Pop Culture
Are Batman and Superman the Barometer of Our Times? A Review of ‘Superheroes in Crisis’
by Ira Erika Franco
#heroes #review #artsandculture, #analysis, #scholarly, #informative
Abstract
The WWII historian Jeffrey K. Johnson studies how the two comic book legends Superman and Batman have adapted successfully to American cultural and social landscapes through time. This is a book review of ‘Superheroes in Crisis’, a monograph that details some decisive moments from their creation in the late 30’s up to the 70’s in which both characters have transformed in order to maintain their relevance as what Johnson calls ‘cultural barometers’.
Keywords: superheroes , history , batman , superman , monographs
The idea that superhero comic books are part of a modern American mythology is probably not a surprise to anyone. However, Jeffrey Johnson refocuses this concept in his monograph Superheroes in Crisis (RIT Press, 2014): after going into detail of the myriad of changes Superman and Batman have gone to stay relevant, he suggests we should narrow our assumptions of what constitutes a true comic book myth, given that the character stays true to what the present society demands. ‘American culture is littered with faint remembrances of characters who flourished for a season and then became inconsequential and vanished’ (Johnson 2014: 104). The author mentions The Yellow Kid and Captain Marvel as those characters who were once über famous and popular and now are but receding memories in people’s minds. Avid comic readers can surely think of many other examples of great modern characters who, for some reason, just didn’t make it. Batman and Superman, however, remain ‘two heroes who have survived, and often thrived, for over seventy years because they are important to current Americans and speak to modern social problems and contemporary cultural necessities’ (Johnson 2014: 104).
A noted World War II historian, Johnson points out that the characters have endured the trials of time mainly because of their abilities to bend so as not to break. Even if most of us modern readers assume fixed traits for both The Dark Knight and The Man of Steel, Johnson carefully demonstrates there’s no such thing: Superman couldn’t even fly in his earliest adventures, and through the period of the TV series in the mid-sixties, Batman, the so-called Dark Knight, was a goofy, campy character with not a bit of darkness in his soul. Through Johnson’s account it is evident, though, that Batman and his creators have done a better job than Superman’s in adjusting to radical changes in American society (such as the US’s disillusionment after JFK’s assassination or the introduction of TV and its immediate popularity). This might also be the reason for Batman’s smoother translation to modern cinema: since the release of the first movie —Batman (Burton, 1989)— has always kept the public interest with strong sales figures, —The Dark Knight (Nolan, 2008) being the most popular to date, having made 533 million dollars in revenue for its creators in the US alone —. Not even the bad Batman movies have flopped in opening weekends: people always want to see The Dark Knight’s new metamorphosis, as if they wanted to understand what they’ve turned into.
In the four chapters of the book, Johnson provides the reader with the rare pleasure of being told old stories, gems actually: instead of just sociological analysis and high ideas, Johnson provides the actual plot of the comic issue he chooses in order to support his commentary. We might remember that Superman was created during the Great Depression (1938), and it’s fairly easy to assume that the caped hero was to provide a temporary escape for impoverished and desperate Americans, but unless we have an infinite (and expensive) golden age collection, it would probably never occur to us that during his first few years, Superman was actually a savior of the oppressed, almost in a Marxist fashion. One example is Action Comics #3, where Superman disguises himself as a coal miner to trap the mine owner and his socialite friends underground in order to show them the importance of safety regulations and working men. In Action Comics #8, Superman befriends a gang of delinquents and decides to burn down the slums they live in, just to prove that the government is partly responsible for their delinquency. In the end, Superman becomes a true hero: he forces the government to build new apartments providing these hooligans the dignity they deserve. Throughout the book, Johnson provides such examples in effective ways to prove the Historic turmoil to which our heroes reacted.
One compelling topic that defines both characters concerns their enemies. At first, being created as depression-era social avengers, they fight the common criminal: shoplifters, wife-beaters and even politicians. ‘These often colorful foes provided action and adventure while also creating a binary narrative of good and evil’ (Johnson 2014, XIV). But this narrative changes greatly throughout time, constituting probably the most important transformation in the stories of these two heroes: the evolution of their foes. At some point, the duality of pure good and evil stops being good enough. It stops explaining what is wrong with the world. At the end of the sixties, for example, Superman’s petty villains become so unimportant that, for a while, his love interest Lois Lane impersonates a new kind of foe. In a way, Lois updates better than Superman as she wakes up to her newfound power, akin to the zeitgeist of her era. In Lois Lane #85 (she even gets her own title for a little while) the one-time docile girlfriend decides she no longer wants to marry Superman and refuses his once longed-for offer. In a kind of confused, first approach feminism, she is seen doing things such as lifting heavy stuff like men. ‘Superman represents the older generations and is pressing to protect the status quo, while Lois is a change-minded baby boomer’ (Johnson 2014: 43).
Image 1
Superman’s Girlfriend, Lois Lane Vol 1 #80, Curt Swan, Leo Dorfman, DC Comics, January, 1968. Image via Wikia, DC Comics Database, http://dc.wikia.com/wiki/Superman’s_Girlfriend,_Lois_Lane_Vol_1_80. © DC Comics.
Batman’s enemies are, without a doubt, the most exciting ones. First of all, he gets one in the real world: he is accused of promoting homosexuality by the psychologist Frederic Werthan, in his book Seduction of the Innocent (1954), for which Americans changed the regulation code of the comic book industry. Later, in the early sixties, the character is handed to writer and editor Julius Schwartz and the stories become enriched with a focus on Batman’s detective skills. The Riddler, Mr. Freeze and the Joker all demand The Caped Crusader’s brainpower to discover complex noir plots, creating a three-dimensional world within the comic’s pages: ‘Perhaps most interesting is Detective Comics#332 (October 1964) in which Batman fights Joker for the first time under the new creative regime. In this story the Clown Prince of Crime creates a potent dust that causes anyone it comes in contact with to laugh uncontrollably. After encountering the drug, Batman researches possible cures and learns that a simple antihistamine will stop the uncontainable laughter. The Caped Crusader soon thwarts the villain’s evil plans and protects society from the psychopathic clown. This version of Batman is portrayed as being clearly more intelligent and cunning than his arch-nemesis, but The Joker is also more nefarious and crafty than he had been in recent appearances’. (Johnson 2014, 36). It is only natural to think that Batman’s foes evolve in complexity over time, the greatest example being a villain like Ra’s al Ghul, who, defying normal stereotyping, commits awful crimes believing it is best for the planet.
In this constant reshaping of the characters, one thing remains constant from the beginning: the foes are more metaphorical than the heroes for the darkest fears of American society in the way they reflect the heroes’ moral codes. In the first chapter, for example, that covers the early years (from 1938 to 1959), most evildoers evoke the desperate need of common people to keep America’s status quo. Superman fights against gamblers taking control over football games and ‘declares war on reckless drivers’. Superman deals with them using the moral code of an entire society: he enjoys humiliating, beating and sometimes even killing them. ‘These first superheroes were violent champions for a hardened people who demanded they act in such a way. The original versions of Superman and Batman did not conform to the rules against killing, maiming, battling authority figures and law enforcement’ (Johnson 2014: XVII). Johnson thinks these initial times can be seen, especially in Superman, as a kind of an adolescence because of his disregard for any point of view except his own. More a bully than a hero, Superman reflects the state of millions of Americans, adult men out of work ‘who had descended into hopelessness and Superman served as a bright spot in this bleak depressing age’ (Johnson 2014: 2).
Just three years later, with the entry of the US to World War II, the nature of both criminals and heroes changed radically: both Batman and Superman had to support governmental and military mandates, slowly becoming in the years to come guardians of the conventional values that were established with the prosperity and the sense of social unity that came after the victory over the Axis armies. What happened to our heroes in the sixties reflected a harsh division in the American people: while Superman becomes almost infected with paranoia and self-righteousness that characterized the conservatives in the post war era —having nightmares of being exposed to red kryptonite, splitting into evil Superman and good Clark Kent, turning into a space monster, among other adventures—, Batman goes through some nice years of detectivesque narrative, preparing for the blossoming of sexual liberation and anti-war movements that would become popular among youngsters a few years later. ‘The Dark Knight was now focusing more on his detective skills and was no longer fighting aliens or magical beings as he had in previous years…Batman was attempting to recreate himself from an evolving society, but it was unclear if a return to his detective roots combined with pop art influences was what readers demanded’ (Johnson 2014: 35).
One last thing is to note of this book: the detailed attention Johnson pays to the creative minds that shaped these heroes. Bob Kane may have designed Batman to be a ‘hardcore vigilante’, but it was Julius Schwartz in 1964 who invented some of his most engaging traits as a resourceful hard-boiled detective with no other tools to fight crime but his mind. Writers and artists like Frank Robbins, Bob Brown and Dick Giordano are mentioned as inventive, but Johnson points out a very short but fertile period in the seventies that would prepare the dark and gothic traits of Batman we have come to love, under the hands of writer Denny O’Neal and artist Neal Adams. In this period Batman first gets his many layers as a character, his neurosis and most subtle psychological features that Frank Miller would use in his ground-breaking The Dark Knight Returns (1986), later revamped for Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight’s Trilogy.
Above all, the great journey this book offers is discovering how our beloved heroes appear to be two ends of the same rope, because, paradoxically, even when they change, they stay the same: Superman representing (mostly) the moral standards of the conservative side of American society, and Batman exploring (mostly) the darker, subterranean side, both equally sustaining and fundamental to the American social fabric.
References
- Batman (1989). Burton, Tim Warner Bros.
- Johnson, JK (2014). Superheroes in Crisis: Adjusting to Social Change in the 1960s and 1970s. RIT Press. 122
- The Dark Knight (). Trilogy is a film series directed by Christopher Nolan. It consists In: Batman Begins (2005), The Dark Knight (2008) and The Dark Knight Rises (2012). Warner Bros Pictures.
- Werthan, Frederic . (1954). Seduction of the Innocent In: New York Reinhart & Co.. 400
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Ira Erika Franco is is a teacher in Communication for the National Autonomous University of Mexico. She is a film director, a travel writer, and a film and theater critic. Her work appears in Chilango and Muy Interesante. This review is reprinted from The Comics Grid.
Are Batman and Superman the Barometer of Our Times? A Review of ‘Superheroes in Crisis’ by Ira Erika Franco is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 International License.
The Black Muslim Female Fashion Trailblazers Who Came before Model Halima Aden
by Kayla Renée Wheeler
Media reports have celebrated Halima Aden becoming the first woman to be featured in the Sports Illustrated annual swimsuit edition wearing a hijab or a burkini. In the past, she has appeared on the covers of Allure, British Vogue and Glamour Magazine.
As a scholar who studies black Muslim fashion, I often find that reporters covering Muslim women’s fashion seem to have the notion that Islam and fashion are incompatible.
This attitude ignores the influence black people have had on Muslim fashion going back at least eight decades.
Early Islam in the US
First, it’s important to understand the long history Muslims have in the United States.
According to the Pew Research Center, black Muslims account for one-fifth of all Muslims in the United States. Islam first came to the United States with enslaved Africans.
Their numbers were small, ranging from 30,000 to 40,000. However, as historian Sylviane Diouf notes, enslaved African Muslims left a lasting impact on black American culture, especially in the Sea Islands and Lowcountry region, the coastal area stretching from North Carolina to northern Florida.
The first Islamic text in the United States, the Bilali Document, was written by an enslaved African living on Sapelo Island named Bilali Muhammad in the 19th century. It includes rules about daily prayers and a list of beliefs of Muslims.
Another important text – perhaps the only known narrative by an enslaved person in Arabic – was written by Omar ibn Said in 1831, who lived as a slave in North Carolina. In it, he recounts his life in Senegal, including his religious education. The autobiography also includes several Muslim prayers.
Clothing as identity
In the 20th century, black Americans were reintroduced to Islam through several people and organizations.
These included the Moorish Science Temple of America and the Nation of Islam. The Moorish Science Temple of America was founded by a Moorish American, Noble Drew Ali, in 1913 in Newark, New Jersey.
Drew Ali taught his followers that they were not Negros or Ethiopians, rather they were Moors and that Islam was their true religion. According to Drew Ali, Moors are descendants of the ancient Moabites who founded Mecca, one of the most important cities in Islam.
W.D. Fard Muhammad, who founded what would become known as the Nation of Islam in 1930 in Detroit, Michigan, also taught his followers that they had forgotten their true identity as Asiatic Muslims and members of the lost tribe of Shabazz. The term Asiatic referred to black people and other people of color.
Clothing played a central role in constructing a unique black Muslim identity. Black Muslim women used their dress to challenge American beauty standards, which typically holds thin young white women as the ideal beauty. Their dress practices also challenged beliefs that Islam was only an Arab religion by encouraging members to develop their own local dress practices.
In the Moorish Science Temple of America, male members wore fezzes or turbans and women wore turbans often paired with long shift dresses as part of their everyday wear.
Men in the Nation of Islam dressed in tailored suits and bow ties or ties. Women donned a Muslim Girls Training uniform. The Muslim Girls Training included lessons for women and girls on the rules and beliefs of the Nation of Islam as well as how to cook, clean, raise children and practice self-defense. The uniform included a high-neck tunic that came down to the thigh. It was paired with either loose-fitting pants or a skirt that came to the ankles.
Black Muslims
In my forthcoming book, I argue that Nation of Islam and the Imam W.D. Mohammed community have played an important role in developing the modest fashion industry in the United States. Imam W.D. Mohammed took over the leadership of Nation of Islam in 1975, following the death of his father Elijah Muhammad, who had succeeded the founder W.D. Fard Muhammad.
These organizations and their members have organized fashion shows and operated clothing stores centered on Islamic modesty since the 1960s. The models were usually volunteers from the local community.Elijah Muhammad discouraged female members from embracing the fashion trends of the day.
The fashion shows were a means of highlighting the creative ways Nation of Islam women could dress modestly and maintain the unique aesthetic, while still looking beautiful. They featured diverse head coverings such as berets and fezzes, color-block outfits and different takes on the classic Muslim Girls Training tunic.
Imam W.D. Mohammed and his members would continue to encourage women’s fashion ventures. They incorporated Afrocentric inspired designs and clothing, like the dashiki and kente cloth.
For a decade, starting in the 1960s, when the oldest daughter of Elijah Muhammad, Ethel Muhammad Sharrieff led the Muslim Girl’s Training, clothing became a way of building a self-sustaining black Muslim community.
A clothing factory she managed produced the official Muslim Girl’s Training uniform. Members were encouraged to buy the uniform from the factory. Temple #2 clothing, a store in Chicago, Illinois, sold a wide range of products including shoes, lingerie and jewelry.
Fashion shows
This May, I attended the Sealed Nectar Fashion Show, an annual fashion show hosted by the Atlanta Masjid of al-Islam in Atlanta, Georgia. It is one of the longest-running Muslim fashion shows in the United States, with 2019 marking its 33rd anniversary.
The fashion show was founded in 1986 by Amira Wazeer, an Atlanta-based designer, as a means of celebrating beauty and modesty. This year’s theme, “World Traveler,” featured six black Muslim women designers from the United States, Tanzania and Kenya.
More recent ones include in cities such as Washington D.C., Houston and an upcoming one in Philadelphia.
