Or,
Of Bruce Wayne, Batman, Buffy, & Redemptive Violence[1]
Poetry lurks everywhere, if you know
how to find it. Recently, over a long
weekend, I came across an example of this in my reading of the fourth book of
the Deluxe Edition of the recent adventures of Batman.[2] There, in a scene set in a jury deliberation
room, Bruce Wayne spoke two sentences which serve to encapsulate the difference
between Batman, whom he feared some in Gotham were in danger of giving a sort
of divine deference, and the only One to whom such deference truly
belongs. What struck me about those two
sentences was that they rhymed; and that, and their rhythm, made me realize
that Mr. Wayne, in his impassioned eloquence, had risen to the level of poetry
in striving to get his point across. The
resulting couplet, I thought, deserved to be given a title, and its own
separate presentation outside of the drama that birthed it. So below, I present the exact words of Bruce
Wayne, with a needlessly pretentious title composed by my own humble self. The last, bracketed word is also here added
by the editor, to make the text fit properly into the genre to which it seemed
to belong:
A Prayer for Gotham City by One of
Its Favorite Sons, Composed in the Form
of a Couplet Contrasting the Deity to the City’s Resident Protective Spirit
God
blesses your soul with grace.
Batman
punches people in the face.[3]
[Amen]
It seemed to me at the time the
perfect short prayer for the good citizens of Gotham City, with only “Amen”
lacking to give it proper form. It
captures both the cure for our ills in this fallen world, and the sort of
violence which characterizes our struggles within it; violence which plagues even
our best efforts, and infects even our noblest attempts at redeeming ourselves
through our own actions. Indeed, the
genre of the superhero comic—whether on page, stage, or screen—is the perfect
example of what some have called “the myth of redemptive violence,”[4]
our quest to convince ourselves that we can somehow cure ourselves of our
violence by applying more violence of the right sort, on the right side,
whether in a “war on criminals,” as is the case with Batman, or in defense of
“truth, justice, and the American way,” as we find it expressed in the
mythology of Superman. Real-life
examples, from the American “War on Drugs” to the global “War on Terror,” are,
sadly, all too easy to come by. The
great value of Mr. Wayne’s prayer is that it forces us to face the ambivalence
of our faith, the way we claim to rely on God’s grace to redeem us, while
repeatedly relying on our own violence in its many forms (Batman, police,
military, government, industrialism, capitalism, personal ambition)
instead. So often our prayers, like this
one, seem only to endorse the status quo, rather than seeking to transform it,
or to be transformed ourselves, so that we might be instruments of further transformation.
Writing these words makes me think
of another superhero who had her origin on film, although she had her greatest
success on television, and later migrated to comics: Buffy Anne Summers, the
Vampire Slayer. Specifically, I recall
the sage words of her watcher, Rupert Giles.
In one episode,[5] a
Native American spirit of vengeance has been roused and is killing those he
sees as the enemies of his people.
Buffy, as the show’s heroic slayer of supernatural evils (the fact that
her enemies are evil beings of a supernatural—even spiritual—nature is the
major way her show moves beyond mere comic book clichés of redemptive violence[6]
towards something more like spiritual warfare) must kill him, but both she and
Willow, as good liberal girls, are highly ambivalent—to say the least—about
opposing a spirit they see as representing an oppressed, victimized
people. Some great lines are occasioned
by this situation of ambivalence, but the wisest of them is Giles’ statement to
Buffy, urging her to realize that she cannot merely leave this spirit to wreak
his vengeance, no matter how wronged his people might have been: "[He] won’t
stop. Vengeance is never sated,
Buffy. Hatred is a cycle. All he will do is kill.”
For a show inspired by the
redemptive violence of superhero comics, it is a remarkably wise insight. But perhaps it should not surprise us. After all, Buffy, with her punning,
wise-cracking, acrobatic fighting style, is clearly a literary descendent of
that other master of putting the “pun” in your punches, Peter Parker, the
Amazing Spider-Man (himself a descendant of the Batman, with his tragic,
traumatic paternal-loss origin story).
