Batman Incorporated: An Image of a Culture in Decline Pt 3
III. TRIP TO VIENNA
by Travis Hedge Coke
“SECONDS to go.” “Only a motion away.”
The Lovers are Siblings are Step-Siblings are Pairings are Weavers and Engines are Duels are Duos are Principals and Seconds are Mentor and Mentee are Squires and Knights, Face and Heel; the Great Mother Goddess Come After the Dragon.
A thing with Batman comics, is that no matter of “standalone” one is, it always connects to an nth number of other comics, and then everything else besides along the trail you take. Franchise shared universe superhero comics do not make pure chronologies, pure continuities, they do not make pure quests. In Batman Forever, directed by Joel Schumacher, Harvey Two-Face tells the Riddler, “Now now, if we kill him, he won't learn nothing,” and that is how these franchise sharing comics work, too. No one can every die and a quest cannot be an end. No goal. Minutes to foe goal, no goal.
In the Batman comic which most directly leads up Batman Incorporated, The Return of Bruce Wayne, an alchemical marriage of engines and weavers, engineers and fretboards, Bruce Wayne, not yet again the Batman, has time move around him so that he is once in prehistoric times when light-skinned humans had yet to leave North America over a land bridge to Eurasia, to the middle of the 17th Century, the 18th, 19th, and a hauntological 20th Century that is both 1930s and 1970s, gathering to himself the accoutrement and ethos of Batman, at once unintentionally, subconsciously, and with intent.
Return of Bruce Wayne can be traced as a pilgrimage on which Bruce Wayne realizes he is not on a quest to be Batman or to be back in his own time and space, but a pilgrimage which, like the Buddhist parable (or comic) of the shepherd (in Incorporated, a goatherd), will always be a pilgrimage. If it ended, we wouldn’t learn nothing.
The stages of Freudian, Jungian, and Grofian psychology, like the Buddhist stages of awakening or where Bruce Batman Wayne is in his life just now, are not sequential, numbered links in a chain which must be set together one way. Like the Stages of Grief, these are all situations which can overlap, come in any order, or even be repeated or not present.
American globalization is a colonial projection straight out of old England, a British Empire excursion still sticking its flag in the gray and white matters of the brains abroad and home.
We get distressed about the days of Charlemagne. We bother a great deal to make the history of European civilization much handsomer, rubbing our eyes and stretching ourself to pretend, if caught in it, that we were merely asleep at the wheel. If you lend credence to many Arthurian tales, you lose sight of their constructed nature, as if Cinderella suddenly decided the fairy was a kitchen wench like her.
As much, for example, as Bruce Wayne can be considered enlightened, to be spiritually attuned, living in some ways as an ascetic, sublimating sexual activity, trying to purge himself of ill-will, he is probably converting the drive for sexual activity into a sensualization of physical violence, and his attachments to a lack of a singular identity or soul, and his obsession with an omnipresent void of thing/no-thing are rooted in a “radiant black” “true individual” which an evil monk (or monk-impersonator) reiterates to him during an incorrectly performed tögal ritual that leaves Bruce feeling falsely individual and freed of Batman for a time.
The individual who successfully experiences rebirth has a profound sense of peace, but someone who only got most of the way might feel that, too, for a moment, or tell themself that their anxiousness is, instead, energetic resolve.
While tögal ritualizes a kind of practice death for Bruce Wayne, and a “radiant black” light can be justified as a reference to ultraviolet light, even if performed in directed order to achieve the traditional four visions, and then a clear light, it is perhaps Bruce’s Americanism, an American exceptionalism, which keeps him both divided into identities or persons, and anchored with panic in the idea of a true, corse self.
The first tögal vision is of simply spots or chains of spots. The second, visualizations complexify and increase in number, shape, size and intensity. In the third, one hundred peaceful and wrathful deities should align in a mandala. And, in the fourth, shapes and visions dissolve and disappear. This all achieved through both the denial of light and subjection to stages of illumination, including skywatching at different times of night and twilight.
Bruce Wayne is not afforded skywatching. He is kept in a cave.
Capitalism is always late stage capitalism.
Batman is “like a fury,” while Talia uses Medusa/gorgon iconography, inherent in her name.
Batman is Bruce Wayne. Batman is not Bruce Wayne. Batman is more people than Bruce Wayne, particularly in Incoporated, in which anyone can be (deputized or own) Batman.
But, Bruce Wayne is is more people than Batman, too. More people than he will let himself be.
Man is machine. Woman is spider. Spider is a machine. Man is slippy. Loki is preggers. Sliepner, an alias of a late stage original Nazi, is the name of the foal of Loki and Svaðilfari. Svaðilfari is an unlucky traveler, a magnificent horse. Loki also fathers a child with a Jotun; a wolf.
Batman might want to be Thor, or have aspects of Orion, but remember, this kind of Freudian reduction was flawed even in Freud’s lifetime. Batman is also Loki and Loki is also Talia. And, when there is no Talia immediately available, a Catwoman, a Jezebel, a woman. A partner.
Batman and Robin inspire Knight and Squire, and when Knight dies, Squire becomes Knight, and when that Knight dies, Squire becomes the Knight. To take the Father’s treasure, Batman needs a female second. With Sivana, in the absence of Talia, the sexy and local but wrong end of the tracks Catwoman in her guise as an heiress and model. Defeated at Talia Head’s feet, Batman’s second is Batwoman.
