PART THREE
ORIGINS AND ETHICS: BECOMING THE CAPED CRUSADER
7
BATMAN’S PROMISE
Randall M. Jensen
The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
—William Faulkner
Batman Begins
Where do superheroes come from? Where do they get their powers? What makes somebody adopt the persona of a masked crime fighter, defender of all that is good? Who decides to leave the house wearing tights and sporting a cape?
Every good superhero saga includes an origin story. Such stories are memorable and powerful, coming close to real mythmaking. Origin stories are typically driven by incredible and fantastic events: genetic mutations, strange laboratory accidents, alien encounters, dealings with the devil, and so on. But Batman’s beginnings are different. The crucial catalyst—an alleyway mugging gone bad—is all too tragically ordinary. And the rest of the Batman genesis is built upon a boy’s extravagant and seemingly foolish promise to his murdered parents that he’ll cleanse Gotham City of crime.
The senseless murder of Thomas and Martha Wayne is likely to remind comic fans of the tragic elements in other superhero origin stories. For example, Peter Parker becomes your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man largely because of the circumstances surrounding the murder of his uncle Ben, and Frank Castle turns into the Punisher due to the execution of his wife and children. What’s distinctive about the Batman origin story is that the why precedes the how. When Uncle Ben is killed, a radioactive spider bite has already given Peter his amazing abilities. Likewise, Castle is a scarily competent military operator long before the mob takes out his family. But Bruce is just a boy at the time of his parents’ death. He has no reason to think that he can do what he’s promising to do. Bruce Wayne doesn’t acquire superpowers and then later discover how he ought to use them. No, he first acquires a mission—a vocation or calling, really—and with it, a desperate need for extraordinary abilities. Through his own herculean efforts (and with the help of the enormous financial empire he has inherited, of course!), he makes himself into Batman so that he can keep the promise he made.
Unlike so many others, Bruce Wayne doesn’t become a superhero by accident, but rather through sheer force of will. Since even the greatest tragedy doesn’t transform most children into superheroes, the key element in Batman’s origin is not the murder of a mother and father but rather the extraordinary promise of a young boy.
The Nature of the Promise
In the 1939 Bob Kane and Bill Finger version of the Batman origin story, just days after the murder of his parents, Bruce Wayne makes an oath: “And I swear by the spirits of my parents to avenge their deaths by spending the rest of my life warring on all criminals.”1 Much more recently, in Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale’s classic The Long Halloween (1998), Batman recalls his boyhood promise: “I made a promise to my parents that I would rid the city of the evil that took their lives.” In fact, this promise plays a very prominent role throughout Loeb’s various contributions to the Batman history, showing up in Haunted Knight (1996), Dark Victory (2001, the sequel to The Long Halloween), Hush (2003), and more recently in his run on the popular Superman/Batman title (2003-2005). For Loeb, this promise seems to be the defining moment in the life of the Batman. So, what kind of promise is it? What prompts Bruce to make it? And why does it have such an enduring role in the Batman mythos?
One all-too-obvious answer is that this promise is an expression of a desire for vengeance. And indeed in its earlier version, Bruce does speak of “avenging” the deaths of his parents. But it’s crucial to recognize it isn’t simple revenge he’s after; Bruce doesn’t promise his parents that he’ll kill the man who killed them. Clearly, with either interpretation of the promise, he takes on a much larger task than that—either to war on all criminals or to rid Gotham of evil! Furthermore, in the first volume of Justice (2006), Batman tells us that “when I was a boy, my father and mother were murdered before my very eyes. I have dedicated my life to stopping that criminal, regardless of the forms or faces he wears. Really, the form is of no consequence” (emphasis added).
