Batman and Psychology: A Dark and Stormy Knight (Wiley Psychology & Pop Culture)

by Langley, Travis

  TABLE 4.1. THEORIZED EARLY LIFE DEVELOPMENT: COGNITIVE, MORAL, PSYCHOSEXUAL, AND PSYCHOSOCIAL STAGES10

  With conventional morality, individuals know to abide by standards and internalize those externally determined values, adopting standards set by parental principles, social norms, and society’s laws. Early conventional morality (stage 3) views trust, caring, and loyalty to others as the foundations for moral judgments. A child at this point will place great importance on being a “good girl” or “good boy” in the parents’ eyes. Those who progress in their conventional morality move from focusing on essential rightness or wrongness as a function of whether specific individuals approve into looking at the bigger picture of society itself (stage 4). Social order, law, justice, and duty become the standards. By most accounts, Bruce grows up expecting to operate within the law even while he also starts cheating the system. To pursue justice unimpeded by well-intentioned adults who want to care either for him or for the orphan’s fortune, “He wrote letters that weren’t exactly forgeries and weren’t exactly anything else—and they enabled him to leave Gotham City at age 14 and begin a global quest for what he wanted to know.”9 When he does so, is he functioning at lower moral reasoning to get what he wants, or has he already started moving into postconventional morality, which emphasizes underlying moral principles?

  Not everyone achieves postconventional morality. Moral reasoning by social contract (stage 5) recognizes that because people established society’s rules by mutual agreement and compromise, society’s contract with its members is no longer binding if rules become destructive or if parties to that contract fail to live up to their respective sides of the agreement. When corrupt authorities fail to promote and defend citizens’ welfare, when that corruption allows crime to flourish, social contractual reason holds that greater ethical principles must take priority, and a law higher than that of the official lawmakers and law officers should take over. Kohlberg’s thoughts on later postconventional morality, focusing on universal ethical principles and mutual respect (stage 6), have not received as much attention by empirical researchers, whether because Kohlberg may have erred or because so few people reach that stage. Bruce Wayne, short on the ability to respect and trust others, lacks the patience to devote himself to achieving ultimate enlightenment through reflection and meditation. After months of martial arts training at Master Kirigi’s temple in the Paektu-San Mountains, Bruce chooses not to stay for the additional years he’d need to move beyond his aggression into illumination on the other side.11

  The Might of a Mask

  “I wear a mask. And that mask, it’s not to hide who I am, but to create what I am.”

  —Batman, Batman #624 (2004)

  Cognitively, Bruce Wayne reasons that, given his resources and Gotham City’s corruption, fighting crime anonymously is a logical thing for him to do. Morally, he has determined that it is the right thing to do. Motivationally, he also may need the mask to overcome any lingering reservations or fears that might hold him back, although he might not anticipate how the anonymity will affect him emotionally.

  Costumes are liberating. In the 1919 pulp fiction serial “The Curse of Capistrano,” Zorro first rides as a masked vigilante out to defend the oppressed in Spanish colonial California.12 In 1933, a voice on the radio becomes the vigilante called the Shadow, who wears no literal mask but instead a scarf hides half his face and, more important, he masks himself using the power to cloud men’s minds.13 In 1939, Batman tackles crime in cape and cowl for the first time, perplexing Gotham’s police as he operates outside the law like those role models, Zorro and the Shadow, so criminals cannot track him down, invade his home, or take him to court for violating their legal rights. Aside from the utility of the secret identity as protection from others, these disguises must affect how each hero sees himself and how he accordingly acts.

  Anonymity makes people act differently or more extremely than usual. It can create disinhibition, a lessening of inhibitions, not only by lowering the odds they’ll have to face the consequences of their own actions but because anonymity may produce an experience of deindividuation, reduced consciousness of oneself as an individual. Disinhibition results from many different causes—e.g., drugs, fatigue, encouragement, party atmosphere, someone else taking responsibility, or getting lost in a crowd—all conditions that can also produce deindividuation. Darkness does both. Onlookers masked by darkness, disinhibited and deindividuated as they watch someone threaten to commit suicide by jumping off a building or bridge, more frequently jeer and yell, “Jump!”14 Psychologist Phil Zimbardo15 identified arousal, anonymity, and diffused responsibility all as factors that contribute to deindividuation and therefore make people more likely to engage in impulsive, destructive activities like rioting and vandalism, depending on the nature of the deindividuating circumstances. Although Zimbardo found that women asked to wear pillowcase masks would deliver greater electric shock to helpless “victims” (who didn’t really get shocked even though the volunteers believed they were shocking someone), Johnson and Downing16 pointed out that the Ku Klux Klan–like outfits may have cued participants to behave consistently with the outfits they wore, an unintended sort of role-playing, so these researchers responded with their own study in which volunteers wore nurses’ uniforms. When those in the nurses’ uniforms were anonymous, they became less aggressive and administered less shock than in individuation conditions of heightened self-awareness, when the researchers addressed the volunteers by name, stressing their personal identities. Reduced self-consciousness diminishes the influence of individual traits and heightens responsiveness to situational cues like the costume one is wearing: Dress like a Klansman, become more aggressive; dress like a nurse, become more nurturing.17

