“Turns Pain into Hope”: Unhappy Endings and Romantic Tragedies

Batman ends Snyder’s Year Zero swinging out over the city, smiling grimly to himself. He’s just explained to Alfred that being Batman makes him happy. Is it “self-rescue” after all? Batman can take pleasure in being Batman, surrounded by the appropriate visual iconography; he just apparently cannot take pleasure in anything else without risking his superheroic status. Compare this to a moment in the animated movie Mask of the Phantasm (Eric Radomski & Bruce Timm, 1993): Bruce Wayne begging his dead parents to let him quit being Batman because “it just doesn’t hurt so bad anymore” and he “didn’t count on being happy…” Brief moments of peace are reserved for the ends of stories, not the beginnings. After Snyder and Capullo left the Batman title, promising a new, healthier Batman, there was another reboot, this time called “Rebirth”. Again, some elements were allowed to remain while others disappeared. In the story “I Am Suicide” (2016) – by Tom King and Mikel Janin – another wrinkle was added to Batman’s origin: that before he left Gotham to train as a vigilante, he tried to slit his wrists. Now he draws blood before swearing his oath. Later in the same run, the Joker attempts to stop the upcoming wedding of Batman and Catwoman, saying, “He can’t be happy. And also be Batman” (Batman #49 2018). When trauma remains a necessity for a superhero, characters like Batman will inevitably romanticise it (Bliss 81).

Scott Bukatman suggests that superhero movies fetishise trauma more than their comic book inspirations in order to give more weight to their weightless digital action (122). However, Christopher Nolan’s cinematic Batman trilogy allows Bruce Wayne to put aside his trauma and achieve a “happy ending”: a romantic retirement with Selina Kyle’s Catwoman. This may “sanitis[e] the trauma of Bruce’s loss” (Bliss 80); it is also an ending only available in a somewhat self-contained movie trilogy. In Batman #50 (Tom King et al 2018), it turns out Catwoman believes the Joker to be right: she calls off the wedding, saying Batman is a “hurt child”. The New York Times described her decision thus: “Their happiness, she speculates, would kill Batman, who rescues everyone and turns pain into hope” (Gustines). The Batman of the comics can have no ending, happy or otherwise. Every night, he dons his costume – and a hero’s costume is inextricably linked to their origin story (Reynolds 48). Every night, he goes out into Gotham and confronts death – and this “opens those old wounds anew” (Walker 53). Every night, he is haunted by the imagery of his origin trauma; still “possessed by a single image or event” (Caruth, “1: Introduction” 4–5). As The 10 Cent Adventure narrator tells us: Batman’s life is a story of tragedies. Perhaps the greatest of them is that no matter how he tries to forget, he’ll be forced to remember; no matter how he tries to remember, he’ll be forced to forget.

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