The Batman, the Grand Appeaser: Repressive Desublimation, Foucault, and False Hope

The Batman (2022) fulfills complex, necessary roles in society. The intricate power relations of the film, as a part of mass media, are directly related to those in the spectacle of the scaffold of modern Europe. Foucault’s genealogy in Discipline and Punish can be used to elucidate the political aspect of the film’s outcome for audience and producers; and Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals illuminates the more psychological outcomes between audience and producers. The movie is fundamentally a project of appeasement for the audience’s political desires and repressive desublimation for the audience’s more animalistic desires – in support of the standing power systems.

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The Batman franchise’s on-screen growth in revenue, from Adam West’s gray-tight-sporting camp to Christopher Nolan’s billionaire macabre, parallels the growth of AT&T as a media conglomerate (the current owner of Turner Broadcasting System, CNN, Verizon, etc., etc., etc.). And although Warner Bros. (Batman’s owner) was recently divested from AT&T, “AT&T shareholders [are] to own approximately 71%”1 of the de jure separate company – showing that the divestment is not a separation from its mother company. Also, please note that the AT&T skyscraper in Nashville is locally called “The Batman Building.” In Discipline and Punish, Foucault asks that “we must first rid ourselves of the illusion that penality is above all (if not exclusively) a means of reducing crime” in favor of analyzing penality in its complex “field of operation”2 as a political tool. Similarly, we must rid ourselves of the illusion that movies, especially blockbusters, are above all isolated forms of entertainment. Rather, we must see movies within the complex functioning of society as political tools via mass media.

Power Relations

To describe how movies engage in power relations with their audiences and society at large, we can turn to Foucault’s analysis. Power relations are the ways in which power is exerted between individuals and/or groups of people. Historically, the relations are seen as top-down – power is exerted downward from the king onto his subjects. Today, the power relations are again typically interpreted as top-down but with a Big-Brother-esque tyrannical despot exerting power onto his popcorn-chewing sheeple. Foucault takes a different position, in line with the decentralized style of post-structuralism, on how power relations exist in society: “This power is exercised rather than possessed; it is not the ‘privilege,’ acquired or preserved, of the dominant class, but the overall effect of its strategic positions – an effect that is manifested and sometimes extended by the position of those who are dominated.”3 Foucault thus takes power as something that may be – and is – exercised by any person or group onto any other. Power then is not exerted exclusively by a strong state (the absolute rule of the king or the Big Brother) or a dominant class (the purebred Marxist view). In contrast, Foucault’s theory gives a dispersed web of power relations that aren’t grounded in any dominant structure. An illustration of this theory of power can be seen here: the sovereign certainly exerts dominant power over their populace, but the populace has a deal of power over the sovereign, who is but a scrawny individual who could be overthrown by just a handful of people from any class. Thus, for every node (the sovereign, their guards, the plebs, etc.) there exists a reciprocal power dynamic. So, power is not a monopolized, possessed noun but a reciprocal, active verb. Nuancing this theory further from monopolies, Foucault describes the power relations as complex and interwoven through the “depths of society.”4 Note, however, that these two directions of power relations are oversimplifications of Foucault’s multidimensional web of power relations which can be exerted in all directions (laterally, top-down, down-up, multidirectional, overlapping, etc.). But this is not to say that the relations are equal; those with the most capital are in dominant positions, which gives the illusion that they are the only ones who can exert power. Thus, media conglomerates seem to have monopolies, and can benefit from seeming so, but the power relations are more complex than that.