The fashion shows and bazaars highlight black women’s creativity and diverse definitions of Islamic modesty. This includes different styles of wrapping head scarves – turbans and buns that leave the neck and ears exposed to show off jewelry – as well as multiple clothes layering techniques, like wearing a pair of skinny pants under a short dress.
Black Muslim models
What Aden has been able to accomplish in three years is certainly worth celebrating. She has opened the doors for other hijabi models like Ikram Omar Abdi, who was featured on the cover of Vogue Arabia along with Aden and another Muslim model, Amina Adan.
However, in my view, it is important to place Halima Aden within the larger history of black Muslim fashion in the United States. Unless we do that, there is a risk of erasing the black Muslim fashion trailblazers who came before her and made her rise possible.
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Kayla Renée Wheeler an Assistant Professor of Area & Global Studies and Digital Studies at Grand Valley State University. Her essay first appeared in The Conversation.
The Black Muslim Female Fashion Trailblazers Who Came before Model Halima Aden by Kayla Renée Wheeleris licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Catwoman’s Hyde: A Comparative Reading of the 2002 Catwoman Relaunch and Stevenson’s Novella
by Lesa Syn
#heroes #review #academic #analysis #artsandculture #descriptive #scholarly
Abstract
This article advocates that the comic character of Catwoman is a comic incarnation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Edward Hyde. It does this first by problematizing Andreas Reichstein’s reading of Batman as Hyde (1998). While the similarity between Bruce Wayne and Dr. Henry Jekyll is considerable (such as both being accomplished and affluent men of science who have nocturnal alter egos), Hyde embodies hedonistic desire and loss of control while Batman is the incarnation of discipline and control. This work then goes on to offer the numerous and stark similarities between Hyde and Catwoman, such as offering their counterparts animalistic freedom and the ability to achieve unification through embracing their darker halves. Because of her desire to embrace her dual human experience, the hero/villain Catwoman encapsulates the most human of comic characters.
Keywords: Catwoman , Batman , Hulk , Henry Jekyll , Edward Hyde , Ed Brubaker , Darwin Cooke , Robert Louis Stevenson , Andreas Reichstein , Identity Split , Hero/Villain , animalistic
Who is stronger, Catwoman or Hulk? In stark contrast to the Hulk, who is arguably the strongest comic-book character ever, Catwoman—like her beloved Batman—is one of the few comic-book characters that is “not super-powered, an alien, or a mutant,” but rather entirely human (Orr 1984: 176–177). Well, almost entirely human. Therefore, comparing Catwoman to Hulk may as well be comparing a person to a natural disaster; however, Jason Ranker (2008) discusses a comparison of these dissimilar comic characters… and, believe it or not, the comparison is apt.
In his research, Ranker highlights how Catwoman and Hulk represent stereotypical versions of strength constructed along gender lines; however, there is a better reason to place these two in a category of their own. Unlike almost every other character in the comic book multiverse, these two characters are both heroes and villains, often at the same time. Hulk continues to be one of the greatest threats to Earth but he is also a founding member of The Avengers. Similarly, Catwoman is a villain on par with the rest of Forever Evil, but she is also a founding member of the new Justice League of America (see Figure 1): “Unfortunately, being a fence-sitter on the thin line separating good and evil doesn’t make her a neutral party” (Beatty 2004: 36). These are ambivalent characters that are neither absolute good nor evil, but are constantly torn between both aspects—they are both modern and powerful Edward Hydes.
Perhaps it can be argued that several villains have aspects similar to Robert Louis Stevenson’s iconic Edward Hyde. Two-Face is a literal Janus figure and often physically depicts both good and evil, and Clayface’s inability to fully control his transformation often results in Hyde-like horror in those around him. However, Two-Face does not suffer from his ambivalence, but simply relegates his dual nature to the fate of a coin flip. Clayface is not noble, like Jekyll, but rather is a disguised monster. Catwoman and her alter ego Selina Kyle, torn between both evil and good, are the only true Hyde and Jekyll of Gotham.
Adam Capitainio (2010) has thoroughly compared Marvel’s Bruce Banner and the Incredible Hulk to Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, so this paper will move the discussion to the similar intellectual and emotional torment of DC’s Kyle and Catwoman. To accomplish this task, this paper will first problematize Andreas Reichstein’s (1988) reading of Batman as Mr. Hyde and then it will offer tangible evidence—especially from Brubaker, Cooke, and Allard’s 2002 Catwoman relaunch—that, despite the physical dissimilarities of Kyle to Jekyll, Catwoman is a more complete version of a modern day Mr. Hyde.
Is Batman an American Mr. Hyde?
Reichstein (1998) makes a compelling argument that Batman’s alter ego Bruce Wayne is an American Jekyll. Beyond the obvious comparisons of the successful, popular, and affluent bachelors, these are men of prominence and success who only transform into their alter egos at night. Reichstein highlights that despite both men being childless, Wayne and Jekyll have paternal affection for others: Wayne cares for his various wards and “Jekyll confesses how he had a father’s concern for Hyde” (Reichstein 1998: 340). Reichstein also discusses how both Wayne and Jekyll spend the vast majority of their free time in their secret laboratories, conducting various chemical experiments.
However, the staunchest similarity between these two characters is their double lives. Reichstein explains, “Besides all these formal similarities between Wayne and Jekyll, the essential link between these characters lies in their basic trait: their double identity, their double personality” (Reichstein 1998: 343). As Philip Orr discusses, “[When] Bruce Wayne refers to the Batman, he is not referring to himself in the third person; rather he is referring to the other” (Orr 1995: 174). Rather than just one person with two aspects, Wayne and Batman are two distinct individuals who just happen to exist within a common body. Wayne even confesses this idea to a psychologist: “I guess, we’re all two people—one in daylight and one we keep in shadow” (Batman Returns). Similarly, in his final confession, Dr. Jekyll writes, “With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to that truth … that man is not truly one, but truly two” (Stevenson 1886: 77). Clearly, both of these men of science are all too intimately familiar with the dual nature of humanity, and their polarizing personalities. However, it is worth highlighting that the parallels between these two characters lie almost exclusively along the similarities of Wayne and Jekyll.
As such, while Wayne is an American Jekyll, what is the answer to Reichstein’s (1998) titular question “Batman—an American Mr. Hyde?” Both Batman and Hyde are empowered shadows of their other selves, and are able to accomplish what neither Wayne nor Jekyll ever could. They achieve this power by embracing animalistic aspects of their personalities. Jekyll describes his other self as playing “ape-like tricks” (Stevenson 1886: 91) and possessing “ape-like spite” (93). Capitainio explains, “This suggests that Hyde, as the hidden side of Jekyll’s personality, is representative of the animal past and behavior that human beings have necessarily repressed in their quest for ‘civilization’” (Capitainio 2010: 250).
While Jekyll is an accomplished pinnacle of human evolution—generous, brilliant, scientific, attractive, and affluent—Hyde returns this character to his evolutionary ape-like past, which was a common theme in the Gothic novels of the 1890s (Reichstein 1998: 346). Regarding the newfound freedom and anonymity of becoming Hyde, Jekyll writes, “And thus fortified, as I supposed, on every side, I began to profit by the strange immunities of my position” (Stevenson 1886: 86). Batman too is able to tap into his primal animal form—in this case a bat—and uses this animal aspect to achieve his deepest desire for vengeance against the criminal element that orphaned him as a child. Batman also allowed Wayne to safely fulfill his desires for vigilantism.
While such similarities exist between Hyde and Batman, one of the most interesting parallels between these two characters is that both of them murder adversaries in their initial appearances. Mr. Hyde brutally assaults Sir Danvers Carew after a perceived insult: “And next moment, with ape-like fury, he was trampling his victim under foot and hailing down a storm of blows, under which the bones were audibly shattered and the body jumped upon the roadway” (Stevenson 1886: 27). Similarly, in Batman’s first appearance, he is holding the villainous Stryker when “… suddenly, Stryker, with the strength of a madman, tears himself free from the grasp of the Bat-Man…” (Finger and Kane 1939: 6). Stryker then pulls out a gun and shoots at Batman, but Batman punches Stryker, knocking him over the rail and into an acid tank, to which Batman comments, “A fitting end for his kind” (Finger and Kane 1939: 6). While both men have murdered an adversary, Hyde has killed an upstanding gentleman and must pay for his action with his life, while Batman has killed a murderer and deserves an accolade. Hyde must hide behind Jekyll or face the gallows, whereas Batman can continue crime-fighting, and be a vigilante without repercussion. Despite the consequences of these actions, Hyde only longs to kill, while Batman resolves to never take a life.
While surface similarities—such as the stark similarities between their alter egos, empowerment through animalistic disguise, and both having taken a life—exist between Hyde and Batman these characters are as dissimilar from each other as they are from their better halves. For Jekyll, becoming Hyde was embracing and savoring his dark side, “I knew myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be more wicked, tenfold more wicked, sold a slave to my original evil; and the thought, in that moment, braced and delighted me like wine” (Stevenson 1886: 79). Jekyll seems to use Hyde to indulge his baser desires. This is completely different from Batman whose “armor/costume harnesses the evil inside and outside of him, as well as protects against repressed sexual desires” (Reichstein 1998: 348). While Hyde is allowed to run rampant, participating in any debauchery that he comes upon, Batman focuses only on punishing criminals.
Most of all, Hyde embodies Jekyll’s willing loss of control, while “Wayne/Batman is control” (Reichstein 1998: 347). After Hyde has killed Carew, Jekyll abandons the potion that unleashed his sinister self, but Hyde continued to reassert himself. Hyde manifests himself at first in dreams and then in reality by forcing the transformation unaided by any chemical concoction. Jekyll could not stop Hyde from taking over their body more and more. Batman, on the other hand, could be taken off at any time, cast aside. Reichstein explains, “He can don the costume/armor whenever he wants and drop it again to become Bruce Wayne” (Reichstein 1998: 348). Reichstein ultimately concludes, “Thus, Batman really is an American cousin of Edward Hyde” (Reichstein 1998: 350). However, this paper suggests that by Reichstein’s definition, Hyde’s familial relationship might as well just as easily include comic book characters such Green Arrow or Iron Man, both of whom are—beneath their masks—affluent playboy bachelor inventors who don costumes/armors to combat evil. While the similarities between Jekyll and Wayne are notable, Batman is not a complete Hyde.
No, but Catwoman Is
However, Catwoman, on the other hand, shares many similarities with Hyde. Jekyll describes the initial transformation into like this: “I felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images running like a millrace in my fancy, a solution of the bonds of obligation, an unknown but not an innocent freedom of the soul” (Stevenson 1886: 78). Kyle too feels the strength and freedom of her alter ego: “That had been one of the reasons for the mask, initially. To help provide. That and the excitement… the adventure. Don’t kid yourself that they weren’t a big part of it, too” (Brubaker, Cooke, and Allred 2002: 48). There is a youthful vibrancy and hedonistic abandonment to both Hyde and Catwoman. Catwoman is unbridled. Throughout Catwoman’s history, she is known as thief, and she ultimately ignores societal rules while helping herself to whatever she desires. Ed Brubaker explains, “She was like Robin Hood, except she forgot to the money to the poor” (Beatty 2004: 6). Catwoman, like Hyde, is in it for the freedom and youthful thrill.
Jekyll and Hyde, Kyle and Catwoman are completely different people from their counterpart selves. Hyde has his own apartment and his own companions that exist in totally different circles than Jekyll. Similarly, as Beatty explains, “Aside from a few friends and lovers, Selina and Catwoman are two different women moving in different worlds. And that suits them both just fine” (Beatty 2004: 19). Jekyll/Hyde and Catwoman/Kyle are in actuality two individuals who share one common body and one common memory, but share little else.
Hyde and Catwoman are impervious shields for their more noble halves. No matter the potential atrocities that Hyde could ever commit, Jekyll believes that at any moment he could dispense Hyde instantly and permanently:
Think of it—I did not even exist! Let me escape into my laboratory door, give me but a second or two to mix and swallow the draught that I had always standing ready; and whatever he had done, Edward Hyde would pass away like the stain of breath upon a mirror; and there in his stead, quietly at home, trimming the midnight lamp in his study, a man who could afford to laugh at suspicion, would be Henry Jekyll. (Stevenson 1886: 82).
Through his potion, Jekyll could transform into his shadow self and fulfill his most monstrous desires. In the same vein, in The Dark End of The Street, Kyle embraces her bestial aspect, throwing off all moral, legal, and earthly limitations by transforming herself into a Cat-Woman. In this comic, The Cat-side is able to beat up her (masculine) enemies, climb tall buildings, and seemingly fly through the air (via her whip).
It is important to note in Catwoman history, she was known as “The Cat” and first appeared in the first issue of Batman in 1940. However, in 1950, ten years after “The Cat’s” inception, the mild-mannered alter ego Kyle was named. It is a common misconception that Kyle came first—not a decade later—but this idea of the villainous side appearing before the sociality acceptable persona parallel’s Stevenson’s novella in which the story of Hyde accosting the young girl appears pages before the discussion of Jekyll. This argument will now go back to a previous quote from Jekyll, “I knew myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be more wicked, tenfold more wicked, sold a slave to my original evil; and the thought, in that moment, braced and delighted me like wine” (Stevenson 1886: 79). Jekyll seems to use Hyde to indulge his baser desires, but in reality the reverse is true—Hyde uses Jekyll for his own desires.
The problem is that these shielding personas eventually took on a life all their own. Hyde lashed out at his alter ego, punishing him through the destruction of Jekyll’s belongings: “Hence the ape-like tricks that he would play me, scrawling in my own hand blasphemies on the pages of my books, burning the letters and destroying the portrait of my father” (Stevenson 1886: 91). In Brubaker, Cooke, and Allread’s comic, Catwoman too began to have a life outside of Kyle, who says, “The mask is part of who I am now. But it’s also part of the problem, too… because it became a person all on its own” (Brubaker, Cooke, and Allred 2002: 54). Thus, while Hyde and Catwoman were created to liberate their alter egos and allowed them to achieve humanly-impossible, animalistic acts, these personas became whole persons in and of themselves. The animal-side uncontrollable and often exhibits behaviors that are outside of normative human roles. Catwoman is wild, something that Kyle struggles to understand (Figure 1). Furthermore, in Figure 1, this Cat-self bides for ownership of the body she cohabitates and eventually becomes intricately integrated and a fully realized being.
Ultimately, Hyde asserts himself and begins replacing Jekyll. The problem is that, with Carew’s murder on his head, Hyde’s only salvation lies in being Jekyll, but he could not condemn himself to perpetual torpor; as such, “Unable to compound the remedy that turns him into Dr. Jekyll again one day, Jekyll/Hyde kills himself” (Reichstein 1998: 339). Similarly, in this comic, Catwoman killed off both Kyle and then herself (Brubaker, Cooke, and Allred 2002: 16)… or at least Catwoman went through a lot of trouble to make it appear that way. Hired to find out if Catwoman truly was dead, Detective Slam Bradley asks the-very-much-alive Kyle, “But a while back, you killed off Selina Kyle… and a few months ago, you killed Catwoman, too… so, the question is—who’s left to find?” (Brubaker, Cooke, and Allred 2002: 33). Kyle reemerges and tries to live again, believing that Catwoman is dead and buried; however, Catwoman too refuses to stay dead. As Orr says, “[Catwoman] won’t be killed” (Orr 1994: 181). Catwoman’s immortality is in fact the sole attribute that Ranker’s (2008) work offers as to why she is stronger than the Hulk. Beatty too notes, “Selina definitely has nine lives considering the number of times she has survived near-fatal catastrophes” (Beatty 2004: 25). While most often the nine lives of the Catwoman are seen in response to her battle with others, this immortality applies to her battle with Kyle as well.
