The Superhero Reader
Page 37
It was as if Wertham’s fears were being vindicated at last, but his 1950s bigot’s anguish had been supplanted by a self-consciously hip 1960s playfulness. What adult audiences laughed at in the sixties Batman was a camped-up version of the fifties they had just left behind.
Batman’s lessons in good citizenship (“We’d like to feel that our efforts may help every youngster to grow up into an honest, useful citizen”20) were another part of the character ripe for ridiculing deconstruction—“Let’s go, Robin, we’ve set another youth on the road to a brighter tomorrow” (the episode “It’s How You Play the Game”). Everything the Adam West Batman said was a parody of seriousness, and how could it be otherwise? How could anyone take genuinely seriously the words of a man dressed like that?
The Batman/Robin relationship is never referred to directly; more fun can be had by presenting it “straight,” in other words, screamingly camp. Wertham’s reading of the Dubious Duo had been so extensively aired as to pass into the general consciousness (in George Melly’s words, “We all knew Robin and Batman were pouves”21), it was part of the fabric of Batman, and the makers of the TV series proceeded accordingly.
Consider the Duo’s encounter with Marsha, Queen of Diamonds. The threat she embodies is nothing less than heterosexuality itself, the deadliest threat to the domestic bliss of the Bat-couple. She is even about to marry Batman before Alfred intervenes to save the day. He and Batman flee the church, but have to do so in the already decorated Batmobile, festooned with wedding paraphernalia including a large “Just Married” sign. “We’ll have to drive it as it is,” says Batman, while somewhere in the audience a Dr. Wertham takes feverish notes. Robin, Commissioner Gordon, and Chief O’Hara have all been drugged with Marsha’s “Cupid’s Dart,” but it is of course the Boy Wonder who Batman saves first. The dart, he tells Robin. “contains some secret ingredient by which your senses and your will were affected,” and it isn’t hard to read that ingredient as heterosexual desire, since its result, seen in the previous episode, was to turn Robin into Marsha’s slobbering slave.
We can tell with relief now, though, as Robin is “back in fighting form” (with impeccable timing Batman clasps Robin’s shoulder on the word “fighting”). Marsha has one last attempt to destroy the duo, but naturally she fails. The female temptress, the seductress, the enchantress must be vanquished. None of this is in the least subtle (Marsha’s cat, for example, is called Circe) but this type of mass-market camp can’t afford the luxury of subtlety. The threat of heterosexuality is similarly mobilized in the 1966 feature film, where it is Bruce Wayne’s infatuation with Kitka (Catwoman in disguise) that causes all manner of problems.
A more interesting employment of camp comes in the episodes where the Duo battle the Black Widow, played by Tallulah Bankhead. The major camp coup here, of course, is the casting. Bankhead was one of the supreme icons of camp, one of its goddesses, “Too intelligent not to be self-conscious, too ambitious to bother about her self-consciousness, too insecure ever to be content, but too arrogant ever to admit insecurity, Tallulah personified camp.”22
A heady claim, but perhaps justified, because the Black Widow episodes are, against stiff competition, the campest slices of Batman of them all. The stories about Bankhead are legendary—the time when on finding no toilet paper in her cubicle she slipped a ten dollar bill under the partition and asked the woman next door for two fives, or her whispered remark to a priest conducting a particularly elaborate service and swinging a censor of smoking incense, “Darling, I love the drag, but your purse is on fire”—and casting her in Batman was the final demonstration of the series’ commitment to camp.
The plot is unremarkable, the usual Bat-shenanigans; the pleasure lies in the detail. Details like the elderly Bankhead crammed into her Super-Villainess costume, or like the way in which (through a plot detail I won’t go into) she impersonates Robin, so we see Burt Ward miming to Bankhead’s voice, giving the unforgettable image of Robin flirting with burly traffic cops. Best of all, and Bankhead isn’t even in this scene but the thrill of having her involved clearly spurred the writer to new heights of camp, Batman has to sing a song to break free of the Black Widow’s spell. Does he choose to sing “God Bless America?” Nothing so rugged. He clutches a flower to his Bat chest and sings Gilbert and Sullivan’s “I’m Just Little Buttercup.” It is this single image, more than any other, which prevents me from taking the post—Adam West Dark Knight at all seriously.
