Superheroes and Being Human

ME AND BATMAN AND YOU

AUSTIN GROSSMAN

This is a song about how sometimes you find yourself living in a house where you think "I have to get out of here" but maybe you're too young to get out of there, or you don't have any money, or you don't have any means or anywhere to go, and yet you cling firmly to the idea that someday you will escape, through some means, maybe Batman will show up in his car outside or something. And like other people might laugh and say, "Man, John, Batman's not coming to save you." And you think, "Look man, between me and Batman and you, I'll take Batman."

— John Darnielle

I.

I'll take Batman. Golden Age Batman or campy Silver Age or grim Batman or the aging Dark Knight or even Batman 2099. I'll take whoever chooses to answer the Bat-Signal on a given rainy night.

I'll take him for all sorts of reasons. Because he's a weird superhero. No powers, just his self-discipline and talent and personal hang-ups. Part vicious vigilante, part neurotic warrior saint. With his private cult of unrelenting mourning, he's the costumed patron of the walking wounded, of simply Not Getting Over It.

I'll take Batman because in the morning he makes such a point of getting up again as Bruce Wayne. He eases a tailored suit on over the bruises and eats his breakfast in bed and sallies forth into the world. He laughs lightly while cracked ribs twinge; makes witty, provocative conversation while counting the hours until sunset, feeling the anguish of knowing how many crimes are even then taking place. Friends wonder why he's always a little remote, why he always happens to know the phase of the moon and the likelihood of rain on a given night in Gotham. The scourge of crime plays it arrow straight; he freezes at the slightest danger of discovery, like a kid caught without a hall pass. Because he takes all of it a little too seriously, including — especially — the most absurd parts of it.

I've got questions for the man. Because really, Bruce, what's going on? Is everything okay? Why the night job, why the lifelong free-running fistfight in a Halloween suit? And, I know, I know, it's for your parents, it's for two dead people who really truly aren't coming back. It's just Batman's luck to be born into the doomful DC Universe where permadeath is the norm instead of Marvel's revolving-door afterlife, where Tom and Martha Wayne (or their good-as-new clones) would have shown up again on Tuesday next in time for cocktail hour. Sorry, Bruce. In DC's world, only Clark Kent comes back.

And while we're asking questions, we could always ask why, at my time of life, do I bank so hard on the possibility of intervention by a costumed vigilante rather than, say, a skilled accountant or psychiatrist?

And, most pressing of all, damn it: Is Batman coming to save me, or isn't he? Who's going to solve the disastrous supercrime scenario of my middle years, if not the World's Greatest Detective?

II.

If I'm calling Batman a neurotic, I don't mean to cast aspersions. Of course Batman is a mess. I'm a mess, too. Lots of us are messes. That's why we like Batman, the hero with something broken.

The thing is, not all of us have Bruce Wayne's excuse for falling off the path to middle-class normalcy. With him, it makes sense to have issues. Billionaire kid, parents gunned down on a moonlit night, who wouldn't have a few quirks? You can at least point to the problem. For the rest of us it takes a little more work.

Like plenty of Batman fans, I don't have quite such an obvious piece of melodrama to explain things. We had a nice house in a quiet safe suburb. Middle-class school, good marks, pleasant surroundings. College education, even. Parents totally not shot. So whatever went wrong in my life, well, that's a harder case to crack. The crime scene is immaculate. Witnesses never saw a thing.

Likewise, Batman's break with the regular college-bound achievement track was pretty easy to spot. In his teens, he ran away from his palatial suburban mansion on a quest to remake himself. He mastered physics, chemistry, engineering, forensic sciences. He roamed Asia and studied a dozen different martial disciplines.

If only we all had that great story, a Crime Alley that led us to our brooding midnight dysfunction. Instead, some of us get a wandering path. It looked like all systems were go, but then down the line there was a more subtle, creeping failure to launch. Wandering from job to job, relationship to relationship via a series of crappy little apartments, never decorated, boxes never unpacked. It's easy not to ask questions when you still think you're smart and successful, but you can go into your thirties to find no actual career or marriage has formed, and gradually suspect the wheels are coming right off the cart.

So what happened? Some say the perfect crime is the one that no one ever knows happened. No one sees anything wrong, not for years. All of a sudden you're in your late thirties and the bodies really start piling up and you look around to find the city of Gotham has become a very dark and terrifying place. Parents dead or alive, there are evidently lots of smaller, more ordinary ways for someone's life to end up broken.

By whose dire hand was this done? Surely no ordinary malefactor was at work here. Was this perhaps the work of the Riddler? Certainly the landscape was littered with lasting riddles. Why are things that are simple and obvious to other people — remaining in a job, for instance, or paying one's taxes correctly — mysterious or just about impossible to...