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