13
WHAT IS IT LIKE TO BE A BATMAN?
Ron Novy
You had a bad day once, am I right? I know I am.
I can tell. You had a bad day and everything changed.
Why else would you dress up like a flying rat?
—The Joker, The Killing Joke (1988)
I could never kill you. Where would the act be without my straight man?
—The Joker, Batman #663 (February 2007)
Answering the Batphone
Imagine yourself doing whatever Batman does. Would the experience let you know what it’s like to be Batman? Like a lot of kids with the impulse to leap off furniture and spring through doorways, it only took a bath towel pinned around my neck for me to become the Caped Crusader. Sliding across the kitchen linoleum in my pre-nonflammable footie pajamas, I would provide my own soundtrack with the “nah-na nah-na, nah-na nah-na” theme from the 1960s TV show. At that time, I had no doubt that this was a thoroughgoing Batman experience. As it turns out, I was wrong.
In fact, if you or anyone besides Batman could know what it’s like to be Batman, you would need to meet at least two conditions: first, you’d need to be as extraordinarily and psychologically damaged as Batman; second, you’d need to have the same experiences and relations to the world as Batman. As we’ll see, the only person who comes close to meeting these conditions is the Joker, and even he doesn’t really know what it’s like to be Batman.
What It’s Not Like to Be Batman
The term phenomena refers to the subjective appearance of material objects in your own conscious experience. So, while reading this sentence, your senses register a variety of stimuli: dark marks on a light field, a particular weight and texture in your hands, perhaps also the smell of freshly brewed coffee and the sound of rain at the window. While the weight of the book or the trace of Arabica in the air can be objectively measured, your experience of these phenomena is subjective—something to which only you have access.
Now, acting like Batman is quite different from actually knowing what it’s like to be Batman. At best, one can “do as Batman does”—brood in the Batcave, admire the long curve of Catwoman’s calf, or tumble down an alley with some of the Joker’s henchmen. Insofar as your actions mirror those of Batman, with a little practice you could do a pretty fair job of behaving as Batman behaves—but this is not the same as knowing what it’s like for Batman to be Batman. Your late-night patrols, undertaken with your Keatonesque, Kilmerite, Baleian, or even West-like physique packed firmly into a Kevlar-and-Lycra costume worn by an actual ice-skating stunt double in the movie Batman and Robin, may even garner an above-the-fold story from a cub reporter on the Gotham Gazette police beat.
Nonetheless, your phenomenal experiences are yours and only yours—even those that occur while you’re imagining yourself to be Batman and performing “Batman deeds.” To actually know Batman’s experience of such events—that is, to know what it’s like to be Batman—would require knowledge of Batman’s subjective experiences, knowledge to which (it seems) Batman alone has access.
We all find ourselves limited in this same way regarding the subjective experiences of other conscious beings. So, to clarify an old chestnut, when it’s claimed that we can’t understand another’s perspective until we have “walked a mile in her shoes,” this doesn’t mean we can come to know what that experience is actually like for that other person, but rather that we can imagine what that experience may be. Nevertheless, this can often deliver the desired understanding, not because we have actually experienced what it’s like to be her, but rather because we are imaginative and empathetic creatures. We can understand one another because people are alike in many ways: we share common experiences, physiology, and so on.
In this way, despite our never having met, you have a reasonable chance of having a phenomenal experience similar to mine when, say, you strike your thumb with a hammer. I say “reasonable” not merely because you have experienced or can imagine experiencing such a thing, but because we share the sort of physiological, psychological, and social background that together brings forth a shooting pain, a yelp of surprise, and some slight embarrassment at having whacked oneself in the distal phalanx. You could reasonably expect that I would shake the injured hand and let fly a string of naughty words, again not necessarily because you had ever hurt yourself in precisely this same way, but because you have had other experiences similar enough to mine to imagine your own reaction.
This all seems quite commonsensical until you discover that you aren’t like me in some relevant way: perhaps your thumb lacks nociceptors—the embedded sensory neurons that translate stimuli into action potentials and transmit this information to the central nervous system—while my thumb does not. Without a shared capacity to feel pain, you would have no grounds on which to claim that you have much of an idea what it’s like for me to have that whacked-by-a-hammer experience. This is so even if you’ve learned to perfectly mimic my pain-related actions such as jumping up and down in a frenzy, weeping, and muttering profanities.
Like us, Batman is “just” a man, with no superpowers: no gifts from mythological benefactors, no alien physiology, no beneficial accident involving experimental radiation. Instead, his body is like ours: his “power” is a product of rigorous physical training, the ability to unnerve criminals, and access to what Jack Nicholson’s Joker called “those wonderful toys.” And yet, Batman is profoundly not like us.
