“So we'll hunt him. Because he can take it.” “Because he’s not our hero.” Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy
is marked by Batman’s ever shifting reputation — transforming him from a mysterious figure
in the night, to hero, to villain, to legend and myth. It's a fitting story for a character whose cultural identity is always in flux. Batman a far more mutable character than any
of his peers. But what kind of hero is he exactly? In this video and the next one, I’m going to look at 6 heroic archetypes and parse out
the many literary influences that have been melded together to form what we think about
as Batman. Batman as a Classical Hero Now, of course, when asking the question “What
kind of a hero is Batman?” the obvious answer is “um, duh, he’s a superhero.” But, of course, the superhero didn’t spring
fully formed out of the minds of Jerry Seigal and Joe Shuster detatched from every kind
of character that came before. When crafting Superman, Seigal said that he based
his character on “Samson, Hercules and all the strong men I have ever heard tell of rolled
into one. Only more so.” Samson and Hercules are what we’d call Classical
Heroes and most superheroes are extensions of their classical predecessors. These are characters known for their strength
and their ability to perform great deeds, usually monster hunting. A key feature of the classical hero however
is that they are flawed, often foolish. Samson is overly trusting, and Hercules accidentally
murders his family. In making Superman like these characters “only
more so,” Seigel and Shuster ironed out these imperfections. Superman’s only weakness, kryptonite, is
external, not internal. In Batman we have a more human version of
the Classical hero, but the kinds of flaws he exhibits, especially in the Nolan trilogy,
more closely align with another type of protagonist that is just as old as the classical hero:
the Tragic Hero. Batman as a Tragic Hero Superheroes are often have a tragic
backstory. Dead parents. Dead uncle. Exploded planets. There are few characters who experience
as much tragedy as Batman does. But that bad things happen to him does not
necessarily qualify Batman as a tragic hero. For that, we have to turn to the ancient greek
philosopher, Aristotle, who defined the character type in his book, Poetics. The character type often overlaps with the classical hero. But the essence of what makes a character
tragic, according to Aristotle, is when they cause us to feel both pity for them, and fear
for ourselves. Okay, so! How does that happen? Well, to figure that out, Aristotle outlines
a few kinds of characters that DO NOT accomplish this. So, if we watch a perfect man fail, it is not
tragedy. “It merely shocks us.” If we watch an evil man succeed. “Nothing is more alien to the spirit of
tragedy." If we watch an evil man fall, we will feel
morally satisfied, but not pity or fear. Here’s the key bit: “Pity is aroused by unmerited misfortune,
fear by the misfortune of a man like ourselves.” So the tragic hero should not be perfect,
otherwise we won’t relate to him, but he should be better than most men, more capable
and more moral. Tragedy will strike only because he makes
“errors in judgement” or because of his “frailty. In other words, their downfalls have to come
as a result of their own actions, and often as a result of actions they thought were morally
correct, as opposed to vices. And the punishment has to be worse than
the crime. Hamlet is a good example here. He's a good, clever, respected nobleman whose fatal flaw or Hamartia is not that he contemplates
murder, but that he contemplates murder for too long. Had he killed Claudius immediately, he would
have avoided catastrophe, but in waiting, in attempting to make absolutely sure he was
acting morally, a bunch of other people die, including himself. Nolan’s version of Batman, at least
in The Dark Knight, owes a bit of a debt to Hamlet, and not just because they have a dead
parent or two. The deaths of Thomas and Martha Wayne is the
most glaringly obvious tragic moment in Bruce’s life, but it is just the
start of his story, and tragic heroes are really defined by their endings rather than
their beginnings. The Aristotelian error of judgement that cements
Bruce a tragic hero happens right here... "Come on, come on, hit me, hit me! Come on, hit me, hit me! Bruce’s fatal flaw is his refusal to kill. A choice that will cause the death of Rachel, Harvey Dent, and the persona of the Batman as we know it. Often, tragic heroes, like those in Shakespeare,
will die at the end of their stories, but not always. Oedipus, for instance, who Aristotle calls the most perfect version of the tragic hero survives the play he
is most known for, and doesn’t die until its sequel, Oedipus at Colonus. What’s more important, and perhaps even
more tragic than a physical death, is a total and complete spiritual and emotional death. THAT is what Bruce experiences at the end
of The Dark Knight. When we are reintroduced to him in The Dark
Knight Rises, he is practically a dead man, a hermit unable to enjoy life. That film is thematically a resurrection of
Bruce Wayne, and in order for something to be resurrected, to rise, it needs to have been dead and fallen to begin with. The classical and tragic heroes are
