Superheroes and Super Messaging

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Batman: Arkham Knight Promotional Photo, Rocksteady Studios

The Dark Knight of Display

Swinging, gliding, flying, or speeding in to save the day, superheroes have been a feature of modern culture for decades. Keeping up with the latest comic, show, movie, or game gets difficult and becomes nearly impossible when it’s not just one superhero to keep tabs on, but an entire universe of them. It incites a sort of choice paralysis. One that, when you manage to pick up the newest edition and flip the pages, the channel, the controller, still exists in the way these messages played out via characters can be missed.

One prime example of this is the Batman himself, one of the core three superheroes most recognizable on a global scale. (The other two being the Spider and the Kryptonian.)

Contrary to the other supers of his time (though each with their own tragedy) Batman was the only one that “works by night, needs a car to get him into town, and is the most mortal. He is the superhero with no superpowers, the one we can most easily believe might inhabit our world” (Langley 5). He is the most human, thereby making him one of the most rich in terms of messaging to the masses. Unlike Superman, Batman can in fact be physically injured by a typical human. Unlike the Flash, Batman was not enhanced through laboratory means (with the assist of a stray lightning bolt). Unlike Wonder Woman, he is not semi-divine. He is the most feasibly achievable model of a hero for the real world and is thereby the hero audiences can vicariously become.

To View A Batman Timeline:

https://www.tiki-toki.com/timeline/entry/2157711/Batman-Transmedia-Franchise/

Dennis O’Neil, notable comic book writer for the Batman franchise, explained such phenomenon as, with each iteration of the Bat from his 1939 inception to now, his plasticity “allowed him to be more than a mirror; he could be a receptacle, too” (O'Neil, Introduction to Batman in Psychology: A Dark and Stormy Knight, 2).

“He is the superhero with no superpowers, the one we can most easily believe might inhabit our world” (O'Neil, Introduction to Batman in Psychology: A Dark and Stormy Knight, 5).

However, as the Bat (or any superhero) extends his reach and as more generations become familiar with his mission for justice, there runs a risk through each new rendition, each entertaining show, film, or game, of people missing the mark. So many expansions, especially if a studio pushes them out at a dizzying pace, runs the risk of turning stories thrumming with themes into shallow one-offs adhering to spectacle. Done enough times, (and as seen with the current Marvel Cinematic Universe) these characters become caricatures of themselves. The audience may watch or play along, but with such rapid output these installations become thin wisps—the audience forgets there is meaning behind the script and screen.

This forces us to ask:

How do audiences and producers avoid this ignorance?
Where can we see examples of thematic transmedia success?
What does this say to those seeking to put out social messages to the public?

Messages Missed in Marvels

Again, superheroes are mirrors—not just for the writer, but for the audience that finds themselves facing everyday corruption and injustices on a mundane scale compared to Batman’s spectacular, and heroes become comforting exemplars when those everyday injustices inflate to cataclysmic sizes. But in disregarding the comics as lesser or surface engagement, not only do we fail the medium by ignoring its affordances, but we allow others to fall prey.

Entertainment for the public comes through different mediums, all of which have affordances that shape the way a message is perceived. With each new invention, each new window for imagination and attention, the ways in which messages are curated and distributed to the public changes.

This is best summarized by the famous quote of media theorist Marshall McLuhan:

"The medium is the message" (Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 7).

By extension, there's a requirement from the audience to know how the poem, television show, or comic book are built. By not doing so, message implications shift, running the risk that “having noticed nothing about the form, they could discern nothing of the contents, either” (McLuhan 122).

In the case of comics, the genre pairs both image and text, farcical and realistic, to create storylines and characters that transcend generational viewership and lead to broad social influence. In comics, readers are able to experience the inner machinations of the characters contrary to, perhaps, films which will compensate with music scores and actor expressions. Even videogames provide players the opportunity to become these characters themselves in various gameplay experiences. In this manner, “[t]ransmedia storytelling, therefore, caters to wide and varied fans of a particular franchise” (Barrett 133).

It is this type of storytelling that is taking advantage of mediums in the way academics should be. Batman provides a pinnacle example. This is most notably seen in the praised video game series Batman: Arkham.

Splitting Spectacular Screens

Bruce Wayne is Batman. Batman is Gotham City's protector. In Batman: Arkham Asylum (2009), Arkham City (2011), and Arkham Knight (2015), he is responsible for restoring order to a chaotic breakdown first in the Asylum, then in a larger citified prison facility (hence the name "Arkham City"), and then the entire city of Gotham itself.

In its simplest form, the Batman: Arkham games represent the cultural conversation around carceral violence and an unjust, or rather malfunctioning, justice system. It begs the question: what happens when the citizen-rights of the incarcerated are stripped? Are they still redeemable?

Batman: Arkham Asylum - Begins in media res with Batman bringing the Joker to Arkham Asylum only for the facility to plunge into chaos as prisoners escape. From the most notorious to mundane criminals, it is Batman's job to restore order even as he faces the unjust treatment practices of incarceration in the psychiatric institution.

Batman: Arkham City - Months after Asylum, Dr. Hugo Strange has taken some of Gotham City's slums and formed a citified open-air prison facility where all of Gotham's criminals, insane or not, are thrust together. Batman seeks a way to shut down the facility and the dangers it presents to the outside world.

In the final series installment, Batman: Arkham Knight, the city has been invaded by the Arkham Knight's militia working alongside Scarecrow to craft and detonate a massive fear-toxin bomb that would plunge not just Gotham, but the entire East Coast, in terror. Batman must stop them and any other criminal now pillaging Gotham's streets.

In this franchise, carceral violence is front and center as is analyzed by Fawcett and Kohm (2019). Violence is a requirement. Players make progress through the games to the sounds of broken bones, skulls slammed to cement, and yelping victims of tasers, freeze darts, and more. They play as Batman but through a third-person perspective, allowing for enough cognitive distance so players may critique themes as they engage.