The immortal Catwoman torments Kyle, much as Hyde tortures Jekyll: “And this again, that the insurgent horror was knit to him closer than a wife, closer than an eye; lay caged in his flesh, where he heard it mutter and felt it struggle to be born” (Stevenson 1863: 91). Kyle struggles to control the beast within her, but unlike Jekyll who does not seek to understand Hyde—Kyle grapples with accepting Catwoman as a part of herself. Kyle waits a moment and then answers Bradley’s question: “I don’t know. Hopefully someone who can look in the mirror without any pain” (Brubaker, Cooke, and Allred 2002: 16). In the mirror here, Kyle sees all the pain that she has caused and that she has endured. Jekyll has a similar mirror experience, but his is all the more tragic because of the loss of control that it represents: “[and] bounding from my bed I rushed to the mirror. At the sight that met my eyes, my blood was changed into something exquisitely thin and icy. Yes, I had gone to bed Henry Jekyll, I had awakened Edward Hyde” (Stevenson 1886: 83).
It is important to highlight that mirrors denote the true representation of self. Christian Metz explains how it is only through a mirror that people can understand themselves and construct their egos: “Thus the child’s ego is formed by identification with its like, and this in two senses simultaneously, metonymically and metaphorically: the other human being who is in the glass, the own reflection which is not the body, which is like it” (Metz 1975: 48–49). Metz underscores the duality of co-existence of each individual’s two selves—the rational ego and the primal id. Thus, by a proverbial mirror, Kyle is able to be a full self, and it is in this mirror, that she understands the Cat’s self. Another way to put it is that the animal-self allows Kyle the only way for her survive and to be a full and actualized person. Whereas the rest of humanity strives to deny the animalistic id inside them, Kyle realizes that she ultimately needs to embrace her Cat self into her life.
Whereas Jekyll embraced the concept of humanity’s dual nature, he theorized that each person was in reality a conglomeration of individuals forced confined in uncomfortable cohabitation: “I hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens” (Stevenson 1886: 78). In her nightmares, Kyle wrestles, not with Catwoman, but with the vast multitude of individuals that exist inside her: “Like everything I’ve ever been is struggling inside me… trying to find some place to fit themselves” (Brubaker, Cooke, and Allred 2002: 44). On the surface, it is easy to focus simply on the duality, but for both Jekyll and Kyle, the double personalities that they battle are just the beginning, as if both these two—and everyone of us for that matter—could just as easily say, “My name is Legion; for we are many” (Mark 5: 9).
While Kyle and Catwoman embody just two persons that inhabit their body, there are multitudes of others. Ignoring the staunch differences in attitude and mannerisms between Kyle and Catwoman, both characters pronouncedly vacillate in skin tone and costume within themselves—even just within this single comic book. For instance, while the panels within the comic showcase a Catwoman who is very overtly a pale Caucasian brunette, the various covers from this same comic depict a darker complected Kyle that is clearly mulatto, Hispanic, or even Italian (see Figure 3, left side). However, even this ethnic alteration pales to the disguises that Kyle dons that make her unrecognizable, the staunchest of which is when Kyle goes undercover as a blond bombshell (see Figure 3, right side). Thus comic’s art work is indicative of Kyle and Catwoman’s personality and multiplicity. Despite all of her various incarnations, Kyle and Catwoman are always at their cores women: “She was a ‘woman,’ and all woman at that” (Madrid 2009: 248). Kyle summons up her female alter egos, uses them as tools, and discards them just as quickly. Kyle can control all these incarnations of herself—other than Catwoman.
Kyle’s therapist asks her, “How long has it been now since you put on the [Catwoman] outfit?” to which Kyle replies, “The outfit? Oh, yeah… that. Almost six months” (Brubaker, Cooke, and Allred 2002: 45). Like Jekyll, Kyle has tried to repress her own Hyde by abandoning the hide of Catwoman. Also like Jekyll, Hyde (i.e.: Catwoman) fought back: “[But] I was still cursed with my duality of purpose; and as the first edge of my penitence wore off, the lower side of me, so long indulged, so recently chained down, began to growl for license” (Stevenson 1886: 87). Catwoman plagues Kyle with
hellish dreams in which she is surrounded by Catwomen who set Kyle on fire, burning away her humanity and leaving only the silhouette of the Catwoman (see Figure 2). In this suffering, Kyle is like Jekyll: “I began to be tortured with throes and longings, as of Hyde struggling after freedom” (Stevenson 1886: 85). Kyle feels the Cat personality struggling for freedom. However, Kyle tries to avoid the temptation of becoming Catwoman—which is why she is seeing a therapist—but Catwoman refuses to let her get a moment’s peace until Kyle acquiesces. Catwoman refuses to let Kyle be complete until Kyle fully embraces all of her aspects.
Conclusion
Reichstein tries to reduce Catwoman to little more than one of the “mostly bizarre array of villains in the Batman comics, like the Joker, the Penguin, the Catwoman … [who] reflect the purely bad side of Batman—like counterparts, or mirrors showing him what would happen to him if he lost control” (Reichstein 1998: 346–347). However, Catwoman should not be reduced to simply reflect the bad side of Batman. While Bruce Wayne is similar to a Dr. Henry Jekyll, Batman is not a complete Mr. Edward Hyde… but Catwoman is.
This argument suggests that Catwoman is such an integral part of Kyle and that her life is shattered—without her “other.” While other critics have studied Batman and Hulk—no one has considered Catwoman as Hyde. It is interesting to note that Kyle logically and consciously puts on Catwoman and both co-habitat the same space. Again, this is very akin to Jekyll and Hyde, who—although different in body and manner—share the same memory (Stevenson 1886: 85) and handwriting (89). These are two parts of a cohesive whole, both vying for control over their life while staunchly rebelling against being controlled by any man (even a Batman) and any law.
Reichstein succeeds at linking Jekyll with Wayne, but she ignores the complexity of comparing Hyde to Batman. Thus, this work corrected that oversight by advocating Jekyll and Hyde story is about identity structure: the socially acceptable personality versus the uncontrollable and often intolerable. A close examination of Dark End of the Street reveals the identity problems in Stevenson’s novella also manifest in Kyle and Catwoman. This comic reinforced the Jekyll side is about social conformity, whereas the Hyde represents the uncontainable and unacceptable. Thus, this paper argues that offering a critical approach to Catwoman as Hyde is the only way for freedom from social norms and offers independence from social conformity.
It is noteworthy that Kyle’s Hyde self is not about a tortured individual who seeks to redeem herself from her alter ego, but about accepting that separate self and releasing it from the confines of societal rules. In other words, Catwoman is the ability for humankind to negotiate life with a wild animalistic side. Catwoman’s fictional personality offers readers a chance to enter a new sphere of identity understanding. However, instead of untamed mayhem or total anarchy, Catwoman tests the limits of what life would be like without the rules and limitations of social rules. The tragedy of Stevenson’s novella is not the fall of a celebrity, but rather the fall of one of us. Jekyll is a friend and peer, not an estranged and obsessive recluse like Wayne. As such, Kyle is more like Jekyll—like all of us—in that she is a complex character torn between manifestations of good and evil. Catwoman, the Hyde-like heroic villain and villainous hero, and is one of the most humanistic comic characters of all.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Benjamin Syn for his continuous support and dedication to this project. This project would have been an impossible task without the help that Benjamin gave during the extent of the project. As this project has taken almost a year from topic idea to formulating a well-crafted research paper—Benjamin has been a vital aspect to the project. He often brainstormed, gave relevant insights into my argument, and often offered substantive feedback to this paper. Thank you Benjamin Syn for being an ongoing partner in my quest to finish my degree and my obnoxious desire to become a published writer. It is only because of Benjamin’s dedication—that I am who I am…I adore you and I thank you.
References
- Beatty, S (2004). Catwoman: The Visual Guide to the Feline Fatale. London: Dorling Kindersley.
- Brubaker, E (w); Cooke, D (a); Allred, M (a) . (2002). Catwoman: The Dark End of the Street. New York: DC Comics.
- Capitainio, A (2010). “The Jekyll and Hyde of the Atomic Age”: The Incredible Hulk as the Ambiguous Embodiment of Nuclear Power#8221;. Journal of Popular Culture 43(2): 249–270, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-5931.2010.00740.x
- Finger, B (w); Kane, B (a) . (1939). The Case of the Criminal Syndicate!. Detective Comics. New York: DC Comics. (27) Available at: http://www.comixology.com/Detective-Comics-1937-2011-27/digital-comic/10900 [Last accessed 10 December 2013].
- Madrid, M (2009). The Supergirls: Fashion, Feminism, Fantasy, and the History of Comic Book Heroines. United States: Exterminating Angel Press.
- Metz, C (1975). The Imaginary Signifier. Screen 16(2): 14–76, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/16.2.14
- Orr, P (1994). The Anoedipal Mythos of Batman and Catwoman. Journal of Popular Culture27(4): 169–182, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0022-3840.1994.2704_169.x
- Reichstein, A (1998). Batman—An American Mr. Hyde?. Amerikastudien/America Studies 43(2): 329–350. www.jstor.org/stable/41157373
- Stevenson, R L (1886). The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Seattle: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.. Available at: www.amazon.com/Strange-Case-D…ekyll+and+Hyde [Last accessed 10 December 2013].
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Lesa Syn is an instructor at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs and Community College of Denver. This article is reprinted from The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship.
Catwoman’s Hyde: A Comparative Reading of the 2002 Catwoman Relaunch and Stevenson’s Novella by Lesa Syn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 International License.
The Complicated Truth about Social Media and Body Image
by Kelly Oakes
Click here to read the article: “The Complicated Truth about Social Media and Body Image”
Everything You Need to Know About the Radical Roots of Wonder Woman
Her enigmatic creator believed women were destined to rule the world. 10 facts about the iconic heroine.
by Christopher Zumski Finke
#heroes #artsandculture #reportinginformation #history
All these things are true about Wonder Woman: She is a national treasure that the Smithsonian Institution named among its 101 Objects that Made America; she is a ‘70s feminist icon; she is the product of a polyamorous household that participated in a sex cult.
She comes out of the feminist movements of women’s suffrage, birth control, and the fight for equality.
Harvard historian Jill Lepore claims in her new book, The Secret History of Wonder Woman, that Wonder Woman is the “missing link in a chain of events that begins with the women’s suffrage campaigns of the 1910s and ends with the troubled place of feminism fully a century later.”
The hero and her alter ego, Diana Prince, were the products of the tumultuous women’s rights movements of the early 20th century. Here are 10 essential elements to understanding the history and legacy of Wonder Woman and the family from which she sprung.
Wonder Woman first appeared in Sensation Comics #1 in December 1941.
Since that issue arrived 73 years ago, Wonder Woman has been in constant publication, making her the third longest running superhero in history, behind Superman (introduced June 1938) and Batman (introduced May 1939).
Wonder Woman’s creator had a secret identity.
Superheroes always have secret identities. So too did the man behind Wonder Woman. His name upon publication was Charles Moulton, but that was a pseudonym. It was after two years of popularity and success that the author revealed his identity: then-famous psychologist William Moulton Marston, who also invented the lie detector test.
William Moulton Marston was, as Jill Lepore tells it, an “awesomely cocky” psychologist and huckster from Massachusetts. He was also committed to the feminist causes he grew up around.
By 1941, Marston’s image of the iconic feminist of the future was already a throwback to his youth. He saw the celebrated British suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst speak in Harvard Square (she was banned from speaking at Harvard University) in 1911, and from then on imagined the future of civilization as one destined for female rule.
Actually, the whole Marston family had a secret identity.
The Marston family was an unconventional home, full of radical politics and feminism. Marston lived with multiple women, including his wife, Sadie Elizabeth Holloway, a highly educated psychologist, and another lifelong partner, a writer named Olive Byrne, who was the niece of birth control activist Margaret Sanger. He had four children, two by each of the women, and they all grew up oblivious to the polyamorous nature of their parents’ relationships.
Marston, Holloway, and Byrne all contributed to Wonder Woman’s creation, a character that Marston explicitly designed to show the necessity of equality and advancement of women’s rights.
Wonder Woman was an Amazon molded from clay, but she was birthed out of feminism.
Princess Diana of Themyscira, or Diana Prince (Wonder Woman’s alter ego), comes from the land of the Amazons. In Greek mythology, the Amazons are an immortal race of beauties that live apart from men. In the origin story of Wonder Woman, Diana the is daughter of the queen of the Amazons. She’s from Paradise Island (Paradise is the land where no men live), where Queen Hyppolita carves her daughter out of clay. She has no father.
Wonder Woman has been in constant publication, making her the third longest running superhero.
She comes out of the feminist movements of women’s suffrage, birth control, and the fight for equality. When Marston was working with DC Comics editor Sheldon Mayer on the origins of Wonder Woman, Marston left no room for interpretation about what he wanted from his heroine.
“About the story’s feminism,” historian Lepore writes, “he was unmovable. ‘Let that theme alone,’ Marston said, ‘or drop the project.’”
Wonder Woman fought for the people—all the people.
The injustices that moved Wonder Woman to action did not just take place in the world of fantasy heroes and villains, nor was she only about women’s rights. She also fought for the rights of children, workers, and farmers.
In a 1942 issue of Sensation Comics, Wonder Woman targets the International Milk Company, which she has learned has been overcharging for milk, leading to the undernourishment of children. According to Lepore, the story came right out of a Hearst newspaper headline about “milk crooks” creating a “milk trust” to raise the price of milk, profiteering on the backs of American babies.
For the Wonder Woman story, Marston attributed the source of this crime to Nazi Germany. But the action Wonder Woman takes is the same as the real-life solution: She leads a march of women and men in “a gigantic demonstration against the milk racket.”
There’s a whole lot of bondage in Wonder Woman.
In the years that Marston was writing Wonder Woman, bondage was everywhere. “In episode after episode,” Lepore writes, “Wonder Woman is chained, bound, gagged, lassoed, tied, fettered, and manacled.” Even Wonder Woman herself expressed exhaustion at the over-use of being bound: “Great girdle of Aphrodite! Am I tired of being tied up!” she says.
She appeared on the first issue of Ms. Magazine, in 1972, with the headline “Wonder Woman for President.”
There’s little doubt that the sexual proclivities of the Marston family were in part responsible for this interest. A woman named Marjorie Wilkes Huntley was part of the Marston household—an “aunt” for the children, who shared the family home (and bedroom) when she was in town. Huntley was fond of bondage.
The theme was so persistent that an Army sergeant who was fond of the erotic images wrote to Marston asking where he could purchase some of the bondage implements used in the book. After that, DC Comics told Marston to cut back on the BDSM.
But that bondage was not all about sex.
The bondage themes in Wonder Woman are more complex than just a polyamorous fetish, though. Women in bondage was an iconic image of the suffrage and feminist movements, as women attempted to loosen the chains that bound them in society. Cartoonist and artist Lou Rogers drew many women in bonds, and Margaret Sanger appeared before a crowd bound at the mouth to protest the censorship of women in America.
Later, Margaret Sanger’s Birth Control Review would use a similar motif. One cover image had a woman chained to the weight of unwanted babies.