The fundamental camp trick that the series pulls is to make the comics speak. What was acceptable on the page, in speech balloons, stands revealed as ridiculous once given audible voice. The famous visualized sound effects (URKKK! KA-SPLOOSH!) that are, for many, the fondest memory of the series work along similar lines. Camp often makes its point by transposing the codes of one cultural form into the inappropriate codes of another. It thrives on mischievous incongruity.
The incongruities, the absurdities, the sheer ludicrousness of Batman were brought out so well by the sixties version that for some audiences there will never be another credible approach. I have to include myself here. I’ve recently read widely in post-sixties Bat-lore, and I can appreciate what the writers and artists are trying to do, but my Batman will always be Adam West. It’s impossible to be somber or pompous about Batman because if you try the ghost of West will come Bat-climbing into your mind, fortune cookie wisdom on his lips and keen young Dick by his side. It’s significant, I think, that the letters I received from the editors of this book began “Dear Bat-Contributor.” Writers preparing chapters about James Joyce or Ingmar Bergman do not, I suspect, receive analogous greetings. To deny the large camp component of Batman is to blind oneself to one of the richest parts of his history.
IS THERE BAT-LIFE AFTER BAT-CAMP?
The international success of the Adam West incarnation left Batman high and dry. The camping around had been fun while it lasted, but it hadn’t lasted very long. Most camp humor has a relatively short lifespan, new targets are always needed, and the camp aspect of Batman had been squeezed dry. The mass public had moved on to other heroes, other genres, other acres of merchandising, but there was still a hard Bat-core of fans to satisfy. Where could the Bat go next? Clearly there was no possibility of returning to the caped Eisenhower, the benevolent patriarch of the 1950s. That option had been well and truly closed down by the TV show. Batman needed to be given his dignity back, and this entailed a return to his roots.
This, in any case, is the official version. For the unreconstructed devotee of the Batman (that is, people who insist on giving him the definite article before the name), the West years had been hell—a tricksy travesty, an effeminizing of the cowled avenger. There’s a scene in Midnight Cowboy where Dustin Hoffman tells Jon Voight that the only audience liable to be receptive to his cowboy clothes are gay men looking for rough trade. Voight is appalled—“you mean to tell me John Wayne was a fag?” (quoted, roughly, from memory). This outrage, this horror at shattered illusions, comes close to encapsulating the loathing and dread the campy Batman has received from the old guard of Gotham City and the younger born-again Bat-fans.
So what has happened since the 1960s has been the painstaking rehetero-sexualization of Batman. I apologize for coining such a clumsy word, but no other quite gets the sense that I mean. This strategy has worked, too, for large audiences, reaching its peak with the 1989 film. To watch this and then come home to see a video of the 1966 movie is to grasp how complete the transformation has been. What I want to do in this section is to trace some of the crucial moments in that change, written from the standpoint of someone still unashamedly committed to Bat-camp.
If one wants to take Batman as a Real Man, the biggest stumbling block has always been Robin. There have been disingenuous claims that “Batman and Robin had a blood-brother closeness. Theirs was a spiritual intimacy forged from the stress of countless battles fought side by side”23 (one can imagine what Tallulah Bankhead might say to that), but we know otherwise. The W
ertham lobby and the acolytes of camp alike have ensured that any Batman/ Robin relationship is guaranteed to bring on the sniggers. Besides which, in the late 1960s, Robin was getting to be a big boy, too big for any shreds of credibility to attach themselves to all that father-son smokescreen. So in 1969 Dick Grayson was packed off to college and the Bat was solitary once more.
This was a shrewd move. It’s impossible to conceive of the recent, obsessive, sturm-und-drang Batman with a chirpy little Robin getting in the way.24 A text of the disturbing power of The Killing Joke could not have functioned with Robin to rupture the grim dualism of its Batman/Joker struggle. There was, however, a post-Dick Robin, but he was killed off by fans in that infamous telephone poll.
