Jason (to Batman): I murdered criminals. Granted, I got dressed up in a goofy outfit to do it, but look in a mirror, Nosferatu—that doesn’t get me in the rubber room. I have passed all of my psych exams—multiple times. I am simply homicidal. Will I kill again? Sure. Am I a bad person? Oh, yeah. So keep me locked up. Just not here. I will not be housed in your kennel for freaks.6
In adopting his killer’s old Red Hood nom de plume, antihero Jason has taken from the life of the villain who took his life. He takes more from the Joker than that. Beyond his own mounting body count and aside from giving the Joker some payback at the end of another crowbar, Jason is trying to teach people, especially Batman, some lessons. The Joker and Jason want Batman to break his rules. Both want substantiation for their respective opinions that rules and order do not work, although neither would keep seeking such support if fully secure in his beliefs. They’re trying to tear down not Batman himself, but rather his restraint. They want to see his darkness unleashed. He is the standard by which they judge themselves. Unable to make sense of the world in which he lives and unable to see the world as Batman does, Jason is trying to get Batman to see that Gotham is ugly and that its most dangerous criminals need to die. Like the Joker, he tries to prove that people are uglier inside than Batman wants to believe. Were Batman to kill the Joker, he’d prove both the Joker and Jason right.
Supposedly to teach Bruce the price of enlisting others’ help in the conflict between Batman and the Red Hood, Jason abducts Green Arrow’s sidekick. The former second Robin tells Mia Dearden, the second Speedy, “Tonight you’re going to get some learning.” He tries to get Mia to see how much she has in common with him so she might be better prepared to kill enemies when necessary to keep herself alive. Jason’s lessons tend to be about the need to kill.
Jason (to Mia): My surrogate dad comes from the same damned upbringing as your self-righteous mentor. I’m like you. I was born out on the streets, too…. I know that sometimes we have to do the bad things just to get by. And I know that sometimes very bad things have to be done to do a great right. I don’t think either of our “fathers” will ever understand that. But you do.7
Whereas the Joker tries to reshape the world in his own image by imposing his visage upon his victims, equipment, and fish, Jason redefines himself to be like others: At different points in his life, he replaces Dick Grayson as Robin, assumes the Joker’s old Red Hood identity, dons the Nightwing costume and name while Dick Grayson is on sabbatical with Bruce and Tim, traipses the Multiverse in the costume of Earth-51 Batman’s late partner Red Robin, and tries to win the right to wear his Batman’s cowl when people think Bruce dead. After Dick wins that cowl and becomes Batman with Bruce’s son Damian as his Robin, Jason transforms his Red Hood outfit into a more traditional superhero costume and gets his own sidekick, a girl called Scarlet. Later, as Bruce resumes his place as Gotham’s one and only Batman, Jason follows and distorts another chapter from Bruce’s life when he leads the Outlaws, the antihero equivalent of the Outsiders superteam Batman sometimes leads.8 The Outlaws include former Teen Titans, notably Green Arrow’s first sidekick and Dick Grayson’s former girlfriend. Jason’s repeated efforts to recast himself to fit other people’s molds show some similarities to borderline personality disorder (previously discussed in connection with Batman Forever’s Riddler), a condition involving a vague, poorly formed identity. While Jason may be too consistent in his actions, manner, and moods to fit that particular disorder well, spending much of his youth brain-damaged and comatose has made him miss out on a critical period in personality development.
The greatest superhero backstories each include a defining moment. A rocket blasts off from a dying planet, a boy kneels crying over his slain parents, another boy’s parents fall when trapeze ropes break, a clown shoots and cripples the police commissioner’s daughter, a teenager stares in shock at the face of the burglar who killed his Uncle Ben. Jason’s defining moments, the events we always think of in connection with him, are of a boy stealing tires from the Batmobile and a clown, the same clown who shot the commissioner’s daughter, later beating the boy to death with a crowbar.g Just as readers cannot leave these moments behind, Jason, with no powerful redefining moment, also surely never will.
