Terrorism, illegal violent or otherwise dangerous actions committed in order to intimidate or coerce in furtherance of political or social objectives,38 “the systematic use of terror, especially as a means of coercion,”39 is a theatrical crime against persons or property, a crime in which its greatest gains are symbolic or psychological satisfaction for its perpetrators.40 Terrorists’ motives are diverse. Some of their goals are straightforward: express outrage, get an imprisoned leader released, drive the U.S. military out of a territory. Some terrorist ideals get more abstract or complicated. Serial bomber Ted Kaczynski filled more than 50 pages with his “Unabomber Manifesto,” 35,000 words meant to incite an anti-technology revolution.41 Technology scared him, so he tried to scare people into sharing his fear.
The Joker in the movie The Dark Knight, a post-9/11 allegory for how terror breaks down reassuring moral categories, is out to scare everybody into dismantling their moral compasses. He doesn’t understand the world and its people much better than Kaczynski but similarly wants to believe he does. If he were confident in that belief, he wouldn’t feel quite so driven to confirm it. Like Kaczynski, he thinks he can get people to reveal how they’re like himself: Kaczynski expected people to take up the anti-technology cause; the Joker expects people to reveal how easily they’ll turn against each other. He gets his bank robbing flunkies to eliminate each other, makes two thugs fight to the death with a broken cue stick, drives Harvey Dent into turning killer, goads a detective into an attack that gives the Joker his opening to break out of jail, and contrives for Batman to break his one rule. “I’ll show you,” he tells Batman. “When the chips are down, these, uh, these ‘civilized’ people, they’ll eat each other.”
Having seen Batman use terror to get what he wants, the Joker sees—or wants to see—a kindred spirit and wants Batman to see that too. The Joker tells mobsters meeting in the back of a restaurant, “I know why you choose to have your little group therapy sessions in broad daylight. I know why you’re afraid to go out at night: the Batman. See, Batman has shown Gotham your true colors, unfortunately.” The Joker means to make the good citizens of Gotham show their “true colors” as well. Repeatedly he panics the populace into providing him with exactly the opportunities he wants, like when he drives a judge straight to a car bomb, scares people into evacuating the hospitals so he can reach Dent and snatch a busload of hostages, or makes police sharpshooters so frantic they nearly shoot those hostages themselves. “You crossed a line first, sir. You squeezed them, you hammered them to the point of desperation, and in their desperation, they turned to a man they didn’t fully understand,” Alfred tells Bruce, before suggesting that Bruce doesn’t fully understand the Joker either. “Some men aren’t looking for anything logical like money. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.” Batman scares the mob into turning to the Joker. The Joker wants to scare everybody into turning into the Joker, like the 9/11 terrorists scared Americans into becoming torturers.
The Joker’s wrong, though—not completely, but enough that two boatloads of people terrified for their lives refrain from blowing each other up. People can be better. Resisting impulses to turn on one another, giving others the benefit of the doubt, is often the best strategy for everyone in both the short term and long. Suspects facing the Prisoner’s Dilemma, the opportunity to earn freedom by turning against each other, more frequently come out ahead by staying quiet and gambling that their accomplices will zip it as well.42 Batman trusts correctly that the Joker will see no explosions from those two ships. We gamble on each other’s better nature all the time. Sometimes we’re wrong, but living without taking those gambles means living gripped by paranoia, which isn’t living fully. The human race continues because we haven’t all killed each other off.
Fright characterizes Batman’s rogues gallery unlike any other. His enemies dress as if en route to a Halloween masquerade party full of trick-or-treat tricksters, evoking chills and thrills. The Waynes’ uncostumed killer, Joe Chill, reflects the fears that give birth to Batman. People grow resistant to fear, though. Graduated exposure to Batman may inoculate Gotham’s criminal element against him. He’s a vaccine whose active ingredient is intimidation. Vaccine-resistant strains, the less easily intimidated criminals, survive and thrive by seizing opportunities previously enjoyed by more fearful felons. Despite Bruce Wayne’s contention that criminals are “a superstitious, cowardly lot,” the most dangerous monsters often feel too little fear to hold themselves back: the psychopaths.
CASE FILE 5–1 Scarecrow
Real name: Dr. Jonathan Crane
First appearance: World’s Finest Comics #3 (Fall, 1941)
Origin: A gangly bookworm victimized by school bullies and raised by a grandmother who regularly punishes him by leaving him alone in a dilapidated chapel where flocks of birds might peck, harangue, and torment him, Jonathan Crane masters his fears by growing up to become a master of fear itself, a psychology professor whose unorthodox methods include firing a gun in class while demonstrating the acquisition of fear. The standoffish, shabbily dressed psychologist never fits in with other faculty. Why buy nicer clothes when that money could go into his book collection? After lecturing on how protection rackets make money by making people afraid, Crane decides to become the symbol he already resembles, “a symbol of poverty and fear combined! The perfect symbol—the Scarecrow.”1 Going into business as a one-man protection racket, he gets unethical businessmen to hire him to drive their rivals away through his use of violent scare tactics, even murder. Unfazed after the university fires him for inappropriate teaching methods like shooting that gun in class, the Scarecrow steps up his reign of terror, striking again and again until Batman and Robin bring him down.