Bats and Thomas Nagel
To my knowledge, Thomas Nagel (b. 1937) isn’t a superhero, and he’s never been accused of being the Batman, but he is a renowned philosopher and the author of “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”1 In this essay, Nagel argues that even a complete accounting of the physical object “brain” will nonetheless fail to fully describe what we mean by the term “mind.” Perhaps most important, such a reduction of “mind” to “brain” would be unable to account for the central feature of consciousness—the subjective character of our experience. As Nagel puts it, “An organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for that organism.”2
To use Nagel’s example, you and I can’t know what it’s like to be a bat. The average Chiroptera experiences the world quite differently from the way we Homo sapiens do: it sleeps hanging head-down from a cave roof, it pursues insect delicacies on leathery wings, and it navigates complex flight paths by way of echolocation.3 While you and I can imagine what it would be like for us—as humans pretending to be bats—to hang upside down or to eat bugs as wind whistles through our hair, our experiences will never be interchangeable with those of the bat. Our subjective experience, even of the same physical phenomena encountered by a bat, relies both upon our particular senses and upon our particular histories.
For Nagel, this inability to capture subjective experience necessarily gives us an incomplete account of consciousness. While Nagel was focused on attacking the hypothesis that subjective experience and consciousness could be fully understood as “merely” a physical event of the brain, it should be stressed that one doesn’t have to take the presence of echolocation in bats and its absence in humans to be crucial for his point. Nagel’s focus on the bat’s echolocation capacity, an ordinary “sense” for the bat yet truly alien for us, makes our inability to “know what it’s like to be a bat” quite stark. Yet, unless we are willing to grant that any Homo sapiens can know what it’s like to be any other Homo sapiens, there must be something besides difference in body type underlying the issue. Surely a lack of shared experience, not a lack of a shared body type, is what is required.
Suppose that Barbara Gordon, also known as Oracle, the brilliant hacker and brains behind the Birds of Prey (not to mention a former Batgirl), had begun her career not as a coy librarian with a crime-fighting alter ego, but as a scientist studying the neurophysiology of vision.4 She knows everything there is to know about the physical processes involved in sight, from the physics of photons to the wavelength associated with the term “maroon,” from the anatomy of the retina to the particular chemical processes involved in conveying visual information in the brain. Strangely, Barbara has spent her whole life in a room absolutely devoid of color and has experienced the world beyond her room only through a black-and-white television monitor. So while Barbara has a fully functional set of visual hardware from cornea to occipital lobe, she has never seen a field of yellow daisies, oranges at the grocers, or bronzed lifeguards in a blue ocean.
Now suppose that while she slept, you slipped a shiny ripe tomato onto Barbara’s nightstand. Even with her complete knowledge of the physical processes necessary for vision, when she sees the tomato in the morning, should we expect her experience of “redness” to be just like yours or mine? It seems unlikely, given the innumerable places, times, and hues of “redness” that you and I have experienced in the past relative to her single encounter. If this difference holds between Barbara Gordon’s experience of redness and ours, it seems reasonable to expect that for you to know what it’s like to be Batman, would require you to have had formative experiences similar to his. Given that Batman and the Joker were transformed into the creatures they are now under similar rare and horrific conditions, and given that each has attempted to make sense of the world through this shared and fractured lens, I suspect that if anyone besides Batman could know what it’s like to be Batman, that person would be the Joker.
Freedom and Conflict
At every opportunity, the truth comes to light, the truth of life and death, of my solitude and my bond with the world . . . of the insignificance and the sovereign importance of each man and all men. . . . Let us try to assume our fundamental ambiguity. It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our life that we must draw our strength to live and our reason for acting.
—Simone de Beauvoir5
Now we switch gears a bit, from discussing phenomena and consciousness to discussing situated freedom and identity, but for a very good reason. Just as you and the color-deprived Barbara Gordon experience the redness of the tomato differently despite both having the capacity to see red, Batman and the Joker find their lives built upon similar foundations, which result in very different narratives bringing each man to his current place in life.
At base, both Batman’s and the Joker’s self-identities—and with them their conceptions of duty and right—are firmly anchored in situated freedom, a concept developed by Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986).6 Situated freedom refers to the idea that our capacity to act and make sense of the world is always constrained by our lived experience of the world. In other words, there are objective conditions under which we live, and these conditions open some options to us while closing others. Thus, while a Neanderthal-era Batman would likely live in a Batcave, he would never strap into the Batmobile or understand the Joker as in need of anything less than a good beating. Similarly, it is difficult to imagine an Elizabethan Batgirl who could appear in public without the corset and petticoats of her contemporaries, or who had the opportunity to develop the martial skills of Barbara Gordon or Cassandra Cain.
