Why Batman is The Worst
People love Batman for all the wrong reasons. Let’s look at why.
People love Batman. In a recent poll, even after the vast success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, when asked about their favorite superheroes, 45% of people mentioned Batman, making him the third most popular hero after Superman and Spider-Man.
Depending on who you ask, the reasons behind his popularity are varied, from his appealingly mysterious aesthetic to his ability to stand side by side with superpowered aliens and gods, even though he’s just a man. His complexity is also attractive; from his traumatic past to the questionable legality of his actions, he’s more compelling as a character than an immortal being who can fly and shoot lasers out of his eyes. He gets hurt, he bleeds and he gets up every time.
His wits are his greatest weapon. He’s the world’s greatest detective, after all. By planning, preparing and outsmarting his opponents, he can beat even the strongest villains. Despite his shortcomings or flaws, he tirelessly fights against injustice and the criminal underworld. Truly, a hero to look up to. Or so the text in most Batman stories explicitly states. The reality of who and what the character is, is a different story.
In this article, I’m going to try to convince you that Batman is the worst and that you shouldn’t like him. I’m going to do my best to address the most common arguments for why Batman is a power for good, and make a case for, you know, the opposite of that. I’m also going to try and draw a comparison between stories about Batman and our current reality, and why that’s relevant.
You might be asking why anyone should care about whether some fictional character is good or not, or why any of this matters. The stories we tell have power. They guide us with their morals, make us question preconceived notions, create empathy in us for those whose lives are different from ours and act as safe spaces to explore ideas and actions without bringing those actions into the real world. What stories we choose to tell, and how we choose to tell those stories matters. But no story is bad, or evil, in itself.
Satire, for example, relies on our ability to understand that it’s presenting bad ideas so that we might recognize how bad those ideas really are. In the same way, if we have the right perspective and the ability to question and analyze the stories being told, we can extract valuable lessons even from the worst stories about the worst people. There are lessons to be learned from The Triumph of the Will, but whether those lessons are good or bad depends on our ability to understand its context. Where, when and by whom our stories are told matters.
Because there’s too much material to pull from and because in the comics Batman has been everything from a detective, to a vampire, to an all-knowing god, I’m going to use the movies as a framing device. That being said, most of these arguments apply just as much to any and all Batman stories, regardless of media.
I would never refute the compelling nature of Bruce Wayne as a character and I’m not saying stories about Batman are bad stories. On the contrary, stories about morally ambiguous or downright evil people can be really fascinating and entertaining. The only big mistake these stories are doing, in my opinion, is framing Batman as the hero and protagonist, when in fact he’s clearly a villain. In fact, he might be the worst villain Gotham has ever faced.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I’m going to go through some arguments why Batman is the good guy and why I don’t agree with them. So, why is Batman the good guy?
He fights crime
Does he, though? Sure, he fights a lot of criminals. But beating the shit out of a thief is still assault. Every movie about Batman shows him using deadly weapons to assault lots of people. That’s super duper much a crime, you guys. It’s a staple of any Batman story that the cops are after him and that he “works outside the law”. The way he fights criminals is a crime in itself. In many cases it’s not self-defense and usually not even a very protective act.
Usually it’s retribution. Punishment. You might say it’s justice, but that’s not really for Bruce Wayne to decide, is it? Should one person, whoever it is, have the power to unilaterally decide what is just and act as executioner of said justice? Obviously not. Crimes against criminals are still crimes. If the criminality of his opponents is what makes them worthy targets, then what does that say about Batman himself?
If the ends justify his means and therefore Batman’s crimes aren’t immoral, only technically illegal, who’s to say that same logic doesn’t apply to his opponents? If a poor person resorts to mugging a rich person to feed their family, isn’t that more just and noble than the very much illegal assault and battery unleashed upon that person by a vigilante?
You can’t fight crime with crime. One crime doesn’t cancel out another and it’s not like the fear of a violent man in a costume takes away a would-be criminal’s desire or desperation. Batman doesn’t fight crime, he fights criminals. It’s a very important distinction, especially when you remember that his methods are criminal acts, too. He doesn’t fight crime, he does crime.
