Batman: You’ve got rights. Lots of rights. Sometimes I count them just to make myself feel crazy. But right now you’ve got a piece of glass shoved into a major artery in your arm. Right now you’re bleeding to death. Right now I’m the only one in the world who can get you to a hospital in time.30
Batman’s obsession with control and order, his disregard for civil rights, and his use of violence to force others, though often criminals, into submission to his will point to comic books’ (sometimes alluring) flirtation with fascism. Illegal, physically violent coercion plays a role in all superhero stories; it is practically a genre convention. Miller questions its role, highlighting an aspect of those narratives in which every reader has, perhaps unwillingly, participated.
The implied threat of large-scale fascistic control must necessarily underlie superhero stories because of a fundamental power differential. In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes writes that the reason men can bond together in equality to create a civilization is that all men are basically equal: where one excels in physical strength, another may excel in mental ability. The power differences among men are never so great that a few might not band together to stop one.31 In the world of superhero comics, this is simply not the case. It is conceivable that the seven core members of DC’s flagship superhero team, the Justice League of America (which includes Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, and the Green Lantern), could reduce the world to rubble in a matter of days. So even in regard to “do-gooders,” the threat of paternalism cum fascism is always present. Other superhero works, like Squadron Supreme and Kingdom Come, deal with this aspect of superhero tradition more specifically. In The Dark Knight Returns, it remains more of an implied threat, but clearly factors into the notable absence of other superheroes in such a global narrative.
Miller’s adumbrated explanation of where all the superheroes have gone suggests the reactionary politics of McCarthy-era America, when those who refused to come before the committee investigating communism were blacklisted. More specifically, it recalls Wertham’s report, which called the entire comic book industry into question and caused the cancellation of more than a few titles. Superman’s fragmentary internal monologue gives only the briefest hints of what happened in Miller’s fictional world, but clearly Batman’s role must be understood in this context:
The rest of us learned to cope. The rest of us recognized the danger—of the endless envy of those not blessed. Diana [Wonder Woman] went back to her people. Hal [Jordan: The Green Lantern] went to the stars.32
They’ll kill us if they can, Bruce. Every year they grow smaller. Every year they hate us more. We must not remind them that giants walk the earth.33
You were the one they used against us, Bruce. The one who played it rough. When the noise started from the parents’ groups and the subcommittee called us in for questioning—you were the one who laughed … that scary laugh of yours. … “[S]ure we’re criminals,” you said. “[W]e’ve always been criminals. We have to be criminals.”34
I gave them my obedience and my invisibility. They gave me a license and let us live. No. I don’t like it. But I get to save lives—and the media stays quiet. But now the storm is growing again. They’ll hunt us down again—because of you.35
After Seduction of the Innocent, the criminal and subversive aspects of comic books were played down but not eradicated. Batman, perhaps the most rebellious of the superheroes, is calling attention to himself again and ignoring the rules, just as Miller’s work ignores the Wertham report and the “Comics Code Authority” (the comic book industry’s reaction to Wertham, similar to the Production Code Administration which was designed to protect “values and decency” in Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s).36 Miller’s work consistently flouts the principles of the code, and is thus the point at which comic books become more interesting for adult readers. Miller puts himself in the position of Batman: Batman’s indictment of Superman and the subservience he now stands for is Miller’s indictment of the comic book industry for crumbling under the weight of the charges in Seduction of the Innocent. [It should be noted that Wertham’s work did not automatically result in the founding of the Comics Code Authority, and in fact Wertham disapproved of the Code. Also, though Wertham certainly attacked the idea of the superhero, the genre no longer dominated the comic book market at the time of Seduction of the Innocent in 1954. Klock’s reading of Miller’s intention, however, strikes us as spot-on.—eds.]
