Popular Culture Review Vol. 3, No. 2, August 1992 | Page 37

Batman: Americana with a Twist

33

initiated during the Enlightenment. The New World, precisely
speaking, was to offer a "Novus Ordo"--a new order of polity, a new
definition and construction of the state, one that would contrast the
decay and dissolution of the Old World. Joker, however, evaluates
the practical results of the New Order. Preparing to gas the crowds,
he remarks, "Now it's time for me to relieve you, the little people, of
the burden of your failed and useless lives." Joker betrays his
promises to the people on the streets, but betrayal is commmonplace in
Gotham. In Gotham personal relations fail—those of love as well as
greed—and in general, institutional and philosophic relations fail.
Democracy, the film suggests, is a bust, as outmoded and useless, as
precious and effete as the busts in the museum through which Joker
anarchically dances and spray-paints his way.
The Gothic implications of Batman should now be clearer.
How a society treats its people and what possibilities exist for them
depends upon how the society regards itself. The film opposes the
fictional constructions customarily defined as "reality" over against
another-or at least different-darkly fantastic world and asks us if
we can tell the difference. In Perils of the Night DeLamotte argues:
Central (to Gothic literature] . . . is the perception
that the Gothic vision has from the beginning been
focused steadily on social relations and social
institutions and that its simultaneous focus on the
most private demons of the pysche can never be
separated from this persistent preoccupation with
the social realities from which those demons . . . take
their shape (p. vii).
Observers of the American scene since Crevecoeur and de
Tocqueville have alternately praised or villified the New World's
democratic experiment. Batman contrasts America's favorite story
about itself—the myth of its democratic origins and destinies—
against the practical, often chaotic consequences of democratic
principles in action. The film's sets carefully direct the viewer to
predicted conclusions. The dty—"disquieting, forbidding, dangerous"
(Newsweek, p. 72)—is a place where darkness itself casts the only
light, and Gotham is surely a far cry from John Winthrop's beacon
like city on a hill. The empty cathedral forces viewers to recognize