De Novo

Just saw The Dark Knight with some friends, and on the walk home, we saw a new billboard placed near I-5:

The Dark Knight just topped opening weekend sales records, making it the most profitable superhero franchise in history.  Americans clearly have an appetite for superhero logic.

An East African vision of [the] great lord of the world emerges from a folktale of a young man whose dead father appeared to him along a path going into the ground, as into a burrow.  … In the morning the Great Chief Death appeared.  One side of him was beautiful, but the other rotten, with maggots dropping to the ground.  Attendants were gathering up the maggots.  They washed the sores and, when they had finished, Death said, “The one born today will be robbed if he goes trading.  The woman who conceives today will die with the child.  The man who works in his garden will lose the crop.  The one who goes into the jungle today will be eaten by the lion.”  But the next morning Death again appeared, and his attendants washed and perfumed the beautiful side, massaging it with oil, and when they had finished, Death pronounced a blessing. “The one born today: may he become rich!  May the woman who conceives today give birth to a child who will live to be old!  Let the one born today go into the market: may he strike good bargains; may he trade with the blind!  May the man who goes into the jungle slaughter game; may he discover even elephants!  For today I pronounse the benediction.”

“If you had arrived today,” said the father to his son, “many things would have come into your possession, but now poverty has been ordained for you; so much is clear.”

– Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology NY: Penguin Books, 1976, pp.118-119

The theme of duality pervades the Batman franchise more overtly than perhaps any other multi-million-dollar Hollywood comic book fad, and indeed, as some have pointed out, can be interpreted as right-wing propaganda.  Isn’t that getting the cart before the horse?  How could Batman possibly be an imitation of Bush, when it’s been so apparent this whole time that Bush is in fact the simulacrum?

Loki, archetype of the Joker

While Two-Face embodies in the flip of a coin Batman’s Jekell/Hyde duality (CEO of a multimillion-dollar corporation by day, high-tech strong-man by night), the Joker is Batman’s mirror image, the trickster, the destroyer of order, with “nothing in his pockets but knives and lint”.  Bruce Wayne hoardes money, in order to use it for “good” ends; the Joker burns piles of it in sweet torment of the pathetic ambitions of the mob.  Batman is the warrior king; Joker, the trickster who is the agent of the oblivion, the teacher of the most difficult lesson we all must one day face, but seek — in fear — to hold at bay.

Make no mistake: Batman is, like most conventional superhero tales, most immediately obsessed with national (and, indirectly, personal and ego) security.  The threats to society consist of mobsters, terrorists, bombs; Gotham City is in a sort of perpetual crisis mode, overrun with criminals and corrupt officials. For the greater part of the 20th century, a large portion of the American people lived cowering in fear that any minute bombs may begin raining down.  This sublimated fear has oozed out of our pores and become pop culture — comic books, movies, cartoons — stories that, not coincidentally, bear strong resemblance to tales our ancestors wove about times and places quite different from our own.  We resonate with Batman: we worship in the temples of our movie theaters and shell out our wages to purchase his likeness.  Excessive violence in the Bible notwithstanding, our understanding of the world order is as much informed by watching the Joker as it is by reading Beatitudes.  Simply because the comic book industry, unlike the religio-tainment industry, does not yet come equipped with an army and a navy, it’s easy to dismiss the religious significance of witnessing and vicariously living in the psyche of Batman, the vigilante of order and reason in a chaotic universe.  Singling out only one form (the Bible, a comic book, a political figure) is an exercise in vanity, unless we go further and address the underlying root cause of these forms and our affinity for them.  The stories we venerate — whether blockbuster movies or Bible tales — are as much a reflection of us as we are of them.  Until we begin to address the affinity between both kinds of “religious” experience and acknowledge that it is a fundamental feature of human psychology, generations will continue to be swayed by the crusading Batman rhetoric of the Bushes of the future.

