Holy Ancient Heresies, Batman!
- Oct 06, 2014
- By stlukesattic
- In Uncategorized
- 0 Comments
The Batman is joyous because he absolutely nailed that drawing! |
I am a Batman fan. And just so you know, I was a Batman fan before it was cool. In fact, I have five children and their names are Barbara, Bruce, Wayne, Alfred, Jim and the baby we are expecting will be named Selina. (Of course I’m joking; we plan to name her Rachel.)* Now that I have established my bonafides, let me clue you in to a problem I have had with The Batman and his myth. I have deep-seated fears that it may be a Manichean myth that has so captivated me.
What do I mean by Manichean? Ah, what a delicate question you have asked; one that, in the hands of a more careful expositor than I, would take many, many pages to explain. Even after this, you would likely be left scratching your head. So allow me to mix metaphors, cut to the chase and paint with a very broad brush; the Manicheans were a group of folks living circa the 5th century A.D. (You guessed it, they were a big splinter in the spiritual eye of St. Augustine during his youth.) Theirs was a gnostic cult that centered on the idea of dualism. For them, good and evil were separate and equal forces vying for control of the universe. So, to recap, we have a group of people who taught that the world was in a precarious balance between equally powerful forces of good and evil and that balance was always in danger of being upset.
Even Batman gets bored with his own drawings sometimes. |
So what in the world does any of this boring nonsense have to do with Batman? Let’s start with the big man himself, Bruce Wayne. Or do I mean Batman? It’s a fun middlebrow exercise to ponder which of these is the “mask” that hides the other. Does Bruce Wayne put on a Batman mask so he can protect his identity and continue to live as “normally” as possible while he carries out his self-imposed mission to rid the streets of Gotham of crime and corruption? Or is it that Bruce Wayne is merely the mask that Batman puts on in the daytime; the mask that provides cover for his obsession with nocturnal crime fighting? The comics are certainly not forthcoming on this and an argument for either position could be made using them. So it seems that Bruce/Batman is in an ever constant tension about his own true identity.
*I’m not really that much of a nut. My kids all have real, non-comic book based names.