This is to say that movies aren’t spoon-fed propaganda from the elite down to a class of sheeple baa-ing to be fed propaganda-cud. While it is true that the media conglomerates produce movies that uphold certain values for their capital utility, the audience also pushes power onto them in how they receive the movie (in terms of tickets bought and/or interpretation of values in the movie). The active power of the audience is emphasized in The Batman’s opening scene, which calls the audience to question its viewership while watching someone watch someone through binoculars. This active participation is paralleled in the spectacle of the scaffold, in which one of the ritual’s main aspects is the spectacular “ceremonial of justice being expressed in all its force.”5 Thus, the audience must actively ingest the justice expressed for the ritual to have its full effect. The necessity of the audience in the spectacle of the scaffold is further highlighted by the Edict of 1374’s encouraging the audience to throw mud and such at the condemned, which simply extended the audience’s existing role.6 This extension of participation, however, could not be more than partially tolerated because it usurped the power to punish: the display of the sovereign’s right to rule. Still, audience participation was permitted as a sign of allegiance to the sovereign and continued until the abandonment of the public execution. So, the audience’s participation in only watching was a sign of their accepting and internalizing the king’s right to rule. What then is The Batman’s audience signifying its allegiance to by watching (and paying $18 for a ticket)? This question will go unanswered, just as I was left unanswered after asking the popcorn booth operator.

Power/Knowledge

Foucault inextricably links power and knowledge: “Power and knowledge directly imply one another; that there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations.”7 An example of the connection between power and knowledge is in higher education: “At 38 colleges in America, including five in the Ivy League, more students came from the top 1 percent of the income scale than from the entire bottom 60 percent.”8 This exemplifies how the truth-producing mechanisms of society are tightly wound with the power structures within our capitalist system – not that students are buying their way in, but simply that power and knowledge are interlinked. Another aspect of this is a college’s prestige: a powerful name on a paper makes it far more likely to be published, and the same name attached to a political candidate makes them appear more suited for powerful positions. So power gives credence to knowledge (e.g., admission and publication), and knowledge gives credence to power (e.g., candidacy). Thus, each implies the other.

The Narrative

This interplay of power/knowledge highlights a movie’s vital role in society as a story. The narrative, from Gilgamesh to Mean Girls, produces an interpretation of the world. The narrative produces meaning: the “reality” that we tell ourselves is an interpretation of events, an extrapolation of meaning from basic sense-perceptions. The narrative is necessary in our world of imperfection, of death, of suffering, of entropy; in On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche assesses that “what really arouses indignation against suffering is not suffering as such but the senselessness of suffering.”9 He then sees Christianity as the great vehicle that has been used to justify inevitable suffering through interpretation: “If we endure, we will also reign with Him.”10 This is to say that the narrative, the meaning-creator, allows humans to exist in a world of certain suffering. And the more an interpretation is accepted in justifying suffering, the higher it rises in power – creating dominant belief structures and institutions around it. A movie can create a narrative that forms power structures through its acceptance, but a movie also implies a power structure in the capital that was necessary for its genesis.

The narrative can also justify societal suffering. Structural failures, such as the growing disapproval of police, can be vindicated – or given the illusion of vindication – through a movie. An iteration of this is in Batman’s first scene in the movie. Various criminals are shown doing various bad things (burglary, arson, assault, and spray-painting the Bank of Gotham “broke”), being spot-lit by a police helicopter, being frozen in surprise, seeing the Bat-signal, and being seized by pathetic fear. This manifests our society’s long-coming discontent with the police, especially after 2020’s BLM movement, as the police light was not enough to strike fear into the criminal. For the criminals to be deterred from crime, a superhero was necessary. This momentary insemination of justice – a sense of right in the world, or a sense of fear in the criminal – into the audience constructs a subliminal narrative that everything in the world is all right: the criminals are running from the hero. So our societal sufferings are justified in the good winning in the end.

The Purpose of the Scaffold

Returning to the scaffold, the sovereign’s ultimate goal was the production of power/knowledge through the ritual of public execution. This was accomplished in two interwoven ways.

First, penal power is expressed onto the body of the condemned as an incarnation of sovereign power and understood by the audience as such.11 The severity of punishment varies in intensity up to Discipline and Punish’s opening: the prolonged and gruesome torture of Robert Francois Damien for his 1757 attempted regicide of Louis XV. His punishment produces an infinity of pure pain beyond existence itself – his dead body is tortured beyond its destruction. This is done to utilize terror: “to make everyone aware, through the body of the criminal, of the unrestrained presence of the sovereign. The public execution did not re-establish justice; it reactivated power.”12 Thus, the scaffold was not a tool of justice or right, but maintenance of power: stability.

