A New, Old, Batman
The texts that help understand this latest iteration of the Batman on screen comes from two sources, the work of writer-artist Frank Miller in The Dark Knight Returns (1986) and David Savran’s “The Sadomasochist in the Closet: White Masculinity and the Culture of Victimization”. Miller’s Return was a groundbreaking mini-series in 1986, which saw the Dark Knight coming out retirement in his fifties to deal with the dystopian state of Gotham City, in a satire of Regan era Cold War anxiety. The comic featured a darker, mentally unhinged, brutalist Batman, who gloated about the surgical sadism he inflicted on his prey. The film takes visual inspiration from this rendition of Batman with the “fat” Bat symbol and his size, Miller rendered Batman as humongous tank who stood apart from the normal people of Gotham City, and the brutality. In “Sadomasochist in the Closet” Savran goes on critical survey of various media texts, fiction and non-fiction, that marks the development of a dominant strand of masculine identity in contemporary society, white male victimhood, which oriented itself around Freudian reflexive sadomasochism. This complex was personified in the male leads of films like First Blood, The Right Stuff, and Falling. This version of Batman fits right in with them.
This complex, Savran postulates, was a response to the various material changes in American society from the civil rights movements, failure of the Vietnam War, and various economic downturns after the end of the post-WW2 economic high. So, to dose this Batman respond to material changes in his environment, the presence of Superman. This subjectivity is composed of opposed positionalities, allowing the subject to use the “reflexive position simultaneously to eroticize and disavows both domination and submission.”[1]. Occupying the roles as dominant and submissive simultaneously allows for Batman to feel powerful and powerless all at once. In the face of the destruction and power of Superman, a new masculine Other, is capable of he is emasculated by the Battle of Metropolis, unable to fully play the hero in the face of such chaos. Taking the role of victim legitimizes his quest to regain it through the destruction of Superman and hardening of his already brutalized body. At the same time his psyche cannot suffer this lack and so he must continually prove his masculinity causing him to flirt “recklessly with disaster, putting himself through the most trying ordeals, torturing himself to prove his masculinity,”[2] This flirtation pushes the film to and past the limits of traditional depictions of Batman. Unlike past filmic and other media representations, Batman v Superman shows without ambiguity Batman killing, breaking the characters “one rule”, in a manner that is not mediated by the filmic language and logic of action movies. Previous film adaptations showed Batman responsible for deaths but mediated through action movie logic or with gallows humor. In a movie preoccupied with questioning the necessity and overall effect superheroes have on the environment around them, there is no choice but to show the destruction associated with their extra-legal actions.
In acting on these sadomasochistic urges, there is the effect of bifurcating the ego into sadistic and masochistic halves, resulting in an internal war on the self. In his exploration of the character of John Rambo, Savran notes how this personifies itself between his sadistic, indomitable will, and its punishment of his masochistic flesh. Both aspects feeding off one another symbiotically. With the character of Bruce Wayne, as a superhero, his ego is already bifurcated between public facing billionaire playboy Bruce Wayne and the dark vengeful masked crusader Batman.
The film represents this internal struggle, wherein Bruce Wayne is the masochistic ego and Batman the sadist, symbolically via editing in a brief sequence and a series of dream sequences. This internal struggle makes up the arc of the character in the film as he struggles between his two selves before finally forsaking his sadomasochistic urges for a newer, different, path. Prior to the Luthor Party sequence, Bruce stares at his other self, the Batman costume. Originally, he planned to break into Luthor’s home as the vengeful Dark Knight until his butler talked him out of it, letting “Bruce Wayne” give it a go. The brief shot reverse shot sequence cuts between two opposing dolly shots of Bruce and the Suit each at differing angles. The Suit is given a low angle view. Bruce is given the reverse, a high angle view. With each cut the Suit gets larger, more dominant, in the frame and Bruce shrinking before it. The sadist imposing its will on the masochistic self.