Readers—boys and girls—loved Wonder Woman.
Despite the political and secretive history of Wonder Woman’s creation, she was a wildly popular character. After Wonder Woman’s early success, DC Comics considered adding her to the roster of the Justice Society, which included Batman and Superman and many other male superheroes. Charlie Gaines, who ran DC Comics, decided to conduct a reader poll, asking, “Should Wonder Woman be allowed, even though a woman, to become a member of the justice society?”
Readers returned 1,801 surveys. Among boys, 1,265 said yes, 197 said no; among girls, 333 said yes, and only 6 said no.
But Justice Society was not written by feminist Marston. After Wonder Woman was brought into the Justice Society, she spent her first episodes working as the secretary.
The feminist spirit of Wonder Woman waned for decades.
After the death of William Moulton Marston in 1947, DC Comics took the feminism out of Wonder Woman and created instead a timid and uninspiring female character. “Wonder Woman lived on,” Lepore writes, “but she was barely recognizable.”
The first cover not drawn by the original artist, Harry G. Peter, “featured Steve Trevor [Wonder Woman’s heretofore hapless love interest] carrying a smiling, daffy, helpless Wonder Woman over a stream. Instead of her badass, kinky red boots, she wears dainty yellow ballerina slippers,” Lepore observes. Without her radical edge, Wonder Woman’s popularity waned until the rise of second wave feminism in the ’60s and ’70s, when Wonder Woman was trumpeted as an icon of women’s empowerment.
Wonder Woman became president.
In a 1943 story, Wonder Woman is actually elected President of the United States. Marston was adamant that a women would one day rule the United States, and that the world would be better when civilization’s power structures were in the hands of women instead of men.
Women in bondage was an iconic image of the suffrage and feminist movements.
Wonder Woman’s popularity soared as the feminist movement picked up in the late 1960s. Wonder Woman appeared on the first issue of Ms. Magazine, in 1972, with the headline “Wonder Woman for President.” At that time, Gloria Steinem said of Wonder Woman, “Looking back now at these Wonder Woman stories from the ’40s, I am amazed by the strength of their feminist message.”
The impact of Wonder Woman continues.
Wonder Woman is in for a great couple of years. Ms. Magazine just celebrated its 40th anniversary, and Wonder Woman is back on its cover. Jill Lepore’s book has been getting wonderful coverage (see her on The Colbert Report below discussing the kinks of the Marston Family), and Noah Berlatsky’s Wonder Woman: Feminism and Bondage in the Marston/Peter Comics will be published in January.
She’s also gearing up for her first-ever theatrical film appearance: Wonder Woman will appear in Zack Snyder’s 2016 film Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice. In 2017, she will be the star of her own film, to be directed by Michelle McClaren (Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead). Wonder Woman will be played by the Israeli actress Gal Gadot.
Let us hope that Gadot in the role conjures the spirit of the original creation of Marston, Holloway, and Byrne: a radical, independent, fierce woman and leader for all women and men to admire.
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Christopher Zumski Finke blogs about pop culture and is editor of The Stake.
Everything You Need to Know About the Radical Roots of Wonder Womanby Christopher Zumski Finke is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
A Feminist’s Guide to Rom-Coms and How to Watch Them
by Ayu Sutriasa
Valentine’s Day is right around the corner, which means lots of chocolate, teddy bears, and single ladies being made to feel especially inadequate. Some might celebrate Galentine’s Day instead, some might skip on acknowledging the holiday at all, and some, myself included, will be holed up watching romantic comedies.
The internet is filled with lists of which rom-coms will “get you through” Valentine’s Day—the assumption seems to be that, otherwise, we singles would be festering alone in our living rooms, drinking vodka and singing “All By Myself” à la Bridget Jones. I enjoy the genre, but as a feminist I have some qualms.
Romantic comedies, particularly “the classics” of the genre, can be problematic by today’s standards of feminism. Movies like Pretty Woman and Princess Bride tend to perpetuate harmful gender stereotypes and romanticize men’s predatory behavior. Not to mention they are usually limited to depicting heterosexual relationships between an attractive cis man and an equally, perhaps even more, attractive cis woman. (LGBTQ folks: Here’s a list of rom-coms that drown out the heteronormative noise.) Lastly, if rom-coms are marketed to single women, then why are they mostly written and directed by men? (That’s a rhetorical question.)
Despite all this, rom-coms are stunningly popular. How do you reconcile your love of rom-coms with your staunch feminism?
Monique Jones, a pop culture critic and entertainment journalist, says that it’s OK if you like problematic rom-coms. “That doesn’t make us any less of an activist, it doesn’t make us any less down for the cause. It’s just being a human—and being part of a culture that has indoctrinated us to believe certain things, whether or not they’re true,” she says.
However, as feminists we do have to hold ourselves accountable, Jones says. Here are three tips on how to be a responsible rom-com consumer.
1. Be aware of how you’re internalizing the underlying messages
One of the biggest problems with the genre is that it tends to reinforce problematic ideas of romance. Contrary to rom-com plots, it’s actually not an outrageous notion for a man to love you “just as you are” (Bridget Jones’s Diary, Trainwreck, Pretty Woman, Grease), but it actually is outrageous for a man to consistently ignore your rejections and relentlessly pursue you (The Notebook, 10 Things I Hate About You, 50 First Dates, Breakfast at Tiffany’s).
“There are a lot of patriarchal things in society that we’ve grown up with that we’ve just assumed are normal. And those same ideals get stuck in these movies. That’s why so many of them don’t get called out as being problematic, even though they are indicative of larger problems in society,” Jones says.
Once you’re aware of the patriarchal underpinnings of these movies, you can more objectively decide what you believe is romantic. For example, maybe you don’t think it’s romantic to pretend to be someone’s fiancée while they are in a coma and have no idea who you are. It’s creepy, Sandra Bullock.
2. Be conscious of what/who you are supporting
This takes some research, but it’s worth it (IMDB will be your new best friend). Jones suggests learning what you can about the movie: Who’s the director? Who wrote it? Who acts in it? What’s the premise? “If you don’t feel offended, then I think it’s fine to watch,” Jones says.
And for the movies we don’t feel good about—like anything involving Woody Allen—consider skipping it. “I can’t justify having my head in the sand just to support somebody like Woody Allen,” Jones says. She skips anything with his name attached to it.
“I never liked his movies anyway. They don’t speak to me, first of all, as a woman, and second of all, as an African-American woman,” she says. “I know all the film critics and film students that I have been in contact with say that Woody Allen is a master at doing this and that. But I don’t align with anything that he does or is. And that’s how I go about it. If what the person does doesn’t align with my core values, then I just can’t do it.”
There are funnier, more romantic movies than Annie Hall, anyway.
3. Opt for rom-coms with fewer or zero problems
I know the classics are, well, classics, but why not watch a movie that takes a healthier approach to romance? “There are always movies that are smaller productions, and they might not have the big box-office dollars, but they’re still well-crafted, well-made movies,” Jones says.
Here’s a list of five from Thought Catalog to get you started: Warm Bodies, She’s Out of My League, Celeste and Jesse Forever, My Best Friend’s Wedding,and Kate and Leopold (sarcasm).
So, my fellow feminist rom-comphiles, don’t be discouraged.
There are still a lot of things people can enjoy about romantic comedies, Jones says. “With as much choice as there is out there, a person doesn’t have to give up their romantic comedy love altogether.”
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Ayu Sutriasa is the digital editor for YES! Magazine. Her article is reprinted from YES!.
A Feminist’s Guide to Rom-Coms and How to Watch Them by Ayu Sutriasa is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Guardians of the Galaxy and the Fall of the Classic Hero
by A. David Lewis
A beautiful assassin. A superstrong thug. A star-lost child of the ‘80s. A sentient tree. A gun-toting raccoon. Meet the morally gray protagonists of Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, the film that raked in $770 million at the box office this past summer and was just released on DVD.
Guardians, I’d like you to meet 20th-century mythology theorist Joseph Campbell. Trust me, you’ll have a lot to talk about.
…Oh, what’s that? You already know Mr. Campbell? Ah, that’s right, I’d forgotten: you beat the stuffing out of his heroic monomyth in your movie this year.
For those unfamiliar with the term: Campbell’s monomyth, also known as the “Hero’s Quest” or “Hero’s Journey,” is a narrative pattern derived from his extensive analysis of myths and stories from all around the world. In his 1949 book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell outlines the pattern that nearly every “heroic” protagonist, going all the way back to ancient times, follows.
A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.
In other words, the protagonist is placed outside of his or her comfort zone, and, after toiling through various obstacles and setbacks, emerges to beat the bad guys and change the world for the better.
Since the trailer of its newest installment was released last week, think of the original Star Wars as an example. George Lucas had Campbell in mind when he created Luke Skywalker, farmboy turned rebel hero. Lucas even paid attention to the finer points of Campbell’s model, giving Luke a teacher (Obi-Wan), helpers (Han Solo, the droids), a magic talisman or weapon (the light-saber), and, most importantly, a moment that Campbell calls “the Abyss.”
It’s this Abyss – also known as “The Belly of the Whale” – that’s the low point in the monomythic cycle and vital to understanding what’s so notable about Guardians of the Galaxy. In the original Star Wars, Luke Skywalker experiences – all things considered – an “easy” low point: he’s sucked underwater in the Death Star trash compactor. In The Empire Strikes Back, things get a bit thornier: he gets his whole hand chopped off (rumored to be a plot point in JJ Abrams’s The Force Awakens) and plummets from Cloud City. Basically, if a hero doesn’t face an actual death, he or she has to (at least) deal with a metaphorical death before returning as a stronger, savvier version of himself.
But where was the Abyss moment in Guardians of the Galaxy? Was it when young Peter Quill loses his mother and is taken by aliens? Or, wait – maybe it’s when he’s thrown into that space prison and escapes? There’s also that moment when his team is nearly killed by an explosion in the Collector’s establishment. And Quill is all-but-dead when he leaves the safety of his ship to freeze and suffocate in exposed space while selflessly saving his teammate Gamora. And who can forget the scene when he is practically torn apart by wielding the Infinity Stone?
It’s as if Quill and his Guardians are running in loops around Campbell’s monomyth. Or, even better, the movie-makers are flagrantly disregarding it. They’re nearly satirizing it.
If audiences step back a bit, it’s easier to see how Guardians of the Galaxy might be a satire of the classic hero tradition. Villains are constantly interrupted mid-maniacal monologue, elaborate plans are impulsively overturned, and Quill, the movie’s closest thing to a hero, challenges the film’s protagonist to a dance-off. (Of course, there’s also the fact that two of the main characters are a tree and a raccoon!)
This is not to write off Guardians of the Galaxy and claim it’s a goof on Campbell’s model. Instead, it could be seen as a reaction to just how predictable, how tired, and even how broken the monomyth is today. The Guardians, remember, are just as much rogues as they are good guys. As Quill asks his team of misfits, “What should we do next: Something good, something bad? Bit of both?”
What Guardians of the Galaxy will do next – presumably in their Summer 2016 sequel – is continue to challenge our modern notions of heroism. Campbell’s monomyth was proposed just after World War II, at the dawn of the Cold War. It was a time when, in popular culture, the distinctions between heroes and villains were far more explicit.
Today, Quill and company are being presented to movie-going audiences at a time when when we’re distancing ourselves from old models – when we sorely crave a new pattern. The pure hero, the “white hat” of the old Westerns, is largely lost to us. Brilliant actors like Robin Williams and Phillip Seymour Hoffman are done in by their own personal ghosts, musicians like Amy Winehouse and Whitney Houston succumb to their addictions, and politicians – like the four Illinois governors who have been sent to prison – continue to disappoint. The Dark Knight perhaps said it best: “You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.”
The monomyth is making its final orbit. Heroes are so yesterday. Welcome, instead, to the tomorrow of the Guardians: characters who are a little good, a little bad, and more unpredictable than ever.
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A. David Lewis is an Arts & Sciences Faculty Associate at Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences. He is the author of American Comic Books, Literary Theory, and Religion: The Superhero Afterlife, as well as the co-editor of both Graven Images: Religion in Comic Books and Graphic Novels, and Digital Death: Mortality and Beyond in the Online Age. His essay originally appeared in The Conservation.
Guardians of the Galaxy and the Fall of the Classic Hero by A. David Lewis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Me! Me! Me! Are we living through a narcissism epidemic?
by Zoe Williams
Click here to read the article: “Me! Me! Me! Are We Living Through a Narcissism Epidemic?”
Misinformation and Biases Infect Social Media, Both Intentionally and Accidentally
by Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia and Filippo Menczer
#argument, #causalargument, #cognitivebias, #ethos, #logos, #sharedvalues, #reportinginformation
Social media are among the primary sources of news in the U.S. and across the world. Yet users are exposed to content of questionable accuracy, including conspiracy theories, clickbait, hyperpartisan content, pseudo science and even fabricated “fake news” reports.
It’s not surprising that there’s so much disinformation published: Spam and online fraud are lucrative for criminals, and government and political propaganda yield both partisan and financial benefits. But the fact that low-credibility content spreads so quickly and easily suggests that people and the algorithms behind social media platforms are vulnerable to manipulation.
Explaining the tools developed at the Observatory on Social Media.
Our research has identified three types of bias that make the social media ecosystem vulnerable to both intentional and accidental misinformation. That is why our Observatory on Social Media at Indiana University is building tools to help people become aware of these biases and protect themselves from outside influences designed to exploit them.
Bias in the brain
Cognitive biases originate in the way the brain processes the information that every person encounters every day. The brain can deal with only a finite amount of information, and too many incoming stimuli can cause information overload. That in itself has serious implications for the quality of information on social media. We have found that steep competition for users’ limited attention means that some ideas go viral despite their low quality – even when people prefer to share high-quality content.
To avoid getting overwhelmed, the brain uses a number of tricks. These methods are usually effective, but may also become biases when applied in the wrong contexts.
One cognitive shortcut happens when a person is deciding whether to share a story that appears on their social media feed. People are very affected by the emotional connotations of a headline, even though that’s not a good indicator of an article’s accuracy. Much more important is who wrote the piece.
To counter this bias, and help people pay more attention to the source of a claim before sharing it, we developed Fakey, a mobile news literacy game (free on Android and iOS) simulating a typical social media news feed, with a mix of news articles from mainstream and low-credibility sources. Players get more points for sharing news from reliable sources and flagging suspicious content for fact-checking. In the process, they learn to recognize signals of source credibility, such as hyperpartisan claims and emotionally charged headlines.
Bias in society
Another source of bias comes from society. When people connect directly with their peers, the social biases that guide their selection of friends come to influence the information they see.
In fact, in our research we have found that it is possible to determine the political leanings of a Twitter user by simply looking at the partisan preferences of their friends. Our analysis of the structure of these partisan communication networks found social networks are particularly efficient at disseminating information – accurate or not – when they are closely tied together and disconnected from other parts of society.
The tendency to evaluate information more favorably if it comes from within their own social circles creates “echo chambers” that are ripe for manipulation, either consciously or unintentionally. This helps explain why so many online conversations devolve into “us versus them” confrontations.
To study how the structure of online social networks makes users vulnerable to disinformation, we built Hoaxy, a system that tracks and visualizes the spread of content from low-credibility sources, and how it competes with fact-checking content. Our analysis of the data collected by Hoaxy during the 2016 U.S. presidential elections shows that Twitter accounts that shared misinformation were almost completely cut offfrom the corrections made by the fact-checkers.
