn’t anger also an issue? Some say that Batman is motivated more by revenge than justice or protecting the innocent, which would make him less heroic.
Robin Rosenberg: That’s another good question and I think anger can be a very powerful motivator. Anger in and of itself isn’t a bad thing. When people who end up becoming doctors or cancer researchers have been motivated because that they were angry that a loved one died of cancer, does that make anger bad? No. When properly harnessed, anger can be a very powerful and a good thing.
I think it’s sometimes the question because Batman functions, in essence, as a vigilante, whether we want to call him that. Whether he’s sort of with the law or against the law. Whether he’s a vigilante or an unofficial arm of the law. Does his anger prevent him from doing the right thing? Does his anger swamp him so that he loses control? But I think that’s the issue.
Police officers, people in the military, may be angry. They’re human. That doesn’t mean it’s not OK to be angry, it’s what you do with it. How you channel it. Which is always the question about anger. As a psychotherapist, I work with people who may have problems with anger. It’s OK to be angry, it’s really important being in control of it. How do you channel it, what do you do with it? To make it work for you, versus working against you.
CC: Sometimes you need anger to overcome feelings of helplessness, inertia, fear of consequences – to get you out of the chair and do something about your problems.
Rosenberg: Right, right. So in this context, Batman’s anger is what got him out of chair. It was his anger, and his desire for social activism, to protect other people, so they wouldn’t experience what he experienced with his parents. So he channeled it in a very positive way. And that’s a good thing.
CC: On page 52, you say “Wayne believes he – and only he – can do something to reduce crime in Gotham.” Doesn’t that indicate messianic thinking? He also thinks his judgment is better than anyone else’s. Isn’t that dangerous in and of itself?
Rosenberg: That’s a funny question. I once did a panel at Comic-Con on whether The Joker was a psychopath. One of the things that came up in the process of preparing for that was the Heath Ledger version of The Joker. He was clearly Narcissistic, he clearly thinks well of himself. Given what he was able to accomplish, he was …
CC: Justified to think so?
Rosenberg: Right. If someone has grandiose beliefs about themselves, is that Narcissism? I guess my answer to that question is, in Batman’s world, the reality is that nobody else can do what he does. That was what motivated him, ultimately, to become Batman. In the film Batman Begins, that’s what motivates him when he comes back to Gotham City. The city is basically a mess, and the Gotham police have not been able to fix it. So if he can fix it, then he’s justified in his messianic beliefs.
How can he be considered messianic if he actually is saving everyone?
Exactly. If it’s justified, it’s not messianic, it’s an accurate self-assessment. So in his case I lean toward accurate self-assessment. But by the same token, when people sacrifice so much for others, a natural tendency to feel that only I can do this, to make the sacrifice more understandable. “I am doing this, I’m sacrificing all this, because only I am capable of helping in this situation, so therefore I must make these sacrifices to do this.” It becomes a little bit cyclical. In the decision to give up so much to help others, the way that one continues to explain it to one’s self is that “I am indispensible.” It’s part of the workaholic self talk.
And he is a workaholic. His job requires it. Physically he has to devote hours that we never see maintaining his strength and agility. It’s kind of like an Olympics athlete or a concert-level pianist. Even if his nights weren’t filled fighting criminals, his days would have to be filled just preparing to fight them, just in case, to stay in peak physical form. And with that kind of sacrifice a human has to feel that it’s worth it.
It seems to me to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Once you make the sacrifices, you’re the only one in position to be Batman. But he’s using being Batman to justify the sacrifices.
Exactly. I don’t think that it necessarily comes from a messianic place, although I can see why people think that. But even in our world you see this all the time with people so it’s not really messianic it’s just how people work how people explain to themselves and others how they make sacrifices that are hard to justify otherwise.
CC: What’s your professional opinion of Christian Bale’s Batman?
Rosenberg: There are different versions of Batman, and I think Christian Bale inhabits a version of Batman incredibly well. I think Michael Keaton inhabited a different version of Batman incredibly well. I think Adam West inhabited yet a different form of Batman incredibly well, one that preceded the comics, the campy version.