“Guy dresses up as something horrific, goes out into the night and terrifies his enemies. He’s acting out from deep, visceral trauma—probably childhood. Sound like anyone you know?”
—Batman, discussing the Scarecrow with Robin, Year One: Batman Scarecrow #1 (July, 2005)
Where Bruce Wayne dresses like Dracula to scare the guilty, Jonathan Crane—yet another villain who inverts key aspects of the hero—dresses like a scarecrow to panic the innocent. At first, the Scarecrow fails to secure his place in Batman’s rogues gallery. Appearing only twice in the early 1940s, he doesn’t become a recurring enemy until after he reappears in 1967. Readers found him more interesting once he moved beyond terroristic scare tactics and into the realm of psychophysiological manipulation. When he returns, he uses a chemical spray to overwhelm victims and crime-fighters with the most primal human fears: heights, animals, darkness.2 Over the years, he develops variants of his fear toxin, typically administering it as a gas to prey on individuals’ personal fears (like Batman’s dread of losing those closest to him)3 with hallucinogenic effects inducing vivid visual and auditory hallucinations of whatever stimulus or situation frightens each of them most. Sometimes, instead of inducing fear, the Scarecrow unleashes drugs that eliminate fear in order to make the exposed recipients reckless to the point of endangering their own lives4 or, among those for whom only the fear of consequences restrains their darkest impulses, hazardous to the lives of other people.5
Are any of ex-Professor Crane’s toxic techniques plausible? Yes.
Psychoactive substances (psychologically active, altering perception and mood, a.k.a. psychotropic as Batman refers to Crane’s toxin in Batman Begins), including both approved medications and recreational drugs, generally operate by boosting, blocking, or mimicking the body’s natural hormones and neurotransmitters (the chemicals that regulate nerve cells’ activity and relay signals throughout the nervous system). Nerve gases produce their effects by increasing the activity of the body’s most prevalent neurotransmitter, acetylcholine, which enables learning, memory, and muscle contraction. A rapid burst in acetylcholine activity can produce lasting damage by exciting an eruption of muscle contractions, including respiratory seizures that can kill w
ithin a minute. If Crane could create a drug that operates on other neural systems, targeting the ones related to fear, and then release that drug in gaseous form, he would essentially invent a different kind of nerve gas.
Our natural stimulants, the neurotransmitters known as the catecholamines, fire up the nervous system to increase heart rate, blood flow, and the brain’s oxygen supply. Specific catecholamines are epinephrine (a.k.a. adrenaline) and norepinephrine (a.k.a. noradrenaline). Catecholamine deficits correlate with depression, and excesses predict stress, anxiety, and physical reactions that resemble our responses to danger: racing heart, palpitations, tremors, hyperventilation. Elevating these physical reactions can heighten a fear response but might also intensify anger or positive emotions as well, just as stimulant substances like caffeine, cocaine, and amphetamines can enhance either unpleasant feelings like anxiety and paranoia or pleasant feelings of euphoria and well-being.6 Both activate systems as part of the innate fight-or-flight response: reacting to danger with readiness to attack or run and hide.7 Fun physical activities, for example, outdoor adventure tasks like canoeing and climbing rocks, can elevate catecholamine levels as well.8
To instill fear specifically, Crane’s toxins must target neural areas associated with the fear side of that equation. Increasing motor responses associated with fear, like rapid heart rate or respiration, could help, but he can’t rely on that alone because his victims might interpret those sensations as enhanced excitement or anger. The antidepressants known as serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRIs) operate much like the more widely used selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). SSRIs combat some forms of depression, anxiety, and obsessive thinking by making the brain use its serotonin (a calming neurotransmitter) more efficiently, selectively increasing effectiveness in some neural regions more than others so that different SSRIs will work better with different problems: Some will work better on social anxiety,9 while others might better treat eating disorders.10 SNRIs provide an added kick with norepinephrine stimulation.11 Although clinicians have used SNRIs to make anxiety sufferers feel better,12 a villain like Crane could selectively target different arousal systems conceivably to make anxieties worse. Crane doesn’t want to calm them down, though, so he wouldn’t increase serotonin’s effectiveness too. In fact, he’d likely include a selective serotonin blocker in his recipe. Some SNRIs also enhance dopamine,13 an important neurotransmitter of which Parkinson’s patients have too little and schizophrenic individuals generally have too much, which might figure into his toxins’ hallucinogenic effects.