This is equal to Batman pulverizing criminals’ faces. There is no question as to who is in power as Batman ravages a gang of ten or so hooligans. Batman, however, does not produce an infinity of pain. Much less, he doesn’t kill anyone out of some kind of morality. Why does Batman display the might of justice, yet shy away from killing? To answer this concerning Batman’s social function, we must first understand why the spectacle of the scaffold was abandoned, which I’ll get to after this second point, and Nietzsche’s purpose of punishment.

Second, the truth of the crime must be proved and accepted by the masses.13 This was done by semi-proofs that were obtained through torturing a suspect in a kind of joust between the executioner and suspect, in which a confession produced a transcendent truth of guilt.14 Punishment and investigation were then mixed. This is partially done when Batman questions Penguin and smashes him against the glass to extract information, though it proves ineffective. The old ways of semi-proofs and a mix of punishment and investigation have been replaced with more efficient, accurate methods. This can be seen in the accumulation of various fields – like the judge up-taking philosophy, or the accumulation of psychology and other sciences into the investigation and trial processes – into the penal-judicial system to prove an objective Truth of guilt in the criminal. Batman, concerning the Truth of investigation, is the “world’s greatest detective” and produces Truth of crime with technology and means, again, better than the police. What purpose does it serve for Batman to be both the violent hand of justice and the “world’s greatest” Truth discoverer?

Leaving the Scaffold

The abandonment of the scaffold was largely affected by the rise of the bourgeois class over the sovereign in the eighteenth century. The bourgeoisie’s rise to power was “masked by the establishment of an explicit, coded and formally egalitarian juridical framework, made possible by the organization of a parliamentary, representative régime.”15 These egalitarian values seem to be predicated on a general acceptance of every individual’s “humanity.” But, as per Foucault, the reform occurred from “within” the “legal machinery” and “representative” government, and was done by “a large number of magistrates and on the basis of shared objectives and the power conflicts that divided them.”16 So the existing power structures, after superseding the sovereign’s centralized and inefficient power, formed the egalitarian structure (a) to maintain capital in the hands of the bourgeoisie and (b) as a result of the bourgeoisie’s dispersed power relations, as the bourgeoisie has a large number of people with similar capital (power) in contention with each other. Note, however, that the change was not entirely predicated on the bourgeoisie’s rise to power, as society is too complex to be interpreted so unilaterally.

Further, there was “a general rise in the standard of living,” which drew the populace into repulsion toward “brutal” acts of the body; as one detaches from nature’s brutality, one becomes averse to it.17 Following these changes, there is a shift toward property crimes away from bodily crimes. Under sovereign power, the lower classes enjoyed tolerance of “illegalities”18 – that is, crimes among their own class that went unpunished primarily because of inefficiency in the sovereign’s power. But as crime shifted from the body to property, these illegalities could no longer be tolerated because they interfered with the possessions of the bourgeoisie. As property crime became widespread, there was thus “a consequent need for security” of the bourgeoisie’s possessions.19 The tolerance of illegalities, however, did not dissolve but merely shifted onto the bourgeoisie itself as the new economy of power came down heavy on the minor property crimes of the poor but tolerated white-collar crimes like “fraud, tax evasion, irregular commercial operations.”20 The penal crushing of lower-class property crime and tolerance of white-collar crime were not a sinister plot by a group of elites to maintain power, but rather a new capitalist system sorting itself out into the most efficient mode of relations; the new power structures keep the working class from harming the system’s productions and allow the upper class to trade in ways that best suit them – away from any transcendent rules that would restrict their trade. With this shift in focus to crimes of poverty came the moralized punishment of criminality as opposed to a crime in itself; poor lawbreakers were seen as evil criminals, while white-collar lawbreakers were, and still are, seen as only morally reprehensible members of society.