And in most storylines, Batman never does bring this nameless and faceless killer to justice. Hollywood is the unfortunate exception here. In Christopher Nolan’s 2005 film Batman Begins, as an angry young man who’s just returned home from college, Bruce plots to kill his parents’ killer when he’s unexpectedly released from prison, only to be thwarted because someone else gets there first. True, he later realizes that there’s more to his mission than simple payback, but in the comics he seems to know this even as a boy. To make matters worse, the 1989 Tim Burton film Batman makes Jack Napier—the man who’ll become the Joker—the very man who killed Bruce’s parents. In that film, in one single narrative Bruce watches his parents die as a boy, and then later, as Batman, he watches their killer fall to his death. But that’s just the movies—we don’t find such a neat and tidy resolution anywhere else in the Batman universe. This isn’t a simple revenge story.
However, it’d also be a serious mistake to deny that revenge—or perhaps, better, a desire for retribution—plays an important role in Batman’s motivation. Retribution isn’t the same thing as base revenge, although it proves surprisingly difficult to spell out the differences. Chief among them is that retribution is less personal and more concerned with a wrongdoer’s getting exactly what she deserves.2 In Loeb’s Superman/Batman: Public Enemies (2005), when Batman uncovers what looks like some evidence that points to the identity of his parents’ killer, he confesses, “Nothing haunts me more than finding out who killed my parents.” But he immediately complicates matters by adding that “their unsolved murder changed Gotham City.” Batman isn’t focused only on his personal loss. Yes, he has a keen interest in bringing his parents’ killer to justice. But the key point is that he’s after a lot more than mere payback. Earlier in the story, Superman says, “I’ve known Bruce for years. I can’t decide if it’s the hero in him that drives him—which I respect . . . or the dark side that puts him in harm’s way—trying desperately to make up for the murder of his parents. That I don’t respect.”
Yet there doesn’t seem to be any good reason to think that these are the only two possible motivations for Batman, or to assume that they’re mutually exclusive. Why must we make this choice? And why should we adopt Superman’s simplistic conception of what it is to be a hero? Why not acknowledge that Batman is a very complex character whose motives may be numerous and perhaps even difficult to identify at times—especially given how many different people have written his lines! Why not let our heroes be human beings who don’t always understand themselves and often aren’t easily understood by others?
In addition to a desire for retribution, what other motives play into Bruce’s promise and his lifelong struggle to fulfill it? In Haunted Knight, Batman remembers his father being called out of bed in the middle of night to respond to some medical emergency, and he asks of himself, while crouching on a rooftop like a gargoyle, “Is that why I’m here?” And this isn’t the only time Batman thinks of his role in Gotham as somehow analogous to his father’s role as a physician. Batman Begins also hints that Bruce wants to continue in his parents’ role, this time as the financial caretaker of Gotham City. In a pivotal scene, Rachel Dawes makes the following appeal to Bruce before he’s decided to become Batman: “Good people like your parents who’ll stand against injustice? They’re gone. What chance does Gotham have when the good people do nothing?” But whereas his philanthropic parents fought crime economically by improving Gotham’s infrastructure, Batman takes the fight to the streets. This suggests that Bruce wants not only to atone for their deaths, but also to give meaning to their lives by ensuring that their legacy doesn’t die with them. If that’s right, then Batman isn’t just trying to defeat and destroy the evil forces of Gotham; he’s trying to build something as well, and this constructive aim further distinguishes him from someone like the Punisher or Watchmen’s Rorschach.
On a psychological level, it’s likely that Bruce’s desperate promise serves to give unity and shape to a life that’s just been broken into pieces. As Alfred observes at the outset of Hush,
I cannot imagine the man young Bruce might have become had his childhood not been ripped from him at gunpoint. Suddenly orphaned and alone, a chilling event took place. There would be no grieving for this child. No time would be lost wishing he could change these events. There would only be the promise. That very night, on the street stained with his mother’s and father’s blood, he would make a vow to rid the city of the evil that had taken their lives. (Emphasis added)
With his parents gone, Bruce needs a new center of gravity in his world, and this life-changing promise provides just that. To fulfill his promise he spends years in study, training, and travel, acquiring the skills and the knowledge he’ll need if he’s to have any chance at all of living up to the intimidating task he’s sworn to perform. Take away that promise and he’s still just a boy in shock, kneeling over the bodies of his parents. His promise gives him something to do and, more important, someone to be. Our commitments and projects shape us and define our character. Thus, the young Bruce Wayne grows up to become Batman; as Rachel Dawes sadly observes at the end of Batman Begins, the Bruce Wayne billionaire-playboy persona is nothing but a convenient disguise.
