Abstract
The scene plays out like this: A black-gauntleted fist is aimed with unerring accuracy until the recipient submits and tells the assailant what he wants to know. Or, it goes like this: Something gleaming and sharp flies through the air, knocking down the first line of defense, or thwacking just a hair away from skin, or landing mercilessly and excruciatingly in some vulnerable flesh that incapacitates, but certainly doesn’t kill. Or: A man is snatched from the street by a bat-masked specter and suspended in terror from the edge of a very tall building, a fall from which will almost certainly prove to be lethal. He is interrogated, threatened, and terrified because the Bat believes his victim knows something that might prove useful to his crime-fighting mission.
Do you know the oldest lie in America, Senator?
It’s that power can be innocent.
—Lex Luthor (Zack Snyder, dir., Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, Ultimate Edition (Warner Bros., 2016). Subsequent references to and quotations from BvS refer to this source.)
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Notes
- 1.
Mohamedou Ould Slahi, Guantánamo Diary (New York, Back Bay Books, 2015); Darcia Narvaez, “Torture, evil and moral development,” Journal of Moral Education 44 no. 1 (2015), 1–16.
- 2.
Narvaez notes that “Naming people under torture leads to more torture of more innocent people. It is a spreading toxic spill of misinformation and harm” (2).
- 3.
Narvaez, 3.
- 4.
Frank Miller, et al., Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (New York, DC Comics, 1986).
- 5.
A.O. Scott “Review: ‘Batman v Superman’…v fun?” The New York Times, 23 Mar. 2016, https://nyti.ms/2ozvFJv. Accessed 1 Mar. 2018.
- 6.
Orion Ussner Kidder, “Historicizing the Superhero: Alan Moore’s Supreme and Warren Ellis/John Cassaday’s Planetary,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 21 no. 1 (2010), 77–96. Kidder argues that “Superhero comics have, almost since their beginning, gone out of their way to erase their own narrative history,” and identifies two types of retcon: the first “alters previous, published comics by disingenuously ‘revealing’ that the events [depicted within] were depicted incorrectly or incompletely”; the second is the “incremental…update on the settings, characters, and politics…to create the impression of a perpetually contemporary setting” (78–9).
- 7.
Grant Morrison, et al., Batman & Robin #4 (New York, DC Comics, 20).
- 8.
Ed Brubaker, et al., Captain America Omnibus, Vol. 1 (New York, Marvel Entertainment, 2007).
- 9.
Geoff Klock, “The Revisionary Superhero Narrative,” The Superhero Reader, edited by Charles Hatfield, et al. (Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 2013), 117, 116.
- 10.
Bill Finger, et al., Detective Comics #27 (New York, DC Comics, 1939).
- 11.
Klock, 119, quoting Miller (1986), 51.
- 12.
Klock, 133.
- 13.
Miller (1986), 22, 45, 64–5, 135, 192; Snyder.
- 14.
Miller (1986), 191, 19–20, 22–25, 130, 166–7; Snyder.
- 15.
Soledad O’Brien, Jon Stewart, Carrie Birmingham, Vikram Gandhi, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Anderson Cooper, Dana Bash, Nancy Grace, Erika Erickson, and Andrew Sullivan appear in BvS.
- 16.
Zack Snyder, dir., Man of Steel (Warner Bros., 2013).
- 17.
Klock, 118. Notably, Miller’s means of making Gotham sensible are replete with misogyny, racism, and homophobia.
- 18.
Klock, 127.
- 19.
Klock, 125.
- 20.
See: Chris Gavaler, “The rise and fall of fascist superpowers,” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 7 no. 1 (2015), 70–87; Gavaler, On the Origin of Superheroes (Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 2015); and Bill Peterson and Emily Gerstein, “Fighting and Flying: Archival Analysis of Threat, Authoritarianism, and the North American Comic Book,” Political Psychology 26 no. 6 (2005), 887–904.
- 21.
Neal Curtis, Sovereignty and Superheroes (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2016), 16.
- 22.
Klock, 130.
- 23.
Superman (1938) and Captain America (1941) responded to Nazism.