He fights the bad guys
Well, I can’t argue with that. He does fight a lot of bad people, that’s true. But isn’t that what the bad guys do? The Italian mob fights the Russian mob, cops fight both mobs, Batman fights the cops and the mob. Along the way, a lot of bystanders get hurt. Batman is just one more bad guy in the endless battle for power bad guys always have.
Batman is also usually pretty picky about the types of bad guys he fights. He doesn’t fight polluting corporations or police brutality or discriminatory housing policies. He only fights the bad guys outside the system and on the street. He’s clearly not interested in decreasing crime through lawful, compassionate action. He’s interested in beating the shit out of people and using their criminal status as an excuse. Saving lives or preventing crime is just a context within which he gets to do violence.
Who else would fight the supervillains?
Right. The supervillains. While supervillains are a fictional concept, and talking about them isn’t relevant to the real world, so is Batman. It would seem, then, that the idea of having extraordinary baddies who can only be stopped by extraordinary good guys, is sound, at least in the fictional world of Batman. It’s in the text, a lot of the time. It’s explicitly stated that these villains are beyond the abilities of any legal course of action, and Batman is necessary for vanquishing them.
Now, obviously, many Batman stories are written by people who believe in this idea of extraordinary, great men and their beliefs are baked into the stories. But even if we ignore this, and only look at the text itself, without analyzing the intent of the authors, it seems that Batman himself is often not very effective at combating these threats and sometimes even the very reason these threats exist in the first place.
In Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, the main villain of the first movie is Ra’s al Ghul, who intends to destroy Gotham city by getting the whole city high on a powerful hallucinogen. Ra’s al Ghul and his League of Shadows is also who trained Bruce Wayne the skills he needs to be Batman, Bruce having been pretty much just a whiny rich kid up to that point.
In the end, Batman confronts Ra’s al Ghul, while Inspector Gordon saves the city by using Batman’s weapons to thwart Ra’s al Ghul’s plan. Batman decides not to save Ra’s, effectively breaking his own rule of not killing people. What this climax seems to say, then, is that any person willing to do so can save the city, given Bruce Wayne’s resources. Batman didn’t save the day and through his willful inaction he killed someone, acting as judge, jury and executioner, his obscured identity acting as a shield against the law.
In the second movie in the trilogy, the Joker is, by his own description, a mirror image to Batman, the yin to his yang. The Joker is motivated by the very existence of a figure like Batman and would never had concocted his evil plan were it not for his desire to be the counterbalance to Batman. If there was no Batman, there would be no Joker.
In the final installment, Bane and Talia al Ghul are pretty much just seeking revenge for Batman killing Talia’s father. At least, that seems to be Talia al Ghul’s main motivation and Bane acts as her henchman.
Bane also has a bigger, more ideological battle in the movie. After the police have been granted expanded powers in the city, Bane brings down the stock exchange to incapacitate not only Bruce Wayne, but all the rich people in the city. Then, he traps the bulk of the police force into a sewer, frees prisoners, executes rich people and brings Gotham to a state of anarchy, ruled by criminals and poor people. He uses what is essentially a nuclear weapon to hold the whole city hostage and to keep the military from intervening.
Even though Bane’s actions are brutal and violent, the underlying philosophy seems to be, well, to take power from the wealthy elite and give it to the people. His ideology is so agreeable at its core that the filmmakers had to make him use unnecessarily cruel and violent methods to not make him the hero of the story.
In the climax, a billionaire in experimental battle armor leads an army of cops in an epic battle to take Gotham back from the poors. Batman flies the bomb out of the city with his personal fighter jet, seemingly sacrificing himself in the process. It is revealed, however, that he survived and is totally fine. This means that his heroic act was doing the bare minimum of using his illegal weapons tech to take care of the nuclear bomb he had built, sacrificing only whatever it cost him to build the weapons.
In the end, Batman is instrumental in returning the city into the hands of the rich elite and their police department. A cop, not a trapeze artist, is revealed to be called Robin and then finds Batman’s lair, probably becoming the next vigilante with illegal experimental weapons technology. He’s an orphan though, like Robin always was, showing that with a bit of hard work and an unfathomable amount of luck, even from humble beginnings, one can become a guy in battle armor, beating up poor people without battle armor.
While my examples were from Chris Nolan’s movie trilogy, the same idea is repeated throughout Batman media. In Tim Burton’s version, Batman knocks a mobster into a vat of acid, thus creating the Joker. Over and over again, Bruce Wayne’s ill-advised attempts at punishing criminals lead to him creating more criminals. Almost like a country whose war against terrorism only creates more terror in the world.