Promises and Morality
Much about Batman’s mission looks toward the future: he wants to make Gotham a safer and better place to live—a place where children don’t lose their parents as he lost his. Batman thus has forward-looking moral reasons for his war against criminals. Are those reasons sufficient to justify his actions?
For a consequentialist, who believes that consequences are the only relevant factor in deciding what’s right and wrong, this all depends on whether Batman’s mission brings about the best possible consequences for everyone.3 If so, then he ought to go to work. And surely Batman does a lot of good, regardless of what critics, like the talking heads in The Dark Knight Strikes Again (2002), might say. But if fighting crime as Batman isn’t bringing about the best possible consequences, Bruce should hang up the cape and cowl. Wouldn’t that mean breaking the promise he made to his parents? And it’s wrong to break promises, right?
In fact, consequentialists have a difficult time giving promises the kind of moral weight they seem to deserve. Consequentialist morality is about making the world a better place, and while keeping promises may often do just that—if they’re the right sort of promises, anyway—there’s really no room to say that we ought to keep our promises even if people are worse off because we do so. Consequentialists aren’t very impressed with “Because I promised I would!” as a moral reason, believing that we need to be prepared to set our commitments aside when the greater good calls for us to do so. To put it another way, consequentialists believe that the end justifies the means, and someone with that mentality will probably end up breaking promises along the way.
After all, why should one keep promises? If, for example, when it’s time for Alfred to keep a promise, doing what he promised is a good idea, then of course he should keep his word. He would have been glad to do so anyway! But if doing what he promised seems like a bad idea, then why on earth should Alfred go through with it? Because he said that he would? So what? If he’s looking to the future, what he may have promised in the past seems relatively unimportant. A potential reason for Alfred to keep his promises might be that he needs people to trust him, and if they find out that he isn’t a man of his word, then they won’t accept any promises he makes in the future. But that’s just a reason for Alfred to make sure that no one finds out that he broke his promise!
All this just underscores the fact that promises aren’t fundamentally forward-looking. Batman’s promise anchors his mission in the past; his commitment to keeping this promise gives him a backward-looking moral reason to carry out his mission, night after night and villain after villain. Furthermore, while it’s undeniable that he wants Gotham’s citizens to be safe from marauding criminals, Batman clearly also wants wrongdoers to get what’s coming to them. And retribution is backward-looking, too. In different ways, then, Batman’s war on crime is connected to the past, to his own history, and to the history of the villains against whom he fights. (Notice how he continually returns to the location of his parents’ murder, then called Park Row and now dubbed Crime Alley.) This shouldn’t surprise us, however, for as witnessed by the architecture of the Gotham cityscape and by the pervasive presence of fear, the unknown, and the uncanny, Batman’s story is a truly gothic one—and this movement of the past into the present is another hallmark of the gothic.
This also means that Batman isn’t a thoroughgoing consequentialist. He’s also motivated by deontological moral reasons, which are reasons that involve what someone is doing rather than what happens as a result of what someone does.4 “Because it would break a promise!” is a deontological moral reason, as is “Because it would be dishonest!” or “Because it would be murder!” Batman’s repeated refusal to kill in carrying out his mission, even when it’s the Joker, is a perfect illustration of his commitment to a deontological moral reason.5 Another such illustration is the way Batman is motivated by his resolve to keep his boyhood promise. And as Alfred observes in Under the Hood (2005-2006), Batman’s enemies fear his incredible resolve more than they fear his appearance or his strength. Batman is a man who always keeps his promises—and that makes him more than a man in the eyes of his foes.