Miller places this difficult structural observation in the context of Reaganera politics, and once again raises dual aspects of the Batman folklore: Batman’s position is that of both a rebel and a dispenser of a new hegemonic discourse. The one must necessarily imply the other because superheroes are in a position of fighting for a world in which they will no longer have a place, in which they will no longer be needed. A successful rebel is a new hegemony, and the sheer power many superheroes wield threatens that success. Because comic book superheroes are produced serially and always take place in contemporary America, it is possible (if not necessary) for characters to be rebels forever. They can continue to fight threats in each issue but still never approach the total eradication of crime. Miller raises the fact that, at least theoretically, each superhero is fighting for an overall change in society, even if in each individual issue the hero is usually reactionary in maintaining the status quo. The rebel/hegemony split once again nods to Wertham’s observation that “superheroes undermine respect for the law and hardworking decent citizens” and the historical observation that comic book politics have consistently aligned themselves with dominant social trends. Superman, father of all superheroes—and thus in metonymy for all standard superhero narratives—enters into this discussion as the spokesperson for the latter. Batman speaks to him in apostrophe: “You’ve always known just what to say. ‘Yes’… to anyone with a badge—or a flag.”37 In Miller’s conception, Superman is a stooge and soldier for an enfeebled Ronald Reagan who wants to see Batman stopped because his empowerment—and empowerment of others by example—threatens the social control Reagan has in place. Reagan says:
I like to think I learned everything I know about running this country on my ranch. I know it’s corny but I like to think it. And well, it’s all well and good, on a ranch I mean, for the horses to be all different colors and sizes, long as they stay inside the fence. It’s even okay to have a crazy bronco now and then, does the hands good to break him in. But if that bronco up and kicks the fence out and gets the other horses crazy, well it’s bad for business.38
The climax of The Dark Knight Returns is the final face-off between Batman and Superman. The rebel threatening a new hegemony against the keepers of the old hegemony and the status quo represents the facing-off of the dialectical aspects of comic book tradition. Both of these aspects have been inherent in the superhero comic tradition, of which Miller has been trying to make sense, attempting a synthesis. Here, the two positions literally battle for control, and the implications of the ending are clear in this context. Batman is clearly the winner before collapsing of a heart attack; but his death is only a ruse, and he lives underground. No longer the visible threat he once was, he allows Superman to ignore him as he prepares students to go above and continue the fight. “The American fighting spirit” (as Lana Lang puts it) appears to have been crushed under the heel of reactionary politics, but it is not dead, only dreaming.39 The rebellious incarnation of the superhero can never be entirely vanquished, but it will always lurk beneath and haunt the genre, no matter how it may try to conform to external standards.
In this respect, The Dark Knight Returns can be read as a kind of fable for comic book tradition, warning against the fascistic impulses inherent in superheroics, in which both the reader and Batman come to a realization of the role that this must play in the superhero narrative. The Dark Knight Returns once again responds to contradictory aspects of Batman’s fictional history or tradition: at times, Batman has been written with the understanding that he is low profile, that at least part of hi
s power comes from his status in Gotham City as a kind of urban legend that the criminal underworld fears is real. Batman comes out only at night and might be some inhuman demon or vampire. At other times, particularly in the sunny 1950s and 1960s, but also randomly throughout his career, this has been forgotten, and the reader has seen Batman walking the streets in the daytime, shaking hands with the mayor and Commissioner Gordon, marching in parades, even touring college campuses with Robin. Miller acknowledges both mutually exclusive portrayals, presenting Batman’s return as Batman-out-in-the-open-with-a-vengeance—a kind of “return of the repressed” 1960s Batman—then reestablishing his urban legend status at the end of the narrative.
