Reborn of Crisis

9/11 and the Resurgent Superhero

Annika Hagley, Michael Harrison

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429885150
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book examines the dominant popular culture convention of the superhero, situated within the most significant global event of the last 20 years. Exploring the explosion of the superhero genre post-9/11, it sheds fresh light on the manner in which American society has processed and continues to process the trauma from the terrorist attacks. Beginning with the development of Batman in comics, television, and film, the authors offer studies of popular films including Iron Man, Captain America, The X-Men, Black Panther, and Wonder Woman, revealing the ways in which these texts meditate upon the events and aftermath of 9/11 and challenge the dominant hyper-patriotic narrative that emerged in response to the attacks. A study of the superhero genre's capacity to unpack complex global interplays that question America's foreign policy actions and the white, militarized masculinity that has characterized major discourses following 9/11, this volume explores the engagement of superhero films with issues of authority, patriotism, war, morals, race, gender, surveillance, the military industrial complex, and American political and social identities. As such, it will appeal to scholars and students of cultural and media studies, film studies, sociology, politics, and American studies.

1
The demons that haunt us

Christopher Nolan’s Batman and the faces of evil

Introduce a little anarchy.

Upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos.

The Joker, The Dark Knight

Before Christopher Nolan got his hands on what is likely one of the most lucrative superhero film franchises ever, the wider world was familiar with a different type of “Caped Crusader”. Outside of the character’s comic book adventures, which had begun in 1939 in Detective Comics #27, the average American likely knew of the character from one of two very distinct live action incarnations, that of Adam West in the 1960’s camp-fest Batman television show and/or the successful film franchise (1989–1997) hallmarked by the stylistic design of director and producer Tim Burton.

Adam West was, of course, the first Batman with widespread appeal, and his crime fighting was marked by a definite frame of reference, which relied heavily upon colorful comic book art. Scenes of violence were overdubbed with comic style “pows” and “whooshes,” making the series appropriate for the millions of children and adults that tuned in for their weekly fix of campy violence and morally black and white tales.

This type of representation of Batman continued in the initial Hollywood versions starring Michael Keaton, Val Kilmer, and George Clooney, where Batman became more brooding than in the television series but still faced an onslaught of capers from “overly cartoonish, preposterous and exaggerated” (Booker, 2007, p. 25) supervillains whose motivations were sinister but whose actions were presented within the traditional comic villain framework and where the films often, in the words of critic Roger Ebert, favored “style over substance”(Booker, 2007, p. 20). The premiere of the darker Batman in the 1989 film and its immediate sequel was, even in its stylized “darkness,” too dark for audiences of the time in the minds of producers and filmmakers, and by 1995, the franchise had become much more frivolous and light, because Batman’s darkness “threatened to make him an unattractive figure, virtually indistinguishable from the criminals he so despised” (Booker, 2007, p. 21).

In the 1990s, Joel Schumacher was only able to steer the films in a lighter direction because the concept of the superhero was immutable at the time. After 50 years of presence in popular media, he saw that too much darkness for Batman would likely result in audiences shying away from the character, due to a sharp deviation from the superhero ethos that audiences at the time associated with superheroes. The director overcorrected, arguably, resulting in a colorful, campy farce, but his intentions appear to be based on the idea that, pre-9/11, superheroes in popular media were expected to inhabit a specific moral and ethical discursive space and could not be accused of straying too close to the “dark side.”

Under Nolan’s influence, however, Christian Bale’s incarnation of Batman resurrected the franchise, making Batman melancholy, crippled by inertia and only possessing a vague sense of what his duties should be. These films pitted him against truly dark villains who sought much more intangible rewards and outcomes than the one-note villains in the previous movies.¹ The Nolan villains are, indeed, terrifying and deranged, but what is perhaps more frightening for an audience that has traditionally been absolutely sure who is good and who is evil is that Nolan’s villains exist in a liminal space between good and evil. They are driven by a need to destroy, but this drive is linked to philosophies and behaviors that raise interesting and significant questions about human nature and psychology, most especially when tied to the psychological trauma suffered after the attacks of 9/11.

The immediate long-term psychological trauma that the events of 9/11 inflicted upon audiences all over the world can be understood as one of the explanations for the swing toward a darker, more hyper realistic portrayal of good and evil in post 9/11 superhero movies in general, and in some ways, the realism may help process the trauma through cathartic reenactments. In others, it could be explained by a pervasive sense of helplessness against terrorist acts making their way to the screen in these big budget films. As Shaun Treat (2009) has said in his study of this phenomenon,

It seems hardly coincidental that superheroes flourish during traumatizing wars abroad and an economic crisis inherited from Gilded Age corporate corruption at home, but a post-9/11 superhero zeitgeist? Since 2001, more comics-based superhero movies have been released than in all the prior years combined, doubling their domestic box-office average ($3 billion conservatively) with “darker” superhero franchises ahead.