As the sovereign power faded, peasant revolts became more numerous as broadsides and pamphlets began to see the condemned man “transformed into a hero,” which can be seen in contemporary stories like Bonnie and Clyde.21 The lower class then began to see the criminal as a human, instead of an inhuman transgressor of the king’s power, and grew in power through their riots. In response to this, the new economy of power needed to remove the lower class’s power, in their position as active audience to the scaffold, to keep these economically inefficient revolts from happening. Thus, responding to the inefficiency of the sovereign’s centralized power and the revolts of the lower class (both parties involved in the public execution), the spectacle of the scaffold was abandoned. The penal system began to extend itself toward more efficient methods of acquiring information, mass surveillance, and tighter separations of the population.22 From this, there was a change in the focus of the penal system from the body to the mind and subconscious of the everyday person. The penal system sought to deter future crime by inscribing its power onto the minds of all citizens. This is more efficient than the mix of top-down violence of the sovereign and the lower class’s possible violence as the audience in the spectacle of the scaffold. Thus, the vast affirmation of more “humane” punishment comes from a shift in knowledge, which implies a shift in power; the ascension of the bourgeoisie, not away from the scaffold and toward “humanity” or “leniency,” but toward efficiency.

The Batfist and the Batopticon

In the initial brooding monologue of Pattinson’s Batman, shots of dirty masks are shown in crowds while he mulls over the nature of criminals: “Hidden in the chaos is the element, waiting to strike like snakes.”23 This initial mention of criminals in the film paints them as an ever-present mortal danger, not just to Batman but to society itself. As a superhero, it’s largely his responsibility to stop these dastardly denizens from ruining society’s sweet justice. Here we return to the spectacle of the scaffold: Batman expresses to the audience the “vengeance” of justice.24 But he doesn’t kill them. The superficial reason is that he is morally upright; but just as the scaffold was not abandoned because of knowledge/philosophy alone, we must see that Batman’s “humanity” comes after a progression of power/knowledge – the question (of Batman’s power display yet restraint from killing) is deferred until later, but don’t peek. Not having any superpowers other than capital, he must come to see his limitations: “It’s a big city. I can’t be everywhere.”25 He is acknowledging the inefficiency of visible violence as a sign of power; Batchad can’t pump his batfist into every dirty criminal. So, as a parallel to the abandonment of the spectacle of the scaffold, he must find more efficient ways to fight crime. After the police chopper flies away, revealing the Bat-signal upon the heavens, Batman describes his symbol: “It’s a warning. To them. Fear … is a tool.”26 The Bat-signal is the guard’s tower in the panopticon.

The panopticon was initially Jeremy Bentham’s prison architectural design in which a guard is placed atop a tower inside of a circle of cells so that the guard can see any prisoner at any time, but the prisoner can never tell if the guard is even inside the tower. This produces not only a form of punishment (warehousing and stripping prisoners of their liberties) but a form of discipline in which the prisoner bears the power relation within himself. This is to say that the guard’s presence is extraneous – the isolated individual must internalize the guard and police themself into right behavior. This produces the most efficient method of power as no violence is necessary, just the belief within the individual that they are being watched. The panopticon, however, is not isolated as a prison: “it is the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form […] it is in fact a figure of political technology that may and must be detached from any specific use.”27 Thus, the panopticon is an abstract method of perfect power relations in which individuals are isolated, systematized, surveilled, and generated an internal thought pattern to produce docile, “normal” citizens.

Carmine Falcone, playing pool in his cigar-style lounge, brags to one of his cronies about his $1,183 sweater and asks, “You know why communism failed, right?” Falcone then answers his question: “Austerity.”28 This shows the face of Gotham’s corruption, the true antagonist of the movie, smugly asserting his victory over the system from which he leeches and feels no remorse. Batman reels at this statement. Why? Because Falcone is contributing to the degradation of Gotham by centralizing power and capital in a pseudo-monarchy – “Falcone’s been the mayor for the last twenty years.”29 The problem with this is that it stagnates the growth and change of the system: it is inefficient. Thus, Batman’s greatest enemy is no supervillain but inefficiency. Batman is a super-appendage of the system at large. He comes from the hauté bourgeoisie, beats petty criminals, and fights larger inefficiency in super-villains. The purpose that it serves for Batman to be both the violent hand of justice and the “world’s greatest” Truth discoverer: Batman works with and goes beyond the police to produce Truth of crime in existing power structures, and he works with and goes beyond the police to display that justice is alive and true in our system.

