You’re a Legend, Mr. Wayne

It’s Batman time.  Again. (Always).

Last time, I men­tioned that Arkham Asylum, (though real­ly neat), most­ly doesn’t exam­ine the Batman mythos with any real gran­u­lar­i­ty.  “You are Batman,” it says, “Now go punch peo­ple.”  By and large, Arkham Asylum is a game about how cool it is to dress up in tights and a cape, but there are a few moments when it stops to ask the play­er a few ques­tions about what it real­ly is to be Batman, and those are the sec­tions I want to talk about today.

The Scarecrow is an old Batman vil­lain who plays a rel­a­tive­ly small but mem­o­rable role in Arkham Asylum.  If you’re unfa­mil­iar with the Scarecrow, all you real­ly need to know is that he is an ex-psychologist who is obsessed with fear, and has invent­ed a pow­er­ful hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry fear gas which caus­es his vic­tims to relive their worst fears and night­mares.  The specifics of his place in the plot are not real­ly impor­tant, as the sec­tions which fea­ture him stand entire­ly (and some­what jar­ring­ly) on their own.  In any Scarecrow story, Batman is inevitably affect­ed by the fear gas, treat­ing the reader/viewer/player to an exam­i­na­tion of what Batman fears the most.  In the best Scarecrow sto­ries, these moments allow us to learn more about the human side of the Dark Knight.  In the worst, the story sim­ply gets trip­py and weird for a while before return­ing to nor­mal­cy.

Arkham Asylum infects Batman with the gas on three sep­a­rate occa­sions.  These three moments allow the game to put on its arty hat and dig a lit­tle deep­er into the psy­chol­o­gy of everyone’s favorite brood­ing vig­i­lante.

The Form

The Scarecrow sequences fol­low a pret­ty strict form: first, Batman will get infect­ed with fear gas, cough for a while, and then keep walk­ing with­out any obvi­ous dra­mat­ic shift.  As time goes by, things get pro­gres­sive­ly stranger and stranger as the toxin works through his sys­tem and Batman begins to hal­lu­ci­nate.  Eventually, these hal­lu­ci­na­tions cul­mi­nate in a com­plete depar­ture from real­i­ty where­in the play­er is required to play through a minigame with com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent rules from the main game.

In these minigame sec­tions, Batman is placed in a near­ly two-dimensional space com­posed of small pieces of the Asylum, float­ing in space.  In the cen­ter of this space stands a fifty-foot tall Scarecrow, slow­ly rotat­ing around and look­ing for Batman.  His gaze is rep­re­sent­ed by a halo of orange light, and the play­er must avoid this light by hid­ing behind walls and only duck­ing through exposed spaces when the Scarecrow is look­ing else­where.  If Batman stum­bles into the Scarecrow’s gaze, the play­er receives an instant game over as the giant looms over a cow­er­ing Batman.

After suc­cess­ful­ly dodg­ing the Scarecrow’s gaze and sur­mount­ing some straight­for­ward obsta­cles, the play­er will come upon a Bat-Signal.  Interacting with the Bat-Signal caus­es Batman to shine the light direct­ly onto the Scarecrow, who will cry out and van­ish.  At this point, the hal­lu­ci­na­tion ends, and Batman comes back to the real world, hav­ing com­plete­ly shrugged off the fear gas with­out any appar­ent lin­ger­ing side effects.

The Content

At first, these sec­tions read as Batman con­quer­ing his fears and there­by sur­viv­ing the tem­po­rary insan­i­ty pro­duced by the gas.  Batman endures the hal­lu­ci­na­tions and then comes out the other end by remind­ing all con­cerned that he’s Batman, dammit, and is there­fore immune to your stu­pid poi­sons.

The first time I played the game, I took these sec­tions at face value, and there­fore found them to be an enjoy­able enough change of pace, but didn’t feel like they lived up to their full poten­tial.  But as I thought about them later, I sud­den­ly real­ized they deserved a closer look.

What is the play­er actu­al­ly doing dur­ing the minigame sec­tions, the real moments of game­play?  The large Scarecrow in the mid­dle of the world is not the actu­al per­son, but a pro­jec­tion of Batman’s fears.  If the play­er runs out and tries to con­front the Scarecrow (and thus, Batman’s fears), direct­ly, he or she is greet­ed with a game-over screen.  The play­er must thus hide from Batman’s fears, must avoid com­ing into direct con­flict or con­tact with them.  Practically every other obsta­cle in the game is defeat­ed through the use of phys­i­cal force.  Batman does hide in the shad­ows when he is attack­ing a group of armed thugs, but he does so only until the play­er can iso­late them and beat them into sub­mis­sion.

But the play­er never actu­al­ly fights Batman’s fears.  Batman never punch­es the huge Scarecrow, never fights with him, never throws Batarangs at him.  Instead, he runs away from him.  He com­plete­ly avoids the Scarecrow’s gaze, and if he allows him­self to be bathed in the light of the Scarecrow’s eyes, to be caught and forced to reck­on with his deep­est fears, he goes com­plete­ly insane.

