Batman’s tragedy, memory, and continuity
First published in Refractory: Journal of Entertainment Media | Volume 32 June 2019
Bruce Wayne’s parents have been shot and killed.
In fact, they have been shot and killed so often that the LA Times ran a feature ranking their cinematic and televisual deaths (Fischer); and yet that does not account for all the times their final moments have been depicted in DC Comics’ pages. “Lost parents” is one of the features that defines the superhero (Reynolds 12), and one would expect that after decades of comics, movies, games and TV shows, Batman’s origin is well enough known
His stories, however, cannot help but return to the death of Martha and Thomas Wayne. Why do we need to see this moment, again, and again, and again? Exploring this obsession with Batman’s traumatic origins means unpicking the complicated logic of comic book continuity and its tug-of-war between remembering and forgetfulness. As this article will articulate, Batman’s memory seems transfigured by the shift from the hazy, repetitive, and dreamlike nature of Umberto Eco’s “oneiric climate”, to the “hyperconscious” storytelling style in which every narrative is set in stone. However, the slippery nature of continuity complicates a strict division between moments forever fixed in memory and moments lost to inescapable amnesia.
Batman famously first appeared in Detective Comics #27 (Bob Kane et al 1939), but his origin was not revealed until months later in #33 (1939). Here, “WHO HE IS AND HOW HE CAME TO BE” is spelled out over two pages: the death of his parents; his oath to fight crime; his training and preparation; and finally the bat coming through his window to inspire him. Film scholar Federico Pagello suggests that “the origin story of superhero fiction is not simply placed in an irrecoverable past; on the contrary, it is revived again and again in order to underscore its mythical status, reinforce the stability of an otherwise chaotic diegetic universe, and, oddly enough, to present the origin as perennially new” (729). Batman’s origin is his “engine”, according to DC editor Denny O’Neil, for all the stories that follow (Pearson & Uricchio 26). Batman may have only been truly “haunted” by the death of his parents since the 1970s (Bukatman 122) but tragedy was always there, present in his narrative engine.
This constant revival of Batman’s origin ensures the trauma of his parent’s death can never fade. In her studies of trauma narratives, Cathy Caruth describes Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder as a phenomenon “in which the overwhelming events of the past repeatedly possess, in intrusive images and thoughts, the one who has lived through them” (Caruth, “2: Introduction” 151). A 2002 promotional issue of Batman, meant to hook new readers by harking back to the days when comics were just ten cents each, begins with the narration: “His life is a story of tragedies…”; the fact that Batman’s mission will not ever succeed is a “common motif” in his stories (Walker 42). The issue continues: “Starting in that moment when young Bruce Wayne saw his parents gunned down before his eyes […] a moment he lives again every night” (Batman: The 10 Cent Adventure, Greg Rucka & Rick Burchett).
“The lonely son”: Trauma as Superpower
A traumatic event, then, results in “a psychic and temporal coexistence between the unwanted and unexpected return of the event in the dreams, hallucinations, flashbacks, etc. of the individual in the ‘present’” (Bliss 5). Separate to Batman’s conscious memories of his parents’ deaths, the iconography of his origins recur again and again in his adventures. A full moon becomes one of Martha Wayne’s falling pearls in Batman: Death and the Maidens (Greg Rucka & Klaus Janson 2003); a Rorschach test becomes a hideous bat in Arkham Asylum (Grant Morrison & Dave McKean 1989). When he sees Alfred stabbed in front of him in Detective Comics #815 (Shane McCarthy & Cliff Chiang 2006), Bruce Wayne’s response is “And just like that… I’m eight years old again.” Comic book scholar Cody Walker suggests there are two aspects to Bruce Wayne’s identity: the “lonely son” and Batman (9). But these two aspects are only one. Batman is always the lonely son, albeit dressed in a cape and cowl.
Batman’s mission to protect Gotham City is another kind of remembering. Caruth points out Freud’s wonder at the “sort of fate” that forced the traumatised individual to repeat catastrophic events, “entirely outside their wish or control” (Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History 1–2). Batman, however, does not believe in fate. His crusade is a wilful reenactment of his most traumatic moment: each criminal he stops stands in for the one who killed his parents, years before. Spider-Man’s regular attempts to quit being a superhero, before inevitably donning his costume again, are perhaps like “an alcoholic returning to the bottle” (Saunders 79). Batman does not often threaten to retire, but his burning need to fight crime each night has the same compulsive drive, as it gives him the opportunity to recreate Bruce Wayne’s origin moment, then to allow the adult Batman to save the day.
The opening of Tim Burton’s blockbuster 1989 movie Batman riffs on the significance of this traumatic origin moment: we see a couple and their son leaving a theatre and encountering a violent mugger, and are led to believe that this is the Waynes. However, it turns out that this opening is set in present day Gotham when Bruce Wayne has already become Batman. The film later does return to images of Bruce and his dead parents through the journalistic investigations of Vicki Vale and Alexander Knox – “What do you suppose something like this does to a kid?”, Knox asks – and a flashback to the night in question brought on by Bruce examining a scrapbook of newspaper clippings. Such self reflexive emphasis on this origin moment is not unusual for Batman stories. Richard Reynolds writes that “[e]very Batman story is to some extent an extension of the origin story, as Batman’s motivation is wholly derived from the trauma of witnessing his parents shot in cold blood” (67). All this ensures that Batman cannot get better, cannot get therapy, without losing access to his heroic abilities. To fully integrate and deal with memories of trauma for the “sake of cure” means “los[ing] both the precision and the force that characterises traumatic recall” (Caruth, “2: Introduction” 153). Precision and force are precisely the tools Batman requires to fight crime. In short, it is grief that remains Batman’s true superpower.
When writer Grant Morrison took over the Batman title in 2006, interviews claimed he was interested in reclaiming Bruce Wayne’s happiness. “Personally, I wanted to see a psychologically ‘healthier’ Batman,” Morrison said, adding that “[i]t seemed like the right moment to step in and start gluing him back together again” (Singer, Grant Morrison: Combining the Worlds of Contemporary Comics 268). This project, however, was deemed a failure: his Batman run was “unable to overwrite the grim, violent, borderline insane Batman of the revisionist years” (Singer, Grant Morrison: Combining the Worlds of Contemporary Comics 275). More successful was Morrison’s desire to “treat the entire publishing history of Batman as the events in one man’s extraordinarily vivid life”, imagining “a rough timeline that allows me to compress 70 years’ worth of Batman’s adventures into a frantic 15 years in the life of an extraordinary man” (Singer, Grant Morrison: Combining the Worlds of Contemporary Comics 268).