But why do media conglomerates show Batman walloping criminals’ faces? Further, why hasn’t the judiciary system in America progressed this most efficient model to its end? Why, as the Batman franchise began to take off, did America shift to a bipartisan tough-on-crime policy? Examples of this policy: the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act, “which established extremely long mandatory minimum prison”30 and “includ[ed] far more severe punishment for distribution of crack,”31 and the 1994 Crime Bill, which offered grants to states that built prisons and cut back on parole. Why has America returned to displays of violence and power like those of the sovereign power structure?

Scratching the Itch

In the opening scene of The Batman, the audience is first shown a policeman sitting in front of a city mansion’s gated driveway through a pair of binocular lenses. Sirens wail in the distance as the heavily breathing voyeur fixes on a boy play-killing his regal father in one of the mansion’s rooms. After focusing on a skylight to be used for entry, the scene cuts to the lone father watching the nightly news about the mayoral election between him (status-quo incumbent) and the young, hopeful Bella Reál. The father, frustrated, asks his phone call partner why the polls are still tied between him and Reál – ambiguously alluding to political manipulation. The voyeur is then revealed behind the father in a dark leather mask with only eye holes, resembling a gimp mask. After the father turns off the TV, the voyeur attacks him in a burning rage with a metal carpet tool, repeatedly bashing his head while straddling his motionless body. The shot focuses on the killer’s black leather combat boots as he slowly trudges over to retrieve the murder weapon while heavily breathing. In a close-up shot, he re-straddles the corpse and breathes with sexual gratification while methodically peeling back a roll of duct tape.

This scene irrevocably paints the masked man as a villain. The lengthy shots of watching seemingly innocent people, fervent breathing, sadist undertones, violence against non-criminals, and general creepiness prevent the audience from ever fully relating to the Riddler. Batman, however, parallels the Riddler with all of these, though in less antagonistic aspects. He watches Selina undress through her window at night, though his eyes are shown – humanizing him. He excessively beats one of the Riddler’s goons while his body lay motionless; but the goon had tried to kill Selina, and Batman was off a green performance-enhancer, and the cops pulled him off to ensure the realization of his moral misdeed. The Riddler’s slow tramps in black leather boots are, however, amplified by Batman’s. It happens twice in the movie: while Batman is approaching the face-painted assaulters, and while he is slowly, slowly making his way to the Penguin’s toppled car. I watched this movie on Sunday at 12:30 pm in an Atlanta theater that was, generously, one-tenth full. But when Batman trudged up to the Penguin’s car in his heavy black-leather boots, there were groups in the theater that went off cheering. I personally got a warm feeling of triumph and consolation to see the hand of “vengeance” solemnly approaching the defeated mob boss. Why does the Riddler’s sadism warrant repulsion while Batman’s warrants cheering?