On the corner of 6th & Pine in downtown Seattle stands an aging Cuban refugee named Pedro (or perhaps Juan).  (Follow those links for more detail.  I’ll be right here waiting for your return.)  An apparent schizophrenic, Pedro has created his identity around condemning the Seattle Police and “everybody in Seattle” for being “communist” and signing a petition (unanimously signed! by everybody in Seattle!) to evict him from his old home in the Frye Apartments.  He’s evidently no longer homeless; he neither asks for nor accepts donations of food or money; and he’s not interested in speaking one-on-one to individuals to sell his mission.  He’s not looking to make converts.  He’s looking to vanquish.

Two or three times a week, my morning bus gets stopped at the stoplight where Pedro stands, 8 to 5 every day, brandishing a wooden sign covered in masking tape and painted with a pseudoreligious rant, in pidgin English:

Pedro with an older version of his sign

A more recent picture of Pedro, sign not yet embellished

In his hand, he carries a scepter fashioned of numerous stickers and model paint with a miniature plastic figure of the Archangel Michael.  The photo above is quite old; his current sign contains less Jesus, and more stickers of Michael:

 St Michael slays the Devil (based on Guido Reini)

St Michael is interspersed with images of Superman:

Clearly, Pedro sees his fight aligned with the Good and Holy fight personified by these two Apollonic gods.  St Michael – a warrior incarnation of Christ – has long personified the triumph of Good over Evil.  And there’s clearly nothing morally ambiguous about Superman.  But what about the Dragon?

In the Biblical context, Michael’s enemy is quite clearly a dragon:

And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon;
and the dragon fought and his angels and prevailed not;
neither was their place found any more in heaven.
And the great dragon was cast out,
that old serpent,
called the Devil, and Satan.

– Revelation 12:7-9

Because the Serpent symbol is possibly one of the most ancient, universal, and complex of symbols in mythology, here (in the context of the second century), it represents the old pagan system.  Michael is the warrior of a new, bright, sky-based religion vanquishing a earth-based one that crawled on its belly in the dirt and in the water.  This is the archetypal triumph of good over evil, the Final Battle.

Albrecht Dürer: St Michael’s Fight Against the Dragon (1498)

In modern-day post-protestant Christian thought (oh how crucial those qualifications are!), the finality of this battle is taken for granted.  Satan is defeated once and for all, and God’s people enter heaven to reside there eternally, free from the evil forces of the Dragon.

Heaven (the Sky-Realm) is the home of clarity and light, Hell (the Earth-Realm) a place of confusion, temptation, suffering and desire.  To defeat the Dragon is to defeat whatever holds us from attaining that realm of light and purity. In another sense, it’s the triumph of mind over matter.  It is the central archetypal image of the Western mind, and in the same way that we identify with Superman through his mild-mannered alter-ego, Clark Kent, we would have St Michael as our avatar.

Though couched in the symbols of Christianity, Pedro doesn’t have a coherent Christian message; his use of Michael is to represent himself and his struggle on cosmic terms.  For Pedro, the “communist” Seattle police are the cosmic Dragon, the evil force.  For American Christian fundamentalists, the Dragon is the force of secular humanism.  For eco-conscious liberals, it’s the global corporations and the greed and selfish power they represent.  For Richard Dawkins, the Dragon is religion itself.  (Perhaps for me, it’s Richard Dawkins?)  In each case, the Dragon represents not merely the Evil, but also the Lower, a force which, at one time, dominated, but whose vanquishing is the herald of a new era, a greater, brighter time untroubled by the struggles of the past.

Yet Pedro’s greater struggle is clearly not with some outside enemy.  The dragon that presents the greater challenge to him – if only he could perceive it – is his own mind.  He has projected his own greatest fears and anxieties (that the Seattle Police have allied with Fidel Castro to evict him, throw him into exile) on an external enemy, but the real enemy and obstacle is within.  Likewise, we tend to see our large, impersonal external foes with the greatest disdain because we’re really looking at our own worst nature reflected back at ourselves. Defeating this dragon is only achieved once that internal struggle is accomplished.

Take it away, Joseph Campbell.