(p. 105)

What is indisputable is that the popularity of the superhero post 9/11 in general and of Batman in particular reached new, dizzying heights and launched a series of films that have become deeply pervasive allegories of post 9/11 political and social realities. As the world takes an even more frightening turn toward utter totalitarianism in the Middle East and as Western democracies are faced with an enemy they, seemingly, do not know how to engage, the potential for superhero movies to continue to dig even deeper into the complexity of evil and terror is even more pronounced.

The Nolan Batman films trace the inception and development of Batman as a distinct hero from the others studied in this volume. The character has no superpowers, but is built out of darkness, revenge, and fear, which provides the filmmakers with a number of rich opportunities to explore these abstract concepts in a concrete superhero format. It is not only the character of Batman and his quest for justice that make these films an engaging part of the post 9/11 superhero landscape, however, but also the interactions Batman has with the various villains he faces that provide the richest commentary about the nature of evil and the threat of terrorism in the 21st century. The trauma of 9/11 on the broader cultural consciousness can be seen reflected in Nolan’s Batman trilogy in its highlighting of fear, trauma, and the threat of uncontrolled terrorism. As Andrew Pulver has pointed out,

Superheroes fill a gap in the pop culture psyche, similar to the role of Greek mythology. There isn’t really anything else that does the job in modern times. For me, Batman is the one that can most clearly be taken seriously. He’s not from another planet or filled with radioactive gunk. I mean, Superman is essentially a god, but Batman is more like Hercules: he’s a human being, very flawed, and bridges the divide.

(Pulver, 2005)

The representation of the origins of the Dark Knight Detective and his interaction with his gallery of villains provides a fascinating reflection upon the evolving societal notion of evil and the innumerable and complicated fears that have arisen and consequently have been explored by Hollywood at a time when the nation of “evil” became multifaceted, problematic, and difficult to understand. Nolan’s trilogy refashions the big screen Batman, opening the character up for representation of exploration of the psychology of fear, societal interaction with terrorism, and contemporary inequities of the modern economic class struggle through the exploration of the superhero character himself as an avatar for the American psyche reacting to the tragedy of the 9/11 terror attacks, as well as through the villains themselves as representative of the different facets of the new “evil” faced in the post 9/11 world.

Inner demons – fear and the making and practice of Batman

In a sometimes very crowded field of superpowered aliens, gods, and magical beings, the character of Batman has always been somewhat of an outlier, both in his lack of extraordinary powers and in his mythic, shadow status in his world. Because he has no powers, “Batman has always been a much more human figure than Superman,” for example, and it is that humanity that has made the character so attractive to audiences for the last 80 years (Booker, 2007, p. 18). While the Man of Steel can inspire power fantasies among audiences and musings about what they might do with near limitless power, the humanity of Batman has always made him more accessible to identification. The birth of fan culture and the rise of the comic book “nerd” in popular culture, then, opens up even more of a space for identification with superhero characters, which serves to further deepen the draw of a character like Batman. For example, Glen Weldon points to late 90s/early 2000s participatory culture (such as the creation of fan fiction and cosplay) to show

a sincere desire for participatory engagement, a wish to enter the story and forge a persona, intimate, and emotional connection to the character. Far more personal, more intimate, and more emotional, these cosplayers believe, than is achieved by passively consuming the story.

(Weldon, 2016, p. 233)

This type of engagement brings the development of the Batman character into the more personal sphere of the audience. In these films, audiences aren’t just hoping for Batman to defeat the villain and save the day. They identify with him. In essence, the participatory nature of fan culture at the time of the release of these films results in identification. They are Batman.² This personalization may be the distinction that makes the Nolan Batman films most symbolically significant post 9/11. If viewers are more participatory in nature, then the stories take on power to represent real preoccupations and fears. Fear itself, then – and the struggle to conquer and reclaim it – become central themes of the Nolan trilogy.

Fear is prolific in the post 9/11 landscape, and in Batman, audiences can watch one man, a victim of evil/crime, use his fear to become mythic and heroic, allowing them to imagine the same in themselves. In these films, Batman is not only a force to fight villains and save the day but is carefully constructed to highlight his own journey through fear and his escape and reclaiming of it. In the development of the character on screen in Batman Begins, screen time early on is dedicated to Bruce Wayne’s life before Batman, and by seeing Bruce’s struggle to deal with his own trauma and victimhood, the audience in turn cares more about the character.³ By privileging his origin story, audiences are presented with a much deeper look into the psyche of one man’s struggle to build an identity and a purpose built from the shattered pieces of his life, and this focus on his origin story at the beginning of the trilogy “explicitly link(s) the hero to his trauma in order to understand the trauma as part of the hero”(Horton, 2016, p. 76).

Although the originating trauma that sets Bruce Wayne’s life on a course that will eventually lead to the creation of the Batman is fairly consistent throughout all iterations of the character, Nolan chooses to explicitly link fear to the hero’s origin in a way that had theretofore not been done. Early on in Batman Begins, Bruce flashes back to an early childhood memory where he falls down a well full of bats, needing to be saved by his father and cementing a fear of bats in the impressionable young Wayne. Upon being saved, his father says “don’t be afraid,” setting up an initial symbolic connection between the bats, fear, and Bruce’s father Thomas Wayne. Later, Nolan reframes a familiar scene in the Batman mythos, when instead of the adult Waynes being murdered after seeing a movie, the family instead is implored to leave an opera featuring grotesque bat costumes in the middle of the performance because young Bruce is too scared to keep watching. When this fear results in the mugging and death of his parents, Bruce’s fear is solidified, and, now interwoven with guilt, this trauma and a lack of purpose and direction will eventually lead him on the vision quest to seek guidance, which will be the creation of the Batman.

