I’m always going to be approaching
The Dark Knight Returns from the wrong perspective. And not just in the sense
that I’m from a generation whose comics either react to or move past the four
issue series. Not even in the sense that my first exposure to the world of the
comic was from reading the trade paperback of its maligned sequel, The Dark
Knight Strikes Again. Rather, this is a comic that only works in its time.
This is not in the typical sense of
the phrase “Of its times,” used when someone talks about the 80’s. Most of the
time, it’s because the work is extremely unironically campy (Hair Metal) or
turns out to universal to a community that isn’t the mainstream (Shock
Treatment). But the of its times nature of The Dark Knight Returns is within
the politics of the comic. Not that the politics of the comic are not possible
to exist outside of the 80’s (I literally couldn’t write this entry for an
entire week because those politics were marching down the streets of
Charlottesville carrying Tiki Torches while chanting “The Jews Will Not Replace
Us” and other charming sentiments). Rather it’s how the comic could be seen as
subversive within those times.
The comic is blatant in how much it
supports the position of its title character: be it how those who criticize him
are portrayed as either deluded jerks just denouncing him for the publicity or
women who need to learn their place within the hierarchy; how the arguments for
Batman win out no matter how weak they are (this is especially in regards to
the claim that “he hasn’t technically killed anyone,” which ignores Grace, the
woman he kills in the opening of issue 2, and the fact that he would have let
people like Harvey die if the weren’t useful to him); and the fact that, were
he not around to force the world to make sense, Gotham would be like the rest
of the world after the nuke hits America: a mob tearing itself apart without a
care for who lives and who dies (contrary to popular belief, people tend to be
good to one another after a crisis has occurred).
There are a few reasons why this
comic was read in a more revolutionary sense rather than the reactionary sense
it’s read in after Holy Terror was released. The comic is extremely critical of
then President of the United States, Ronald Regan; it uses Superman, the
superhero you use to critique the genre of the superhero as a whole, to
represent how American Idealism is naïve at best and useless at actually; and
it was released within the context of Watchmen, so people just assumed it was
in the same conversation.
Going backwards from these
assumptions, it wasn’t released in the context of Watchmen, Watchmen was released
in the context of The Dark Knight Returns. You see, the first issue of Watchmen
was released on August 31st, 1986. The final issue of The Dark
Knight Returns was released on June 1st, 1986, two whole months
before Watchmen even begins. This in turn explains how people so
catastrophically missed the point of Watchmen that they created the 90’s comic
book scene in its name (one could argue that Marvelman prefigures The Dark
Knight Returns [in fact, a chubby Miracleman cosplayer can be seen in the
streets of Issue 4], but for all its violence, said violence is always done in
the name of problematizing the concept of the fascist superhero messiah as
opposed to embracing the monstrosity of it).
Next, we have American Idealism is
bunk. This of course fits within an unfortunately popular genre of fiction
known as Grimdark: a rather unhealthy genre where we accept our cruelties and
solve all our problems by hurting everyone around us, especially ourselves.
Because growing up means throwing away any belief in the goodness of mankind in
favor of watching characters suffer for our amusement; that the pains and
cruelties of the world will never be solved, so why bother at all (there are,
of course, genres with dark and bitter themes that don’t fall into Grimdark due
to embracing the campiness of the genre that the po faced stories that dominate
Grimdark like to act as if it’s not there). By having Superman become a tool of
the government (in more ways than one), The Dark Knight Returns full heartedly
embraces this genre as a good thing.
And finally, there’s the
condemnation of Ronald Regan. It’s worth noting the way in which the comic
condemns Regan. His first appearance in Issue 2 is a rambling, though on point,
monologue about how running the government is like owning a ranch, he acts like
a fuddy duddy at the best of times, and is easily provoked into action by being
called a degrading name. In short, when contrasted with the more proactive and
ruthless Batman, the critique of Regan seems to amount to “he’s to weak and
passive to be left in charge.”
And keep in mind; this is Ronald
Regan we’re talking about. The man who, when faced with nonviolent protestors
who wanted a park not to be replaced with a parking lot, responded with “If it
takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with. No more appeasement.” What Batman
offers then is a Regan who never had Alzheimer’s, whose brain was still in the
place where he would do more than look pretty and do as little as possible.
This of course brings us back to
the theme of the Philosopher King that I was yammering on about in the Black
Suit entry: that of the right kind of fascist being what people need, specifically,
the desire to be led by the smart scientists as opposed to the dumb military.
Batman then can be read as the perfect fascist leader in that he embodies both
of these philosophical tenants, though the comic primarily focuses on the
militaristic aspect of the character (nonetheless, as one of my childhood
cartoons put it “Batman’s a scientist”).
Indeed, the text perfectly fits
within many of the tenants of fascism outlined in Umberto Eco’s Ur Fascism. The
main ones focused on in the comic include “Action for action’s sake” (“…and I
honestly don’t know if I could beat
him.”), “Hostility to analytical criticism” (every debate segment in this
comic), “A permanent state of war” (“It begins here-- an army-- to
bring sense to a world plagued by worse than thieves and murderers…”),
“Contempt for the weak” (Ronald Regan), “A cult of heroism espousing a noble
sacrifice” (“It would be a good death…”),
and “A focus on machismo” (“…except he’s got exactly the kind of body I wish he
didn’t have…powerful without enough bulk to slow him down…every muscle a steel spring-- ready to lash out--and he’s young… in his physical prime…”).