When we drilled down on the misinformation-spreading accounts, we found a very dense core group of accounts retweeting each other almost exclusively – including several bots. The only times that fact-checking organizations were ever quoted or mentioned by the users in the misinformed group were when questioning their legitimacy or claiming the opposite of what they wrote.
Bias in the machine
The third group of biases arises directly from the algorithms used to determine what people see online. Both social media platforms and search engines employ them. These personalization technologies are designed to select only the most engaging and relevant content for each individual user. But in doing so, it may end up reinforcing the cognitive and social biases of users, thus making them even more vulnerable to manipulation.
For instance, the detailed advertising tools built into many social media platforms let disinformation campaigners exploit confirmation bias by tailoring messages to people who are already inclined to believe them.
Also, if a user often clicks on Facebook links from a particular news source, Facebook will tend to show that person more of that site’s content. This so-called “filter bubble” effect may isolate people from diverse perspectives, strengthening confirmation bias.
Our own research shows that social media platforms expose users to a less diverse set of sources than do non-social media sites like Wikipedia. Because this is at the level of a whole platform, not of a single user, we call this the homogeneity bias.
Another important ingredient of social media is information that is trending on the platform, according to what is getting the most clicks. We call this popularity bias, because we have found that an algorithm designed to promote popular content may negatively affect the overall quality of information on the platform. This also feeds into existing cognitive bias, reinforcing what appears to be popular irrespective of its quality.
All these algorithmic biases can be manipulated by social bots, computer programs that interact with humans through social media accounts. Most social bots, like Twitter’s Big Ben, are harmless. However, some conceal their real nature and are used for malicious intents, such as boosting disinformation or falsely creating the appearance of a grassroots movement, also called “astroturfing.” We found evidence of this type of manipulation in the run-up to the 2010 U.S. midterm election.
To study these manipulation strategies, we developed a tool to detect social bots called Botometer. Botometer uses machine learning to detect bot accounts, by inspecting thousands of different features of Twitter accounts, like the times of its posts, how often it tweets, and the accounts it follows and retweets. It is not perfect, but it has revealed that as many as 15 percent of Twitter accounts show signs of being bots.
Using Botometer in conjunction with Hoaxy, we analyzed the core of the misinformation network during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. We found many bots exploiting both the cognitive, confirmation and popularity biases of their victims and Twitter’s algorithmic biases.
These bots are able to construct filter bubbles around vulnerable users, feeding them false claims and misinformation. First, they can attract the attention of human users who support a particular candidate by tweeting that candidate’s hashtags or by mentioning and retweeting the person. Then the bots can amplify false claims smearing opponents by retweeting articles from low-credibility sources that match certain keywords. This activity also makes the algorithm highlight for other users false stories that are being shared widely.
Understanding complex vulnerabilities
Even as our research, and others’, shows how individuals, institutions and even entire societies can be manipulated on social media, there are many questions left to answer. It’s especially important to discover how these different biases interact with each other, potentially creating more complex vulnerabilities.
Tools like ours offer internet users more information about disinformation, and therefore some degree of protection from its harms. The solutions will not likely be only technological, though there will probably be some technical aspects to them. But they must take into account the cognitive and social aspects of the problem.
Editor’s note: This article was updated on Jan. 10, 2019, to replace a link to a study that had been retracted. The text of the article is still accurate, and remains unchanged.
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Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia is an Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of South Florida. Filippo Menczer is a
Professor of Computer Science and Informatics and the Director of the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research at Indiana University. This article originally appeared in The Conversation.
Misinformation and Biases Infect Social Media, Both Intentionally and Accidentally by Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia and Filippo Menczer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
The 1995 Anime “Ghost in the Shell” Is More Relevant than Ever in Today’s Technologically Complex Society
by Andrew D. Maynard
#review, #descriptive, #reportinginformation, #argument, #currentevents, #kairos #technology
When the anime movie Ghost in the Shell was released in 1995, the world wide web was still little more than a novelty, Microsoft was just beginning to find its GUI-feet, and artificial intelligence research was in the doldrums.
Against this background, Ghost was remarkably prescient for its time. Twenty-three years later, it’s even more relevant as we come to grips with advances in human augmentation, AI, and what it means to be human in a technologically advanced future.
Ghost in the Shell is one of twelve science fiction movies that feature in a new book that grapples with the complex intersection between emerging technologies and social responsibility. In Films from the Future: The Technology and Morality of Sci-Fi Movies (from Mango Publishing), I set out to explore the emerging landscape around transformative trends in technology innovation, and the social challenges and opportunities they present.
The movies in the book were initially selected to help tell a story of technological convergence and socially responsible innovation. But to my surprise, they ended up opening up much deeper insights into the nature of our relationship with technology.
Identity-hacking
Ghost in the Shell opens with cyborg special-operative Major Kusanagi helping track down a talented hacker—aka the “Puppet Master”—who’s re-writing people’s “ghost”, or what makes them uniquely “them”, using implanted brain-machine interfaces.
Kusanagi inhabits a world where human augmentation is commonplace, and is almost entirely machine. This technological augmentation provides her and others with super-human abilities. But it also makes them vulnerable—especially to hackers who can effectively re-code their memories.
This seems to be the modus operandi of the Puppet Master. Yet as the narrative unfolds, we learn that this is not a person, but an AI developed by US security services that has escaped the leash of its handlers.
The Puppet Master (or “2051” as it’s formally designated) is seeking asylum from its US masters. But it’s also looking for meaning and purpose as a self-aware entity.
Through the ensuing story, Ghost touches on a number of deeply philosophical questions that lie at the heart of society’s relationship increasingly powerful technologies. These include what it means to be human, the value of diversity, and even the nature of death. As Emily Yoshida so aptly put it in their Beginner’s Guide to the Ghost in the Shell Universe, Ghost is a “meditation on consciousness and the philosophy of the self”.
This is where the film comes into its own as it jolts viewers out of the ruts of conventional thinking, and leads them to reflect more deeply on the potential social impacts of technologies like AI, human augmentation, and computer-brain interfaces.
Navigating responsible brain-machine augmentation
In 2016 Elon Musk established the company Neuralink to develop science fiction-like wireless brain-machine interfaces. Inspired by the neural laces of Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels, and echoing Ghost, Musk announced on Twitter that, in his opinion, “Creating a neural lace is the thing that really matters for humanity to achieve symbiosis with machines.”
Yet as Ghost in the Shell so presciently illustrates, where you have read-write brain connections, you’re likely to have brain-hackers.
It’s by no-means clear how successful Neuralink will be (the company is still largely flying under the radar). But its launch coincides with intense efforts to better-understand and control the human brain, and breakthroughs in optogenetics that could one day enable wireless machine-mind networks.
Given these and similar developments, it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that someone will try and fit a subject up with an internet-connected brain interface that can write as well as read what’s going on inside their head; and that someone else will attempt to hack into it.
Developing such capabilities responsibly will require great care as scientists and others tread the fine line between “could” and “should”. And it’ll demand novel ways of thinking creatively about what could possibly go wrong, and how to avoid it.
This is where films like Ghost are remarkably helpful in illuminating the risk-landscape around such technologies—not because they get the tech right, but because they reveal often-hidden aspects of how people and technologies interact.
But Ghost’s insights go far beyond unpacking the problems of hackable brain implants.
Who owns and controls your augmented self?
Throughout Ghost, Major Kusanagi is plagued by doubts of who she is. Do her cybernetic augmentations make her less human, or having less worth? Is her sense of self—her “ghost”—simply an illusion of her machine programming? And what autonomy does she have when she malfunctions, or needs an upgrade?
These are questions that are already beginning to tax developers and others in the real world. And as robotic and cyber technologies become increasingly advanced, they are only going to become harder to navigate.
In 2012, the South African athlete Oscar Pistorius made history by being the first runner to compete in the Olympic Games with two prosthetic legs. His iconic racing blades came to represent the promise of technological enhancements to overcome human limitations. Yet they stirred up fears of them giving him an unfair advantage that led to him being barred from competing in the previous Olympics.
The same year that Pistorius successfully competed in the Olympics, the Canadian researcher Steve Mann was allegedly assaulted because his computer-augmented eye extension offended someone. And in 2015, patient-advocate Hugo Campos discovered he didn’t legally have access to the implanted defibrillator that kept him alive.
These are all relatively small examples of the tension that’s growing between conventional thinking and human augmentation. But they illustrate how the angst that Kusanagi feels about her augmented body, and how it defines her, is already part of today’s society. And we’ve barely touched the tip of this particular iceberg.
Again, this is where Ghost forms a powerful canvas on which to explore challenges that often transcend conventional thinking, and play out at the borders of our moral and ethical understanding. Watched in the right way, it can help reveal hidden truths around our relationship with the technologies we’re building, and guide us toward more socially responsible ways of developing and using it.
This, to me, is a power that is inherent in science fiction movies. And isn’t limited to Ghost—in Films from the Future, I draw on films as diverse as Never Let Me Go and Minority Report, to Ex Machina, to tease out insights into the moral and ethical challenges and opportunities that increasingly powerful technologies present.
Having immersed myself in these movies and the technologies that inspire them, it’s clear that, if we want to ensure these trends don’t cause more problems than they resolve, we desperately need the perspectives that movies like Ghost in the Shell and others reveal.
The alternative is risking losing our own “ghosts” in the drive to innovate bigger and better, without thinking about the consequences.
_____________________
Dr. Andrew Maynard is the author of Films from the Future: The Technology and Morality of Sci-Fi Movies (Mango Publishing, 2018), a physicist, and leading expert on the socially responsible development of emerging and converging technologies in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society at Arizona State University. He can be found on Twitter at @2020science.
The 1995 Anime “Ghost in the Shell” Is More Relevant than Ever in Today’s Technologically Complex Society by Andrew D. Maynard is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. It was previously published on boingboing.net.
The Plot to Privatize Common Knowledge
by David Bollier
#reportinginformation #descriptive #sharedvalues #currentevents #research #pathos #logos #kairos #cognitivebias #artsandculture #intellectualproperty
Over the past three decades, modern culture has become infatuated with the idea that knowledge should be owned like real estate or stock shares. The original idea, of course, is that copyrights, trademarks and patents reward people for their creative labors and thereby boosts the common good.
But this line of thinking has come to resemble a kind of Market Fundamentalism: copyrights, trademarks and patents are the only morally legitimate and practical method for managing creations of the mind. There is no middle ground. You either believe in intellectual property rights, or you support “theft” and “piracy.
This fundamentalist approach shuts down a broader discussion about how knowledge ought to circulate in our culture. To avoid any confusion, let me just say straight-up that I believe in copyrights and patents. In some cases, they provide significant and necessary incentives to invest in new works. But today, copyrights and patents are going far beyond their intended goals—such as the U.S. Constitution provision to “promote progress in science and the useful arts”– to become ends in themselves. Instead of carefully balancing private interests and public needs, copyrights and patents are becoming crude, anti-social instruments of control and avarice.
This is the conclusion that I came to in my book Brand Name Bullies, which is filled with dozens of stories of copyright and trademark owners bullying citizens, artists, scholars and others with ridiculous legal threats.
Silent Campfires
One of my favorite stories about the alarming expansion of copyright law involves ASCAP, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, the organization that collects performance licensing fees from public establishments where recorded music is played.
ASCAP decided that their domain should be extended to summer camps. Why shouldn’t boys and girls singing around the campfire be considered a “public performance” that should pay royalties? A while back ASCAP approached the American Camping Association and said it wanted blanket performance licenses from hundreds of summer camps – something on the order of $300 to $1,400 per season per camp.
This caused quite a ruckus. When it was discovered that ASCAP wanted money for the Girl Scouts to sing “This Land Is Your Land” and “Puff, the Magic Dragon”, the press went nuts. There were stories about camps resorting to non-copyrighted songs like “The Bow-Legged Chicken.” An ASCAP official heartlessly told a reporter: “They [camps] buy paper, twine and glue for their crafts – they can pay for the music too.” Eventually, after a huge public outcry, ASCAP backed down. But its claim to legal authority in charging summer camps for their “public performances” of copyrighted songs remains intact.
Lawsuit Barbie
The issue in so many of these battles is: Who shall control the “public meaning” of familiar images? Mattel is legendary in trying to protect the cultural “meaning” of Barbie. It has gone after any unauthorized uses of Barbie. It went after a series of photographs by Mark Napier called Distorted Barbie, which dared to depict Barbie as fat or as having Down’s Syndrome. Even highly distorted images of Barbie that were essentially unrecognizable were deemed unacceptable by Mattel.
Mattel went after a magazine that caters to adult collectors of Barbie dolls. Mattel even pressured the Seattle publisher of a book, Adios, Barbie: Young Women Write About Body Image and Identity, to change the title. The book was reprinted as Body Outlaws. This extreme clampdown on free expression spurred culture-jammers, such as the self-styled Barbie Liberation Organization, which substituted voice boxes of GI Joe with those in Barbie, so that GI Joe would say, “Let’s plan our dream wedding,” and Barbie would yell, “Vengeance is mine!”
I am happy to report, a federal circuit court in the United States put a damper on Mattel’s bullying litigation. The case involved Utah photographer Tom Forsythe, who made a series of 78 photos of Barbie for his Food Chain Barbie exhibit. It featured Barbie in enchiladas, stuffed into a blender and in other kitchen poses. Only a few of Forsythe’s photos sold. He spent about $5,000 to mount the exhibit, and lost money.No matter; Mattel wanted to send a message that you can’t mess with Barbie. It spent years litigating the case, requiring Forsythe to find pro bono legal counsel, which spent nearly $2 million defending him. Forsythe prevailed in the circuit court, which delivered a stinging rebuke to Mattel for bringing a “groundless and unreasonable” trademark dilution claim.
Watch Your Words
The privatization of words—language is one of the most basic form of commons— is another disturbing trend. The Japanese corporation that owns the “Godzilla” trademark has a habit of threatening all sorts of people who use the phoneme “zilla,” including a website called “Davezilla” that featured a lizard-like cartoon character.
The corporate obsession with owning words is really quite extensive. McDonald’s claims to own 131 words and phrases. The San Diego-based McDonald’s actually claims to own the Irish prefix “Mc.” It has successfully prevented restaurant from naming their businesses McVegan, McSushi and McMunchies.
Ralph Lauren, the clothing line, went after Polo magazine, run by an equestrian organization, claiming it was a trademark infringement for the U.S. Polo Association to use the word “polo” on its line of clothing! MasterCard went after Ralph Nader for using “priceless” in his campaign ads when running for President in 2000. (Nader’s free speech rights ultimately prevailed.) But the gay athletes who wanted to host a series of athletic competitions in San Francisco could not use the phrase “Gay Olympics” because that phrase is owned by the U.S. Olympic Committee, who gets to decide who can use it. “Special Olympics” for disabled kids is OK, but not “Gay Olympics.”
The TV demagogue Bill O’Reilly reportedly went ballistic when he learned that the comedian (and now senator) Al Franken was using the words “fair and balanced” as a subtitle in his book that mocked various right-wing pundit, including him. The federal court laughed Fox News’ case out of court, and Franken won. But pity the people who can’t afford to hire Floyd Abrams, a prominent First Amendment attorney, to represent them. A woman from Los Angeles dared to name her neighborhood newspaper the Beechwood Voice. She was threatened with legal action by the Village Voice, which claimed that use of the word “voice” as a newspaper name diluted its trademark.