CASE FILE 10–2 Dr. Fredric Wertham
Real name: Fredric Wertham (originally Wertheimer), M.D.
First appearance: Munich, Germany (March 20, 1895)
Origin: This psychiatrist’s 1954 book, Seduction of the Innocent, a condemnation of comic books as the root of much juvenile delinquency in America, rocked the comics industry and instigated many changes. Among other things, Wertham contended that Batman and Robin live out a homosexual fantasy, and people have kept talking about that ever since.
Is Batman Gay?
No.
Is Robin Gay?
No.
But what about … ?
No. To those who read the stories as written, these questions can seem stupid—in which case the greater question might be why people keep asking. That greater question could ignite considerable and fascinating debate while remaining objectively unanswerable. Comic book writer Alan Grant, one of numerous intervieweesh Silver Bullet Comics once surveyed regarding Batman’s sexuality, said, “In my 40 years as a Batman reader, that question never occurred to me. Then, during my time as writer on the Batman titles, I was interviewed for an American college rag. The first question was ‘Is Batman gay?’ Well, the Batman I wrote for 13 years isn’t gay. Denny O’Neil’s Batman, Marv Wolfman’s Batman, everybody’s Batman all the way back to Bob Kane—none of them wrote him as a gay character.”1 The Dark Knight Returns author Frank Miller has said, “Batman isn’t gay. His sexual urges are so drastically sublimated into crime-fighting that there’s no room for any other emotional activity. Notice how insipid are the stories where Batman has a girlfriend or some sort of romance. It’s not because he’s gay, but because he’s borderline pathological, he’s obsessive. He’d be much healthier if he were gay.”2 DC Comics stories consistently present the Batman-Robin relationship as that of father and son, master and apprentice, mentor and mentee. Readers over the years have had fun pulling examples out of context, like a panel in which twin beds look like the same bed shared by both characters,3 but consider this: If we could generate over a hundred thousand panel images from your life, assorted snapshots displayed out of context, aren’t there more than a few we could misinterpret in wildly creative ways?
Popular discussion of the Caped Crusader’s sexual orientation started with psychiatrist Dr. Fredric Wertham, who authored studies on homicide, helped pioneer courtrooms’ use of expert witnesses in forensic psychiatry, provided information that helped the Supreme Court end school desegregation,4 judged comic books to be the root of mid-20th-century juvenile delinquency, and shook the comic magazine industry to its foundation. Wertham studied under eminent psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin, worked with Adolf Meyer, and met with Sigmund Freud, all of whom exerted powerful influence over him—even though he ignored Freud’s personal recommendation to keep psychiatry out of the popular press.5 A social reformer who fought for civil rights, Wertham immigrated to the United States after World War I and made his name as a consulting psychiatrist for the New York court system. His psychiatric clinic was among the first to provide psychiatric examinations for all convicted felons, and his recommendations helped lead to the modernization of many facilities and their methods. A charitable mental health clinic Wertham established in Harlem became “the most successful in the nation to provide psychotherapy for the underprivileged … the only center in the city where both Negroes and whites may receive extended psychiatric care.”6 Known in Harlem as “Doctor Quarter” for the nominal fee he charged to encourage responsibility rather than administer service completely for free, Wertham kept this clinic open for about a decade, during which time he studied how segregation affected children and developed his ideas on how comic books, especially horror comics, cultivated juvenile delinquenc
y.
