Popular Culture Review Vol. 3, No. 2, August 1992 | Page 36

32 ^ThePo£ularjCulti^ the city itself is certainly an outsider's unkind stereotype of Manhattan. Joker, who inspires "Gotham's shopping nightmare," leads a mock-Macy's Thanksgiving parade, complete with oversized balloons, through the city's midnight streets. Alternately gruesome and silly, the film manipulates its viewer's recognition of conventional American iconography, parodying its media-created desires for style and fashion while, at the same time, exacerbating fears of violent urban life. The cars, the fashions, the post-modern architectural excesses—all evoke a city of 1939, though the gloom they inspire is timeless: the year could be 1989 or even 2039. To expand on Waller's point. Batman locates the origin of the horrific, as Freud did, in the familiar and the near-at-home. Fantasy never escapes its tether to the real world from which it is construct^. The uncanny comes from within the confines of our quite homely imaginations, no nrtatter how defiantly we displace it onto worlds elsewhere. The film suggests that little separates the world we know as "American," a world created largely of rhetoric and debased religious moralism, from the most bizarre products of its horrific imagination. William Day, in In the Circles of Fear and Desire. observes that "the study of the Gothic illuminates the unbroken connections between our imaginative life and our economic, social and political life" (p. 191). Beneath its antic frenzy, the Gothicism of Batman explores some enduring questions and tensions of the American psyche: What is the appropriate use of power in a democracy? How shall we define freedom? Is the law to be used conservatively, as a weapon supporting the status quo, or liberally, or as a revolutionary force for individual empowerment? These tensions cross and recross, amplifying what is perhaps a major sub-text of the film. Thus an unforeseen, additional irony attaches to the date o