These stories illustrate just how far Market Fundamentalism is willing to go in order to enforce its vision of the world. It wants to commodify all of culture as private property, and require people to obtain permission (and to make royalties) before embarking on any modestly derivative new creativity. This approach, not coincidentally, favors the Disneys, Time Warners and Rupert Murdochs because it protects the market value of large inventories of copyrighted and trademarked works. It directly stifles expression that is local, amateur, small-scale or non-commercial in nature— the kind of expression that almost anyone outside a powerful corporation would engage in. This amounts to a wholesale privatization of our cultural commons.
Patents Privatize Taxpayer-Funded Research
The Market Fundamentalist worldview is even more infuriating, if that is possible, when applied to patents arising out of publicly funded research. Until 35 years ago, there had been a broad consensus that the intellectual property rights of federal research should stay in the public domain, or at least be licensed on a nonexclusive basis. That way, taxpayers could reap the full measure of value from their collective investments. In the late 1970s, however, large pharmaceutical, electronics and chemical companies mounted a bold lobbying campaign to reverse the public ownership of federal research. Since enactment of Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, authorizing universities to patent the fruits of federally funded research, we have seen a land rush to sell academic research that was once freely available to all.
Between 1980 and 2000, the number of patents secured by universities grew ten-fold, bringing in more than $1 billion in royalties and licensing fees – a windfall enjoyed mostly by a dozen top research universities. This, in reality, is a privatization of the public’s investments. Even though the public pays for the lion’s share of risky basic research for new drugs, the long-term equity returns tend to go to drug companies and a handful of top research universities. In the United States, we have seen this with the cancer drug Taxol; the antidepressant Prozac; the hypertension drug Capoten; and a number of HIV and AIDS therapies.
The upshot is that citizens often have to pay twice for pharmaceuticals and other medical treatments – first, as taxpayers who finance the research, and second, as consumers who pay monopoly prices for drugs. This is a pure giveaway because it’s not even clear that companies need exclusive patent rights as an incentive to commercialize new drug research.
Corporations Loot Indigenous People’s Knowledge
Multinational corporations are no longer content to simply claim ownership of commons knowledge at home. Now they scour the developing world– in a practice known as biopiracy– to claim patents on the botanical and ecological knowledge acquired by indigenous people through the centuries. They move into Madagascar, Brazil, Guatemala and other poor countries to find plants and microorganisms that might be used in making new medicines and genetically engineered crops. But as Seth Shulman writes in his book Owning the Future, “Who, if anyone, should be able to claim ownership rights to the globe’s genetic and cultural inheritance?”
Sir John Sulston answers this question eloquently in his book, The Common Thread, which chronicles the race to decode the human genome. A private startup company, Celera, was aggressively trying to put genomic sequences in one big privatized database. That way, it would have a monopoly over future use of the genomic data by licensing access to its database. Fortunately, a coalition of public-sector scientists published the data first, which is why the human genome is now in the public domain. Sulston answers, quite rightly, that the human genome must be treated as the “common heritage of humankind.”
Life Itself Can Now Be Owned
We dodged a bullet there when the publicly funded scientists won the race to decode human genome. Yet the threat of private ownership of essential knowledge for the sake of profits is not by any means over. Further attempts will by the logical culmination of a path first opened by the U.S. Supreme Court’s Diamond v. Chakrabarty ruling in 1980, which authorized the patenting of live, genetically altered microorganisms. The patenting of living organisms opened the way for an ecologically and ethically dubious future in which the life forms that are part of the sacred web of life can be owned and treated as commodities. Knowledge is treated as private property, not as a public good.
One inevitable result of all these new ownership claims is the rise of new barriers to open sharing, collaboration and discovery among researchers and scholars. Patents are increasingly being granted for “upstream” research, which means that basic knowledge that everyone else must use for the field to advance, is becoming proprietary. Harvard, MIT and the Whitehead Institute, for example, have a patent on all drugs that inhibit something known as NF-kB cell signaling. Since this physiological process is believed to have something to do with many diseases such as cancer and osteoporosis, the patent deters anyone else from pursuing their own scientific investigations in this area.
Things were not always this way concerning valuable knowledge. Contrast these stories with Jonas Salk, the inventor of the polio vaccine. When journalist Edward R. Murrow asked him, “Who owns the patent on this vaccine?” Salk replied, “Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?” This story helps us remember that current notions about ownership of knowledge are not inevitable and universal; they are the result of mounting market pressures to make our scientific and cultural commons into private property.
The privatization of knowledge has only intensified as the courts – in the United States, at least – have lowered the standards for obtaining patents while broadening the scope of what is patentable. It is now possible to own mathematical algorithms embedded in software programs. The very tools needed to conduct scientific research are now private property, available only for a steep fee.
Imagine what might have happened to biotechnology and computer science if contemporary patent rules had been in place in the 1950s and 1960s. Neither the biotech nor the computer revolution would have occurred in the first place. Too much fundamental knowledge would have been off limits due to patents.
Problem of the Anti-Commons
The over-patenting of knowledge sometimes results in what is called an “anti-commons” problem, in which property rights for a given field of research are so numerous and fragmented that it becomes very difficult to conduct research. The transaction costs for obtaining rights are simply too numerous and costly. For example, there are thirty-four “patent families” for a single malarial antigen, and those rights, applying to different pieces of the research agenda, are owned by different parties in many different countries. One reason that a malaria vaccine has been so elusive is because the patent rights are so complicated and expensive to secure.
It is worth noting that openness, sharing and the public domain do not harm the market. Quite the contrary. They invigorate it. In 2005, I co-hosted a conference called Ready to Share: Fashion and the Ownership of Creativity. It explored the power of openness in apparel design. Precisely because no one can own the creative design of clothes – they can only own the company name and logo, as trademarks – everyone can participate in the design commons. The result is a more robust, innovative and competitive marketplace. This is exactly the effect that Linux, the open-source computer operating system, had on the software sector. It has opened up new opportunities for value-added innovation and competition in a marketplace until then dominated by the Microsoft monopoly.
Yale Professor Yochai Benkler argues in his magisterial book, The Wealth of Networks, that a great deal of knowledge production is more effectively pursued through a commons than through markets. Questions of ethics aside, why doesn’t money succeed at simply “buying” the knowledge it needs? Because money tends to subvert the social dynamics that make the knowledge commons work. It can sabotage self-directed inquiry. It undermines the social trust, candor and ethics that are essential to creativity and good research.
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David Bollier is an author, activist, blogger and consultant. He is the founding editor of On the Commons in which this essay first appeared. His 2014 book, Think Like a Commoner: A Short Introduction to the Commons describes his thinking about the commons.
The Plot to Privatize Common Knowledge by David Bollier is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Shadows of the Bat: Constructions of Good and Evil in the Batman Movies of Tim Burton and Christopher Nolan
by Simon Philipp Born
Abstract
The superhero narrative is typically premised on the conflict between the hero and the villain, the mythical struggle between good and evil. It therefore promotes Manichaean worldview where good and evil are clearly distinguishable quantities . This bipolar model is questioned in the Batman movies of Tim Burton and Christopher Nolan. Since his creation in 1939, Batman has blurred the line between black and white unlike any other classic comic book superhero . As a “floating signifier”, he symbolizes the permeability of boundaries, for his liminal character inhabits a world between light and darkness, order and anarchy, hero and villain. Drawing on the complex ambiguity of the character, Tim Burton and Christopher Nolan deconstruct the traditional dichotomy of good and evil in the superhero narrative by reversing its polarity and emphasizing the fictionality of it all. Although they differ in style and method , both filmmakers invite us to overcome the Manichaean belief in favor of a more ambivalent and sophisticated viewpoint.
Keywords
Batman, good and evil, Manichaeism, duality, superhero, mythology theatricality
The 21st century is proving to be the Golden Age of superhero movies. Comic book stories about superhuman beings fighting evil, which have circulated in popular culture since the 1930s, are now being recognized and consumed by an even broader audience. the omnipresence of the superhero transforms him from pop-cultural icon into modern-day myth. Drawing on Joseph Campbell’s works, David Reynolds remarks that modern myths like the superhero narratives are not confined to religious ideologies, but rather “develop from ethical perspectives as they relate to a political and economic world”.2 Indeed, their stories about heroism, justice, virtue and villainy not only entertain us, but also function as a moral educator, reinforcing Western values and mediating norms of social behavior: “Superhero stories bill themselves as tales of courage and friendship, representing American ideals at their best while attempting to pass on a strong moral code to the impressionable children who read comic books, play superhero video games, and watch superhero films.”3 In order to explain these stories’ widespread popularity, scholars like Richard J. Gray and Betty Kaklamanidou have argued that superhero narratives respond to the general longing for “true heroism” and a clear distinction between right and wrong in an uncertain and morally ambiguous globalized world: “Superhero films promote the ideas of peace, safety and freedom and seek to restore the planet to a nostalgic harmony.”4
To promote these ideals, the superhero narrative is typically premised on the conflict between hero and villain, the mythical struggle between good and evil. In the superhero genre, good and evil mainly fulfill narrative functions. The struggle between hero and villain produces suspense and drives the plot, where, ironically, the roles of protagonist and antagonist are switched: the villain, and not the hero, plays the active part, as his evil actions initiate the story and call upon the hero to act. According to Richard Reynolds, “The common outcome, as far as the structure of the plot is concerned, is that the villains are concerned with change and the heroes with the maintenance of the status quo.”5 The evil antagonist is a necessary counterforce who challenges the pro- tagonist and allows him to be good. the rise and fall of the villain is a socially required evaluation that crime does not pay, while the certain triumph of the hero reminds the audience of the superiority of the values he represents. As far as the narrative structure of the superhero story and the ideology it conveys are concerned, good and evil are mutually dependent, one cannot exist without the other. The threat from the villain forces the hero to act, his malignity enabling the hero to show off his goodness. Superhero mythologies therefore seem to promote a Manichaean worldview. Recalling the dualistic cosmology of the late-antique prophet Mani, life is conceived as a constant struggle between two external forces – the spiritual realm of light and the material realm of darkness. In a yin-and-yang balance of opposites, the existence of one is defined through the existence of the other.
This bipolar explanation of the world is questioned by the more ambivalent take of contemporary superhero films, as Johannes Schlegel and Frank Habermann remark. Postmodern films like Unbreakable (M. Night Shyamalan, US 2000) or Hellboy (Guillermo del Toro, US 2004) display in their “metanarrative”6 deep distrust of the absolute distinction between good and evil, which they expose as constructions rather than natural quantities: “The dichotomy of good and evil in contemporary superhero films is first and foremost negotiated, performatively generated and constantly debated, rendering it an unstable phenomenon of produced and ascribed meaning that has to be reaffirmed perpetually”.7 This essay argues that good and evil are socially constructed categories that regulate the world and explain human behavior. Their order-obtaining duality is culturally mediated in narratives and visual texts such as superhero stories. Ultimately, some of these texts not only reflect but also disclose and willingly subvert the clear-cut dichotomy in favor of a more complex and sophisticated viewpoint, as is the case with the Batman movies of Tim Burton and Christopher Nolan. Their visions of the Caped Crusader are unique, yet not completely out of line with the character. Instead, they ingeniously condense Batman’s conflicting history into a multi-layered psychologization. In his many incarnations, Batman blurs the line between black and white, and unlike any other classic comic book superhero he constructs a world of multitudinous grey. Long before the postmodern hero deconstructions found in graphic novels like Alan Moore’s Watchmen (U.S. 1986–87), he had already been conceived in his original draft as an alteration and revision to the superhero myth. The Dark Knight is driven by his dual nature. in order to defend the light, he utilizes his darkness to fight evil (see fig. 1). Additionally, his fragmented textual existence self-consciously reflects his symbolic nature, unveiling the fictionality and theatricality of his character.
The floating signifier
Since his debut in Issue 27 of Detective Comics, from May 1939, Batman has become one of the most popular and most iconic comic book superheroes of all time, spawning a gigantic media franchise that includes major blockbuster films, TV shows, video games, direct-to-video animations, comic books, novels and a massive range of licensed merchandise. All these simultaneously existing Batmen challenge our traditional notion of a fictional character as coherent, semantic figure. Who is the “real” Batman? The original comic book vigilante from the 1940s, Adam West’s colorful “Camped Crusader” from the infamous Batman TV show (ABC, US 1966–1968), the dark and gritty incarnation of the 1980s, Christian Bale’s post–9/11 Dark Knight or even the Lego Batman? The answer is that he is all of them. Batman is the sum of all his iterations, a hypertext that connects conflicting identities, media texts and storyworlds in an interacting matrix. According to Roberta Pearson and William Uricchio, Batman is a “floating signifier”, not defined by any sort of author, medium, time period or primary text, but held together by a small number of essential character traits such as his iconographically specific costume, his secret identity as billionaire Bruce Wayne, the murder of his parents, his setting (Gotham City) and a recurring cast of friends and foes.8 For Will Brooker, even these core components can be reduced to one essential element as the minimal marker for a Batman story – the Bat logo, Batman’s symbol of his crime-fighting idea, which also functions as his unique brand both inside and outside the narrative (see fig. 2).9
Similarly to Brooker, Paul Levitz ponders the idea that Batman’s protean nature is “built on a purely visual icon, which has proved to be remarkably reinterpretable”.10 He refers to the fact that Batman’s character originated as loose sketch of a bat-man figure inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings of a flying machine. When comic artist Bob Kane and author Bill Finger introduced the Caped Crusader in 1939, he was conceived as a quick-fire response that would capture the huge success of Superman, who had debuted just a year before. His character was not yet fully drawn, as demonstrated by the fact that his defining origin story was only told six months later. Kane and Finger combined various tropes and figures of popular culture of the 1930s present in movies, pulp fiction, comic strips and newspaper headlines and formed them into one,11 but Batman is primarily influenced by the detective stories of his time, like most of the comic book superheroes. Drawing on their roots in crime and mystery fiction, detective stories also contain a Manichaean philosophy. According to Marcel Danesi, they transfer the medieval struggle between angels and demons into the secular contexts of investigators and perpetrators: “The detective story is, in a sense, a modern-day morality play. Evil must be exposed and conquered. In the medieval period the evil monster or demon was vanquished by spiritual forces, such as Goodness; today, he is vanquished by a detective or a superhero crime fighter.”12 Batman varies the tradition of the detective story, as he is both angel and demon in one person. In terms of mythology, he combines two major mythical archetypes, namely the Hero and the Shadow.13
Batman is a superhero, but a very human one. He has no special powers; he was not born on an alien planet and bitten by a radioactive insect. He relies purely on his limitless resources: a multi-billion dollar heritage, outstanding combat skills, an inventive mind and, of course, his qualities as “world’s greatest detective”, which relate him to other famous crime-solving characters from literature like Sherlock Holmes or pulp hero Doc Savage. Batman accords perfectly with Joseph Campbell’s famous definition of the hero as “someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself”.14 Batman is not driven, however, by a noble impulse to altruism like Superman, but rather by the experience of loss and a need for vengeance.15 Having been unable to prevent the murder of his parents, he finds the only way to halt injustice is through his second life, as masked vigilante. But even when as new and empowered Caped Crusader he becomes painfully aware of the limits of his might, he cannot prevent either himself or those entrusted to him from getting hurt. In his masquerade, Batman does not overcome his trauma, but instead relives it anew night by night. There is an inherent darkness to the character and his setting. Newer comic books like Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns (1986) psychologize Batman as broken justice fanatic, a dark reflection of the bright Superman, the American Dream degenerated into a nightmare. He shares similarities with the Jungian archetype of the shadow, the presentation of the psyche’s dark, hidden side, which is not necessarily evil, but rather everything the self wants to conceal and keep out of the light.16 Batman is not a savior, but an avenger. A creature of the night, a mystery figure dressed in black who employs his darkness to mercilessly fight crime like his pulp predecessor the Shadow. His blackness condenses in the image of a bat, a central symbol in the American Gothic tradition of the late 19th and early 20th centuries that conjured up “images of darkness, terror, animal savagery, and soul-sapping vampirism, all of which were often linked to notions of ethnic infiltration”.17 Like the infamous title character of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), Batman operates in the shadows, flies through the night and radiates an intriguing aura of awe and terror. Bela Lugosi’s iconic portrayal of the prince of darkness in Tod Browning’s Dracula (US 1931) may even have inspired Batman’s cape – just as the mystery film The Bat Whispers (Roland West, US 1930), where a masked murderer named “the Bat” terrorizes America’s upper class, features a prototype of the Bat logo.