The “freedom” part of situated freedom means that the individual is constantly in a position to make meaningful choices that manipulate the world, choices that in turn alter the options available later. Given that we are social beings with our futures open in this way, a choice made by one person may well change the options available to another. So, even the smallest of our decisions carries with it some moral weight.
For example, your decision to sign on as the Penguin’s henchman simultaneously expands and restricts your future opportunities. You’ll meet people and visit places you likely wouldn’t have otherwise, while at the same time sacrificing any chance you may have had to attend the police academy. Your decision also ripples through the futures available to those around you: the wealth and influence that come with being the Penguin’s enforcer may have gotten your child into the exclusive Brentwood Academy with Tim Drake and the other scions of Gotham’s upper crust; similarly, a shopkeeper late with one of Mr. Cobblepot’s payments may never be able to play the violin because of your enthusiastic, crowbar-wielding reminder.
To say that this freedom is “situated” is to acknowledge that we’re all born into a world already brimming with buildings, ideology, poems, commerce, dental hygienists, mythology, bacteria, and hats. The world didn’t start anew with our birth, but rather is an independent and complex product of the past in which we must learn to navigate. As such, there are facts about our existence over which we have little or no control, from our gender, poor eyesight, and strawberry allergy to when, where, and to whom we were born. Obviously, at least some such contingencies can affect future options available to us.
To recognize that freedom is situated is to also recognize that the future is unwritten, as well as that we are always teetering at the edge of violence. While we all share the desire to live a life that is as fully human as possible, decisions made by people grounded in different situations will necessarily neither open nor close off the same future options. Since all possible futures cannot simultaneously come to fruition, we inevitably come into conflict with one another. Violence is thus a constant presence lurking about the edges of human freedom.
One Bad Day
All it takes is one bad day to reduce the sanest man alive to lunacy. . . . You had a bad day, and it drove you as crazy as everybody else—only you won’t admit it!
You have to keep pretending that life makes sense,
that there’s some point to all this struggling!
God you make me want to puke.
—The Joker, The Killing Joke
Batman and the Joker were each born in violence, each the product of an ordinary person who was fundamentally transformed on “one bad day.” Their strange intimacy is the madness shared by two angels of death debating conditions necessary for human freedom.
Batman’s story is well known. Young Bruce Wayne witnesses the senseless murder of his parents by a small-time crook. Despite their cooperation, the mugger loses his nerve and shoots the pair. In that instant, Bruce loses not only his parents, but also his illusory understanding of the world. Suddenly, he realizes that not all people are decent and that not everyone cares about his happiness; that some problems can’t be resolved by a generous dip into a bottomless bank account; that visceral hate and explosive violence can be liberating; and that the polished world of Wayne Enterprises is built upon a sunless foundation in which suffering and want are not isolated occurrences.
The Joker’s “one bad day” is less well known: An unremarkable chemical engineer has quit his job and failed at his dream of being a stand-up comedian; he loses his pregnant wife in a fluke accident, is forced into a bungled robbery of his former employer, and plummets into a tank of noxious waste while fleeing the police.7 It is a baptism from which emerges the Joker: green hair, pallid skin, and insane. Recognizing Batman’s similar experience of destruction and rebirth, the Joker is stunned by Batman’s commitment to fight chaos:
When I saw what a black, awful joke the world was, I went crazy as a coot! I admit it! Why can’t you? I mean, you’re not unintelligent! You must see the reality of the situation. . . . It’s all a joke! Everything anybody ever valued or struggled for—it’s all a monstrous, demented gag! So why can’t you see the funny side? Why aren’t you laughing?8
For both Batman and the Joker, violence overthrew a coherent picture of the world without installing a replacement; they share this realization and are bound together in an effort to make sense of it. Like violators of the tabernacle or visitors in Oz, each has glimpsed behind the curtain of appearances—that is, beyond the “merely” phenomenal world. Recognizing that what we call “the world” is just an appearance cobbled together by our minds from sense data, is also to admit that there is a world “out there” unmediated by our sight or touch. This other world that exists behind the appearances—what Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) called the noumenal world—is terrifying.9 It serves as the armature upon which our knowledge is organized; and yet, we can know next to nothing about it apart from what might be inferred from those illusory appearances.
This experience of becoming disillusioned and of catching this glimpse of secret knowledge binds Batman and the Joker, though neither is quite sure what was revealed about how the world “really is.” While they have different hopes regarding the nature of that world behind the appearances, they have only one another with whom to commiserate regarding the terrifying recognition that this world—our world of cops and robbers, joy-buzzers and cemeteries—for them doesn’t exist.