(That’s not getting into how his fascism overwhelms the comic. Throughout the
entire comic, the 16-panel grid is adhered to, to the point where [combined
with the narration that just never stops [which hurts the comic as some of the
pages work better silent then they do with the never ending narration], making
the panels even smaller] the comic gets so tight and constrained that it
triggers my claustrophobia and literally hurts me to read the fucking comic.
This is odd, considering I can read another 16-panel comic, Pax Americana, rather
easily). In essence, the Batman of The Dark Knight Returns is the physical
embodiment of the enemy of this blog.
Which brings us, over a thousand
words in, to why we are talking about this book. In many ways, it ties into a
running gag I have in regards to the work of JM DeMatteis: How much does this
comic hate Batman? That isn’t to say hates Batman (which is to say I asked and
he doesn’t) but that there’s a pattern within his superhero comics that has
interesting implications. This can range from the bemused humor of JLI to being
the most unsympathetic character in Batman: Absolution, to being Literal,
Actual Satan in the mythological system set up in Supergirl: Wings. In the case
of Kraven’s Last Hunt, this comes in the form of the titular character.
Consider: both are older men
lamenting the fallen world they find themselves living in. Both are lamenting
the loss of their parents at a young age, and cope with that by going onto the
crime riddled streets and beating the crap out of people (including the
neuroatypical). Also, both are aristocratic fascists who are supported by the
law (until they get caught committing murder, which forces the law to turn on
them). This isn’t me reaching for a connection between the two: DeMatteis has
said in an interview with Comics Interview that Kraven, once he resolves the
narrative collapse by donning the costume of Spider-Man, “becomes… something
akin to Frank Miller’s Dark Knight character.”
Which makes Kraven’s death all the
more interesting. It’s a suicide, a common death for a fascist (right up there
with guillotines and time travelers). But why does he kill himself? There is no
sign that the army is at his door, about to burn down his perfect empire. In
fact, he claims throughout the penultimate issue that he’s won the war against
the Spider. So then why do it?
Simple: because he empathizes with
Spider-Man. Empathy is the understanding between us and them. To see the world
from the perspective of other people as they see it rather than how you think
they see it. To embrace the stranger as if he’s a fellow in this mad world we
live in. To say that fascism needs an other to react against would be an
understatement. They need the Jews, the queers, the blacks, the Mexicans, the
barbarians plotting to tear down the walls of the Empire. They need that threat
of the unknown and a populace that fears it. If punching Nazis is a “Hail Mary”
surgery used at the last possible minute (as it has been used lately), then
empathy is treating the infection that fascism leaves behind so things don’t
get as bad or worse than they currently are.
And so, when injected with empathy
towards his enemy, Kraven can’t live anymore. Because the character of Kraven
is defined by his fascism, and outside of that he is a rather simplistic
character (even DeMatteis didn’t find interesting until he found out Kraven was
Russian, and could write him as a Dostoyevsky character [I don’t think I’m
going to read a Dostoyevsky book for this, but there are other posts that I
didn’t think I was going to write about that I am, so who knows]). When the
hunt is over, Kraven is nothing; just a guy in a leopard leotard howling about
Spiders.
Is this how we solve fascism then:
by making it empathize with the other? By creating a society of people who care
about how their actions and opinions hurt others and try their best to make
things better? For our society to just fight less, talk more; say sorry
sometimes? Is it really that simple? No. It’s not simple at all.
I’ve been on twitter lately, mainly
to procrastinate from writing this post. There was this tweet that’s been going
around about how Tina Fey made a joke about how we should just stay inside and
do nothing and how she is speaking from a perspective of privilege in that she
can just ignore the outside world. In response to that, someone pointed out a
more egregious joke Fey made in regards to a desire for neo-Nazis to fight drag
queens since they’re “a 6’4” black man”.
Now to say that’s a minefield that
should be treaded on carefully would be an understatement. But what I’m more
interested in is a defense of it made by another comedian (much smaller than
Fey, so he’ll be left unnamed). The defense effectively amounts to a bemoaning
the circular firing squad the left tends to use constantly. More precisely,
it’s that we shouldn’t critique the particulars of a joke in the face of
literal, actual Nazis.
In essence, it’s the long-standing
stance of the neoliberal that when catastrophe comes, we must put aside our
petty differences to fight the common enemy (typically, said petty differences
amount to “the powers that be are right and the marginalized are wrong”). By
rejecting the opinions of the marginalized, we allow fascism to burrow itself into
the fabric of our society, which it can as our society is one that is founded
upon a status of white supremacy, which goes hand in hand with fascism. Be its
face the Klan, the Nazis, the Gators, the Puppies, the Neoreactionaries, so
long as we keep society as it is fascism will adapt and become more powerful
until we all suffocate and die in the face of it’s oppressive structure.
Sadly, we don’t seem to want to
change the world. We’d rather die of climate change than see the end of things
as we know them. As someone once put it, “We can imagine the end of the world
before we can imagine the end of capitalism.” We’d rather bend the knee to a
fascist than embrace painful, wonderful change. And if we can’t accept change,
what hope do we have?
“Hope? (Keep those bells ringing, Chris.) You want to talk about hope? We’ve got a militarized police state in front of us! A race of carnivorous monsters behind us! A city that’s given everything because it doesn’t have the guts to fight! Let me tell you a thing about hope! Hope has three daughters: Anger at the state things have fallen into. Courage to fight to make things right. And the third daughter is Truth… And she won’t hide her true face any longer.”
-Kaare Andrews, Spider-Man: Reign
(Next Time: The Other Thing I Have
To Talk About.)
[Photos: Dumbing of Age: “Your princess is in another
castle” by David M. Willis]
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