When Miller’s Batman emerges from retirement, the immediate issue in question is his visibility. The Bat-Tank in particular lacks a certain level of subtlety. Oliver Queen, known to those with knowledge of the DC universe as the Green Arrow, makes the key statement for understanding the Batman’s role in the political in this work:
You’ve always had it wrong, Bruce … giving them such a big target. Sure, you play it mysterious—but it’s a loud kind of mysterious, man. Especially lately. You’ve got to learn how to make those sons of bitches work for you. Look—it’s been five years since I blew out of prison—and you know I’ve kept busy—
[…] And they’ve been covering for me, just like they covered up my escape. Sure, they’d love to frost me … long as they can do it without admitting I exist. But you, Bruce—man, they have to kill you.40
Batman’s use of conspicuous force parallels the Reagan-era cold war politics: both Batman and Reagan are “fighting crime” in a conspicuous display of power (the Bat-Tank, Reagan’s missile,41 and “real-life” Reagan’s Star Wars missile defense shield) to impress the population they want to control. In Miller’s realism, where the subtlety of Batman-as-urban-legend is much more believable, any conspicuous display of power will be used for, or by, the government (e.g., Superman’s involvement as a tool of the White House) to drum up fear or to gain support for the government (to fight the Russians in Miller’s fictional Corto Maltese subplot; or, on the local level, the anti-Batman stance, used to get support for a new and unpopular police chief). In the course of The Dark Knight Returns, Batman becomes the worst sort of reactionary fascist terrorizing people into his control with cheap theatrics.
Batman’s former status as an urban legend kept him outside of this kind of political struggle (outside being co-opted by the White House or being used in a “Big Brother will save you from the Batman” campaign). In the urban legend position, a warrant for Batman’s arrest would have been laughable to a disbelieving public, as if the police department were trying to rid Gotham City of the bogeyman. In the end, Bruce Wayne realizes that the Batman persona is being manipulated and publicly destroys it. An early, proposed ending for The Dark Knight Returns42 placed Batman on a throne, in a cave surrounded by disciples waiting to return, but the finished version makes better sense in the story’s context. Bruce Wayne becomes a teacher, on the floor of the cave, kneeling in plain clothes and speaking to students—some of whom are actually standing above him. The narration tells us he has learned that the world is “plagued by worse than thieves and murderers,”43 presumably the methods used in fighting them. Miller’s text reinstalls Batman as a rebel, as subversive, but with a greater understanding of the power structures involved. As with Shakespeare’s, Miller’s innovation within his tradition is to allow reflection to result in character development.
Batman’s understanding of himself must also be seen in terms of Miller’s understanding of tradition. The final page of The Dark Knight Returns is a vision of Batman overcoming his previous interpretations. On the narrative level, this occurs as the destruction of the Batman persona because of the “interpretations” of the media and the government. On the level of trope, it means the placement of Miller’s Batman for the Batman of other creators (e.g., Bob Kane and Dick Sprang). As Bloom says of Childe Roland, “There is only Roland himself to serve both as hero and villain. … The Childe stands in judgment against his own antithetical quest and, however lovingly, against his antithetical precursors as well. … He is an interpretation of his precursors’ quest.”44 Batman’s metatextual act of knowledge is of himself and his tradition, of his razing of preceding visions of the Batman: “Here, in the endless cave, far past the burnt remains of a crimefighter whose time has passed … it begins here—an army—to bring sense to a world plagued by worse than thieves and murderers.”45 Miller’s is the Batman who, in his strength, burns his predecessors “whose time has past” (the Batman of 1939; the Batman of 1968; his own Batman persona within The Dark Knight Returns, literally burned in the destruction of Wayne Manor), but who also understands that the Batcave, and the Batman comic book, is “endless,” that is, serially published. However strong a reading Miller might perform, “it begins here” rather than ends. Batman will continue to be published in the hands of other writers.