And Buffy has clearly inherited from Mr. Parker not only his sense of
fun-with-fighting, but also his sense of sacred duty. For to Buffy, being the slayer is a sacred
calling, a weight she bears, because so often “I have to save the world. Again!”[7] Peter Parker likewise understood that, “with
great power there must also come—great responsibility!”[8]
But it is Spike who captures for us
so much of the truth of our violent species in that episode. He sums up succinctly—and in a sense, rather
unintentionally—how completely captive we tend to be to a cycle of violence,
even for the best of reasons (listen carefully to his last sentence):
"You won. All right? You came in, and you killed them, and you took their land. That’s what conquering nations do. It’s what Caesar did, and he’s not going around saying, 'I came, I conquered, I feel really bad about it!' The history of the world is not people making friends. You had better weapons than them, and you massacred them. End of story."
"You won. All right? You came in, and you killed them, and you took their land. That’s what conquering nations do. It’s what Caesar did, and he’s not going around saying, 'I came, I conquered, I feel really bad about it!' The history of the world is not people making friends. You had better weapons than them, and you massacred them. End of story."
When the girls insist that they should find a way to talk to him, Spike responds, “You exterminated his race! What could you possibly say that would make him feel better? It’s kill or be killed here, take your bloody pick.”
“Maybe it’s the syphilis talking,”
says a stricken Xander from the couch (he had been the spirit’s first victim;
his syphilis is a result of that), “but, some of that made sense.”
Of course it did. And so does what Willow says earlier in the
episode. When an anthropology professor
from UC Sunnydale says that Thanksgiving represents the melting pot, which is
about “contributions from all cultures making our own culture stronger,” Willow
responds in a sort of a aside to best bud Buffy, “What a load of horse hooey[!]...Thanksgiving
isn’t about blending of two cultures.
It’s about one culture wiping out another.” Okay, so maybe Willow is a little too hard on
Thanksgiving itself, which is about being kind to new settlers too stupid to
know how to grow corn, but her general point about the “destruction of the indigenous
peoples” is well made, nonetheless.
Overall, the episode has some good comments on our troubled history of
violence (and as Spike’s words note, such violence is not a uniquely American phenomenon),
and with its violent Indian-massacre of a finale, it is saved from hypocrisy
only by the fact that those massacred are not humans, but spirits of vengeance
which vanish without a trace once their leader has been defeated (this helps to
displace the violence and conflict towards spiritual warfare, as noted above;
this is the same reason a vampire, when slain on the show, collapses instantly
into a pile of dust. Evil, defeated,
vanishes like a tempting thought resisted—or more appropriately, like the devil
departing from tempting you for a season).
While I am on the topic of the wit
and wisdom of Rupert Giles, I must recall another relevant aphorism spoken by
the man. In an earlier season,[9] a different
restless spirit had been roused, and was killing people. In this earlier instance, it is the spirit of
a boy (played by a young Christopher Gorham) who, decades earlier, had been
having an affair with his teacher. When
she broke it off, he shot first her and then himself; now, in the present,
something has awakened his spirit, which is possessing people and forcing them
to act out the murder-suicide again and again.
Buffy realizes that the boy—James—is seeking forgiveness for having “killed the one person he loved the most in a moment of blind passion,” but, having just recently had her heart broken
by a similar betrayal, she insists that he does not deserve forgiveness.
Cue Giles: “To forgive is an act of
compassion, Buffy. It’s not done because
people deserve it. It’s done because
they need it.” Again, Giles plays the
role of the wise mentor to our heroine.
As an act of compassion, or mercy, forgiveness is given precisely to
those who do not deserve, but need. To
get what one deserves is called “justice,” and who can bear it? (“Use every man after his desert,” said the
Prince, “and who shall ’scape whipping?”[10]).
Forgiveness is given to help both the
one forgiven and the one who forgives.