Making Promises to the Dead
In spite of the fact that certain aspects of promises may seem puzzling, their importance to our ordinary moral lives is hard to deny. We often make promises to one another, even as young children, and we take ourselves to be obligated by them. There’s a further problem in the case of Batman’s promise, however. We do make promises to someone, right? In fact, that seems to be an essential part of what distinguishes a promise from a more generic commitment. Further, one very natural way of understanding the wrongness of breaking a promise is that in some way it wrongs or harms the person(s) to whom the promise was made. This idea is supported by the fact that if Batman broke a promise to Oracle, for example, he would owe her an apology for doing so, and even if he thought he was morally justified in breaking that promise, surely he would at least owe her an explanation. But Bruce’s parents are dead when he makes his promise to them. Does it even make sense to promise something to a dead person? Can it be wrong to break a promise to the dead in the way it’s wrong to break a promise to the living? Can someone who is dead be wronged or harmed? Are the dead inside or outside of our moral universe?
Of course, we can’t think for very long about such questions without facing an even larger question: what happens to us when we die? Is death the end of our conscious existence, or is there some kind of conscious life after death? This is a question that confounds any number of religious and philosophical thinkers—and it leaves even the world’s greatest detective in the dark! In Under the Hood, when Batman begins to suspect that somehow Jason Todd—the second Robin, who was killed by the Joker—has returned from the grave, he seeks out both Superman and Green Arrow to ask them about what it was like to die and then to come back to life. Although he doesn’t really understand it, resurrection is a genuine possibility in Batman’s world. We mustn’t forget about Ra’s al Ghul’s Lazarus pits, either, for they can also bring the dead back to some kind of life. Whatever may be the case in our reality, death doesn’t seem to be the final exit in comics.
Suppose death isn’t the end of us. The 1939 version of Batman’s promise invokes the spirits of Thomas and Martha Wayne. One relatively clear way to make sense of promises to the departed is to say that in some sense the dead still exist among us—as ghosts or spirits of some sort. But while Batman is haunted by his murdered parents, he’s not usually haunted in that way. They don’t reappear to fight alongside him in the way that Harry Potter’s parents do, for example, and when they do show up, it’s typically in the form of a flashback sequence, a memory, a dream, or a hallucination.6 Batman isn’t literally haunted by his parents’ ghosts. Rather, he’s haunted by his memories of them and of their deaths, by his longing for them, and by the loss of the life he shared with them. And so our question is whether we can understand his making a promise to a mother and father who are dead and gone—and who aren’t going to show up to express their disappointment if he doesn’t do as he’s promised to do. As it turns out, that’s the most philosophically interesting question here, too, and a number of philosophers have wrestled with the issues it raises.7
So, let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, that death is the end of us after all. The ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus (341-270 BCE) goes beyond supposition here. His view is that human beings are composed of atoms, body and soul, and that death is literally our dissolution: we simply go to pieces, and that’s it. We don’t get to reassemble ourselves like Clayface does. Epicurus famously argues that such a death is nothing to be afraid of:
Get used to believing that death is nothing to us. For all good and bad consists in sense-experience, and death is the privation of sense-experience. Hence, a correct knowledge of the fact that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life a matter for contentment, not by adding a limitless time [to life] but by removing the longing for immortality. For there is nothing fearful in life for one who has grasped that there is nothing fearful in the absence of life. Thus, he is a fool who says that he fears death not because it will be painful when present but because it is painful when it is still to come. For that which while present causes no distress causes unnecessary pain when merely anticipated. So death, the most frightening of bad things, is nothing to us; since when we exist, death is not yet present, and when death is present, then we do not exist. Therefore, it is relevant neither to the living nor to the dead, since it does not affect the former, and the latter do not exist.8
Epicurus is a hedonist, which means he believes that what’s good for human beings is pleasure and what’s bad is pain. And since pleasure and pain can’t exist without being felt, Epicurus says that “all good and bad consists in sense-experience.” And since death is the absence of sensory experience, it’s nothing to be afraid of. (The process of dying might be really painful, and thus something to fear, but as long as you’re still dying “death is not yet present.”) Moreover, nothing can be good or bad for the dead, for they experience nothing at all. If Epicurus is right, then it seems like nothing can be good or bad for Bruce’s dead parents. And if a large part of the reason not to break a promise is that it’s somehow bad for the one to whom the promise was made, that reason simply won’t apply in this case, or in any case where the “promisee” is deceased.