So he does an amazing job. Batman Begins I think is an absolutely brilliant film. I think in Dark Knight that Heath Ledger’s performance and character, The Joker, was such an amazing character that in a way Batman was a supporting actor in that film. He supported The Joker, but he was ancillary because it really was about The Joker. I think Christian Bale did a fantastic job in that film. And from what I’ve seen from the trailers of the Dark Knight Rises, he will be similarly fantastic. It’s a very difficult role to play, very dark, very, very dark. And I think Dark Knight Rises will be the darkest of all of them, which is really saying something. I think he did a great job. And Christopher Nolan’s vision is amazing.
Would you say the Nolan movies are psychologically accurate?
Christopher Nolan, Jonathan Nolan and David Goyer … are really good lay psychologists. In Batman Begins … I thought it was absolutely brilliant to have Bruce Wayne as a young child be an anxious and fearful kid, temperamentally. We know a lot about anxious and fearful temperament and here … he fell into a cave of bats and was traumatized by that, and then he goes to the opera [which] has people dressed as bats going up the walls of the stage, and he has a panic attack. And having that … was absolutely brilliant, because that’s the part about his guilt. … He understands that if he hadn’t had the panic attack his parents wouldn’t have ended up in the alley with Joe Chill.
“And they had him master his fear by the technique called exposure, where you expose yourself to what you’re afraid of in a controlled way. And that’s the totem of him taking on the bat as his animal costume. It added a whole other veneer to the Batman mythos, the meaning of his becoming Batman. I thought that was absolutely psychologically brilliant.”
What do you make of his “Sophie’s Choice” decision in Dark Knight, where he has to save the girl or a boatload of strangers? What does that say of his priorities? Of his strengths or weaknesses?
The girlfriend vs. the people on the boat thing is the classic superhero dilemma. That was in the first Superman film with Christopher Reeve, where he had to save Lois Lane or people who were about to be hurt by earthquake fallout. Part of being a hero is making those decisions on the spot, which is really hard. It gets into a whole moral and philosophical issue. But it’s where can your efforts do the greatest good. And that may not be where you want to put those efforts. But if you can save 100 people versus just one that you know, that you love, what do you do?
CC: On page 10 you dismiss the occasional charge, going back to Frederic Wertham’s 1954 book Seduction of the Innocent, that Batman is somehow secretly a gay character. My personal opinion has always been that when people see gay dog whistles in Batman stories it says more about them than it does about Batman. After all, Batman stories were originally aimed at pre-adolescents, and the Batcave was basically a “No Gurlz Alowd” clubhouse literally in Bruce’s parents’ basement. You seem to agree, saying “writers of Batman stories have stated they wrote Wayne as a heterosexual character.”
But in a recent Playboy interview, long-time Bat-writer Grant Morrison made the startling claim that “gayness is built into Batman. I’m not using gay in the pejorative sense, but Batman is very, very gay. There’s just no denying it. Obviously as a fictional character he’s intended to be heterosexual, but the basis of the whole concept is utterly gay.” What is your response to that?
Rosenberg: Here’s the great thing about superheroes or fictional characters in general. They’re like Rorschach ink blots. There’s a form to the inkblot, but you infuse a meaning into it. … People bring their own perspectives to the characters, and they fill in the blanks, if you will. Like with comic panels, we fill in what happens from one panel to another. We fill in the back story or the elements of the character that aren’t provided for us. So someone who wants to see certain elements, will see those elements. And there’s not a way to refute it, because that whole point is that the information isn’t there. You’re … filling in the blanks of a structure. I think even Grant Morrison would say that, because from the lens that he is wearing that is what he sees in the blank spots. It’s what he brings [to the table]. You and I don’t see that, we see something else, because of what we bring. … That’s one of the neat things about humans, right? We’re all different!”
Andrew “Captain Comics” Smith has been writing professionally about comics since 1992, and for Comics Buyer’s Guide since 2000.
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