Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Pagan
Why Batman v. Superman Matters

Why Batman v. Superman Matters

Last updated on: March 26, 2016 at 7:19 pm by Tom Swiss

Why Batman v. Superman Matters 2016-03-26T19:19:40-04:00 Tom Swiss

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

I haven’t seen the latest DC superhero movie yet, and given the reviews I’m probably going to wait for the DVD release. Two and a half hours is just too long to sit in a theater. (Unless some lovely fangirl wants to take me to see it?) But I was puzzled by a comment a friend posted on Facebook: “Why would anyone want to see Batman vs Superman? Who cares?” He clarified, “I’m not anti-superhero story…I’m anti-this superhero story.”

Of course one might say “The reviews of this movie are lousy, I’m not going to risk spending my money on it,” but my friend seems to be dismissing the idea that a movie with a plot based around a conflict between Batman and Superman could be worthwhile.

I’d like to investigate that idea. Current movie aside, why does the idea of Batman versus Superman matter?

Now perhaps some readers who aren’t comic book fans are saying, “Obviously a juvenile idea about a space alien fighting a billionaire could never make for a good story.” But you can dismiss any plotline with a simplistic summary: “I heard about this play about an angsty suicidal prince out to get revenge on his stepdad for killing his dad. Who cares about this dysfunctional family nonsense?”

Batman and Superman matter, because the tales of the superheroes are our modern myths. By “superheroes” here I mean not just the DC and Marvel pantheons, but all the larger-than-life heroes of popular speculative fiction: Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia, Frodo and Sam, Kirk and Spock. (Yes, it is a male-heavy list — a topic for another time.) These stories are to a modern American what the tales of Heracles and Jason and Apollo were to a citizen of ancient Athens.

The myths of agrarian civilization, from Homer to the Bible, have proven insufficient to the new industrial and technological age in which we find ourselves. But we cannot do without myth. As Joseph Campbell put it, “[M]yth is everywhere the womb of man’s specifically human birth…simultaneously protecting the growing ego against libidinal quantities which it is not prepared do deal with and furnishing it with the necessary foods and saps for its normal, harmonious unfoldment.” [Campbell, 59]

As the biological womb takes us as a zygote and forms us into a complete biological being, so the mythological womb takes us from the tabula rasa of infancy and forms us into a complete mental and social being. Mythology is necessary. So in the past few decades, as our civilization has transformed from agrarian to industrial, a new sort of mythology has started to form, growing up alongside the new communication technologies of color printing, radio, television, animation, and film.

And the power of this modern mythology is no small thing. I have used Batman stories in mediation lectures to my karate students, finding them just as useful as ancient Zen and samurai tales.

Panel from John Byrne’s “Superman: The Man of Steel”, published by DC Comics and Ballantine Books. (Used under fair use provisions.)

Comics writer and chaos magician Grant Morrison says of Superman, the first of the superheroes:

He was Apollo, the sun god, the unbeatable supreme self, the personal greatness of which we all know we’re capable. He was the righteous inner authority and lover of justice that blazed behind the starched-shirt front of hierarchical conformity.

In other words, then, Superman was the rebirth of our oldest idea: He was a god. His throne topped the peaks of an emergent dime-store Olympus, and, like Zeus, he would disguise himself as a mortal to walk among the common people and stay in touch with their dramas and passions.[Morrison, Supergods, 15-16]

(Yes, there is some dispute on the exact definition of “superhero” and whether Supes was the first — some say Popeye was one, and there are borderline cases, pulp heroes of extraordinary ability like Doc Savage and The Shadow and comic strip heroes like The Phantom and Mandrake the Magician, who set some of the conventions of the genre and were somewhat retconned after Superman came along. But for our purposes the genre begins in 1938, when Siegel and Shuster crossed from exciting tales of extraordinary heroes into the territory of myth. There was just more to Superman than to those pulp heroes.)

Ken Kesey’s 1964 novel Sometimes a Great Notion makes reference to a similar idea about the superhero as a symbol of personal greatness. The character Leland Stamper, a young man caught up in a sibling rivalry with Oedipal overtones, reflects on his childhood fascination with Captain Marvel:

“Shazam.” I said the word softly aloud into the chilly room, smiling at myself but thinking: maybe it wasn’t really Captain Marvel that was my hero; maybe it was Billy Batson and his magic word. I always used to try to figure out what my word was, my magic phrase that would turn me instantly enormous and invulnerable…[Kesey 142]

And artist and comic historian Arlen Schumer wrote how Superman may have been an inspiration to one of the heroes of Flight 93, the 9/11 flight whose passengers fought back against the hijackers:

…I heard Amy Nacke — the wife of passenger Louis Nacke — tell Dateline how much Louis loved Superman; why, she said, he even had Superman’s “S” shield tattooed on his shoulder for years! I bolted upright from my drawing board when I heard that, because now I knew why it had bothered me so much when those writers claimed superheroes didn’t really matter in real life. “Where were the Superheroes on September 11th?,” they asked? Well, I’ll tell you:

Superman was on United Flight #93.

I believe that Louis Nacke’s love of Superman, emblemized by that tattoo on his shoulder, helped motivate him — even if only “on a small subconscious level” — to garner the courage to confront a terribly hopeless situation. And then to respond heroically, with his fellow passengers, in those desperate moments when action mattered most.

