Popular Culture Review Vol. 3, No. 2, August 1992 | Page 40

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The Popular Culture Review

merely to redefine Gotham's society as an extension of himself.
Batman and the Joker make room for the individual only by
dispensing with democratic presuppositions entirely, thus raising a
question as old as Hawthorne about the efficacy of democracy. The
film reaches its climax in the tower of the "exploded Gothic"
cathedral. Gotham's riot of aggressive, outsized architecture,
presided over by the abandoned cavernous cathedral, visibly
witnesses the collapse of law and social organization that is Gotham.
Gotham's aesthetic chaos is emblematic of a culture in which all
principles of organization, religious or civil, have been abandoned,
perhaps forgotten, or maybe never understood in the first place. The
vacant, dusty husk of a cathedral, in which Joker and Batman
ultimately square off, perfectly describes the collapse of metaphysics
that makes them possible, and perhaps even necessary, in the first
place. Their fight is anarchic, apocalyptic, signaling the death of
law, religious and civil, because of the death of the individual.
Gotham is doubly silent: the bell-less cathedral on the one hand, the
inarticulate City Hall on the other. The answer Batnnan and Joker
pose to the dilemma of the Republic is a grim one. Only facing death
are they truly equal.
In its European origins the Gothic traditionally encoded the
protest by the powerless of society against institutional forms of
repression and oppression. In a similar manner American Gothic texts
and films continue a dialogue with the visionary theological
tradition from which they emerge; they embody the contradictions of
an antinomian people who idolize laws that they nonetheless rarely
wish to obey. In Batman one can read the anxieties of a very old
Republic—a republic that is, in some ways, still very young. Gotham
celebrates its 200th anniversary; its general decay demonstrates the
weight of failed tradition. Its people smother in their own passivity,
prey to the morass of religious and civil laws represent^ by the
moldering city. Outside City Hall, a pair of statues briefly evident
in the opening scenes of the film epitomize the burdens the people
carry: human figures labor, bent double beneath the heavy weight of
unwieldy globes. Bruce Wayne, finally, embodies the contradictions
of a democracy that has sold itself to capitalism. Wayne can do
what the little people cannot—he can buy power, and thus buy
privacy, the all-important privilege of the rich. Thus, he can wrest
individuality from the amorphousness and undifferentiated life