The feeling of finality in the last moment of The Dark Knight Returns is juxtaposed with a statement of beginning. Just after calling for a lamp to illuminate the darkness of the cave—a new fire, a new Batman past the burnt remains of the old—he informs his students that “we haven’t got all night,” but thinks to himself, “That’s not true … we have years—as many as we need.”46 The last we hear of Batman’s pedagogy is Miller’s imparting of the fecundity of the Batman mythos to future writers, “First we get a steady supply of water. There’s a spring right beneath.”47 Miller’s powerful misprision of comic book history ends with a troping of superhero narratives as an “endless cave” with a “spring” of contradictory but rich tradition to be drawn upon “right beneath.” The Dark Knight Returns becomes the fons es origo (the fountainhead and the origin) of the revisionary superhero narrative. Miller himself has gone into Batman’s fictional history and selected elements for use in his work, taking many elements a lesser writer would have simply ignored, and made them his own. The reader can understand that in his last act of knowledge on the final page, Miller’s Batman, to quote Bloom again on Childe Roland:
negates the larger part of the poem, a negation that strengthens rather than weakens the poem, because there [he] suffers a unique act of knowledge, an act that clarifies both his personal past and tradition, though at the expense of both presence and present. By “presence” I mean both [his] self-presence [the willing destruction of both the Bruce Wayne and Batman personas past and present], and also the virtual existence of any opposing force in the poem other than [his] internalization of the precursors.48
This is what Miller’s work is about. Batman (and Miller’s) struggle is not to control any villain but to master preceding visions of himself and his tradition. When the new chief of police confronts Commissioner Gordon as to why he supported a vigilante during his tenure, Gordon’s words express an understanding of the interpretive process:
I’m sure you’ve heard old fossils like me talk about Pearl Harbor, Yindel. Fact is we mostly lie about it. We make it sound like we all leaped to our feet and went after the Axis on the spot. Hell, we were scared. Rumors were flying, we thought the Japanese had taken California. We didn’t even have an army. So there we were, lying in bed pulling the sheets over our heads—and there was Roosevelt on the radio, strong and sure, taking fear [read: anxiety] and turning it into a fighting spirit [cf. Lana Lang’s description of Batman as the return of the American fighting spirit]. Almost overnight we had our army. We won the war. … A few years back a lot of people with a lot of evidence said that Roosevelt knew Pearl Harbor was going to be attacked—and that he let it happen. … I couldn’t stop thinking how horrible that would be, and how Pearl was what got us off our duffs in time to stop the Axis. But a lot of innocent men died. But we won the war. It bounced back and forth in my head until I realized I couldn’t judge it. It was too big. He was too big …49
“I don’t see what this has to do with a vigilante,” Yindel says. “Maybe you will,” is the
reply. The relation to Batman is obvious, but in terms of Miller’s text, it serves as a statement on the power of the single interpretive (revisionary) stance. There is no stable point from which to pass judgment, no standard other than the strength of the vision—the strength of the personality, be it Batman or Miller. This passage is quoted at length, because it is paradigmatic of a move many revisionist superhero narratives will make, from Watchmen to The Authority.
The role of fascism, the role of forced control in The Dark Knight Returns, is clearly reflexive. Batman’s imposition of control over the chaotic streets of Gotham City cannot be seen as distinct from Miller’s imposition of control over Batman’s chaotic narrative tradition and intertexts.50 In his battle with Superman, Batman narrates:
You sold us out, Clark. You gave them the power that should have been ours. Just like your parents taught you to. My parents taught me a different lesson, lying on the street, shaking in deep shock—dying for no reason at all—they showed me that the world only makes sense when you force it to.51
Miller’s take on the history of the Dark Knight, and on the contradictory tradition of superhero narratives, is that it will only make sense when you force it to. In a psychomachia, the retired “Batman” taunts the aging Wayne, “You are nothing, a hollow shell, a rusty trap that cannot hold me—smoldering, I burn you.”52 Miller holds the chaos of signifiers that is Batman and ultimately shows his character in the cave “far past the burnt remains of a crimefighter whose time has passed.” Miller organizes the contradictory signifying field that surrounds the subject of Batman—which includes figures like Wertham and issues as far apart in the American political sphere as fascism and homosexuality—and forms them into a coherent story that is itself a commentary on the history that has come before, as well as on the tradition of the genre. To (mis)quote Bloom on Milton again: “[Miller’s] design is wholly definite, and its effect is to reverse literary tradition. … The precursors return in [Miller], but only at his will, and they return to be corrected.”53 Every convention that allows superhero narratives to function, and every intertext, is exposed to the reader with a clarity that at once cleans up comic book history and also complicates it. The superhero narratives of any worth that follow The Dark Knight Returns can no longer ignore these determiners on the genre, but must confront both comic book tradition and Miller’s influential handling of it: the superhero narrative will forever be under the shadow of the bat.
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