Batman is a villain

Batman is an interesting character, but maybe more interesting is how he’s viewed by our society. Let’s start with the obvious and go from there. Batman is Batman because he’s rich. He also concerns himself largely with the crimes of the poor and mentally ill. Presumably someone who holds the title “world’s greatest detective” has a few braincells and can think of more effective ways of reducing muggings than punching street thugs. Ultimately billionaires get what they actually want, and they have PR teams that spin it so society views it in a positive light. Bruce Wayne just has a kink for punching people, he doesn’t actually care to reduce the petty crime in Gotham. Additionally, as a successful serial assaulter, Wayne picks individuals with little recourse: who is the jury going to believe, an upstanding billionaire philanthropist with great lawyers or an ugly schizophrenic who think’s he is penguin. In fact, if we wanted to get conspiratorial, we could assume that Arkham Asylum is maintained in a state of disarray specifically to maximize the mental anguish of the inmates and fail to prevent escapes. So if Batman is keeping a rogues gallery of mentally ill criminals and allows them to escape and run loose on the city that’s pretty villainous. But ‘wait’ you say, Batman is fighting the villains, doesn’t that make him a hero? Let’s consider Batman’s ethos. His moral rulebook has one rule: don’t kill people. Forget all the guns and missiles that his cars and planes have, let’s assume he’s not trying to kill people. Why does he have that rule for himself? No, it isn’t because he thinks that all life is precious and people don’t deserve to have their life extinguished by an angsty emo billionaire, it is because he believes that if he kills someone, then he won’t be able to control himself and his body count will grow exponentially. Much darker… let’s explore. The bar for acceptable behavior for Batman is much lower than it would be for anyone else. When Batman sneaks into the dockside warehouse at night and takes out the guards by dropping down from the rafters, he might very well be seriously injuring or paralyzing a dock worker who was slipped an extra $50 to keep watch for any cops but otherwise has no involvement. That dock worker now can’t support their family and is crushed by medical bills. Does Batman think that our poor dock worker paying that cost justifies Batman’s surreptitious entry? Yep, he sure does. Now let’s apply that same bar to someone else in a hypothetical: My friend works at BestBuy and has complained that they are owed overtime. “Wage theft” I decry, this is a job for Ratman. I pull on my furry costume and head down to the BestBuy in my Civic. I haven’t been able to dedicate my life to training in martial arts in the mountains, but I do own a solid slugger and it hits pretty hard. The security guy in the yellow shirt is looking at the receipt of a customer trying to leave. Perfect! He won’t see me coming. I swing hard and take out his knee, he crumples to the ground and shrieks in pain. I’ve got to maintain stealth so I silence him with a quick bonk on the forehead to knock him unconscious. It doesn’t work, shrieking continues. I go for another whack and he puts his arm over his face, this will be hard. I take a deep breath and go for a big swing and at that moment I am tackled by an ex-high school wrestler who was shopping for the new iPhone. Credits. We can all see how that stands in stark contrast to when the billionaire with the better costume does it.

At this point you’re probably thinking that I’m deliberately being thick on the the idea of an anti-hero. Let’s be clear, I am saying he’s not a hero at all, just straight up villain. Could he be both a hero and a villain at the same time? Sure, but that isn’t what he’s doing. Let’s consider another hypothetical: a Batman who really wants crime to go down (hero) and who also is willing and eager to commit heinous violence up to but not including murder (villain). Batman could easily identify and kidnap people of high influence in the criminal underworld, waterboard or otherwise torture them to let them know he’s serious, then release them back to their positions of power with the mandate of keeping the vulnerable citizenry safe or else face continued and frequent torture. Having armies of influential and powerful people who are adamantly and personally vested in the safety and well being of the regular people of Gotham would greatly diminish the number of muggings. Truth be told, Batman has been at it for decades and crime is always worse than the year before. Batman is either impotent to make any real change or impact in his world, in which case he is just doing this for his own edification (not heroic), or he is playing the role of an individual hero in a world that he makes systematically and stochastically dangerous through policy and funding choices.

The long and short of it is Batman runs Gotham city and it is what he want’s it to be. A nightmarish hellhole of poverty, drugs and violence. Contrast that with Metropolis, run by a guy who actually wants to improve the lives of people. The proof was right there the whole time.