  Reducing self-awareness can have both advantages and disadvantages for the crime-fighter. The mask can make it easier for the hero to lose control. “For superheroes worried about not crossing the line—not being more violent than they need to be to apprehend the villain—wearing a mask can make it harder to monitor that line,” psychologist Robin Rosenberg asserts, while also pointing out that diminished self-awareness can help the person feel less pain, less sadness or anger, and less distracted by one’s internal experience, thereby enhancing awareness of the external environment.18

  A mask does not have to deindividuate when it’s part of a role or identity that its wearer takes personally. “The reality is that the Batman persona is the true persona,” says DC Comics executive editor Dan DiDio, “and that Bruce Wayne is the mask.” The Dark Knight Rises executive producer Michael Uslan argues, “I think that Bruce Wayne doesn’t exist. I think he died that night with his parents, and that form, that boy, that entity who moved on after that was no longer Bruce Wayne. He had at that point in his heart and mind and soul already become Batman. He just had a path, a journey to take.”19 Comic book writer Paul Levitz sees it differently: “The core of his identity always remains Bruce because it’s his formative experience as Bruce that fuels both. Batman is a tool he puts on to accomplish what he needs to do.” Another comic book writer, Scott Snyder, contends, “It’s not like Bruce is some phony thing he wears, but in the scale of the superhero identity, Bruce is deeply tilted towards Batman.”20 Wisdom from the Batcave author Cary A. Friedman weighs in: “Which is the real identity—is it Bruce Wayne or is it Batman? The really cool answer, of course, is when we say, ‘Oh, it’s Batman,’ but I think that misses the point. What defines the character is the essential humanity that the character possesses.”21

  We can get lost in our roles, even the roles we consciously design. When psychologist Phil Zimbardo conducted a prison simulation experiment in which he randomly cast volunteers in the roles of either guards or prisoners, the guards got carried away with how harshly they treated prisoners, and many prisoners became dehumanized drones who thought only of escape, survival, and how much they hated the guards.22 Zimbardo himself lost sight of the project’s true purpose and the harsh reality of how guards were t
reating prisoners, in part because he made the mistake of playing a role as the prison superintendent. It took a heated argument with an outside observer to clear his head before he realized that he and everyone else in the study had gradually “internalized a set of destructive prison values that distanced them from their own humanitarian values.”23

  Travis Langley: You keep calling it a mistake to have played a role in your own experiment, but don’t you understand it all better for having made that mistake?

  Phil Zimbardo: Without a doubt. I also learned things about myself.24

  Underestimating the importance of his Bruce Wayne identity and learning from that misjudgment similarly helps Batman reassess his priorities and better understand his own nature. When Lex Luthor frames Bruce for murder, Batman decides he doesn’t need to be Bruce anyway. “Bruce Wayne is a mask I wear, that I’ve been wearing since I was a child,” he tells his allies, “but it’s become a liability, so it’s over. Bruce Wayne and his troubles aren’t my concern anymore. The only thing that matters now is my mission. Nothing will stand in the way anymore.”25 He attempts to quit being Wayne altogether, only to discover that he should not and cannot. A confrontation with Catwoman and the dying wish of a detective who investigated his parents’ murder26 make him realize that in trying to convince himself that he is nothing but the thing he created to scare criminals, he has briefly forgotten the whole point of it all: The people who died once upon a time in Crime Alley were Bruce Wayne’s parents, not a bat’s, and the bat’s primary mission is about the innocent more than the guilty.27 Protect and avenge them. The Batman who remembers this even takes a moment to tend to a criminal as a wounded human being because Thomas Wayne would have.

  Batman wears two masks: the Dark Knight’s cowl and Bruce Wayne’s public façade. Each mask reduces his current consciousness of certain aspects of himself while raising his consciousness and concern about others. We come closest to seeing the “real” Bruce when he’s sitting in the Batcave, at the computer with mask and gloves off, drinking coffee while he talks with his father figure, Alfred, and adoptive son, Robin. Maybe on some level he feels he’s in the company of Thomas Wayne’s ghost and his own eight-year-old self. Batcave Bruce, hidden beneath the earth from the worlds in which the masked avenger or bored playboy might circulate, may be our hero at his truest.