- 24.
Klock, 129.
- 25.
Klock, 129.
- 26.
Finger, et al., Detective Comics #27, #33.
- 27.
See: Aidan Diamond, “‘Stronger than their madhouse walls’: Disrupting Gotham’s Freak Discourse in ‘Mad Love’ and ‘Harley Quinn,’” The Ascendance of Harley Quinn: Essays on DC’s Enigmatic Villain, edited by Shelley E. Barba and Joy M. Perrin (Jefferson, McFarland & Co., 2017), 120–132.
- 28.
Will Brooker, Batman Unmasked (New York, Continuum, 2005), 276, quoting Denny O’Neil’s The Bat-Bible, an unpublished document used to standardize Batman at DC editorial offices.
- 29.
Steve Brie, “Spandex Parables: Justice, Criminality and the Ethics of Vigilantism in Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and Alan Moore’s Batman: The Killing Joke,” Literature and Ethics: From the Green Knight to the Dark Knight, ed. Steve Brie and William T. Rossiter (Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), 205.
- 30.
Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985, 2005); Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996, 2005); Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Berkeley: Stanford University Press, 1998); Jacques Derrida, Dissemination (London, the Athalone Press, 1981); Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2003); Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977 (New York, Pantheon Books, 1980).
- 31.
On sovereignty in Derrida and Foucault: Vincent Leitch, “Late Derrida: The Politics of Sovereignty,” Critical Inquiry 33 (2007), 229–247; Marc Lombardo, Critique of Sovereignty, Book 1: Contemporary Theories of Sovereignty (Brooklyn, Punctum Books, 2015); Sergei Prozorov, Foucault, Freedom and Sovereignty (Burlington, Ashgate Publishing Company, 2007).
- 32.
Schmitt (1996, 2005), 5.
- 33.
Schwab in Schmitt (1985, 2005), xliii–xliv.
- 34.
For a more thorough and nuanced interrogation of Schmitt’s politics than is possible here, please see Tracy B. Strong’s “Foreword” and George Schwab’s “Introduction” in Schmitt (1985, 2005).
- 35.
Agamben, 83; emphasis in original.
- 36.
Derek Gregory, “The Black Flag: Guantánamo Bay and the Space of Exception,” Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 88 no. 4 (2006), 406.
- 37.
Snyder.
- 38.
Neal Curtis, “Superheroes and the contradiction of sovereignty,” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 4 no. 2 (2013), 209–222.
- 39.
Claudia Aradau, “Law transformed: Guantánamo and the ‘other’ exception,” Third World Quarterly 28 no. 3 (2007), 492.
- 40.
I summarize both Schmitt and Agamben; this necessarily lacks the depth and nuance of both theorists’ work.
- 41.
Curtis, 58.
- 42.
Miller (1986), 172.
- 43.
Frank Miller, et al., Batman: Year One (New York, DC Comics, 1987, 2005), 4.
- 44.
See Brie.
- 45.
Metropolis has never been Batman’s city in comics or film; that he has established inroads there well before Superman’s arrival may be read as an imperialist act, with Wayne Financial read as a colony. The destruction is thus a double assault on Batman’s sovereignty: on territory he had claimed and on his right as sovereign to expand his territory.
- 46.
Finger, et al., Detective Comics #33, 2.
- 47.
Snyder; emphasis added.
- 48.
Gregory, 415.
- 49.
Aradau, 491.
- 50.
Curtis, 77.
- 51.
Snyder; emphasis in original.
- 52.
Tina Managhan, “We all dreamed it: The politics of knowing and un-knowing the ‘war on terror,’” Critical Studies on Terrorism 10 no. 1 (2016), 1; Leigh Johnson, “Terror, torture and democratic autoimmunity,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 38 no. 1 (2012), 111.
- 53.
Johnson, 114.
- 54.
Agamben, 187.
- 55.
Johnson, 118.
- 56.
Brie, 213.
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Diamond, A. (2019). Dawn of Justice: Revisioning, Accountability, and Batman in the Twenty-first Century. In: Picariello, D. (eds) Politics in Gotham. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05776-3_14
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