Popular Culture Review Vol. 3, No. 2, August 1992 | Page 33

Batm an; Americana
with a Twist—
American Gothic Revisited
In the 1989 film Batman, the Joker, arch-villain, playacts for
a moment as the Wicked Witch of the West: "I'm melting!" he cries
after Vicki Vale douses him with a bucket of water. An interesting
exercise in cultural triangulation results. A troublesome half-century
of American history separates the film Batman from its 1939 comic
book original~the same year, interestingly, that MGM Studios
gambled on a musical production of L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful
Wizard of Oz. Vicki Vale is not Dorothy, nor is Joker the meltable,
stagey witch, though they have in common a flair for entrances and
exits--and, of course, in a tradition of great villains since Milton's
Satan, Joker and the witch have the best lines. Nonetheless, cultural
and imaginative links between the comic-book and the pair of films
are intriguing and deserve attention. It can be argued that all three
are fantasy texts and typical of American Gothic. Like other works in
this genre, including texts by Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, O'Connor,
Hawkes and West, they are parodic, subversive narratives whose
fictional worlds mirror worlds not so fictional nor so far away. As
Gothic texts, each interrogates the "real," calling into question the
assumptions upon which that real world is constructed. In this essay I
wish to consider how Batman, in particular, presents a satirical look
at some essential American principles. The film offers an alternative
reading to the political tradition authorized—and rhetorized—by
America's foundational imaginative text, the Declaration of
Independence.
Questions of ideology and a web of barely concealed social
anxieties entangle the worlds of Oz and Gotham. Their respective
fictions suggest that each era, in its own way, is taking a second (or
third, or fourth) look at the terms "American" and "American Way."
Joker doesn't so much wish revenge on Batman; rather, he wants to
revenge himself on the system that makes Batman, the vigilante,
possible. He wishes to reshape American polity and social practice.
To this end he offers, quite literally as it turns out, to restyle the
American self and to reconstruct the country's deeper sense of itself.