Popular Culture Review Vol. 3, No. 2, August 1992 | Page 39

Batman: Americana with a Twist

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to accept the anarchy of our own occasionally horrific, but disowned,
desires. Permitting desires that have been silenced to have voice is
always dangerous, and perhaps never more so than when people have
lost the ability to separate dream from nightmare from reality. He
threatens to give us exactly what we want, offering us an escape from
the fear of being different. It is no accident either that Joker exploits
the major diversions of the culture-TV and the cosmetic industry, or
that greed and fear are his principal weapons. The uniquely
American self, once secure in theological and social hierarchies, equal
under God and before the law, becomes, in Joker's hands, revealed as
what it is—hungry, cosmetic, manufactured, empty, in a culture where
style is the new metaphysic, and consumption, the real-life version of
our vampire-full cinema life, is the new virtue.
Ill
Gothic texts maintain connection with a real world while leading
us deeper into the darkness of a different fiction. In Redefining the
American Gothic. Louis S. Gross argues that:
[the Gothic] vision of a world of darkness, terror,
oppression, and perversity, seemingly so alien from
the rational bias of the Founding Fathers, is as
pervasive in our national consciousness as its daylight
opposite. The texts Americans have traditionally
viewed as the reflection of national identity—the
Declaration of Independence and the Constitutionhave their counter images—images in the long line of
Gothic texts that show the land, people, and
institutions of this country as participants in the
nightmare of history (p. 89).
Batman and Joker double and mimic each other throughout
the film; it is no surprise, finally, that both equally subvert the
institution, exposing society's assurances to be illusory. Democracy,
they imply, is little more than a mask, a hood, a role, and not what it
seems. Batman acts, he would have Vicki Vale believe, in society's
best interest, though even he sometimes suspects otherwise. The
Joker, on the other hand, translates "seir into "Ego" and wishes