It’s intriguing to speculate how much latent (or blatant) homophobia lay behind that vote. Did the fans decide to kill off Jason Todd so as to redeem Batman for unproblematic heterosexuality? Impossible to say. There are other factors to take into account, such as Jason’s apparent failure to live up to the expectations of what a Robin should be like. The sequence of issues in which Jason/Robin died, A Death in the Family, is worth looking at in some detail, however, in order to see whether the camp connotations of Bruce and Dick had been fully purged.
The depressing answer is that they had. This is very much the Batman of the 1980s, his endless feud with the Joker this time uneasily stretched over a framework involving the Middle East and Ethiopia. Little to be camp about there, though the presence of the Joker guarantees a quota of sick jokes. The sickest of all is the introduction of the Ayatollah Kohomeini, a real and important political figure, into this fantasy world of THUNK! and THER-ACKK! and grown men dressed as bats. (As someone who lived in the part of England from which Reagan’s planes took off on their murderous mission to bomb Libya, I fail to see the humor in this cartoon version of American foreign policy: it’s too near the real thing.)
Jason dies at the Joker’s hands because he becomes involved in a search for his own origins, a clear parallel to Batman’s endless returns to his Oedipal scenario. Families, in the Bat-mythology, are dark and troubled things, one more reason why the introduction of the fifties versions of Batwoman and Batgirl seemed so inappropriate. This applies only to real, biological families, though; the true familial bond is between Batman and Robin, hence the title of these issues. Whether one chooses to read Robin as Batman’s ward (official version), son (approved fantasy) or lover (forbidden fantasy), the sense of loss at his death is bound to be devastating. Batman finds Robin’s body and, in the time-honored tradition of Hollywood cinema, is at least able to give him a loving embrace. Good guys hug their dead buddies; only queers smooch when still alive.
If the word “camp” is applied at all to the eighties Batman, it is a label for the Joker. This sly displacement is the cleverest method yet devised of preserving Bat-heterosexuality. The play that the texts regularly make with the concept of Batman and the Joker as mirror images now takes a new twist. The Joker is Batman’s “bad twin,” and part of that badness is, increasingly, an implied homosexuality. This is certainly present in the 1989 film, a generally glum and portentous affair except for Jack Nicholson’s Joker, a characterization enacted with venomous camp. The only moment when this dour film comes to life is when the Joker and his gang raid the Art Gallery, spraying the paintings and generally camping up a storm.
The film strives and strains to make us forget the Adam West Batman, to the point of giving us Vicki Vale as Bruce Wayne’s lover, and certainly Michael Keaton’s existential agonizing (variations on the theme of why-did-I-have-to-be-a-Bat) is a world away from West’s gleeful subversion of truth, justice, and the American way. This is the same species of Batman celebrated by Frank Miller: “If your only memory of Batman is that of Adam West and Burt Ward exchanging camped-out quips while clobbering slumming guest-stars Vincent Price and Cesar Romero, I hope this book will come as a surprise. … For me, Batman was never funny. …”25
The most recent linkage of the Joker with homosexuality comes in Arkham Asylum, the darkest image of the Bat-world yet. Here the Joker has become a parody of a screaming queen, calling Batman “honey pie,” given to exclamations like “oooh!” (one of the oldest homophobic clichés in the book) and pinching Batman’s behind with the advice, “loosen up, tight ass.” He also, having no doubt read his Wertham, follows the pinching by asking. “What’s the matter? Have I touched a nerve? How is the Boy Wonder? Started shaving yet?” The Bat-response is unequivocal: “Take your filthy hands off me … Filthy degenerate!”
Arkham Asylum is a highly complex reworking of certain key aspects of the mythology, of which the sexual tension between Batman and the Joker is only one small part. Nonetheless the Joker’s question “Have I touched a nerve?” seems a crucial one, as revealed by the homophobic ferocity of Batman’s reply. After all, the dominant cultural construction of gay men at the end of the 1980s is as plague carriers, and the word “degenerate” is not far removed from some of the labels affixed to us in the age of AIDS.
BATMAN: IS HE OR ISN’T HE?