enduring and pervasive. And it’s really not until the early 19th
century that we start to talk about heroes in other terms, with the
emergence of the Romantic Hero. Batman as a Romantic Hero Now, don’t let the name fool you. This term does not mean the hero of a romance
story. No, it comes out of Romanticism, a movement
that emphasized emotion and individuality and which produced literary heroes that broke
the mold of what we typically considered heroic. In contrast to classical and tragic heroes,
who were often characters at the center of their societies — kings, leaders and warriors — the romantic hero
is typically an outsider, a rebel. Someone who is waging war on society itself,
its systems of justice, its materialism, its hypocrisy, etc. The character is a reflection of the social
disintegration, violence, urbanization and upheaval that defined the early 19th century as a result
of the French and Industrial Revolutions. Literary critic Northrop Frye wrote that this
version of the hero is someone “who is placed outside the structure of civilization and
therefore represents the force of physical nature, amoral or ruthless, yet with a sense
of power, and often of leadership, that society has impoverished itself by rejecting.” You can see the outline of Batman in that
description. The Nolan trilogy really emphasizes that final part
of the character, since Gotham is clearly a poorer place when it doesn’t incorporate
Bruce's ideas. In the Romantic Hero, those ideas come from
someone who is engulfed in a sea of psychological struggles. They are moody and unpredictable, “They are brooders or visionaries.” "The centers of intense mental activity." Who does that sound like? There is something, some idea or emotion,
that this character has that sets them apart from the world, and as a result of this separation,
they are introspective, melancholic and often wandering, wayward men. You can see all of these characteristics seep into
the portrayal of Bruce Wayne throughout the Dark Knight trilogy, but especially in the
early parts of Batman Begins where his dissatisfaction with Gotham’s systems of justice sends him
adrift in the world, on a journey that begins aimlessly. His return to Gotham and and his subsequent war on crime mimics
Edmund Dante’s transformation into the Count of Monte Cristo or Heathcliff’s return to Wuthering Heights after mysteriously acquiring great wealth and both of their battles with the people who had wronged them. All of these characters are clever and intelligent,
a necessary quality for someone who has diagnosed the world as lacking, a quality that isn’t
as necessary for classical or tragic heroes. But there is a key characteristic
that separates Batman from the Romantic heroes. Batman is not misanthropic. He's altruistic, not
egoistic. One of the earliest Romantic heroes appears
in french writer Honoré de Balzac’s, Le Pere Goriot. In it, a young man named Rastignac declares
war on the cruelty of Parisian society. Raney Sanford says that “the limitations of Rastignac as hero are readily apparent. The rebel who deludes himself that to plunder
and exploit make him somehow different from those who with whom he contends can only be
an adolescent figure. Without self perception, he sees all the irrational
demonic forces in the world as outside himself — a delusion that perhaps is the most limiting
quality of the typical romantic rebel.” We run into a bit of a catch 22 here. The character who thinks of society as corrupt
without analyzing himself will also act in an immoral manner. But if they recognize the potential damage
of their own actions, they can rise above that darkness. This happens in the Count of Monte Cristo when Dantes begins to regret his relentless
pursuit of revenge and redeems himself by helping others. That moment of self-revelation happens much
earlier in Batman Begins when Bruce regrets nearly killing Joe Chill himself. For the Romantic Hero, salvation comes not
when they recognize the mutual goodness between themselves and the rest of society, but when
they recognize the potential for evil in both, and thus the need not to just wage war against
something, but to produce something new as well. In rejecting Ra’s Al Ghul, Bruce Wayne essentially
rejects being a Romantic Hero. The quest of the Batman — to rid Gotham
of crime — is too big and too fundamentally good to fit fully into the mold of the flawed
rebel as seen in Romantic literature. So we may say that, in Nolan’s interpretation
of the character, Batman has the personality, the moodiness and darkness of a Romantic hero,
as well as the outsider status, but that he has a more traditionally heroic set of values. At the same time, he accomplishes great feats
of strength like a classical hero, and faces terrible consequences for his errors in judgement
like a tragic hero. But we’re not done yet. In part two, we’ll dive into other archetypes
of heroism in literature, and take a look at how they’re used in some of Batman’s
comic book portrayals. Until then, thanks for watching. This episode is sponsored by Squarespace. Squarespace is an excellent all-in-one platform
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gotta love the effort DC/ Batman fans put into the fandom