In the course of his work with juvenile offenders, Wertham noted how avidly delinquents read comic books and how excitedly they described the sometimes gory content (often in response to Wertham’s leading questions). Because the delinquents had all read comic books, Wertham concluded that the comics exerted unhealthy influence. One of the many flaws in this reasoning is that Wertham did not measure them against a control group (comparison group) of non-delinquents, the greater flaw being that he did not systematically collect enough quantitative measurements. In the 1940s and early 1950s when he made these observations, every delinquent child would also have seen baseball games (as would the non-delinquents), so why not blame baseball? After a child broke into a meat market so his companions would reward him with comic books and candy, why did Wertham blame the comic books instead of that wicked candy?7 Hardly the first to criticize comic books but surely the most influential, Wertham started shaking things up with a 1948 Saturday Review of Literature article and grew increasingly more vocal, giving lectures and writing more articles over the next seven years, culminating with his famous book Seduction of the Innocent in 1954. During hearings before the Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency of the Committee on the Judiciary, Wertham testified, “I think Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic book industry.”8
Seduction of the Innocent focused on horror and crime comics, devoting only a small portion of the book to superheroes, but in that small portion lies some of the book’s most famous content. Wertham called Superman a fascist, scoffed at letting children read stories that “teach them the Green Lantern will help” save them,9 said Batman and Robin lived a homosexual fantasy lifestyle, and called Wonder Woman the “Lesbian counterpart of Batman.”10 He never called Batman and Robin gay. He said their lifestyle was like “a wish dream of two homosexuals living together.”11 Wertham inferred a homoerotic subtext that the characters’ creators never intended, a charge as easily leveled against other popular stories about men sharing adventures with their fellow men (e.g., war movies, cowboy movies, the Three Musketeers, the Three Stooges). “Only someone ignorant of the fundamentals of psychiatry and the psychopathology of sex can fail to realize a subtle atmosphere of homoeroticism which pervades the adventures of the mature ‘Batman’ and his young friend ‘Robin.’” These Freudian fundamentals to which he refers, especially early psychoanalytic views on the psychopathology of sex, remain controversial among a majority of psychological professionals and inadequately supported by empirical study.12 “At home they lead an idyllic life,” Wertham said of the lifestyle Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson enjoy, “in sumptuous quarters, with beautiful flowers in large vases, and have a butler, Alfred.” “To avoid being thought queer by Wertham,” Andy Medhurst, like others, suggests that Bruce and Dick needed to “never show concern if the other is hurt, live in a shack, only have ugly flowers in small vases, call the butler ‘Chip’ or ‘Joe’ if you have to have one at all, never share a couch, keep your collar buttoned up, keep your jacket on, and never, ever wear a dressing gown.”13
Wertham complained about villains taking Robin hostage, not because that depicted child endangerment (which would have been a valid concern about Batman’s relationship with Robin), but instead because he found something inherently sexual in the act of rescuing one’s friends—a staple in adventure stories through any medium. Just as he says, “They constantly rescue each other from violent attacks by an unending number of enemies. The feeling is conveyed that we men must stick together because there are so many villainous creatures who have to be exterminated,” when describing how “the Batman type of story helps to fixate homoerotic tendencies,” he complains that “Where Batman is anti-feminine, the attractive Wonder Woman and her friends are definitely anti-masculine. Wonder Woman has her own female following. They are all continuously threatened, captured, almost put to death. There is a great deal of mutual rescuing, the same type of rescue fantasies as in Batman.”14,i
Dismissing strong good girl characters like intrepid reporter Vicki Vale, Wertham carped, “In these stories there are practically no decent, attractive, successful women. A typical female character is the Catwoman, who is vicious and uses a whip. The atmosphere is homosexual and anti-feminine. If the girl is good-looking she is undoubtedly the villainess.”15 Some truth may hover in there, for reasons other than Wertham’s perceived homosexual subtext. Bob Kane distrusted women. Batman’s creator, who enjoyed dating women like Marilyn Monroe, didn’t know how to befriend them. “You always need to keep a woman at arm’s length. We don’t want anyone to take over our souls, and women have a habit of doing that,” Kane said in his autobiography. “With women, when the romance is over, somehow they never remain my friends.”16
By paving the way for the creation of the Comics Code Authority as a tool for the comic book industry to regulate its own content, a code Wertham himself neither supported nor endorsed, as he objected to censorship and felt pessimistic about the comic book companies’ ability to regulate themselves, Wertham’s campaign for parents to take responsibility and supervise their children’s reading got Catwoman evicted from the comics for more than a decade. Never mind the whip—that, she could have gone without. The code, by forbidding suggestive postures, demanding realistic drawings of women with no exaggeration of any physical qualities, banning glamorous or sympathetic criminals, and requiring punishment for all crime every time, left little room for the sexy thief who steals Batman’s heart.