Once Bruce is able to train with the League of Shadows, he learns that fear is a weakness to be mastered, but Bruce does not just master the fear that has consumed him and that he views as part of the cause of his parents’ death. Instead, he goes one step further and decides instead to practice “conquering fear by becoming fear” (Wainer, 2014, p. 143). He fashions a shadow persona that utilizes the tools that he learned under the League’s tutelage. In one of the earliest Batman comics stories, Bruce Wayne similarly plots to terrorize villains, saying “Criminals are a superstitious cowardly lot, so my disguise must be able to strike terror into their hearts.”⁴ What distinguishes the comic book origin story from Nolan’s filmic one, however, is that Bruce channels the fear that he himself holds deep in his psyche and that he latches on to when partly blaming himself for his parents’ death into the heroic persona of the Batman. Instead of being just a tool to terrorize criminals, in Batman Begins the persona of the bat is almost a form of psychotherapy. Bruce Wayne wields his own fear as a weapon, immunizing himself against it while he seeks vengeance against evil. This one symbolic difference that distinguishes Nolan’s from the numerous other representations of the Batman origin story in various media is significant, due to its ties to the cultural trauma pervading US culture in the aftermath of 9/11. Owen Horton, for example, examines Nolan’s choice to inject Bruce’s fear as part of his origin and part of his heroic mission as explicitly tied to the post 9/11 landscape. He says, “This initiation and reconfiguration of values mirrors the experience of Americans after 9/11 and during the buildup to the Iraq War, as the Bush administration attempted to redirect feelings of vulnerability into aggressive responses” (Horton, 2016, p. 80).

Another aspect of the Batman origin story as presented in Batman Begins that distinguishes it from the others that came before it is the presence of the figure of Thomas Wayne. In previous iterations, the deaths of Thomas and Martha Wayne most definitely figure into the birth of the superhero, but the focus is most often on their death itself, traumatic, by a thief, in the middle of the seedy streets of Gotham City, that is the most ever-present image, and that act does similarly play a featured role in Nolan’s origin story. However, Nolan goes one step further and includes a number of scenes that establish Thomas Wayne and his interactions with his son and with his city that tie this film to the preoccupations of the US post 9/11.

In flashback scenes and in scenes in which people discuss Thomas Wayne’s legacy, he is presented as a model citizen who sought to use his wealth to improve life for all Gothamites. Wayne is a doctor, and the film ties medical imagery of Dr. Wayne with his young son, with stories of how he spent his family wealth and his own time and efforts to “heal” a sick city.⁵ Thomas is Bruce’s model of beneficence, and although he does so with very different techniques, he shares his father’s love for his city and his desire to “cure” it of its ills. This reflection of a previous, more optimistic and less jaded, generation and its failure to achieve its goals in part due to that optimism can be understood within the rhetorical framework established earlier as representative of the generational dichotomy before and after the 9/11 attacks. The world in which a member of the Wayne family attempted to make choices that would put Gotham back on track, when viewed through the hindsight of his traumatized son, is similar to the cultural viewpoint of US culture after being attacked. The methods and perspectives of the past would no longer be sufficient, and, as a culture, Americans began to question the ways and policies of previous generations.

The flaws of the policies and perspectives of a previous generation being viewed as potentially to blame for the darkness that came afterward is further emphasized when Ducard tells Bruce during training that his father was in part to blame for his death and that of his wife, because he was afraid to act. Instead of allowing an idyllic, perfect idea of who his father was to remain in Bruce’s psyche, Ducard attempts to plant seeds of doubt as to the character and fortitude of Thomas Wayne. As one of the archetypal victims in the Batman mythos, by injecting this new perspective as to Thomas’s partial culpability in his own death, questions are raised about where one might place blame as the victim of a traumatic act. By framing Thomas Wayne not only as a victim but also as culpable for not acting, this problematizes the idea of pure victimhood. As a culture after the 9/11 attacks, Americans were faced with victimhood for the first time on a large scope, and much of the discourse ignored any culpability that US foreign policy might have played in inspiring the attacks. Here, invoking Thomas Wayne as partly to blame simultaneously positions him as one who should have done more (should the US have been more aggressive?) and also as a mirror for what might have inspired the attack in the first place.

Once Bruce decides to harness his grief and trauma, he begins his journey to get heroic v...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The demons that haunt us: Christopher Nolan’s Batman and the faces of evil
• 2 The high price of freedom: Captain America
• 3 We create our own demons: Iron Man
• 4 Post 9/11 and the reappearing women: Wonder Woman
• 5 A miracle of counter resistance: post 9/11 racial narratives in Black Panther
• 6 The marginalized “other”: mutant identities in the X-Men films
• Conclusion
• Index