Batman is the ultimate right-wing power fantasy. A Billionaire who beats up poor people on the streets because the law/government is too corrupt/weak/incompetent to deal with anything. What had you conflicted about this?
Most or at least many Batman fans have a love-hate relationship with TDKR. Not that it disproves your point. I think its an enjoyable story but its outdated and has some really shitty aspects to it.
I don’t think the classical archetypical Batman is inherently right-wing, or should be considered right-wing. I grew up with multiple incarnations of Batman, and I find that those who claim Batman is “just” a billionaire who beats up poor people to be misunderstanding the crucial context and nuance, not arguing in good faith or missing the forest for the trees, even if I don’t completely disagree with their arguments.
Many of Batman’s villains themselves are/were capitalists, bourgeoisie or their enforcers and bootlickers and agents of them, namely Penguin, Simon Stagg that themselves treat the working class and poorer people as garbage and relentlessly exploit, manipulate or abuse them.
And while many of Batman’s villains have extremely sorrowful mental issues, most of them are of the disgusting and vile and sadistically cruel mindset of “if I can’t be happy, no one else can!” or “everything sucks, so I should be able to kill people!” and are straight up no-exaggeration irredeemable monsters, like Riddler, Mad Hatter, Joker, Calendar Man, Professor Pyg, Hush, Victor Zsasz.
For every working-class villain that’s screwed over by capitalists like Mister Freeze, there are villains like Firefly.
Of course being a billionaire is disgusting and irresponsible, but those who criticize Batman for this don’t have any real solutions, and just seem to be complaining for the sake of it. Is Batman supposed to give away billions of dollars to various aid organizations to feed, house and clothe the entire Gotham population? Is he supposed to become a revolutionary communist that tries to insert himself into the general population to overthrow the Gotham government so that way when Gotham becomes socialist, they can be invaded by the trillion-dollar U.S. military and their puppets?
In real-life, it costs billions of dollars a week for a city to operate in even just a week, and I don’t see Batman ushering in a national communist revolution anytime soon.
There is plenty of criticism to be made of Batman and superheroes, but it always annoys me when the criticism is the same old surface level “rich white billionaire beats up poor people because he’s sad and nuts”
It seems we are approaching the situation from two different perspectives, you seem to be asking how within the fictional setting, a Billionaire character could go about making positive impacts to combat supervillains, and within his own constraints, perhaps he is doing all he can. But I am talking about the very concept of Batman as a literary work of fiction.
The authors chose to write their stories from the perspective of a Billionaire, they chose to write their villains and create this setting where the most idealized reactionary vision of individual excellence can be portrayed. The core of the issue with Batman stories is how they build the world around him in order to justify his actions. The villains in Batman are always irredeemable, and are repeatedly sent to prison or asylums only for them to break out again and cause problems, pushing the reactionary idea that there is no such thing as rehabilitation for those who have done wrong. The government and authorities in Gotham are meant to look pathetically corrupt and incompetent, not because of the inherent trend of the capitalist system to prevent it, but because they’re all devoid of agency and submissive to organized crime, which is absolutely not how police corruption works in the real world, police are not weak, they are overwhelmingly powerful, and that is where their corruption arises, this is another blatantly reactionary view.
And to top it all off, there is the one single aspect of Batman that stands out to me over all the rest, and that is his technological superiority, which never goes questioned. The idea of a supercomputer database which knows everything about what happens in a city through the control of mass surveillance is the stuff of horror for most people. But only should it fall into the wrong hands, most reactionaries will cry out in horror at the thought of mass surveillance if the “wrong” government is the one doing it. But in the stories, Batman has this very technology all to himself, and its shown as a good thing, because he’s the enlightened, incorruptible individual who deserves to wield this power. I think even in the dark knight films they touch upon this, and it makes you wonder, why does Batman keep all this to himself? Its because he is placed in a world where only he knows best, and everyone else cannot be trusted. When you think about that, its hard to not see it as the peak of right wing fantasy.
I agree with your points, I think you’re right in that I was speaking from more of an in-universe perspective, but I feel that admitting its from an in-universe perspective is unfair to a piece of fiction. I do tend to prefer Watsonian explanations over Doylist ones.
I have the same question but about batman
Batman is the ultimate right-wing power fantasy. A Billionaire who beats up poor people on the streets because the law/government is too corrupt/weak/incompetent to deal with anything. What had you conflicted about this?
