Popular Culture Review Vol. 3, No. 2, August 1992 | Page 35

Batman: Americana with a Twist

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precisely all that Oz is not. Gotham resembles a vision out o f Dante.
Anxious citizenry walk fearfully through dark and dirty streets; they
clutch drinks in makeshift, outdoor shelters, or in crowded, noisy bars;
they greedily scramble for dollars scattered by Joker shortly before
he turns the gas on them and ends the party. Batman's symbolic
landscape parodies the world of Oz, darkens and inverts its pastoral
vision, subverts its mythology of being American. Standing at the
base of Gotham's towering, yet empty, cathedral, we recognize that,
clearly, we are not in Kansas any longer, if ever we really were in the
first place.
In addition, the terror provoked by Joker is perhaps less
"fantastic" than the witch's because he coheres more to our latterday imaginations. The hastily convened committee of gangsters on
the steps of City Hall appalls viewers more than the Oz's Wizard
precisely because gangsters frequenting places of government is, alas,
more routine, more everyday. It is a point worth remembering that
Oz and Gotham are fictional constructions of the democratic
imagination. One could forget this point, judging from the
disproportionate distance separating "the little people"--as Joker
calls them—from the forces and principalities that pass for
governments. Government in Gotham and Oz consists of despotic forces
who rule by coercion and illusion. Joker's condescending description of
the people as "little" is apt, and terror is the latest duty in a culture
where obedience to duty is a patriotic virtue. "Oz" and Batman were,
respectively, book and comic before being translated into film, and as
products of American literary culture they show the disparity
between Walt Whitman's 19th century cosmic vision of the Republic
and its present embodiment. Joker's tart dismissal of Gotham only
underscores the point: "Nice people shouldn't live here. This city
needs an enema." Where is Kansas, anyway?
II
In American Horrors Gregory Waller comments that recent
horror films have "engaged in a sort of extended dramatization of and
response to the major public events and newsworthy topics in
American history" (p. 12). This is especially evident in Batman.
which never ceases to remind viewers that fantasy is hardly to be
distinguished from reality. Gotham's mayor resembles Ed Koch, and