But lots of people don’t buy this Epicurean argument. For one thing, it seems reasonable to think that even if death itself doesn’t involve any bad experiences, it’s a bad thing to die precisely because we’re deprived of all the good experiences we might have had!9 Furthermore, there are reasons to be suspicious of the idea that all bad things must be experienced. Consider the following words from Aristotle (384-322 BCE): “For if a living person has good or evil of which he is not aware, a dead person also, it seems, has good or evil, if, for instance, he receives honors or dishonors, and his children, and descendants in general, do well or suffer misfortune.”10
According to Aristotle, then, there are things that are good and bad for the dead. Let’s call these things postmortem benefits and harms. Aristotle begins by appealing to an analogy: if the living can be harmed but remain unaware of it, then the dead can be harmed as well. Obviously, he flatly rejects Epicurus’s claim that “all good and bad consists in sense-experience.” Suppose that Selina Kyle (aka Catwoman, for anyone not in the know) is only pretending to be romantically interested in Batman as part of some complicated plot against him. Suppose further that Batman is totally unaware of this and quite enjoys her company—and in fact he never becomes aware of her duplicity. Hasn’t he been harmed? Hasn’t something bad happened to him although he doesn’t know it? If so, then perhaps there are unexperienced harms.
This example suggests that deceit and betrayal can harm us quite apart from their effect on our experience. As Thomas Nagel puts it, “The natural view is that the discovery of betrayal makes us unhappy because it is bad to be betrayed—not that betrayal is bad because its discovery makes us unhappy.”11 And Aristotle believes we can be harmed through our reputations and through our friends and families in a way that doesn’t depend on our experiencing anything. The idea of an unexperienced harm seems very plausible.
What about a postmortem harm? If a living Batman can be harmed without experiencing the harm, why not a dead one? If Bruce Wayne were to die, and if after his death people wrongly came to believe that he was a horrible villain rather than a terrific hero, wouldn’t we think that something harmful—in Aristotle’s words, a misfortune—had happened to him? Expressions like “He’d be turning over in his grave” suggest that this is a rather natural thought. Aristotle certainly thinks so, although he concedes that harms to the dead are relatively weak.
Maybe Epicurus is wrong, then, to say that the dead cannot be harmed because they can’t experience the harm. But doesn’t another of his points still remain? It’s one thing to say that a living person can be harmed in a way that doesn’t affect her experience. It’s another thing to say, as Aristotle does, that a person who no longer exists can be harmed! How on earth can harm befall someone who doesn’t exist? Well, in one sense, it surely can’t. Nothing you or I do can really harm Bruce Wayne, right? Because he’s made-up; he’s not a real person. Surely, however, the dead are in a category different from fictional characters! While the latter do not exist and never did exist as flesh and blood human beings, the former are real people who used to exist.
That’s the clue we need to make sense of harming the dead. When we wonder whether it makes sense to say that breaking a promise to the dead might harm them, we need to be careful how we characterize the ones we harm. Are we asking whether Bruce can harm the postmortem Thomas and Martha Wayne? If so, we’re asking whether he can harm a ghost, or a corpse, or maybe even nothing. And that’s just silly. But what if we ask whether he can harm the antemortem Waynes, the living people who cared for him in his early childhood?12 If that’s how we think of it, then there is an appropriate candidate to suffer the harm of a broken promise. The next problem is to figure out when the harm occurs and how to talk about a harm that seems to involve backward causation, where somehow what Bruce might do in the present might cause harm to his parents in the past. And that’s a real philosophical problem, but it seems like the right kind of problem for Batman fans to take up, given the ways in which the Dark Knight’s stories always blend the past and the present.
