Welcome to From the Batman News Desk, a new series of op-eds and articles covering various aspects of Batman history. Each week one of the Batman News writers will share their thoughts on Batman characters and concepts across comics, film, television, and more.
I’m sure you’ve heard many of the accusations levied against Batman. Everything from him being responsible for crime in Gotham to his fight against that crime being totalitarian and itself evil. In fact, these sorts of perspectives have gone beyond simply being hot takes one might hear from fans. Even the comics themselves have acknowledged and sometime gone so far as to promote them. So how much validity is there to these ideas? Would Gotham be better off without Batman at all?
In this “Batman on trial” series, we’ll break down some of the biggest criticisms against Batman and examine their validity. Last time, we discussed whether or not Batman was responsible for the supervillains that plague Gotham. After a careful examination, it seemed that the answer is “no”, but what if the opposite is true? What if Batman’s war on crime is so brutal and totalitarian that he’s actually the one who’s the problem? Could you even go so far as to call him a fascist?
What is a fascist?
Now, I think it’s important to have a brief semantic discussion before moving forward. “Fascism” as a political ideology is difficult to pin down with an explicit definition due to existing in multiple historical forms, but there are a number of core features that can be used to identify it. Umberto Eco’s famous essay Ur-Fascism is a great resource on this. It outlines fourteen properties of fascism as an ideology along with the way they have historically manifested. Not every fascist regime will meet every criteria and not every ideology that meets some of them is inherently fascist, but it gives a good framework to work from.
I’m not going to go through every single point in his list, but suffice it to say that it would difficult to claim the list defines Batman as we know him. Some of these are because tenets of the ideology are antithetical to Batman’s core beliefs (“contempt for the weak”) but others simply aren’t applicable outside of a socio-political movement (“appeal to a frustrated middle class”, “selective populism”). Batman rarely concerns himself with broader political movements and only tends to act on an individual level.
However, simply pointing out that he does not lead a fascist political movement is not enough to really address the accusation in good faith. After all, there are definitely elements of Eco’s list that could arguably apply to an individual like Batman, even if it requires a somewhat uncharitable reading of the character. No, what people mean when they call Batman a fascist is the more ill-defined, colloquial usage of the term. It’s meant to evoke an image of brutal authoritarianism and an imposition of one’s will through violence.
On its face, the idea of an extralegal strongman vigilante that enforces the law through violence sounds inherently fascist to many people. Yet, that description would equally fit to literally every comic book superhero ever, so what sets Batman apart? Well, more than most other superheroes, a lot of focus is given to the types of criminals Batman targets. There exists a belief that he oppresses the marginalized of society, reinforcing a cruel social hierarchy. These often include both the mentally ill and the impoverished, so let’s take a look at those members of Batman’s rogues.
The “insanity” of Batman’s villains
It’s technically true that many of the villains Batman fights and throws in Arkham suffer from mental illness, with some pretty big caveats. The first has to do with what we’re defining as “mentally ill”. Insanity (or at least what comic calls insanity) is a major reoccurring theme among Batman villains. Some of them are even used by writers to represent and explore specific conditions like dissociative identity disorder or obsessive-compulsive disorder, to varying degrees of success. However, those are actually a minority. Most of the time they just get lumped together under an enormous umbrella labelled “criminally insane”.
As a point of order, “insanity” has a specific, legal definition, which is an incapacity to understand that one’s actions are wrong. Note that this is very different than believing you’re morally in the right due to megalomania, personal beliefs or something similar. Pretty much none of Batman’s villains meet this criteria. Even Joker, the poster child of “insane” villains, understands the consequences of his actions and why he’s not “supposed” to do them; he just still wants to do it. He’s almost certainly suffering from some variety of mental illnesses, but that’s not enough to classify a criminal as “insane”. There are maybe a tiny handful of characters like the Ventriloquist who could legally argue they were not in control of their actions, but it’s far less than the amount that are getting insanity pleas in Gotham.
As for the villains who do at least suffer from some sort of mental illness (and aren’t just normal criminals with a costumed gimmick), it’s almost incidental to the crimes they commit. Sure, it all ties together via whatever plant/animal/Wonderland motif they’ve put together, but their illness is not what’s driving them to crime. To be very clear: having a mental illness does not make you a violent or “bad” person, and if anything makes you more likely to be a victim of violence.
Batman is by no means targeting the mentally ill. It’s just that for whatever reason Gotham produces a bunch of theatrical criminals, some of whom have motivations tied to a running theme of the popular idea of “insanity” (see the last Batman on trial entry). No one should ever be targeted or victimized for mental illness, but at the same time it doesn’t act as some sort of get out of jail free card. Just because Joker is psychopathic doesn’t mean he should be allowed to poison the city’s water supply.
Batman: enemy of the downtrodden?
If Batman is not to be held at fault for fighting the villains the story has labelled “insane”, there is still the matter of the poor. This one is a bit trickier, in part because it touches on more realistic sources of criminal behavior. It’s important to note that Batman has never targeted the poor in some sort of fascistic disdain for the lower classes or belief that the dispossessed need to be put in their place. Most of his stories focus on the “supervillain” aspect of Gotham, the majority of whom are actually quite wealthy. They run criminal empires and have the resources for elaborate plans. However, that doesn’t mean that low level henchmen and petty criminals like muggers aren’t also on the receiving end of Batman’s war on crime.
Just as with the mentally ill “supervillains” of Gotham, Batman’s clashes with the more street-level criminals are almost always in direct response to an act of violence. It’s either to neutralize an immediate threat, or using fear and intimidation to interrogate some sort of henchman about their boss. No one’s getting bataranged for “looking suspicious”.