It is part of our way beyond redemptive violence to reconciliation. The truth is that we forgive because it is
the only way to avoid what Peasant Dennis (not to be confused with Angel’s Phantom Dennis) in Monty
Python and the Holy Grail called “the violence inherent in the system.”[11]
For those who haven’t seen it, I
won’t spoil the brilliant resolution of the episode, except to say that it does
ultimately involve James finding the forgiveness he needs to break the cycle,
and he does so with the help (unwilling though it be) of a person who can
absorb the full force of James’ act of violence and survive, so as to offer
forgiveness thereafter. And so again Buffy rises above the level of comic
book violence to show us, even if just in a glimpse, a more excellent way.[12]
Like the cycle of violence and
counter-violence which is its subject, this essay could be endless; for the
subject is like Bottom’s Dream, and hath no bottom. Also like many a dream, it began one way and went
another. I intended to meditate briefly
on what I considered an interestingly and coincidentally poetic pair of lines
from a Batman comic, but the ironic contrast between divine grace and vigilante
violence led to deeper reflections than I expected. But then again, I suppose that is why we call
them essays—attempts. The question is:
can we learn anything from this particular attempt to think a thought through
to its end?
Perhaps. Superheroes like Batman and Buffy offer us the
fantasy of being able to solve our problems with violence, but it never really
works that way. Serial comics featuring
characters like Batman or Superman or Spider-Man, which must always keep the
cycle of stories going endlessly (by now, even Spider-Man has been swinging
through the pages of the comics for 57 years) can never really afford to show
us glimpses of a way beyond the violence, but, as we see, Buffy occasionally does so.
And the answer is not more violence.
In season two, we see James’ spirit freed from its torment when he is
offered forgiveness by his victim. In
season four we get a Thanksgiving lesson on the “violence inherent in the
system” which can leave us wondering how different the good guys are from the
bad guys, if even the good guys are in the habit of snapping necks.
but the full lesson is found
elsewhere: the way of suffering, sacrifice, and love. We see it several times, usually in the finale to a given season. We see it in season two, when Buffy
sacrifices everything she values, including the man she loves (only, him
literally), to save the world. We see it
again in season five, when Buffy embodies the lesson, no greater love hath any man than this, that he should lay down his
life for his friends, when she gives her life to save her sister—and the
world. Then, in season six, when Willow
suddenly loses the woman she loves and is driven so mad by grief that she is on
the verge of raising a magical force that will destroy the world, it is Xander who
saves both her and the world (the second time in the series he has done so; the
man never really gets his proper credit) by repeatedly telling her that he
loves her, and using their friendship to bring her back from the brink of
damnation and destruction. It reminds me
of another man who gave his life to save his shipmates, saying to his captain,
“I have been, and always shall be, your friend.”
It really should have ended there,
and I like to ignore the limping, extra-long episode they called season seven. Not long thereafter, they gave us season five
of Angel, and they did it right. Angel
as a series had always struggled to find its way, but in the end, they found
their rhythm, and its final season is one of the most perfect seasons of
television ever. Its vision, like that
of J.R.R. Tolkien of The Lord of the
Rings fame, and the poem Beowulf
which so influenced Tolkien, mixes the Judeo-Christian elements it had
inherited from Buffy with a more
pagan, Nordic spirit to make something a little less hopeful than Xander and
his girl Willow embracing on a hilltop,[13]
but not without courage or consolation.
Seeking to attain membership in the
Circle of the Black Thorn—the sort of middle management forces of darkness
running the show here on Earth—Angel signs away any hope of returning to a
normal human life, all in order to get close enough to hurt them. Cordelia Chase and Winifred Burkle are both
lost in the course of the season, but Cordy, before she goes, gives Angel a
vision to get him back on track (rather ironically, a vision of the Circle);
and enough of Fred remains so that Wesley—the man she had come to love, but oh,
they had come to love each other too late!—is able, when he perishes in the
final fight, to die imagining he is in her arms (showmaker Joss Whedon would
later give these two a sort of redemption when he cast the same two actors who
played Wes and Fred to play Benedick and Beatrice in his adaptation of
Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing). Working together, the team kill the various
demonic members of the Circle of the Black Thorn, then those who have survived
that initial assault gather to face the onslaught of evil unleashed against
them in reprisal. It is clearly meant as
a “Ragnarök in Los Angeles” sort of ending, with our heroes going down in a
glorious defeat (how they managed to bring them back in the later comics I have
not yet bothered to find out, but as I said before, comics have to keep the
story going, so no one should be surprised).