The one constant factor through all of the transformations of Batman has been the devotion of his admirers. They will defend him against what they see as negative interpretations, and they carry around in their heads a kind of essence of batness, a Bat-Platonic Ideal of how Batman should really be. The Titan Books reissue of key comics from the 1970s each carry a preface by a noted fan, and most of them contain claims such as “This, I feel, is Batman as he was meant to be.”26
Where a negative construction is specifically targeted, no prizes for guessing which one it is: “you … are probably also fond of the TV show he appeared in. But then maybe you prefer Elvis Presley’s Vegas years or the later Jerry Lewis movies over their early stuff. For me, the definitive Batman was then and always will be the one portrayed in these pages.”27
The sixties TV show remains anathema to the serious Bat-fan precisely because it heaps ridicule on the very notion of a serious Batman. Batman the series revealed the man in the cape as a pompous fool, an embodiment of superseded ethics, and a closet queen. As Marsha, Queen of Diamonds, put it, “Oh Batman, darling, you’re so divinely square.” Perhaps the enormous success of the 1989 film will help to advance the cause of the rival Bat- archetype, the grim, vengeful Dark Knight whose heterosexuality is rarely called into question (his humorlessness, fondness for violence, and obsessive monomania seem to me exemplary qualities for a heterosexual man). The answer, surely, is that they needn’t be mutually exclusive.
If I might be permitted a rather camp comparison, each generation has its definitive Hamlet, so why not the same for Batman? I’m prepared to admit the validity, for some people, of the swooping eighties vigilante, so why are they so concerned to trash my sixties camped crusader? Why do they insist so vehemently that Adam West was a faggy aberration, a blot on the otherwise impeccably butch Bat-landscape? What are they trying to hide?
If I had a suspicious frame of mind, I might think that they were protesting too much, that maybe Dr. Wertham was on to something when he targeted these narratives as incitements to homosexual fantasy. And if I want Batman to be gay, then, for me, he is. After all, outside of the minds of his writers and readers, he doesn’t really exist.
NOTES
1. Martin Barker, A Haunt of Fears: The Strange History of the British Horror Comics Campaign (London: Pluto Press, 1984).
2. Fredric Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent (London: Museum Press, 1955), 188.
3. Wertham, 190.
4. See, for example, the newspaper stories on “how to spot” homosexuals printed in Britain in the fifties and sixties, and discussed in Jeffrey Weeks, Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain (London: Quartet, 1979).
5. Phrases taken from Chapters 5 and 6 of Mark Cotta Vaz, Tales of the Dark Knight: Batman’s First Fifty Years (London: Futura, 1989).
6. Les Daniels, Comix: A History of Comic Books in America (New York: Bonanza Books, 1971), 87.
7. Cotta Vaz, 47 an
d 53.
8. Wertham, 192.
9. Richard Dyer, ed. Gays and Film. (New York: Zoetrope, 1984), 1.
10. See Richard Dyer, “Judy Garland and Gay Men,” in Dyer, Heavenly Bodies (London: BFI. 1987) and Claire Whitaker, “Hollywood Transformed: Interviews with Lesbian Viewers,” in Peter Steven, ed., Jump Cut: Hollywood Politics and Counter- Cinema (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1985).
11. Wertham, 192–193.
12. See Barker.
13. Mark Booth, Camp (London: Quartet, 1983), 18.
14. Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” in A Susan Sontag Reader (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), 106.
15. Jack Babuscio, “Camp and the Gay Sensibility,” in Dyer, ed. Gays and Film, 46.
16. Michael Bronski, Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility (Boston: South End Press, 1984), 42.
17. Philip Core, Camp: The Lie That Tells the Truth (London: Plexus, 1984), 7.
18. Sontag, 116.
19. George Melly, Revolt into Style: The Pop Arts in the 50s and 60s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 193.
20. “The Batman Says,” Batman #3 (1940), quoted in Cotta Vaz, 15.
21. Melly, 192.
22. Core, 25.
23. Cotta Vaz, 53.
24. A female Robin is introduced in the Dark Knight Returns series, which, while raising interesting questions about the sexuality of Batman, which I don’t here have the space to address, seems significant in that the Dark Knight cannot run the risk of reader speculation that a traditionally male Robin might provoke.
25. Frank Miller, “Introduction,” Batman: Year One (London: Titan, 1988).
26. Kim Newman, “Introduction,” Batman: The Demon Awakes (London: Titan, 1989).