Maybe my conviction is so strong because I know that many of those who face life and death every day — police officers and firefighters — became police officers and firefighters because of superheroes like Superman….

…Superman afforded me, in a more dynamic and accessible form than family or religion could ever really compete with, a specific morality from which to understand the difference between right and wrong and good and evil; and with that, the strength to act on those convictions. Perhaps, on that late summer morning, in the air above Pennsylvania, Superman gave Louis Nacke that strength, too. And in that way, Superman became real.[Schumer]

(My own childhood favorite, I should note, was Green Lantern — where other superheroes were granted their powers by circumstances of birth or by accident, Hal Jordan was given his power ring by Abin Sur because he displayed courage and compassion. It was an ethical lesson in bright colors.)

Superman was the first of the superheroes. But just as Apollo implies Dionysus, so Superman’s sun god — in the D.C. One Million story arc he spends 10,000 years living in the core of the sun,[Morrison, DC] one can’t get much more solar than that — must have a dark twin. It took less than a year for Bill Finger and Bob Kane to follow Superman with Batman, of whom Morrison says:

Crime, madness, and the supernatural defined Batman’s theater of operations and allowed him to mine a rich seem of blood and thunder sensationalism stretching back a couple of centuries…It was Batman as Dracula, the vampire as hero, preying on the even more unwholesome creatures of the night.

…His was the territory of the dark unconscious…[Morrison, Supergods, 22]

Panel from Frank Miller’s “The Dark Knight Returns”, published by DC Comics. (Used under fair use provisions.)

A story which has these two in conflict, which presents them as thesis and antithesis, holds out promise of synthesis of the light and dark sides of human nature.

And more than that: where Supes is in effect a god, a being not of our world, Bats is as mortal as any child of Earth. (Though one wag noted that he does have one divine-level power: Bruce Wayne has more money than God.) Can a cunning mortal strive against the raw power of a god and win? That’s a question that’s interested us since Odysseus outwitted Poseidon’s son Polyphemus. (Yes, Odysseus’s genealogy is questionable and may include gods, but we see him in the Odyssey he’s fully mortal.)

So Batman and Superman in conflict has been a trope since the Modern Age of comics began in the mid 1980s. Their most famous fight (before this movie) was in Frank Miller’s 1986 The Dark Knight Returns, in which a power-suited Batman gone full-on vigilante and gang leader in the wake of a complete breakdown of society takes on a nuclear-blast-weakened Superman acting as a morally-compromised covert federal agent.[Miller 166-196] But they also come into less dramatic but more Machiavellian conflict in the main DC continuity a few months later in an early issue of John Byrne’s post-Crisis Superman reboot.[Byrne 8]

Done well, a story that pits Batman against Superman could be an exploration of cleverness versus raw power, of different interpretations of duty and goodness, of a mere mortal (though a very very rich one) striving with a being just short of a god.

Done poorly, of course, it could be just a bunch of CGI explosions, sound and fury signifying nothing.

But hope springs eternal, and so it should be no surprise that people are interested enough to see the film and judge for themselves.

References:

Byrne, John. Superman: The Man of Steel. New York: Ballantine Books,
1988.

Campbell, Joseph. The Flight of the Wild Gander. New York, N.Y: HarperPerennial, 1990.

Kesey, Ken. Sometimes A Great Notion. New York: Penguin Books, 1977.

Miller, Frank, et al. Batman : The Dark Knight returns. New York,
New York: DC Comics, 2002.

Morrison, Grant. DC One Million. New York, NY: DC Comics, 1999.

Morrison, Grant. Supergods : What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants,
and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human. New York:
Spiegel & Grau, 2012.

Schumer, Arlen. “Text of Arlen Schumer’s Speech Delivered at the Society of Illustrators’ Memorial Exhibition, February 1, 2012.” The Art and Writing of Arlen Schumer. http://www.arlenschumer.com/images/stories/history_pdfs/NACKE-art-Speech.pdf

It’s still rough around the edges but I’ve created a Patreon page for this blog. Please consider supporting me with a pledge. There’s a special gift for the first 20 people to do so — be the first on your block!

You can keep up with “The Zen Pagan” by subscribing via RSS or e-mail.

If you do Facebook, you might choose to join a group on “Zen Paganism” I’ve set up there. And don’t forget to “like” Patheos Pagan and/or The Zen Pagan over there,
too.

Previous Post

March 24, 2016

The Gods Are Like Golden Apples

Next Post

April 9, 2016 What Is A Black Belt? Initiation in the Martial Arts

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category 2017 52 Makeup 2020 52 Makeup Always Roaming With A Hungry Heart Art Because I Could Not Stop For Death Caught On Video COVID-19 Culture Discordianism Ethics, Virtue, and Right Living History Magic(k), Ritual, and Mysticism My Blogging Life and Times Philosophy Podcast Poetry Random Wednesdays Religion & Politics Seasonal Musings Techno-Pagan Theology Uncategorized Warrior Path Zen

Select a Month October 2026 September 2026 August 2026 March 2026 February 2026 January 2026 December 2025 March 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 September 2024 August 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 December 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 October 2022 September 2022 June 2022 April 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

Who was struck dead for lying about money in the early church?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Demas Ananias and Sapphira Nicodemus Simon the Sorcerer