Notes
1. Bergner (2007); Grassley & Nelms (2009); Parker & Wampler (2006).
2. Cole (2010); Stone (2011).
3. Bigger & Webb (2010); Djikic, Oatley, Zoeterman, & Peterson (2009); Isbell, Sobol, Lindauer, & Lowrance (2004); Oatley (2011).
4. Happé (1994); Premack & Woodruff (1978).
5. Flavell (1979); Pizzolato (2006); Woolley (1996).
6. Bill Finger, quoted by Kane & Andrae (1989), 46.
7. Krause (2010); Meissner (1970).
8. J. Robinson, personal communication (June 23, 2009).
9. Jerry Robinson, quoted by Couch (2010), 38.
10. Detective Comics #38 (1940).
11. Bill Finger, quoted by Daniels (1999), 38.
12. Star Spangled Comics #65–130 (1947–1952).
13. Young Allies #1 (1941).
14. The Avengers #4 (1964).
15. Sub-Mariner #14 (1969).
16. The Brave and the Bold #54 (1964).
17. Coogan (2006), 213.
18. Duncan & Smith (2010), 228.
19. Piaget (1930, 1952).
20. Batman #217 (1969).
21. The New Teen Titans #39 (1984).
22. Tales of the Teen Titans #44 (1984).
23. Daniels (1999), 147.
24. Batman #357 (1983).
25. D. O’Neil, personal communication (July 24, 2011).
26. Detective Comics #526 (1983).
27. Quoted, respectively, by Robinson (2001) and Brownstein (2000).
28. Batman #408 (1987).
29. Batman #368 (1984).
30. Batman #427–428 (1988).
31. Daniels (1999), 191.
32. O’Brien (2005).
33. Fodor & Farrow (1979); Stahl & Harrell (1982).
34. Sharrett (1991), 35, 40.
35. Batman: Year Three (1989).
36. Quoted in Daniels (1999), 170.
37. For example, his mother in Detective Comics #618–621 (1990) and his father in Identity Crisis #5 (2004).
38. For example, his ex-girlfriend Stephanie Brown in Robin #174 (2008). Tim’s parents stay dead despite their brief stint as Black Lantern super-zombies (Blackest Night: Batman #1–3, 2009).
39. Red Robin #1 (2009).
40. Detective Comics #647–648 (1992).
41. Robin #58 (1998).
42. Robin #65 (1999).
43. Robin #126–128 (2004).
44. Johnston (2011).
45. Batman #633 (2004).
46. Batman #644 (2005).
&n
bsp; 47. Robin #174 (2008); Robin/Spoiler Special (2008).
48. Cooper & Grotevant (1989).
49. Robin #58 (1998).
50. Ellis et al. (2003).
51. Batgirl #1 (2011).
52. Batgirl #24 (2011).
53. DC Special Series #15—Batman Spectacular (1978); Batman: Son of the Demon (1987).
54. Batman #655–658 (2006).
55. Batman #657 (2006).
56. Batman and Robin #1 (2011).
57. Adler (1908).
58. Ernst & Angst (1982); Zajonc (2001).
59. Kidwell (1982).
60. Allred & Poduska (1988); McGuirk & Pettijohn (2008); Kennedy (1989); Kidwell (1982); Salmon (1998, 2003).
Batman and Psychology: A Dark and Stormy Knight (Wiley Psychology & Pop Culture) Page 26