It’s worth acknowledging the at least superficial similarities between Batman’s tactics and the sort of broken windows policing that harasses innocent people. What separates them is that, as presented by the story, Batman actually does what the cops claim to do: use detective work to investigate a crime and only use force when absolutely necessary. In fact, this distinction is often a source of conflict between Batman and the infamously corrupt GCPD.
Despite this, Batman still lacks any legal authority to do the things he does. Were he a real police officer he’d be guilty of violating numerous legal rights like the Fourth Amendment (unless there were a lot of scenes of Batman obtaining search warrants we never saw). These laws exist to protect innocent people from an abuse of power by the state, lest the cops decide they can go after anyone they just don’t like. As a vigilante he’s definitionally outside of these laws, but that’s also why vigilantism is a crime. It would be fantasy that we could entrust a random individual to enforce the law totally unchecked by any oversight or restrictions save for what they choose to personally abide by. Except, that’s the suspension of disbelief we agree to for every vigilante superhero including paragons of virtue like Superman. Batman is in a position where he could easily abuse his power, but he doesn’t because he’s Batman.
Another part of Batman’s reputation as a symbol of institutional oppression is due to how he seemingly defends the status quo to a fault. On at least the surface level, you can see where this is coming from. Batman has a semi-official working relationship with the police, and among his villains are people like Poison Ivy and Anarky who ostensibly want to create positive social change. This ultimately becomes an instance where it’s less that Batman himself refuses to allow societal progress, but rather the mandates of the serialized superhero genre and is by no means limited to stories set in Gotham.
Every time a comic antagonist claims to want to make the world a better place, they always go too far and end up hurting people. It’s a trend that can be frustrating at times as a reader. Writers want to give their villains sympathetic angles so they ascribe lofty goals, but they still need to be a villain so they necessarily do it “the wrong way”. What results is a hero who is forced to prevent any meaningful change because it never happens “the right way”. The reality is that things can never fundamentally change in these worlds, for good or bad. Batman also goes after corrupt officials and executives (such as in the famous “you have eaten well” speech from Batman: Year One), but the corruption will always remain.
When Batman actually is sort of a fascist
More than any specific actions or accusations, what often makes Batman seem “fascist” is a matter of aesthetics. Many of the things we’ve discussed such as enforcing the status quo and going after muggers are true for just about every superhero published, but you rarely see Superman or Spider-Man face the same accusations. Batman just feels more sinister and authoritarian, even to those that aren’t among a superstitious and cowardly lot. If there’s one source for the vibes being off, we need look towards one of the most influential Batman comics of all time: The Dark Knight Returns.
Earlier I brought up Umberto Eco’s Ur-Fascism, and this comic is where you really could start checking off a lot of boxes. Its story does present crime as the result of a morally decadent society, enabled by weak and ineffectual liberals. Batman calls for a return to the past by creating a literal hero cult of violent vigilantes led by his singular machismo and force of will. Society’s institutions have failed and only one man can fix it by crushing the inhuman degenerates. It might not be overtly fascist, but there are certainly undertones of what Alan Moore criticized as “sub-fascism”.
The thing is, this is on some level intentional. The Dark Knight Returns is not a “normal” Batman comic. Not only is it explicitly non-canonical but it was also written as a direct response to what Frank Miller saw as a gradual softening of the character due to things like the Adam West TV show. It was not meant to be the “correct” version of the character, but rather a sort of shock to the system. Just how far could someone take Batman away from the kid friendly image he had cultivated?
The mid-late 1980s were a time of immense experimentation in comics where new ideas were being thrown around in ways that would change the medium forever. It was in that environment that Miller set out to challenge what Batman could be. It’s easier to understand this goal when contrasted with a year later when Miller wrote Batman: Year One, which kept the grittiness but with a characterization far more in line with what one would expect from the Caped Crusader.
Don’t get me wrong, The Dark Knight Returns was arguably too successful and there were some writers who took the wrong lessons from it into the main Batman books. This mostly manifested via tone, and not any of the larger dystopian world-building that gave it its fascistic undercurrents. However, tone and aesthetic still matter, and acted as the source for a lot of people to read the character a certain way. He feels like someone from a fascist narrative, even if the meat wasn’t there.
There is probably no better example of a comic taking all those wrong lessons than Batman: White Knight. It writes Batman as if every one of the accusations against him were true. Here, Batman really is a totalitarian brute who ruthlessly targets the misfortunate and mentally ill with no regard for the people who get hurt. Joker is made out to be the misunderstood, victimized savior of Gotham in spite of the terror that Batman has wrought. At times it seems more like a diatribe than simply an Elseworlds story. It even makes it so that the Waynes worked with the Nazis, if the message of the book wasn’t clear.
The reason this is perfect comic to close with is that, in order for the story to function, everyone in it has to be written wildly out of character. The premise of “what if Batman is actually the bad guy?” doesn’t work if you keep him or anyone else involved at all resembling what we know, because that’s just not who they are. Reading through the series you realize that if this is the Batman that his critics envision, it bears little to no resemblance to the Batman that actually exists.
Despite his sometimes sympathetic villains and an enforcement of the status quo true to all mainstream superheroes, Batman is ultimately someone who fights to protect the weak, not hurt them. His crusade comes from a place of making sure no one has to suffer what he did that one night so long ago, not any sort of disdain for those he sees as beneath him.
What’s next?
So maybe Batman isn’t a fascist, but he’s still a billionaire. If he really cared about stopping crime in Gotham he’d use his money to fix the problem, not just beat up the poor who get roped into gangs, right? Tune in next week to talk about if Batman’s so good, why is he still rich?
Part 1: Are Gotham’s villains Batman’s fault?
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