Batman is not fac­ing his fears and tri­umph­ing over them, he is run­ning away from them.  Each sec­tion forces Batman to inter­act with ele­ments of self-doubt– all of the hal­lu­ci­na­tions relate to Batman’s per­cep­tion of him­self.  Each time the Scarecrow poi­sons Batman, he forces him to take a long, hard look at him­self.

And how does Batman shake off the toxin?  Not by accept­ing the fears, or by con­fronting them, but by shin­ing the Bat-Signal on the image of the Scarecrow, lit­er­al­ly stamp­ing the Batman emblem on his fears.  This is an act of self-definition, of reassert­ing his iden­ti­ty in the face of the unpleas­ant intro­spec­tion the fear gas is mak­ing him under­go.  When Batman shi­nes the bat-signal on the Scarecrow, he is redefin­ing him­self as Batman, “tri­umph­ing” over his fears not by con­fronting them, but by remind­ing him­self who he is.  Batman is an idea more than he is a per­son, and by shin­ing the Bat-Signal on his fears, Bruce reasserts his iden­ti­ty as the leg­end.  He is not Bruce Wayne, he is the @#$%# Batman.

The fact that he shrugs off the effects of the gas all at once imme­di­ate­ly after this act of self-definition indi­cates that he is com­plete­ly repress­ing his fears and self-doubt, shunt­ing them out of his mind, con­quer­ing his fears not by fac­ing them and let­ting them pass through him, but by putting his fin­gers in his ears and shout­ing “I’m Batman and Batman is not afraid of things,” until they go away for a while.

So, what does the game think Batman is afraid of?  The three sec­tions boil down to two major fears.

1. Bruce Wayne

One of the most inter­est­ing parts about Batman is the inter­play between his two per­sonas– the inter­ac­tion and fre­quent dis­con­nect between the way he views him­self and behaves as he switch­es between Bruce Wayne and Batman.  The real ques­tion is one of def­i­n­i­tion: is this per­son real­ly Bruce Wayne, a bil­lion­aire play­boy who moon­lights by night as a cos­tumed vig­i­lante, or is he pri­mar­i­ly Batman, who pre­tends by day to be a wealthy exec­u­tive?  Some super­heroes are less con­fus­ing in this regard: Clark Kent isn’t a real per­son, he’s a mask for Superman.  Spider-Man, con­verse­ly, is an excuse for Peter Parker to do all the things he real­ly wants to do.  But Batman is less clear-cut.  Where does Batman stop and Bruce Wayne begin?

Arkham Asylum is most­ly uncon­cerned with this dynam­ic.  You play the game as Batman, and although Oracle calls you Bruce from time to time, the Bruce Wayne side of things is most­ly irrel­e­vant.  But the one time you do play as Bruce Wayne rather than Batman is telling: you don’t play Bruce Wayne the bil­lion­aire play­boy, you play Bruce Wayne the ter­ri­fied lit­tle child.

The sec­ond hal­lu­ci­na­tion sequence caus­es the player’s avatar to be replaced by a lit­tle boy in a tuxe­do, walk­ing down a rain­ing alley­way, and lis­ten­ing, in the dis­tance, to the sounds of his par­ents being mur­dered.  The alley­way seems to go on forever, stretch­ing on in per­ma­nent dark­ness, and the play­er can do absolute­ly noth­ing to stop the mur­der of Bruce’s par­ents.  Keeping the mur­der entire­ly audi­to­ry is actu­al­ly a stroke of bril­liance as it makes it all the more inex­orable.  You can’t see what’s hap­pen­ing, so you wouldn’t even begin to know how to stop it, but you can hear it, so you know it’s hap­pen­ing.  The game does not take con­trol of the avatar; it still allows the play­er to have con­trol over the char­ac­ter, in that the play­er can phys­i­cal­ly move the lit­tle boy around, but the play­er has no con­trol over the events that are unfold­ing in the game.

This is how Batman views Bruce Wayne: as a scared, pow­er­less lit­tle boy, per­pet­u­al­ly trapped in the dark alley where his par­ents were mur­dered.  In Arkham Asylum, at least, Batman asso­ciates the name “Bruce Wayne” with pow­er­less­ness, with weak­ness, and with loss.  He becomes Batman to escape from Bruce Wayne, to leave the lit­tle boy behind, and in this case, the reasser­tion of his iden­ti­ty through the Bat-Signal is a way of dis­tanc­ing him­self from this part of him­self.  “I am not Bruce Wayne,” he says, “I am not this pow­er­less lit­tle child who could not save his par­ents from being mur­dered.  I am Batman, and I can do any­thing.”