Even acknowledging that this phenomenal world is one of appearance, Batman and the Joker, at least in regard to each other, behave as if the world matters. Batman has ended more than a few story arcs by returning the killer clown to Arkham Asylum—something one might not expect given the Joker’s body count and the numerous opportunities Batman has had to offer Gotham City “a more permanent solution” to its recurring Joker problem.10 Yet as he reveals to Mr. Zsasz, the serial killer who commemorates each kill with a tally mark carved into his own body, Batman needs to continue his relationship with those he fights. It is in their struggle that he gains recognition as something apart from the world of appearance: “Do you want to know what power is? Real power? It’s not ending a life, it’s saving it. It’s looking in someone’s eyes and seeing that spark of recognition that instant, they realize something they’ll never forget.”11
The Joker, too, recognizes this reciprocal relationship with Batman, a relationship without which each one would cease to be who he now is. As he explains it to Batman, “You can’t kill me without becoming like me. I can’t kill you without losing the only human being who can keep up with me. Isn’t that ironic?!”12 For the Joker, behind the fa?ade that dissolved in the tank of chemical slop, there is only chaos. While literally nonsensical, chaos is also wholly liberating—in chaos, there is no fear to restrain you and no conditions that might limit your choices. According to his therapist at Arkham Asylum, the Joker “creates himself each day. He sees himself as the Lord of Misrule and the world as a theater of the absurd.”13 For Batman, this world beneath the appearances is one of order, though not a predetermined order one might read about in that copy of Metaphysics for Dummies you picked up from the discount table at your local bookstore. Rather, it is a moral order that must be wrestled into existence by recognizing the effect of one’s choices on our shared future.
What It Is Like to Be Out of the Asylum
Yet, for all of the shared events, nonsense, chaos, tragedies, and victories that Batman and the Joker have experienced, they do not—and can not—know what it’s like to be in one another’s shoes. Batman’s phenomenal experience and situated freedom is wholly his own; the Joker’s phenomenal experience and situated freedom is wholly his own; and each is unable to experience the world in any other way. Yet, both Batman and the Joker are committed to the absurd yet serious task of seeing the world as it truly is. Each seems to grasp that this requires a sort of testing, and thus the other’s participation, despite that other person’s literal inability to experience the world in the same way.
With this in mind, consider the joke the Clown Prince tells Batman at the end of The Killing Joke as they wait for the police to arrive. Two inmates decide that they should escape the lunatic asylum together. They scramble to the top of the asylum’s wall and gaze upon the world spread before them in the moonlight. Just one hop to a nearby roof and they’re free—out of the asylum and into the world. The first jumps across and then turns to see his partner frozen on the far side. As the Joker puts it, “His friend daredn’t make the leap, y’see. Y’see, he’s afraid of falling.” The inmates stand there, freedom waiting in any direction if only the second man would leap over what his companion sees as a little gap but which he perceives as a deadly abyss. The first man proposes a solution:
He says, “Hey! I have my flashlight with me. I’ll shine it across the gap between the buildings. You can walk along the beam and join me.”
But the second guy just shakes his head. He says . . . he says, “What do you think I am crazy? You’d turn it off when I was half way across!”
As it begins to rain and the police lights appear in the distance, the Joker and Batman laugh. Their snickers build to doubled-over roars, overcome by the absurdity of their shared secret. The first unable to know what it is like to be Batman; the second unable to know what it is like to be the Joker.
NOTES
1 Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Philosophical Review 83 no. 4 (October 1974): 435-450. The article has since been reproduced in many anthologies concerned with the philosophy of mind, such as The Mind’s I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul, ed. Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett (Basic Books: New York, 1981).
2 Nagel, “What Is It Like,” 436.
3 Nagel does not specify any particulars about his bat beyond the capacity for echolocation. But the Joker, having stumbled upon the Batcave, used its computer to help determine the taxonomical classification for Batman. Deciding that “obviously he’s from the ghost-faced family,” the Joker cannot restrain his giggling at the genus name mormoops (Alex Irvine’s novel Inferno [New York: Del Rey Books, 2006], 73).
4 This scenario is a variation on a much-discussed thought experiment developed by philosopher Frank Jackson in “Epiphenomenal Qualia,” Philosophical Quarterly 32 no. 127 (1982): 127-136); and “What Mary Didn’t Know,” Journal of Philosophy 83 no. 5 (1986): 291-295).
5 Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, trans. Bernard Frechtman (Secaucus: Citadel Press, 1948).
6 See Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (1949; repr., New York: Penguin, 1972), for de Beauvoir’s fullest treatment of “situated freedom.”
7 This version of the Joker’s origin—and there have been many—is revealed in flashbacks throughout The Killing Joke (1988).
8 Ibid.
9 The terms “phenomena” and “noumena” are technical terms used by Immanuel Kant in his 1781 opus Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1929), 9.
10 See Mark D. White’s essay in this book for more on why Batman has never ended the Joker’s life.
11 “Scars,”Batman: Black & White, vol. 2 (1996).
12 Batman #663.
13 Arkham Asylum (1989).