On the surface level, the Player-Batman seeks to restore order as Giddens (2017) notes that “most superheroes, although operating outside official avenues of law and order, pursue the aim of re-affirming the hegemonic values of justice” (7). Yet, the countervisual subverts this as players witness the inhumanity, archaic, and crudeness inundated with the institutionalized settings and interactions.

For our purposes, let us focus primarily upon Arkham Knight (2015). To read further about the other games and more specific instances of social messaging: Click Here

Gotham City is under siege.

To make simple the plot of Arkham Knight, Scarecrow himself—one of the main villains to battle—states the plight Batman faces beyond the simple goon and gang as:

“You promised that Gotham would be safe. Protected! But what does the world see now? My toxin choking its streets! Blotting out the moonlight! Poisoning the saplings you thought could stop me. And now, Dark Knight, I turn to you. But don’t be afraid. It’s not your life that needs ending, it’s your myth. The hope that you stand for. The hope that dies tonight” (Lancaster, 2015).

In a game in which the villains are determined to see Batman fall, to have his fears and failures exposed to the world, to prove that he is a man rather than the mythos he’s become, the antagonistic Arkham Knight is a very tangible example of when Batman fails.

As the Scarecrow taunts throughout the game: “You will bring death to all who follow you” (Lancaster 2015). Here is where player and Batman alike see the fallout when that truly happens.

Bruce is a protector – the city’s protector – unable to save one particular citizen. When it is learned that the Arkham Knight is actually the second Robin, Jason Todd, once thought dead at the Joker’s hands, the city is no longer just a place taken siege, but a city made representation of grief and failure. It is the grisly yet picturesque, muted yet technicolored, chaotic yet orderly experience of Gotham that players view Bruce Wayne’s burden and desperation to maintain and rectify himself as a hero, a legend. To keep himself from collapse all while various rogues, thugs, and thieves seek to dismantle him.

Players are immersed in this storyline. They experience what the characters do. They jolt at sudden jump scares, hold their breaths at close calls, and grip their controllers tight in pressure situations. In this manner, the player must ask themselves the same questions Batman does. They must sit with the uncomfortable alongside him.

The reason it works lays in what Eugenie Shinkle (2008) wrote on emotion interaction with video games:

“Playing a video game is a different activity from looking at a still or moving image: video games and other interactive media forms mobilize not just sight and hearing, but the ‘hidden’ kinaesthetic, proprioceptive, and vestibular senses as well. They support ‘full experiential flow’ (Grodal, 2003: 131), linking perceptions, cognitions, and emotions with actions, and engaging the broad spectrum of sensory modalities involved in perception with a transparency not found in their historical antecedents.” (908)

As Shinkle noted, ““[G]ameplay is not just about represented or symbolic actions and gestures, but real ones, which are meaningfully and inextricably linked to perceptions, cognitions, and emotions. […] Gestures are meaningful bodily actions that reflect – on both conscious and unconscious levels – our expressive intentions.” (910)

In this manner, you the player are unable to do anything but engross yourself in the story. The Batman: Arkham games utilize this to a high degree.

Throughout his existence, Batman has been the example of a man who trains, fights, fails, and rises again in ways that audiences may live vicariously through. To find comfort in a fictional vigilante pursuing justice, rectifying misdeeds, allows us to see the same as possible here in our own universe. At times, he is more valid than the best academics of our age in managing to see change among the masses.

We buy into his pursuit of justice, and Batman extends his reach beyond the game, the podcast, the merchandise, the screen…beyond the pages where his foundation was first laid. It is his icon, on shirts, stickers, and the like that keep modern audiences looking towards hope in the same way Gothamites do when the Bat symbol is lit across the foggy, moonlit sky.

It should matter that Batman reaches the crowds through vividly colored text boxes, action-packed games, campy television shows, and blockbuster movies. It should matter in that it should not diminish the power of heroes as lesser for not appearing in cold academic journals or in perfect Times New Roman, twelve point font. I argue that academics of all veins ought to seriously consider the affordances that heroes hold for messaging to the public. If we do not, if comics and heroes and games are consistently seen as lesser than, we tie one arm behind our backs when it comes to connecting with the public. Worse, there become opportunities for others, whether directors or readers, to view Batman simply as a vessel for spectacularized brutalism and adrenaline and become completely blind to the very complex themes of existence. Maybe it is time that we remind ourselves, in our modern reality, that we need the legend of Batman just as much as the citizens of Gotham do.

Notable Sources

The sources listed below are those that appear in this site’s page alone. For the full list involved in the paper, see here.

Barrett, Kyle. “The Dark Knight’s Many Stories: Arkham Video Games as Transmedia Pathway.” Iperstoria no. 16 (2020).

Fawcett, Christina; Steven Kohm, “Carceral Violence at the Intersection of Madness and Crime in Batman: Arkham Asylum and Batman: Arkham City,” Crime Media Culture, vol. 16, no. 2, 2019: 265-286.

Giddens, T. “Crime, Justice, and Anglo-American Comics.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Criminology, 2017.

Lancaster, Martin. Batman: Arkham Knight, Directed by Sefton Hill, London: Rocksteady Studios, 2015.

Langley, Travis. Batman and Psychology: A Dark and Stormy Knight. John Wiley & Sons. 2012.

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. The MIT Press. 1994.

O’Neil, Dennis. Introduction. Batman and Psychology: A Dark and Stormy Knight, by Travis Langley. John Wiley & Sons, 2012. 1-4.

Shinkle, Eugenie. “Video games, emotion, and the six senses.” Media, Culture & Society, vol. 30, no. 6, 2008, p. 907-915.