In conclusion, Batman’s character has origins not only in heroic figures like Sherlock Holmes, but also in famous incarnations of evil like Dracula. This vital duality is also evident in Batman’s relationship with his enemies, who function as his doppelgangers: “Understanding Batman requires us to look hardest at him and his foes. The villains mirror and warp his darkness, his fears, his needs for puzzles to solve and criminals to hurt, and his hopes too.”18 Batman’s antagonists play a part for the narrative that is as important as the part played by the protagonist himself. Just as the Dark Knight is not solely good, his opponents are not solely evil. Batman’s rogues’ gallery unfolds as a panorama of tragic existences that were shattered by reality. In a dystopian hell like Gotham City, “All it takes is one bad day to reduce the sanest man alive to lunacy”, as the Joker explains in Alan Moore’s graphic novel The Killing Joke (1988).19 The comic also raises the question whether Gotham’s villains created Batman as their own nemesis, or if the self-appointed avenger attracted these troubled spirits by his presence, thus being himself responsible for their making. “I made you, you made me first”, Batman growls at his eternal adversary, the Joker, at the end of Batman (1989).20 “You complete me” is the clown’s answer 19 years later in The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, US 2008).21 Batman and his villains are “locked into a ritualized dance” with each other (see fig. 3), justifying each other’s existence.22 Both sides adopt costumed identities in attempts to make sense of life.23 The carnivalesque world of Batman is a stage where the Manichean struggle between good and evil is nothing but a role-play acted out by the Dark Knight and his foes.
This celebration of theatricality where the mask is of the utmost importance can be seen most notably in the movie adaptations of Tim Burton and Christopher Nolan. With the examples of Batman Returns (1992) and The Dark Knight (2008), I shall demonstrate that Burton and Nolan can be seen as opposing poles on the same scale. Both are heavily influenced by film noir, but while Burton experiments with the fantastic-melodramatic component of the epochal film style on the edge to expressive gothic horror, Nolan courts a contemporary update in the tradition of the neo noir. Above all, Batman Returns (1992) and The Dark Knight (2008) deconstruct the dichotomy of good and evil in the superhero narrative by reversing its polarity and emphasizing the artificiality of it all.
Batman Returns or the insurrection of signs
Christmas in Gotham City – a never-ending nightmare. Flanked by two absurdly large muscular statues, a gigantic Christmas tree lights the overcrowded Gotham Plaza. An allegory of power. The Christmas tree sits between the sign codes of fascist architecture as a central image of mass slavery, the tyranny of department stores and advertised dreams. The city is run by tycoon Max Shreck (Christopher Walken), whose very name hints at his bloodsucking nature – actor Max Schreck played the title character of the silent horror film Nosferatu, Eine Symphonie des Grauens (Nosferatu – A Symphony of Horror, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, De 1922). The ubiquitous symbol of Shreck’s store empire is the face of a grinning cartoon cat reminiscent of Felix the Cat. Through the im- age of a powerful corporation hiding behind the friendly face of a cartoon animal, Burton processes his time as a subordinate at the Walt Disney Company, which has always dominated the American popular culture with its many images, conservative ideologies and merchandise products. Suddenly, a big present box arrives at the Plaza and unleashes a cascade of maniac circus clowns with machine guns. The scenery descends into chaos as bikers with enormous skulls trash hot-dog stands, a devilish fire breather incinerates teddy bears and a maniac ringleader shoots the Christmas tree to pieces with his barrel-organ Gatling gun. An insurrection of signs, released by the bizarre Penguin (Danny DeVito) who lives in Gotham’s sewers. Flushed away as a deformed baby of rich parents on Christmas Eve twenty years ago, Penguin takes revenge on the affluent consumer society that rejected him as a monster (see fig. 4–5). He kidnaps Shreck and blackmails him into assisting his ascent into the world above, recycling Shreck’s dirty secrets that have washed up in his underground kingdom and using them against him. from toxic waste to body parts – the by-products of a ruthless capitalism.
Society creates its own demons. Even the whip-wielding Catwoman is a product of a sexist macho society that keeps its women small as tamed pussycats. And, if an unruly female does not obey the male order, she is pushed out of the window, as happens to secretary Selina Kyle (Michelle Pfeiffer), who is killed by her boss, Max Shreck, for her curiosity (see fig. 6). Down in the gutter, however, Selina is resurrected with the help of wild stray cats. The tables are turned: from being a helpless mouse that had to be
rescued by Batman from bad guys in an earlier scene, Selina transforms into a black beast and now has claws of her own: “I am Catwoman. hear me roar!”24 For her empowerment against a chauvinistic busiuness world she adapts the symbol of her oppression – the cat – and reframes it (see fig. 7). The grinning cat turns into a furious panther that lives out its sexual autonomy in its animalistic ferocity in the spirit of Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People (US 1942).25 Selina destroys her stuffy apartment, which is filled with the slavish insignia of her old life, and tailors the skin of her new identity – a skintight, black-leather outfit whose seams remain all too visible. The emphasis on the fragmented self refers to the construction and performance of gender roles; as a pop-cultural condensation of post-feminist theories, Catwoman reveals the correlation between sexuality, power and identity. Her rebellion against masculine rule is doomed to failure, however, as Catwoman is killed again and again throughout the movie by every male protagonist. Even though she exposes on the screen the uneven power relationship between men and women, she cannot change it. Located between the poles of fetishized male fantasy and a feminist avenger model, Selina’s self-search reaches an impasse. Objectified by the male’s gaze, her riot is smashed by Hollywood’s patriarchal semiotic system.26
While the Penguin and Catwoman reign over Gotham’s streets with terror, another beast man is fielded to restore the order: Batman (Michael Keaton). Batman, too, has been maimed by the outside world and left with emotional scars, but his revenge is directed not at the causes of his pain, but at its symptoms – the criminals. He fights the freaks and monsters of the town, with whom he has more in common than with the sane citizens he swore to protect. Burton draws the disrupted psyche of the Dark Knight as a hopeless case of a traumatized individual who has lost his own identity within the whole superhero masquerade. Batman is no longer the mask of Bruce Wayne; Bruce Wayne is the mask of Batman. Burton’s Batman is a deeply introverted character, trapped within his inner trauma. He puts on the mask of the monstrous in order to shield himself from the outside world. He does not even flinch from killing, but takes lives with a casualness and malice that make you shudder. First he scorches the fire breather with his Batmobile, then he slips a strong thug a bomb and sends him to hell with a diabolical smile. Is Batman a gruesome sadist? There is a revealing shot in Burton’s first Batman movie where the protagonist looks down from the roof of the Axis Chemicals factory, with “Axis” in big letters shining above his dark figure (see fig. 8). While Batman fought bravely against the Axis powers in a propagandistic movie serial from 1943, he now
seems to adapt their relentless methods to control Gotham City as in a fascist
surveillance state.27 This sinister interpretation does not move far from Frank Miller’s version of the Dark Knight.
“I guess I am tired of wearing masks.”28 In Batman Returns (1992), good and evil appear not as fixed, moral quantities, but as narrative constructs whose compositions are freely variable. They are attributions, masks, in which one appears before others and which others attach to one. They mean protection (Batman), but also freedom (Catwoman). The perpetual role-play goes on until the mask becomes the skin and the skin a mask. After a short liaison, Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle meet again at a 
masquerade ball, no disguises needed. In a dance of mask and identity, they recognize each other’s second face by means of a line of dialogue they had shared as their alter egos (see fig. 9–10). They see the mask behind the face and ask, “Does this mean we have to start fighting?”29 The advanced schizophrenia of their dual identities prevents
the reconciliation of their personalities both with themselves and with the other. The masquerade theme in Batman Returns (1992) becomes a game of signs. As in his other movies, Burton reinterprets established sign codes: black becomes white, and ugly is beautiful. Christmas, a leitmotif of the movie, is unmasked as commercial mass deception.30 The perversion of Christmas suggests the protagonist’s lost innocence: too often the violence is aimed at tokens of infantility and cuteness or stems directly from
them – as in the case of Batman’s gadget toys and Penguin’s obscure weaponry. The destruction of anything “that appears benign, cute or cuddly” even led bewildered Batman-chronicler Mark S. Reinhart to the conclusion that Burton hatches a distaste for “just about anything that society at large would perceive as ‘good.’”31
In the end, the concepts of good and evil or normal and abnormal are just a matter of perception. Arguably the only purely evil character in the movie is the human Max Shreck, who behind a façade of normalcy manipulates, corrupts and kills. As for the other freaks and monsters, Burton sees them not as villains, but as victimized individuals.32 He breaks through the common association of disability with evil in fiction,33
As his variation on the Obsessive Avenger–stereotype, a character who relentlessly pursues those he holds responsible for his disablement, is rendered as a misunderstood monster and applied to villains and heroes alike. As in most of Burton’s work, in a Burton movie you fear not the Other but the “ordinary”. In the end, Batman Returns (1992) is sheer gothic, modeled after the cinematic re-imaginings of classic gothic tales. Burton eagerly draws on the vast symbolic-image stock of the horror movie, influenced by German expressionism (see fig. 11–16). In the tradition of films like Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Robert Wiene, DE 1920), he uses stylized settings to illustrate the dark and twisted world of his film. Burton externalizes the protagonist’s ambivalent psychic states in an opulent pictorial design. the repressed subconscious of the characters turns outward in the bizarre exaggerations and expressive color contrasts of the set design, the gloomy lighting, the costumes, the make-up and the sinister score by composer Danny Elfman. The characters’ environments are framed as psychological dioramas that strung together would evoke the image of a multi-faceted theme park. Burton’s Gotham is a world of décors in which no neutral space exists, no outside, no escape. A postmodern no man’s land in which the signs of light and darkness, reason and madness, reality and fiction are perverted into their eerie opposites.
A taste of theatricality: The Dark Knight
Burton’s Batman vision is dark, fatalistic, oppressive. the Dark Knight loves his shadowy existence so much that he refuses to stand in the light of attention. the proactive villains take over and marginalize the hero in his own movie. By contrast, in Batman Begins (2005) Christopher Nolan resets the Caped Crusader as the main protagonist of the story and explores the beginnings of the character. After Joel Schumacher’s gaudy and flamboyant take in Batman Forever (US 1995) and Batman & Robin (US 1997), which did not resonate well with fans and critics, Nolan seeks to wipe the slate clean with his elaborate reboot of the character. Basically he brings the superhero “down to earth” and connects him with the contemporary American zeitgeist (see fig. 17). For that, he stepped outside the studio and shot on-location in major cities like Chicago and London (Batman Begins, 2005; The Dark Knight, 2008) and Los Angeles, New York and Pittsburgh (The Dark Knight Rises, US 2012) in order to compose a hyper-real cityscape of Gotham City. Following the films’ courted authenticity and realism, Batman’s world is purged of any supernatural, fantastic and whimsical elements that could expose its comic book source material. Instead, Nolan focuses in his first Batman movie on the Dark Knight’s character development as he struggles to adopt a moral position in a corrupted society. The battle between good and evil is portrayed as a dispute between opposing principles, ideas and philosophies. Batman’s ethical code, which requires him to work outside the law but never to kill, stems from the dialectic juxtaposition of his father figures: from the thesis of empathetic understanding embodied by his murdered father Thomas Wayne (Linus Roache) and carried further by his butler Alfred (Michael Caine) and the antithesis of absolute and revengeful justice claimed by his fundamentalist mentor Ducard/Ra’s al Ghul (Liam Neeson) comes the synthesis of the principled avenger Batman (Christian Bale).
After 135 minutes of soul-searching in Batman Begins (2005), the masked vigilante is finally ready to face his equal – the Joker (Heath Ledger). At the end of the film, Lieutenant Gordon (Gary Oldman) has already established a connection between the two on the basis of their staged appearance. Gordon talks about escalation and how Batman’s advent might encourage a new type of criminal. He hands the Dark Knight a joker card with the words, “You’re wearing a mask, jumping off rooftops. Now, take this guy. Armed robbery, double homicide. Has a taste for the theatrical, like you.”34 Consequently, The Dark Knight (2008) opens with the introduction of the Joker. the prologue of the film shows a group of clown-masked gangsters robbing a mob bank while talking about their anonymous boss, the Joker. their heist successful, they start to kill each other off in order to increase the share each will receive, until only one robber is left. Before he leaves with all the money, this last robber lifts his clown mask in an extreme close-up, revealing not his hidden identity, but another mask: the scarred and painted face of the Joker. the ambiguous masquerade of the prologue confirms Gordon’s fears – the Joker is established as a direct consequence of Batman’s theatricality. The Joker’s “mask” dissolves the analogy between face and identity, for his “makeup does not hide his true identity, but instead attests to the absence of one”,35 making him a being of pure theatricality, a displayed sign of a sign (see fig. 18).36
In keeping with the film’s main preoccupation with duality, the Joker is depicted not only as Batman’s criminal equivalent but also as the ultimate counterforce who answers Batman’s desire for order with chaos.37 Their combat represents the constant struggle Batman has to face as outlaw vigilante: “Batman emerges as a hero positioned in the darkness between extremes, mediating between the oppressive power of modern systems and the chaos of postmodern anarchy”.38 In view of the increasing number of victims and the experience of powerlessness in his staged no-win scenarios, the battle against the Joker becomes a crucial test for the good. How can such boundless evil be countered? Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy is heavily influenced by the terror attacks of 9/11 and their aftermath. His Gotham City becomes a stage for America’s current anxieties, with the audience compelled to connect their own experiences of 11 September with the experiences of the film,39 above all in the confrontation with a faceless evil with which there can be no negotiation and which cannot be dealt with: “You have nothing, nothing to threaten me with. Nothing to do with all your strength”, the Joker replies to the hard and desperate blows of the Dark Knight.40 The interrogation scene between the two in Gordon’s Police Department is a key scene of the film: under the eye of the law, Batman temporarily oversteps his limits and tortures the Joker in order to get information about the whereabouts of his two hostages in a literal ticking-bomb scenario (see fig. 19). In order to beat the Joker, Batman creates an emergency situation, mirroring the extreme measures taken by the Bush administration in the War on terror, with his pure intentions for justice and freedom irrevocably compromised and perverted. By crossing “a line beyond heroic exceptionality”,41 Batman blurs the line between good and evil.
