By Alexandra Edwards

As Josh teased in this month’s intro post, the main reason I wanted to write about Batman this month was my discovery, upon rewatching the 1989 film a few months ago, that it participates in a much larger contemporaneous debate about artists and public art, especially in America.

While the 60s tv show and the 1966 movie reveled in their pop art imagery, Burton’s first take on Batman is much more suspicious about contemporary art.  In a number of images and plot happenings throughout the film, a deeply conservative message about art, collecting, museums, and publicly funded art projects is broadcast almost subconsciously.

Conservative Hollywood Masculinity

Film critic Susan Jeffords, in her book Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era, develops the theory that the conservative mindset of a time period can be mapped onto the same period’s blockbuster action films.  I’ll be building on this analysis for this article.  I should be clear that I’m not arguing that Burton himself was suspicious of contemporary art, but that, because Batman was a blockbuster designed for mass appeal, the kinds of thematic shorthand that get utilized are inherently conservative.

The Joker and Batman obviously represent binary opposites — good versus evil.  By doing so, they also convey coded messages about what kinds of things are good or bad in masculinity.  Defending the innocent is good; killing people is bad.  But what is so interesting to me is that they also convey coded messages about masculinity in terms of art, and in doing so, clearly set up certain kinds of art as good or bad, even evil.

Artist Versus Art Collector

It is, of course, canonical that Bruce Wayne is fantastically rich.  Batman uses key visual indicators to get this point across, notably Wayne’s large collection of historical art and artifacts.  His house is literally a museum, dedicated especially to weapons and armor of the past.

While this makes canonical sense for Wayne as a character — he uses his wealth to study historic armor, as a means of better designing and developing his own Batman armor — it also says something very specific about his brand of wealthy masculinity.  Wayne is a collector, a preserver, a representation of the old guard.

Alone this may not mean much, but when compared to the film’s depictions of the Joker as prankster artist, a clear pattern starts to emerge.  Consider, for example, some of the scenes of the Joker’s mayhem.  In his first encounter with Vicki Vale, he tricks her into meeting him at the Flugelheim Museum (an obvious reference to the real Guggenheim Museum in New York City).  He and his goons burst in and proceed to redecorate the museum’s classic art with bright splashes of paint and graffiti.

The aesthetic does indeed resemble the street art movement that gained popularity after the film, especially the work of Banksy (though he never knocked anybody out with nerve gas in order to wreak havoc in a museum).  This kind of art, which has no respect for the high culture that came before it, is seen in the film as a public menace.

But throwing paint on masterpieces isn’t the only “art” the Joker creates.  He specifically refers to his girlfriend’s face, which he has scarred with acid, as his art.

I now do what other people only dream. I make art until someone dies. See?  I am the world’s first fully functioning homicidal artist.

And, in addition to all this, part of the terror of the Joker as psychopath is his gross twisting of Vicki Vale’s documentary photos into art as well.  The Joker not only damages (masterpieces and people), but he misreads journalism’s factual reporting of horrible conditions as something, well, beautiful.  His ebullience while doing all these things add yet another layer of monstrosity to him.

Portrait of the Artist as Public Menace

So, as we’ve seen the dichotomies are set up: good vs. evil, Batman vs. the Joker, art collector vs. artist.  But why?

The simple answer is, because the 1980s had a vexed relationship with the visual arts that got filtered through electoral politics in America, causing immensely heated debates about the nature of good and bad art and the role of taxpayers in the creation of both.

It’s no coincidence that, in the same summer as Batman was released, a controversy over Robert Mapplethorpe’s art exhibit, The Perfect Moment, was sweeping the nation.

In the summer of 1989, Mapplethorpe’s traveling solo exhibit brought national attention to the issues of public funding for the arts, who defines what is obscene, and what censorship should be acceptable. The Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. had agreed to be one of the host museums for the tour. Mapplethorpe decided to show his latest series that he explored shortly before his death. Titled Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment, it was curated by Janet Kardon of the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA). The hierarchy of the Corcoran and several members of the U.S. Congress were upset when the works were revealed to them, due to some of the content being homoerotic and sadomasochistically themed. The museum refused the exhibit’s stop during the national tour.  — from Wikipedia

Public conflicts over the government funding of so-called obscene art were common at the time.  With the rise of the Moral Majority in the 80s, conservative politicians banked electoral dollars by decrying the use of taxpayers money to fund art they found objectionable, usually for homosexual content.  Just a year later, the debate would erupt yet again in the case of the NEA Four, a group of performance artists who had their government-funded grants yanked due to “obscenity.”  (In a country with legally-protected free speech, denying access to funding is a key method of censorship.)

The Joker’s very real link to these debates about publicly funded art is perfectly spelled out in one of his pirate TV appearances later in the film.  Hijacking the airwaves, the Joker appears in flesh-colored makeup, concealing his mutated face.  In an oversized easy chair, he addresses the camera while holding a large book in his hands.

The shot blatantly parodies Alistair Cooke in his guise as the host of Masterpiece Theater, public television’s drama anthology series.  PBS has long found itself under attack by Republicans and others as a waste of taxpayer money.  It is reviled, it seems, not for any shocking content but rather for being too highbrow.

The Joker, then, plays both sides of the coin (sorry for the mixed-villain pun!) — he is both obscene art menace and dangerous highbrow culture snob.  And yet, at the same time, these identities mock Batman-as-Bruce-Wayne, the wealthy but masculine collector of ancient weaponry.  If Wayne’s hobby is acceptable, it is because he uses private funds and has a mission of preservation and a theme of warfare; the Joker’s inversions directly comment on what is and isn’t acceptable when it comes to culture.  The fictional defeat of the Joker is no less than the fictional defeat of the dangerous artist-figure seen, in the 80s, as a very real threat to good Americans everywhere.

This film is probably the only Batman story in which obscene art and censorship play a major role.  And yet, interestingly, comics themselves are no stranger to such debates.  The very existence of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund speaks volumes about the power of legal censorship in America — comics are frequently art which must be defended from the politicians and police force.  It is strange, and yet not strange, given Susan Jeffords’s theories on the conservative nature of blockbuster films, that Batman comes down so firmly in favor of censorship at the expense of the artist.

Whatever else Batman is (and it’s a lot of things), it is also a fascinating snapshot of a time in American culture when public battles over decency in art were erupting all over the place, making villains out of artists themselves and protector-heroes out of the conservative politicians who tried to ruin their careers.