Within the brain, Crane would hit the limbic system, the so-called animal brain,14 a doughnut-shaped collection of brain parts at the border between the brainstem (controlling basic life support deep down in the brain, atop the spinal cord) and cerebral cortex (where conscious thought and more advanced functions take place across the brain’s surface). The limbic system includes the hippocampus, which processes explicit memories for long-term storage; a cluster of parts collectively known as the hypothalamus, which governs some motivation (hunger, thirst, caring whether we freeze or overheat) and emotion (sex drive and the flight-or-flight response to danger); and the amygdala, which links our motivations and emotions to the stimuli that set them off (actually amygdalae, plural, since there’s one on each side of the brain). Electrical or chemical stimulation to the hypothalamus or amygdala can make an animal leap to attack15 or, with only a slight difference in target location, cower in fear.16 Crane might also target the brainstem’s locus coeruleus and other structures involved in the central stress circuitry,17 giving this psychology professor gone bad many options as he induces stress, anxiety, and outright panic in his victims.
There’s more to us than automatic stimulus/response, though, just as there’s more to fear itself than arousal activation. Both physiology and cognitions—our perceptions, memories, and interpretations—together can create our feelings. According to Schachter and Singer’s two-factor theory, whenever we experience forms of general autonomic arousal (e.g., elevated heart rate) similarly associated with different emotions like fear, joy, and anger that involve similar general autonomic arousal, we interpret our own feelings and label them according to available cues. Arousal from one source like a shot of epinephrine could become happiness when exposed to someone else who acts euphoric or testiness around a person who acts irritated,18 a process known as excitation transfer.19 “Arousal fuels emotion; cognition channels it.”20 We can often think our way through our feelings. The Scarecrow once uses a device that sends vibrations to the parasympathetic nervous system, the division of the autonomic nervous system that normally calms the body. Batman works his way around its effects by asking himself how Crane stays calm and realizes it’s simply because the psychologist knows there’s no reason for fear. “Since it was your gadget, it was logical to understand that I had nothing to fear, either! Simple mind over matter, Scarecrow!”21 He successfully tells himself not to interpret those physiological sensations as fear.
This happens long before the Scarecrow, through repeated exposure to his own toxins, loses his capacity for fear. Complete loss of fear by someone who grew up fully able to experience it is so rare that the phenomenon lacks systematic research and classification, but it does happen, as in the real-life case of “patient SM,” whose specific amygdala damage left her unafraid even when held at gunpoint.22 Like her or the research animals who no longer frighten due to experimental cuts to their fear centers, Crane no longer feels afraid of anything—and he misses that sensation.23 The master of fear grew up wanting to accept his fears and control them, not eliminate them altogether. His own toxins won’t induce fear in him either, whether because he has developed a tolerance (resistance to their effects) or damaged his fear centers so severely. A victim of his own devices, the boy who grew to cook up some fear for others now desperately seeks new ways to serve it to himself.
CASE FILE 5–2 Hugo Strange
Real name: Dr. Hugo Strange
First appearance: Detective Comics #36 (February, 1940)
Origin: Debuting in the comics as a mad scientist who fights Batman months before the more colorful Joker and Catwoman come along, back in the days when readers could accept a villain using a fog-and-lightning machine to cover a bank robbery instead of making a fortune off the fact that he has invented a fog-and-lightning machine, he’s the first candidate to become a Moriarty to Batman’s Holmes, ahead of the curve in many ways only to get supplanted in every way as Bob Kane and crew kept creating flashier foes. Strange, for example, spreads “fear dust” around the city1 months before the Scarecrow appears. He dies a lot. Many appearances end with Strange presumed dead, only to survive somehow and later return to vex the Dark Knight yet again. In his Bronze Age appearances, he discovers Bruce Wayne’s big secret2 and makes several attempts to take his place in the Batman costume.3
“I can know what it feels to be the Bat-Man psychologically but not—not physically. God, h-how I envy him—how I hate him.”
—Hugo Strange in Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight #11 (November, 1990)
Rebooted after Crisis on Infinite Earths, Strange reenters comics as a prominent psychiatrist whom Gotham’s mayor hires to develop a forensic profile on the city’s new bat-clad vigilante and to form a strategy for turning public sentiment against the Batman. Strange articulates his thoughts to a lingerie-clad mannequin. Donning his own version of a Batman costume helps him understand his target’s point of view—not the worst of strategies, as it helps him recognize the compulsion, the symbolism, and the disinhibiting empowerment that comes with the costume, except that Strange quickly envies Batman’s freedom to run rampant through the night in that outfit and escalates his own actions to kidnapping the mayor’s daughter in order to frame Batman. Strange deduces Batman’s identity. The secret seemingly dies with him when he gets shot by police and falls into the river after Batman clears himself of Strange’s frame.4 Reminiscent of the original Strange’s use of fear dust, thi
s Strange soon teams up with Scarecrow Jonathan Crane to strike terror into Gotham, though the two quickly turn against each other and Crane impales Strange on a weather vane.5 Later posing as a psychiatrist running standard stress evaluations on Wayne Enterprises employees, Strange tries but fails to coax a drugged Wayne into admitting he’s Batman. Concluding that he erred in ever thinking Wayne was Batman, Strange breaks down and finally goes to Arkham Asylum instead of faking another death, not without dressing like Batman again in this course of this story6 because keeping Hugo Strange out of a Bat costume would be like keeping cross-dressing filmmaker Ed Wood out of a skirt.7
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