Just as in Batman’s fight against criminals he only does more crimes, in his desire to be some kind of superhero he only creates the supervillains he then must fight.
So what are you trying to say?
Well, even when Batman isn’t the reason supervillains exist, Bruce Wayne kind of is. The origin stories of most Batman villains follow the same basic path: they’re the downtrodden, the powerless, the poor and the mentally ill. They are, at their core, victims of the material circumstances in Gotham. In just about every Batman story, power and wealth in Gotham is concentrated in the hands of a small elite. There are lavish parties, skyscrapers and mansions, armies of cops and underfunded mental institutions and orphanages filled to the brim.
Bruce Wayne is the poster child of this inequality. The perfect target for the hatred of the subjugated masses living out their miserable existence under the monuments of the powerful all over the city. Bruce Wayne is the golden boy of the elite. Fabulously wealthy, enigmatic, charming and handsome. Publicly, he is one of the most powerful people in the city.
Privately, he’s even more powerful. He uses his fabulous wealth to build illegal weapons and uses those weapons to further terrorize and humiliate the terrorized and humiliated. Bruce Wayne is the very engine that powers hatred of the status quo. He uses violence to strengthen the strong and kick the ones who are already down. He’s like the Koch brothers, but instead of lobbying and propaganda, he uses his fists and his vast arsenal of experimental weapons.
So what?
What do Bruce Wayne, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Bill Gates have in common? Yeah, okay, they’re all rich, but it’s more than that. They all have the power to make things a lot better for a lot of people, but choose not to.
They’ve all exceeded, a long time ago, the kind of wealth that will afford them the best of everything and give them the ability to do whatever they please for the rest of their lives without having to ever think about money again.
None of these people, their children, or their children’s children, have to really work another day of their lives. They can dedicate their time to whatever they please and even give out 99% of their wealth and not change anything in their daily lives in any practical way.
These very real people, just like Bruce Wayne, have made a conscious decision to not help people. They’ve decided to hoard more wealth, dodge taxes, to pay people working for them as little as possible, to use their resources to drive startups, small businesses and any potential competition out of business and to forego morality in exchange for more wealth and power, even when they have so much they don’t know what to do with it all.
Jeff Bezos literally said “The only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel. That is basically it.”
One person could single handedly end world hunger, but chooses to build space rockets instead. He doesn’t even see any other way of spending so much money. Bettering the material conditions of just about every living human in the world isn’t even something that has crossed his mind.
Bill Gates uses a part of his vast wealth on his charity pet projects. Not where it’s most needed, not how it can make the most good, but he spends his absurd, unearned wealth on what makes him feel good. He isn’t even spending fast enough to counteract his ever-increasing wealth. He gives away less than he makes. If he just paid his fair share in taxes, there would be no need for his foundation.
That is the ideology of Bruce Wayne. Batman is Blue Origin, Space-X and The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It’s the ill-advised and useless pet project of someone completely removed from the reality of ordinary people. It’s selfish, silly and cartoonishly evil.
When we tell these stories about Batman, positioning him as the good guy, we are excusing and rationalizing the wealth hoarding of the one percent. We’re bolstering the debunked, damaging theory of the Great Man. We become bootlickers, willing subjects of the oligarchy. And, perhaps worst of all, by reveling in the fantasy of Batman, we reveal something about ourselves. That we, too, given great power, might use it to bully the weak.
That doesn’t mean that we should stop telling these stories altogether, or that we shouldn’t read Batman comics or watch Batman movies. Like I said in the beginning there are lessons we can learn, even in The Triumph of the Will. Whether those lessons are good or bad depends on how we approach the story and how it’s told. Just like we can watch a nazi propaganda film, knowing who made it, when and why and use that knowledge to view it critically and therefore learn worthwhile lessons from it, so too can we watch a movie about Batman.
If we watch The Dark Knight Trilogy, with the understanding that Bruce Wayne is a narcissistic psychopath who will do whatever it takes to mold Gotham in his own image, we can learn something worthwhile about our world. We have people like Bruce Wayne in the real world and it would do us all good to view them as the Lex Luthors they are, not the Supermen they want themselves to be viewed as.