There’s a lot of varients of batman from movies and comics, so there’s the more obvious than the other
This is from Dark Knight Returns, which is probably the exemplary work for Batman’s political message.
Most or at least many Batman fans have a love-hate relationship with TDKR. Not that it disproves your point. I think its an enjoyable story but its outdated and has some really shitty aspects to it.
I think a lot of Frank Miller’s subsequent work, and the whole “dark age of comics” that TDKR spawned has soured people on the original.
A technical question, off-topic, I am viewing this in Jerboa on my phone, how do I expand the image to read the text?
I don’t think the classical archetypical Batman is inherently right-wing, or should be considered right-wing. I grew up with multiple incarnations of Batman, and I find that those who claim Batman is “just” a billionaire who beats up poor people to be misunderstanding the crucial context and nuance, not arguing in good faith or missing the forest for the trees, even if I don’t completely disagree with their arguments.
Many of Batman’s villains themselves are/were capitalists, bourgeoisie or their enforcers and bootlickers and agents of them, namely Penguin, Simon Stagg that themselves treat the working class and poorer people as garbage and relentlessly exploit, manipulate or abuse them.
And while many of Batman’s villains have extremely sorrowful mental issues, most of them are of the disgusting and vile and sadistically cruel mindset of “if I can’t be happy, no one else can!” or “everything sucks, so I should be able to kill people!” and are straight up no-exaggeration irredeemable monsters, like Riddler, Mad Hatter, Joker, Calendar Man, Professor Pyg, Hush, Victor Zsasz.
For every working-class villain that’s screwed over by capitalists like Mister Freeze, there are villains like Firefly.
Of course being a billionaire is disgusting and irresponsible, but those who criticize Batman for this don’t have any real solutions, and just seem to be complaining for the sake of it. Is Batman supposed to give away billions of dollars to various aid organizations to feed, house and clothe the entire Gotham population? Is he supposed to become a revolutionary communist that tries to insert himself into the general population to overthrow the Gotham government so that way when Gotham becomes socialist, they can be invaded by the trillion-dollar U.S. military and their puppets?
In real-life, it costs billions of dollars a week for a city to operate in even just a week, and I don’t see Batman ushering in a national communist revolution anytime soon.
There is plenty of criticism to be made of Batman and superheroes, but it always annoys me when the criticism is the same old surface level “rich white billionaire beats up poor people because he’s sad and nuts”
It seems we are approaching the situation from two different perspectives, you seem to be asking how within the fictional setting, a Billionaire character could go about making positive impacts to combat supervillains, and within his own constraints, perhaps he is doing all he can. But I am talking about the very concept of Batman as a literary work of fiction.
The authors chose to write their stories from the perspective of a Billionaire, they chose to write their villains and create this setting where the most idealized reactionary vision of individual excellence can be portrayed. The core of the issue with Batman stories is how they build the world around him in order to justify his actions. The villains in Batman are always irredeemable, and are repeatedly sent to prison or asylums only for them to break out again and cause problems, pushing the reactionary idea that there is no such thing as rehabilitation for those who have done wrong. The government and authorities in Gotham are meant to look pathetically corrupt and incompetent, not because of the inherent trend of the capitalist system to prevent it, but because they’re all devoid of agency and submissive to organized crime, which is absolutely not how police corruption works in the real world, police are not weak, they are overwhelmingly powerful, and that is where their corruption arises, this is another blatantly reactionary view.
And to top it all off, there is the one single aspect of Batman that stands out to me over all the rest, and that is his technological superiority, which never goes questioned. The idea of a supercomputer database which knows everything about what happens in a city through the control of mass surveillance is the stuff of horror for most people. But only should it fall into the wrong hands, most reactionaries will cry out in horror at the thought of mass surveillance if the “wrong” government is the one doing it. But in the stories, Batman has this very technology all to himself, and its shown as a good thing, because he’s the enlightened, incorruptible individual who deserves to wield this power. I think even in the dark knight films they touch upon this, and it makes you wonder, why does Batman keep all this to himself? Its because he is placed in a world where only he knows best, and everyone else cannot be trusted. When you think about that, its hard to not see it as the peak of right wing fantasy.
I agree with your points, I think you’re right in that I was speaking from more of an in-universe perspective, but I feel that admitting its from an in-universe perspective is unfair to a piece of fiction. I do tend to prefer Watsonian explanations over Doylist ones.
To each their own, interesting idea to discuss regardless.
David Graeber wrote this about the last movie in Nolan’s Batman trilogy: https://thenewinquiry.com/super-position/