As the team huddles—wounded, weakened, some of them dying—in an alley,
the rain comes pouring down, and an army looking like the worst creatures to
ever march forth from Mordor gathers at the alley’s mouth. Just before Angel mutters that final line,
“let’s go to work,” and the screen goes black, we find this exchange:
Spike: And in terms of a
plan?
Angel: We fight.
Spike: Bit more
specific?
Angel [looking up into
the sky]: Well personally, I kinda want to slay the dragon.[14]
And
so the series ends, not only in a version of Ragnarök, but with Angel imitating
that other tragic favorite of Professor Tolkien, Beowulf. He also was a great warrior whose character
was a mixture of pagan and Christian, and he too died facing—and defeating—a
dragon.
Again,
I remind my readers that in a situation where the forces you are physically
fighting against are demonic forces of darkness, any violence you employ is
nothing if not ambivalent, for the lines between redemptive violence and spiritual
warfare have blurred. With most comic
book superheroes, like Batman, we only get the former, but in Buffy and Angel, we sometimes get a little bit of the light of the
latter. And yet, it would be wrong of me
to ignore that the very story which I began this essay by quoting comes on the
heels of a story that comes about as close as the comics can to a story of real
sacrifice. Bruce Wayne, in the story
quoted, had bribed his way onto the jury because he knew the confession he had
obtained as Batman was coerced; and he had coerced the confession out of
excessive zeal due to his grief at a recent loss: for several issues we had
been following the events of the engagement and wedding preparations of the
Batman and Catwoman. It actually looked
like they were really going to do it.
But, at the last minute, she broke his heart because she was afraid that
marrying her would make him lose that edge that enabled him to be Gotham’s
protector. And so she sacrificed her
love and desire for him for what she conceived as the greater good.
So you see, comics can have moments
of real sacrifice, but in the end, they turn out to really be done in order to
continue the myth, the myth of redemptive violence. Catwoman sacrifices her love for Batman and
her desire to be his bride (and even the daughter whom, we see in a sort of
flashforward, they could have had), so it will always be possible to pray the
Prayer of Gotham City. For as long as
there is a Batman, it will continue to be true that:
God blesses your soul with grace.
Batman
punches people in the face.[15]
Amen.
[1]
This was supposed to be a
short note, but it seems to have grown in the telling.
[2] Batman Deluxe Edition Book 4
[3] Bruce Wayne, in “Cold Days: Part
3.” Batman
Deluxe Edition Book 4.
[4] The best single book I know on
this subject—for beginners such as myself, at least—is Walter Wink’s The Powers That Be, although one might
then venture beyond into Gil Bailie’s Violence
Unveiled, then into the life work of René Girard. Happy Reading!
[5] “Pangs,” Season 4, episode 8.
[6] Another comment on the
ambivalence of redemptive violence occurs in this same episode. Angel, Buffy’s vampire-with-a-soul
ex-boyfriend shows up to help, and is initially mistaken for his evil, soulless
alter ego Angelus, but, as he
responds, “I’m not evil. Why does
everybody think that? I haven’t been
evil for a long time.” Later, during the
big climactic fight with a number of embodied warrior spirits, Angel stops one
warrior who is attacking Willow & Anya by quickly snapping its neck and
tossing the body aside like a load of bad asphalt. Anya’s very pertinent question to Willow,
asked in a tone that underlines the heavy irony present, is, “What’s he like
when he is evil?”
[7] “Becoming, Part 2,” Season 2,
episode 22.
[8] From the narratorial comment in
the last frame of his first appearance, Amazing
Fantasy 15 (1962). Faith, the rogue
slayer, is of course a study in what can happen when power is used without any
sense of responsibility.
[9] “I Only Have Eyes for You,”
Season 2, episode 18.
[11] “Help! Help!
I’m being repressed!”
[12] Cf. I Corinthians 12.31 (KJV).
[13] Willow’s lesbian awakening notwithstanding,
I really wanted to see those two together; I quote Spike in a remark to Giles:
“I can’t do it, do it for me!”
[14] “Not Fade away,” Season 5.
Episode 22.
[15] Bruce Wayne, in “Cold Days: Part
3.” Batman
Deluxe Edition Book 4.