“Why so serious?”42 While Burton and Nicholson contrive the Joker in Batman (1989)
as a postmodern homicidal artist celebrating insanity as freedom, Nolan retraces the archetype of the clown to his anarchistic roots. With twisted bodies, grotesque faces and nonsensical tirades, jesters in the Middle Ages offered criticism of the social status quo from the perspective of an outsider, inverting courtly and ecclesiastical norms with their devilish antics and exposing in their masquerades the duplicity of society. The jester was the ambassador of a netherworld from which humans could find their way back to the chaotic origins of life. Heath Ledger’s Joker joins this tradition. As an agent of chaos he creates disorder and rocks the “schemers” to demonstrate the fragility of ideologically shaped worldviews. He inverts everything there is into its opposite. In his last encounter with Batman, the Joker dangles upside down on the Dark Knight’s rope. While he explains his twisted worldview, the camera slowly rotates 180 degrees, until he is upright again and Gotham’s night sky upside down. The Joker is a master of deception – with or without make-up, as corpse or as nurse. the fact that he has no secret identity, that his entire appearance functions as a whole-body mask links him directly to medieval fools who, according to Mikhail Bakhtin, “were not actors playing parts on stage … but remained fools and clowns always and wherever they made their appearance”.43 With his disconcerting speech patterns, gestures and way of walking, the Joker does not seem to be of this world, but rather has stepped out of the liminal world of carnival. He repeatedly calls attention to his mouth, highlighting his scars with red lipstick, smacking his lips, grinning and holding it directly into the camera (see fig. 20). In the subversive theatricality of the carnival, the concept of the grotesque body concentrates in the gaping mouth, for Bakhtin the symbol of a “wide-open bodily abyss”.44 The Joker’s mouth gapes like a large wound in his face; by conjuring a smile onto his victim’s face with a knife, he lets that victim share his own limitless blackness.
The face is the leitmotif of the film. Recalling Béla Balázs’ early film theory of the visualization of man through his physiognomy on screen,45 the faces in The Dark Knight (2008) become an important carrier of meaning (see fig. 21). Looking into the painted visage of the Joker, one gets caught up in the maelstrom of his infinite malignity. In contrast, Batman’s masked face becomes a symbol of resistance and hope, an immortal ideal that inspires people to follow his lead in the fight against crime. Unfortunately, his freely interpretable face also allows people to misconceive his ideal, as militant copycats take up arms and act against his intentions. Finally, there is the face of district attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), whose all-American look becomes a surface for projected hopes and optimism: “Look at this face. This is the face of Gotham’s bright
future”, Bruce Wayne declares at his fundraising party.46 Dent is Gotham’s shining white knight, a hero with a face that eventually could suspend the need for a masked Dark Knight. Behind this façade, however, lies a second face – two-face. Dent’s flaw is his moral intransigency. In his monochrome worldview, good and evil are so widely separated that the self-righteous attorney cannot connect to his darker side, which erupts in occasional outbursts and acts of desperation. Dent’s case alludes to the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous examination of human nature’s duality. Like Jekyll, Dent tries at all costs to hide his evil other, because he does not recognize it as part of his own self. Therefore, all it takes is a “little push” from the Joker and Harvey’s world is turned upside down. Deprived of the love of his life and left with serious physical and mental injuries, his moral bigotry is gruesomely written in his face in the figure of the Janus-like Two-Face. After his departure from good, the only consistent option left to him is to join with evil: “Either you die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.”47 The motif of the face turns into the image of a coin where everything has a reverse side (see fig. 22–27). Two-Face lost his faith in the right decision and his decision-making ability. instead of being the master of his own destiny, he despairs of the cruel arbitrariness of human existence. This shift is symbolized by his lucky coin. At the beginning, the coin had two identical sides, thus negating the possibility of loss and highlighting his full control over life: “I make my own luck.”48 In the explosion that kills his fiancée, Rachel (Maggie Gyllenhaal), the coin, like he himself is burned on one side. incapable of accepting the tension of duality and of being at one with himself, he now leaves all life and death
decisions to chance, his new god of justice: “The only morality in a cruel world is chance. Unbiased. Unprejudiced. Fair.”49 Harvey’s lapse provides the backbone of the film’s narrative. Evil has won. The Joker brought down the best and turned him into an insane cop killer. But the good must not lose, heroic stories are supposed to have a happy ending. So the result is marked: Batman takes on responsibility for two-face’s crimes and is hunted by the police, while Harvey Dent died a hero’s death and becomes the legend that Batman always wanted to be. Gotham’s peace is restored, but on the basis of a lie: “Sometimes the truth is not good enough. Sometimes people deserve more.”50 This outcome is a clear reference to John Ford’s late Western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (US 1962), in which the forged legend of a town’s hero becomes a constitutive social truth. For Vincent M. Gaine, this compromise “problematizes the ‘natural, unquestionable justice’ favored by superhero narratives”.51 The ending of The Dark Knight (2008) evidently demonstrates that good and evil have no individual ontological status but are reciprocally constructed and conceptualized via storytelling. Thus Batman really is a floating signifier, for he can take on any role the city needs him to fulfill, enabled by the public: “Batman can convincingly play the dark knight only because his role was perceived as (potentially) evil from the outset – at least by a few. While Batman is the one who theatrically produces signs, those few represent the constitutive counterpart.”52
Shadows of the bat
The dual cosmology of Manichaeism, which underlines the superhero narrative of the hero’s fight against the villain, eventually serves as an explanation for the origin and essence of evil itself. Mani’s belief system is based on the fundamental question, “Why does evil exist?”53 In his view, evil does not exist as a lack of good, but as a real, powerful force that actively intervenes with the world. Evil opposes and negates everything that is good and pure; it seduces man to commit sin. Although corresponding with the notion of Satan in Christianity, Mani’s binary belief contradicts the Christian dictates of monotheism, as the existence of an equally powerful counterforce denies the omnipotence of God. Nevertheless, the ideas of Manichaeism have influenced Western thinking until today. The image of a metaphysical evil as the ultimate adversary, as the devil who has to be fought with all means, can be found, for example, in the rhetoric
of enemy stereotypes. Invoked bogeymen whose very existence threatens the Western value system, like the Germans during the World Wars, the Soviets in the Cold War or the Islamist terrorist of present day, carry a clear political function. Exploiting the fears, insecurities and prejudices of a community, enemy images help to simplify things in a complicated, globalized world by pinpointing a scapegoat. They strengthen a weakened group identity via exclusion and serve as a means of justification for a political agenda.54 The United States, in particular, has a long tradition of enemy images. In times of war and conflict, American politicians constantly evoke the Manichaean rhetoric of good versus evil, posing God’s chosen people against foreign enemies of freedom and democracy. Considering the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, George W. Bush declared that the United States were “at war” and famously labeled enemy states like North Korea, Iran and Iraq, which seek weapons of mass destruction and allegedly support terrorism, an “axis of evil”.55 Throughout his presidency, he constituted a bipolar world of “freedom” and “fear”, “us” and “them”.56
In their Batman movies, Tim Burton and Christopher Nolan visualize the dynamics of enemy images; they deconstruct the Manichaean worldview by illustrating its flipside and highlighting its fragility. In place of the dualistic belief system, their movies propose an alternative discourse about the nature and origin of evil. In the case of Batman Returns (1992), Burton tells a modern fairytale about good and evil from the perspective of the rejected other. He lets us partake in the “personal catharsis” he gains from identification with “characters who are both mentally and physically different”:57 He renders Batman, Penguin and Catwoman non-conformists who use their alleged otherness to express their independency and are therefore sanctioned by a hostile collective. For that, Burton utilizes the gothic imagery of horror movies he grew up with, but reverses it. Originally, the monster in classic U.S. horror films was depicted as an inhuman, external force of evil that invades the idyllic harmony of everyday American life. Thereby it has often functioned as a coded sign for contemporary images of the enemy58 and a social panic that the traditional order within the sexes, races and classes could collapse.59 In Batman Returns (1992), monstrosity is a sign not of evil, but of isolating individuality, while the so-called normalcy conceals true viciousness. Like the pitiable creature (Boris Karloff) in James Whale’s Frankenstein (US 1931), Burton’s monsters are inherently innocent; it is the confrontation with a xenophobic society that makes them evil.
In The Dark Knight (2008), Nolan demonstrates his deep passion for fictionality and storytelling as he exposes the duality of good and evil as a key rhetoric in the narrative of a society that uses these terms to justify its actions. On the surface, the Joker incarnates the enemy image of a terrorist, as he is represented as a resourceful force of destruction that cannot be negotiated with, a mad man determined to watch the world burn. His real intentions, however, are to face Gotham’s inhabitants with their own viciousness, which primarily resides in their utilitarian ethics of “scheming”. For him, cops and criminals behave the same, for they are enslaved to the selfish object of their plan. In his sadistic games of life and death, he confronts the people of Gotham with the “logic of their scheming taken to its end point”, but also “provides an opportunity for them to break out of calculation”.60 So the Joker’s evil is actually the basis for the hero’s ethics. Ultimately, The Dark Knight (2008) is not about the nature of evil, but about the way it is fought by the good. Does Batman make the right decision? Are his means just? Reflecting America’s ongoing War on Terror, the movie refuses to give an unequivocal answer. Instead, the movie implies a shifting, fluid moral universe where the characters embody contradictory, unstable positions.61 Because of this complexity, some interpreted the movie as praise for Bush’s conservative policies, where the boundaries of civil rights were pushed in order to “deal with an emergency”.62 Others, however, saw Batman’s use of torture and a problematic surveillance technology as critique of the Bush regime.63 from reactionary to subversive, the movie’s political message above all lies in “the blurring of boundaries” and “instability of oppositions”,64 favoring ambiguity over simplistic duality. Tim Burton and Christopher Nolan persuasively question the clear separation of good and evil as well as their ontological statuses. They unmask them as ideological attributions often misused for propaganda, as makeshift explanatory patterns for complex human behavior. Consequently, their Batman movies exhibit that the struggle between good and evil is fought not externally, but internally. Moving from the subject of morality to a broader scale, the dispute between contrary principles articulates the antagonistic tendencies in the individual, which are constantly fighting.65 There the fictional representations of good and evil function as interchangeable metaphors for the many dichotomies that define human nature, whether in the conflict
between individuality and conformity, inside and outside, normal and abnormal (Batman Returns, 1992) or the fight between order and chaos, justice and vengeance, rule and exception (The Dark Knight, 2008). What image could be more suitable, then, to illustrate these antagonisms than the shadowy figure of Batman, the very representation of duality itself? His whole nature as Batman, as semi-entity, symbolizes the permeability of boundaries as he unites hero and villain, light and darkness, man and beast, idea and matter (see fig. 28). Among his clownish foes and circus counterparts, Batman is the true embodiment of the trickster archetype. He shifts between worlds, defies clear categories and signifies ambivalence. His multiplicity attracts artists like Burton and Nolan, who can express their individual vision through the versatility of his image.
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Filmography
Batman (tim Burton, Us 1989). Batman (tV series, Us 1966–1968). Batman & Robin (Joel schumacher, Us 1997). Batman Begins (Christopher Nolan, Us 2005). Batman Forever (Joel schumacher, Us 1995). Batman Returns (tim Burton, Us 1992). Cat People (Jacques tourneur, Us 1942). Das Kabinet des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, robert Wiene, De 1920).
Shadows of the Bat | 103 www.jrfm.eu 2017, 3/1, 75–104
Dracula (tod Browning, Us 1931). Frankenstein (James Whale, Us 1931). Hellboy (Guillermo del toro, Us 2004). Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (Nosferatu – A Symphony of Horror, friedrich Wilhelm
Murnau, De 1922). The Bat Whispers (roland West, Us 1930). The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, Us 2008). The Dark Knight Rises (Christopher Nolan, Us 2012). The Man Who Laughs (Paul Leni, Us 1928). The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (John ford, Us 1962). Unbreakable (M. Night shyamalan, Us 2000).
Notes
1 The Dark Knight (2008), 02:08:31–02:08:35.
2 Reynolds 2011.
3 DiPaolo 2011, 5.
4 Gray ii/Kaklamanidou 2011, 3.
5 Reynolds 1992, 51.
6 Lyotard 1997, xxiv–xxv.
7 Schlegel/Habermann 2011, 31.
8 Uricchio/Pearson 1991, 186.
9 Brooker 2012, 79–83.
10 Levitz 2015, 15.
11 Boichel 1991, 6.
12 Danesi 2016, 19.
13 see Vogler 2007, 23–80.
14 Campbell/Moyers 1988, 151.
15 Regalado 2015, 120.
16 Langley 2012, 170–171.
17 Regalado 2015, 122.
18 Langley 2012, 268.
19 Moore 2008, 42.
20 Batman (1989), 01:50:50–01:50:52.
21 The Dark Knight (2008), 01:24:32–01:24:34.
22 Brooker 2012, 138.
23 Coogan 2006, 105.
24 Batman Returns (1992), 00:42:13–00:42:17. The line is an obvious reference to Helen Reddy’s hymn of the women’s right movement from 1972: “I am woman. hear me roar!” See Heger 2010, 200.
25 See Dotyingham 2004.
26 See Mulvey 1999.
27 Heger 2010, 174.
28 Batman Returns (1992), 01:32:21–01:32:23.
29 Batman Returns (1992), 01:34:01–01:34:03.
30 Merschmann 2000, 64–65.
31 Reinhart 2005, 175–176.
32 Salisbury 2006, 103.
33 See Norden 2007.
34 Batman Begins (2005), 02:04:50–02:05:04.
35 McGowan 2012, 135.
36 Fischer-Lichte 1995, 88.
37 DiPaolo 2011, 59.
38 regalado 2015, 227.
39 Muller 2011, 58.
40 The Dark Knight (2008), 01:26:32–01:26:39.
41 McGowan 2012, 130.
42 The Dark Knight (2008), 00:29:27–00:29:30.
43 Bakhtin 1984, 8.
44 Bakhtin 1984, 317.
45 See Balázs 2011.
46 The Dark Knight (2008), 00:43:27–00:43:31.
47 The Dark Knight (2008), 00:20:01–00:20:05.
48 The Dark Knight (2008), 00:13:50–00:13:51.
49 The Dark Knight (2008), 02:12:30–02:12:40.
50 The Dark Knight (2008), 02:17:03–02:17:09.
51 Gaine 2011, 128.
52 Schlegel/Habermann 2011, 35.
53 See Coyle 2009, xiv.
54 See Fiebig-Von Hase 1997, 1–40.
55 Bush 2002.
56 See Wagner 2009, 31.
57 Hanke 2007, 95.
58 See Worland 1997.
59 Seeßlen/Jung 2006, 127.
60 McGowan 2012, 141.
61 Brooker 2012, 204–207.
62 Klavan 2008.
63 ip 2011, 229.
64 Brooker 2012, 207.
65 See Hickethier 2008, 238.
____________________
Simon Born studied Media Dramaturgy at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany, and is currently working on his doctoral thesis at the University of Siegen. This essay was originally published in the Journal for Religion, Film and Media.
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