2. Illegitimacy

How is Batman dif­fer­ent from the cos­tumed lunatics and mur­der­ers he oppos­es?  Bruce Wayne, a grown man, spends his nights dress­ing up like a bat and beat­ing up crim­i­nals and lunatics, and calls it his life’s work, argu­ing that he’s sav­ing Gotham City.  But Bruce could unques­tion­ably accom­plish far more good as the multi-billionaire CEO of a major cor­po­ra­tion ded­i­cat­ed to res­cu­ing Gotham, and he would prob­a­bly get punched less.  Rather than per­son­al­ly beat­ing up rob­bers and rapists, Bruce could donate sev­er­al mil­lion dol­lars to reform­ing the entire Gotham Police Department, and then donate sev­er­al more mil­lions of dol­lars to the edu­ca­tion­al sys­tems and infra­struc­tures of the city so as to help peo­ple avoid becom­ing rob­bers and rapists in the first place.  In the real world, while Phoenix Jones may (or may not) do some good with his vig­i­lan­tism, it’s hard to argue that he does as much good for the world as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.  Jones, of course, isn’t a bil­lion­aire, but Bruce Wayne is.

This is not to say that all future edi­tions of Batman comics ought to cen­ter around the day-to-day affairs of a bil­lion­aire phil­an­thropist, because, you know, yawn.  And to be fair, many of the Batman sto­ries do show him doing all man­ner of phil­an­thropy in the day­time in addi­tion to his night-time antics.  But if Bill Gates ran around in a bat cos­tume and punched peo­ple, even bad peo­ple, we would not cheer him on, we would call him crazy and lock him away.  In the real world, that kind of vig­i­lan­tism isn’t real­ly laud­able, it’s psy­chotic.

Batman, sadly, does not live in the real world, but any work of art which real­ly wants to engage with the Batman mythos is going to have to explore this prob­lem.  Arkham Asylum does so in the third hal­lu­ci­na­tion sequence, which takes the game’s open­ing cin­e­mat­ic and inverts the roles.  In the orig­i­nal cin­e­mat­ic, we watched as Batman drove a bound and gagged Joker to the Asylum and escort­ed him to his pris­on cell.  In the hal­lu­ci­na­tion, how­ev­er, the Joker takes a bound and gagged Batman to the Asylum while all of the other vil­lains watch and com­ment on how crazy Batman is.  What’s the dif­fer­ence, Batman’s psy­che asks, between these lunatics and your­self?  It ends with the hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry Joker killing Batman, and then cuts (after some fun fourth-wall break­age involv­ing a faux game-over screen) to Batman’s grave.  Batman then claws his way out of the grave and walks through a series of cells which each con­tain images of Batman behav­ing just like the lunatics in the asy­lum before descend­ing into the final minigame sec­tion.  Maybe Batman isn’t that dif­fer­ent from the Joker.  Maybe he should be caged.  Maybe he is a lunatic.  Maybe the Batman myth is dead.

Batman is almost com­plete­ly silent dur­ing these hal­lu­ci­na­tions.  He doesn’t engage with these legit­i­mate doubts and ques­tions, he avoids them, and this time, when he shi­nes the Bat-Signal and reasserts his iden­ti­ty, he is actu­al­ly reassert­ing the value of the entire leg­end.

The Bat-Signal is real­ly one of the sil­lier aspects of the Batman mythos.  While it inevitably shows up in all of the dark­er Batman sto­ries, it real­ly seems most at home in lighter ver­sions of the char­ac­ter.  It belongs with a Batman who is any­thing but dark and edgy and brood­ing, a Batman who is pure-hearted and good and maybe even a lit­tle goofy, who inhab­its a uni­verse com­plete­ly free of psy­chosis and real vio­lence.  Thus, using the Bat-Signal to reassert the valid­i­ty of the Batman leg­end may serve as a way for him to for­get all of the issues that undoubt­ed­ly under­lie his behav­ior and remind him­self of the leg­end.  No, he’s not a psy­chopath.  He’s dif­fer­ent from the Joker because he’s BATMAN.  The Batman leg­end seems dead for a moment, but Batman crawls his way out of the grave, again, not by actu­al­ly con­fronting the issue, but by reassert­ing his iden­ti­ty and his own self-made def­i­n­i­tions, ignor­ing what is prob­a­bly the truth of the mat­ter in favor of the myth.

Conclusion

The most telling part about this is that this inter­pre­ta­tion is not imme­di­ate­ly appar­ent.  Batman cer­tain­ly doesn’t think he’s run­ning away from any­thing.  Batman thinks he’s tri­umph­ing over Bruce Wayne’s piti­ful self-doubts and night­mares, and remind­ing him­self who he real­ly is.

Arkham Asylum is usu­al­ly any­thing but sub­tle: it cli­max­es in a bat­tle with a twelve-foot mani­ac clown.  But hid­den down beneath the broad strokes and nifty gad­gets is real com­men­tary about the sort of per­son Batman must be.  You have to dig down to find it, past the trap­pings of the sit­u­a­tion into the mechan­ics, the fun­da­men­tal level at which the play­er inter­acts with the game.

When Batman final­ly breaks out of his last hal­lu­ci­na­tion, he has the real Scarecrow by the throat.  Scarecrow astound­ed­ly yells that he has inject­ed Batman with enough toxin to drive ten men insane.  Batman has the willpow­er of ten men, the game seems to declare.  But maybe it’s not so much that Batman is stronger than the rest of us.  Maybe he just has a much greater capac­i­ty for self-deception.