  Notes

  1. Secret Origins trade paperback (1989).

  2. Quoted by Zehr (2008), p. xvi.

  3. Zehr (2008), p. 261.

  4. Cuddy-Casey & Orvaschel (1997); Nagy (1948).

  5. Piaget (1952, 1954); Piaget & Inhelder (1969).

  6. Kuhn (2000); Overton & Byrnes (1991).

  7. Piaget (1932).

  8. Haidt (2001).

  9. Secret Origins trade paperback (1989).

  10. Commons & Richards (2003); Kramer (1989).

  11. Secret Origins trade paperback (1989).

  12. McCulley (1919).

  13. Starting with “The Living Shadow” by the prolific Walter B. Gibson under his pen name, Maxwell Grant (1933).

  14. Mann (1981).

  15. Zimbardo (1969).

  16. Johnson & Downing (1979).

  17. Postmes & Spears (1998).

  18. Rosenberg (2009).

  19. Langley et al. (2011).

  20. Guerrero (2011).

  21. DiDio, Levitz, and Friedman, each interviewed in the Batman Unmasked television special (2008).

  22. Zimbardo (1971).

  23. Zimbardo, Maslach, & Haney (1999), 18.

  24. Zimbardo, personal communication (August 18, 1991).

  25. Batman #600 (2002).

  26. Batman #603 (2002).

  27. Batman #605 (2002).

  aMost notable exceptions still average out to eight, from authors like Frank Miller depicting him as six years old when the murders occur (Batman: Year One, 1987) to some like Geoff Johns placing him at ten (Justice League #5, 2012).

  5

  Why the Bat?

  “You’re not just some guy in a bat costume, are you? Are you freaking kidding me?!”

  —Hal Jordan, a.k.a. Green Lantern, Justice League #1 (October, 2011)

  A boy runs where he shouldn’t. Ground beneath his feet gives way and he falls. Through the earth he plunges into a cavern dark and damp, a cavity of size undefined in the darkness, silent except for a slow and steady drip, a whisper of wind, and a stir of something else. The darkness moves, “and then they boiled from the blackness, flapping, beating, clawing, a nightmare of leathery wings and gleaming eyes and fangs.”1 Bats screak and they fly, filling the cramped space around him. His terror turns to despair before an arm curls around him, his father having descended to lift him back up into the day. Bruce wonders if he’d fallen into hell. The world has now changed. All its shadows seem to be reaching his way. He never escapes the shadows. After a man with “frightened, hollow eyes”2 later comes out of the shadows and Bruce’s parents fall to the man’s gunfire, Bruce finds his own place in the darkness. Instead of running from shadows and fears, he cloaks himself with them.

  Alfred (Michael Caine): Why bats, Master Wayne?

  Bruce (Christian Bale): Bats frighten me. It’s time my enemies shared my dread.3

  Facing Our Fears

  We all have things that bother us or situations we just don’t like. Some of them we might sharply fear, but that doesn’t mean we’re phobic. Many people who say they have phobias are wrong. Discomforts and dislikes that fall short of pathological fears are aversions, which disturb us without overpowering us. A phobia is a persistently intense and unrealistic fear that causes such distress or so significantly impairs function that it counts as a mental illness. Degrees of fear that fall within the normal variety of human experience do not qualify. People with agoraphobia have a fear of open spaces, an often crippling dread that renders its sufferers unable to go outside. Those with social phobia fear social situations. They want friends. They wish they could leap into social interactions, but they become so embarrassed and afraid that they end up avoiding the very thing they want most. All other phobias, with thousands of different names, in the DSM get lumped together under the collective term specific phobias. Agoraphobia and social phobia, by keeping the individuals environmentally or socially trapped, interfere with life more broadly than other phobias. Even claustrophobia, a specific phobia of closed spaces that can make riding an elevator as terrifying to a claustrophobic person as stepping out the front door would be to an agoraphobe, does not keep that person trapped. The claustrophobe can travel the earth. If young Bruce’s dread of the bats in the shadows and beneath his family’s property begins intruding frequently into his thoughts and makes him ready to cry at the thought of playing in his own yard, he might qualify for chiroptophobia, the specific phobia toward bats, or maybe sciophobia, a pathological fear of shadows.

  Other phobias that would directly impede Batman’s effectiveness—so it’s a good thing he doesn’t have them—include acrophobia (fear of heights), achluophobia or lygophobia (darkness), noctiphobia or nyctophobia (night), and maskophobia (masks). Fears that would impede anybody’s ability to face Gotham’s criminal population include agateophobia (fear of insanity), agliophobia (pain), hoplophobia (firearms), icophobia (poison), Samhainophobia (Halloween), scelerophobia (burglars), traumatophobia (injury), and zoophobia (animals—cats, bats, rats, birds, hyenas, all). Conversely, kleptophobia (fear of stealing) would interfere with committing theft. Here are a few more examples of the many phobias that would inconvenience those who must face specific Bat-foes:

  Ailurophobia (felinophobia)—cats (Catwoman, Catman)

  Automatonophobia—fear of ventriloquist dummies (the Ventriloquist’s dummy Scarface)

  Bibliophobia—fear of books (Bookworm, Scarecrow)

  Botanophobia—fear of plants (Poison Ivy)

  Caligynephobia—fear of beautiful women (Talia, Catwoman, and many others)

  Chiroptophobia—fear of bats (Man-Bat)

  Chronomentrophobia—fear of
clocks (Clock King)