This is ultimately a question of what separates (senseless) violence from justice. Nietzsche finds that civilization and man’s depth (contrasting to animals) were founded on instincts – like “hostility, cruelty, joy in persecuting, in attacking, in change, in destruction”32 – being “inhibited.”33 But another product of this inhibition of natural instincts is the formation of guilt, of “bad conscience,” of morality itself. Nietzsche draws a dichotomy between two aspects of punishment: the “enduring” and the “fluid.”34 The enduring aspect is the practice itself, the action of punishment; the fluid aspect is the narrative constructed around it: the old regime’s obstruction of the crown, the enlightenment’s social contract, Kant’s retributivism, Beccaria’s deterrence, Bentham’s utilitarianism, and so on. Because it changes with every structure of power/knowledge, the fluid aspect is not grounded in the practice of punishment itself – it is an abstraction. Why then do we punish? Nietzsche posits that the enduring aspect, the act itself, is the free expression of our inhibited instincts. In other words, our dominatory natures are suppressed by morality – but in the domination used on a wrongdoer, our consciences do not restrict our nature. Thus, the Riddler’s sadism in domination is so repulsive because it’s a morally repressed aspect of our natures. And Batman’s sadistic justice is so euphoric because it draws out this repressed nature in a morally acceptable way, but Batman can’t kill because that would topple this morality and make it unacceptable to cheer. Thus, our wills are satiated in relating with the characters on-screen; we see it occur and have catharsis by way of active participation. The progression of the penal system cannot entirely remove itself from violence and become ideal – our desire to punish comes from our natural, ceaseless instinct for power and thus cannot be entirely negated, just as our desire for water cannot be negated. So, in actively participating in the sadism of the film, we disperse our desire – negatively in the Riddler and positively in the Batman – enough until the sequel; and in Batman being an effective appendage of the system, a narrative is subconsciously constructed in us in which the system is all right and needs no real change.

Consolation

Batman seems to leave his call for “vengeance,” similar to the straying from the scaffold as the sovereign’s revenge and display of power, and attempts to become a symbol of hope: leading the helpless through the water with a beacon and giving comfort to someone being medevac’d. So can we expect the sequel of The Batman to have no violence? To be only a symbol of hope? Hell no! Justice needs to be displayed and the desire for power needs to be dispersed. Instead, Bella Reál is the poster child of real change. But this is black exceptionalism: “cosmetic diversity, which focuses on providing opportunities to individual members of under-represented groups, [which] both diminishes the possibility that unfair rules will be challenged and legitimates the entire system.”35 She falls to the same (racially charged) errors that American politicians did in the 1970s-90s by overstating the issue of drugs. Why are drops so bad in this film? The simultaneous elite-party yet homeless-addict drug seems to be a catch-all for the problems in the movie. Its dirty money is the source of corruption in the government. This is a cop-out for the complexities of the structural issues in society. If pseudo-coke can be pinned as the primal cause for all our society’s issues, then all we must do is take the kingpins off the streets – or we could criminalize it. This paints an overly simplistic and dangerous picture in the mind of the viewer. The War on Drugs was a massive failure. What is the great rub with Reál and Bruce Wayne? She accuses him of not following his family’s “history of philanthropy,” which is treated as a saving grace for the city.36 The thought in the film is: “If only the Waynes’ philanthropy wasn’t ruined, first by corruption in the Renewal’s failure and second in Bruce’s apparent apathy, then Gotham could be saved.” In other words, the system’s only redemption is through accepted elites who hoard enough wealth that they can give small parts of it away to solve all the issues. Could the media conglomerate funding this movie benefit from drawing attention to non-issues like coke (which wasn’t a real problem, even in the ’70s) and lacking philanthropy instead of economic inequality, racism, corporate domination, or mass incarceration?

The greater project of the film is appeasement. The desire for justice is satiated by Batman’s punches. The repressed desire for power is drawn out by the Riddler and satiated (morally) by Batman. The desire for change is appeased by the empty hope in Bella Reál’s black exceptionalism and in Batman’s helping civilians as if he wouldn’t squash them if they stole baby formula. Still a pretty good movie, though.

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Bibliography

Aisch, Gregory, et al. “Some Colleges Have More Students from the Top 1 Percent Than the Bottom 60. Find Yours.” NYT, 2017. https://nyti.ms/2jRcqJs.

Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow. New York: The New Press, 2010.

“AT&T to Spin-Off Interest in Warner Media to Shareholders.” AT&T, 2022.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. New York: Vintage, 1975.

Holy Bible. New King James Version, Reference ed., Thru the Bible Radio, 1976.

Nietzsche, Friedrich, Walter Arnold. Kaufmann, and Reginald John. Hollingdale. On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo. New York: Vintage, 1967.

Reeves, Matt. The Batman. Warner Bros. Pictures, 2022.

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Note: All images are screenshots from YouTube trailers and videos.