Popular Culture Review Vol. 3, No. 2, August 1992 | Page 34

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The Popular Culture Review

The plot of Batman encodes questions of liberty and p>ower, of
polity and social practice. The film interrogates the nature of history
as Americans understand it, and history's probable conclusions as they
imagine them. Finally, Dorothy, at least in the film version of
Baum's tale, comes of age in the American Depression. She shares
with Bruce Wayne a world whose dark, real edges are dimly visible
beyond the outer limit of the filmic fantasy worlds. Behind and
around the unraveling edges of Gotham's night world one glimpses a
post-Enlightenment Republic struggling to make sense of its
nightmares, while trying to distinguish them, if possible, from the
real world of reasonable dreanns that gave them birth.
In The Spoken Seen; Film and the Romantic Imagination.
Frank McConnell comments that "each era chooses the monster it
deserves and projects" (p. 137). B a tm a n , under a mask of
"entertainment," pro(>oses three possibilities of the monstrous, while
leaving unanswered the question, who is the most monstrous—Joker,
Batman, or perhaps that t