Batman Returns
In Kingdom Come (1997), a story depicting one possible future or alternate Earth in the DC Universe, Batman is still fighting crime in Gotham. In fact, it seems that he’s winning the war, with the help of a legion of robotic Bat-Knights. He’s kept his promise, or close to it. But at the opening of Frank Miller’s classic The Dark Knight Returns (1986), another futuristic tale, Batman has retired. Why? Not because he’s rid the city of evil and fulfilled his promise to his parents. Far from it. Miller’s Batman has hung up his cape and cowl not because his mission is over but because of the death of Jason Todd, a former Robin. (Interestingly, Miller wrote this story a couple of years before Jason died in the regular Batman continuity, thereby predicting—and probably helping to bring about—the Joker’s infamous killing of Robin depicted in A Death in the Family in 1988.)
In The Dark Knight Returns, Batman’s career ends as it began: with a promise. Consider this internal monologue in which Bruce is describing an ongoing struggle with his inner Batman:
And he [Batman] laughs at me [Bruce Wayne], curses me. Calls me a fool. He fills my sleep, he tricks me. Brings me here when the night is long and my will is weak. He struggles relentlessly, hatefully, to be free—
I will not let him. I gave my word.
For Jason.
Never.
Never again.
Finally, of course, Batman is victorious in this psychic conflict; he comes out of retirement to fight evil once more. Why? Perhaps it’s because the older, stronger promise simply cannot be ignored. As Miller puts it, in trying not to be Batman, Bruce has made himself into “a walking dead man.” The promise to his parents and the project to which it gave birth define who he is. Without them, he’s just a shell of a man. And the past simply cannot be forgotten: “It could have happened yesterday. It could be happening now. They could be lying at your feet, twitching, bleeding.” In the end, Batman has made a promise he can never fully keep, yet it’s a promise he can’t live without.
Batman Forever?
Some philosophers have argued that human beings should be glad they’re not immortal, for an endless life would inevitably prove to be boring and thus be a curse rather than a blessing.13 Surprisingly, then, death might be part of what makes life attractive and appealing. Even a superhero’s life might grow tedious; the thrill of fighting evil might wear off after years, decades, or centuries. But Batman’s not primarily driven by the thrill of the chase or by the pleasure of victory. He isn’t a superhero because he finds the life so exciting and satisfying. In Superman/Batman: Public Enemies, he is brutally honest: “It is not a life I would wish on anyone.” No, Batman’s crusade against crime is motivated by his ongoing commitment to strive to keep the unkeepable promise that defines him. This commitment gives his life a meaning that isn’t connected to his own personal satisfaction. In fact, it’s connected to his own personal sacrifice. Batman’s promise binds him to Gotham for however long she may need him.
NOTES
1 Detective Comics #33 (November 1939). This scene is included in Les Daniels, Batman: The Complete History: The Life and Times of the Dark Knight (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2004), 34-35.
2 See, for example, Robert Nozick, Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1983), 366-368.
3 Historically, the most important consequentialists are the British utilitarian philosophers Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) and John Stuart Mill (1806-1873). A useful anthology is Stephen L. Darwall, ed., Consequentialism (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2002).
4 The most influential figure in deontological ethics is the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). A helpful collection is Stephen L. Darwall, ed., Deontology (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003).
5 The chapter by Mark D. White in this book discusses Batman’s refusal to kill the Joker in more detail.
6 See, for example, Haunted Knight’s third tale, a revision of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol in which Bruce’s father appears as Jacob Marley’s ghost; or The Long Halloween, where Bruce is gassed by the Scarecrow and lives half in the present and half in the past while he and his mother are trying to escape his parents’ killer.
7 See the various essays in John Martin Fischer, ed., The Metaphysics of Death (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 1993).
8 From Epicurus’s “Letter to Menoeceus,” in Hellenistic Philosophy: Introductory Readings, ed. Brad Inwood and L. P. Gerson, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997), 29.
9 See Thomas Nagel’s “Death” in his Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979), also reprinted in The Metaphysics of Death, 61-69.
10 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 2nd ed., trans. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1999), 13.
11 Nagel, Mortal Questions, 65.
12 See George Pitcher’s “The Misfortunes of the Dead,” reprinted in The Metaphysics of Death, 159-168.
13 Bernard Williams, “The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality,” reprinted in The Metaphysics of Death, 73-92.