Everyone wants to be Batman.

I had a thought a while ago about Batman and Gotham.

“Everyone wants to be Batman, no one wants to be Gotham.”

The thought felt interesting, but I wasn’t completely sure where to go with it. The thought by itself isn’t complete, there’s no conclusion or point.

Within the Batman universe, it’s been stated that Batman and The Joker need each other, that a criminal like The Joker can’t be an ultimate super villain without an amazing hero to thwart him, and a super hero can’t be a hero without a super-smart, super-evil villain to defeat. I feel like that’s a cute, superficial analysis, though. It’s trying to be smart, it’s a bit clever, and as far as telling a fictional story, it’s very true. But that statement is missing some sort of larger point as far as relating to real life goes. Real-life villains are just assholes, they don’t need heroes to “offset their story,” and real-life heroes are either regular folks doing something that needs doing or people who go into heroing as a job, like the fire fighting or EMT. They don’t need some ultra-villain to give them purpose.

So I put my own observation away until some sort of point could come of it.

I recently read an article that discussed how people — lots of people, average people — are totally willing to jump into a raging flooded river to save a small child, but lots of those same people are unwilling to contribute to government programs to feed that small child when she doesn’t have enough to eat. There’s something about the immediate danger and saving someone from it that’s just — exciting, dare-doing, heroic. People love heroics. They don’t like civic duty and caring for a faceless populace that needs financial support or offering community programs for public playgrounds or health care. In too many people’s minds, saving a drowning child is a no-brainer, but saving a starving child through a government-funded benefit program is bad somehow, or at least something to be thought about and debated and limited. As though a drowning child is obviously there through sheer bad luck, but a starving child must have brought her situation on herself, or is, at the very least, ignorable in a way that a kid in a river is not.

The article made a good point, but I feel like it was only a little deeper into the hero/villain dynamic.

When I read that article, something popped into place for me at a cross-section of all of that. All of the previous ideas leave out one more aspect of the villain/hero dynamic — a victim. A villain isn’t a villain unless they’re hurting someone, or threatening to.

This is where it all gets uncomfortable and weird for me.

Everyone wants to be Batman, no one wants to be Gotham — everyone wants to play hero, but no one wants to be victimized. But in order to have a hero, you have to have a victim. So Batman fetishes naturally include a victim somewhere in the story. You have to want someone to be victimized in order to save them. But no one wants to play the victim role if they can avoid it. Can you blame them? So why would someone who wants to be a real hero WANT someone to be hurt, just so they can be saved? Why not want to prevent the hurt to start?

This is where I start getting into the idea that the police don’t prevent crime, they respond to it. Something I agree with, to a large extent, especially considering my work with animals and my understanding of punishment/reward responses. People generally don’t commit crimes unless they don’t have access to the food/medical care/mental care/education/shelter that they need to get by. Other countries outside the U.S. have shown that access to medical care, mental health care, food, shelter, and other necessities prevents crime a lot more effectively than punishing people for hurting others after the fact.

I get that The Joker is supposed to be crazy — but again, wouldn’t proper access to mental health care help more than epic battles with Batman? Arkham Asylum isn’t exactly portrayed as “mental health care.”

Now, I live nearby a state hospital for the mentally ill and dangerous — the “criminally insane,” if you will — and have several friends who’ve worked there. A lot of the patients there are not fit to be released, proper mental health care or no. I imagine The Joker is supposed to fit in a place like that.

The people that have been hurt by some of the people in that hospital — it breaks my heart. There’s supposed to be patient confidentiality, but looking some of the stories up in newspapers isn’t exactly hard. They’re awful.

In order to be Batman, you have to have those victims. You have to. Who the hell else are you going to save?

That line of thinking has me really turned off by the whole concept of superheroes and villains. It becomes a false dichotomy that leaves out the pain and suffering of the people stuck in the middle.

This is part of the reason I’ve enjoyed the show The Boys so much. Although that premise paints the superheroes as no better than the villains, which presents another story line that I’ve been enjoying. Batman is generally supposed to be a moral, decent guy. But I digress.

I think this sort of thing matters, and matters to me, because as a storyteller, I’m acutely aware of the purpose that stories serve in human society. We tell each other how life is, how it could be, what to look for and care about, how the world works, in stories. We communicate how people should behave, what’s right, what’s good, what’s true; and what’s wrong, what’s deplorable, what hurts. And when a story — especially a popular type of story — misses an important character or point, I find it a little concerning. We create our society with stories. We support and decry the types of society we want or want to be free of by telling stories to each other about how things could be, or how they might be if things go wrong.

There’s a not a lot I can do about it. I can try to tell better stories and do my best to make them stick and not miss important aspects of communities and people. But I assume Batman and The Joker are probably going to stay really popular for a long time.

Hell, even I enjoyed Heath Ledger’s Joker. Just because I know better doesn’t make it not a fun story. And Batman is supposed to be a moral guy. He’s kind of sort of supposed to be an example of how we want to be. How we want to teach others to be. Still, though, there’s that entire other group of characters that represents all of us collectively a whole lot more accurately. The ones Batman stories don’t talk much about. The people whose names we don’t even know.

The victims.