When Hebe, the cup-bearer god, is removed from her occupation and ritual role, she, Heracles’ wife, is replaced by Ganymede. He is a young lover of Hebe’s father, Zeus.
Batman and Alfred Pennyworth are good dads, the Good Father, because they encourage seconds. They permit the rise of new little knights.
Ganymede was used to explain and justify pederastic practice.
But, if Talia does something bad, even something only as bad as what Batman or Alfred do, she is the Demoness. The Devilina. The monster we can be misogynistic about.
The path to Damian’s death is hewn by Batman’s second who became Batman, the first Robin, Dick Grayson, making Damian a Robin as he wants to be. The path is shaped by Bruce Wayne, as Batman, encouraging this squiring. The path is paved and lit by Alfred releasing Damian on a technicality to fight in adult wars. Good men, good dads, all walking a child hand in hand to a battlefield execution.
But, when Talia does the same, women are weavers and men are engines. Engines are only tools, motion machines moving as they are set to, and weavers choose to weave.
Dr Dedalus, from a book, is Oroboro, but could as easily be, Ulysses. Dedalus and his doubles, from dummies to skeletons to a drugged keeper-turned-prisoner. Dedalus, also named Netz, also Webb.
Britain recruits the ex-Nazi, Dedalus. The States adopt the ex-Nazi, Werner von Braun. Batman, nation as notion, notion as man, Catwoman and the Red Hood, and if she would allow him, Talia Head.
Britain, the United States of America, and Bruce Wayne like looking in mirrors if the mirror is under their control.
Bruce and Talia a Scots Jew American man and a multiracial, nationless woman select totems and design flags. Bruce chooses the name, Batman, while Talia takes a pun on her father’s name as her anglophone alias.
Dedalus is the web. And, of course, Daedalus of myth literature. Engine-maker foiled by Daughter/Weaver, and Batman a funhouse and mirrors.
In the Mindless Ones’ fan comic in text, Batman’s narration says, “Luckily for me I’d spent years meditating on the bat-yantra,” but in the DC Comics-published comics, there is no official bat-yantra, while Talia and Leviathan do have hers, and we will never know if her Kali Yantra is genuinely Nazi themed or if it is satirically or sarcastically so, or even, simply, not at all. Talia tells Batman that a senile old Nazi suggested the red and white, “warlike colors” of her yantra banner, but this engine in weave is almost wholly traditional and it is the traditions from which the Nazis appropriated some of their accoutrement, not the other way round. Buddhist to Nazi to Buddhist with Japanese flag colors in sick parody or slick satire of the squires and knights reflected in dueling oppositions.
In Gotham City they eat White Castle stand-in, Dark Castle, because this is a Childe Roland world. Every unproven knight will have a chance to prove themselves, someday, and also fall short.
It is suffocation by fear, pressing against the cervix in the beginnings of labor, the sysiphean push that we panic and fear may not ever end. The terror of the Pit and the Pendulum game is not that it will end, but that it might not. The blessing and curse of being Batman is that you get to be Batman. And, the violent, thrilling dangers and pitfalls of birth? Like rising from the sinking and always sunken Leviathan ship, like Cthulu resting in waters, dead but not, like a fetus not yet at the crown. The chance to be hung on the umbilical cord. To come in sideways or slide feet first into adventure.
Talia tells her youngest agent, also her youngest child, the Heretic, that his time will come (to supplant or invalidate his father?) after his father is “suffocate[d] in the womb of chaos.”
The adventuresome long suffering. The Leviathan cervical channel to submergence or air. What world! What life.
The traps and tricks and “clues” of Leviathan are false-goals, fake-outs; parodies of mythic tasks and stages in a classical quest. Every call, every challenge is not emboldening or heroic or embiggening, but demeaning and dismissive and grotesque, even when not bloody giallo symbols and satire of superhero tropes. And, Talia only commits to presenting them, chasing Batman to appear a step ahead, to keep to his pathway, to keep with him.
“The funhouse mirror metaphor underscores that the self-monitoring practice disproportionately emphasizes very specific practices of self while devaluing others. Self-perception can be informed by many and at times competing data doubles, each of them grounded in a different ontology,” say Mira W Vegter, Hub A E Zwart, Alain J van Gool.
“The Dark Knight and the Devil’s Daughter.” An ouroboros is a snake eating itself, but this is iterations of two snakes with so much of each other down their gullet they are, inside, maybe more the other than themselves.
The only way fully out of the pilgrimage on which Talia and Bruce find themselves, the pilgrimage of suffering, is a death of the skin-encapsulating ego and any compulsion to be strong, in control, and constantly prepared for danger. They could, arguably, be freed from seventy-six paranoid, defensive postures, if they let go. Metavalues. Metamotivations like the upper atmosphere becoming indistinguishable with outer space and the air just below.
Something children have trouble with and adults ought to find out is that strong is not good.
Talia and Bruce, Batman and Head, cannot have this ego death, because in this franchised shared universe multi-connector web nobody really dies, especially not your ego.
At the beginning of Batman Incorporated, Batman is hyperventilating, shallow, fast breaths coupling in his excitement, and an individual who experiences ego-death incompletely not only seeks special favor and acknowledgment, as he and Talia find themselves in this moment doing, not only make big plans and host grand celebrations, they are prone to prepping, preaching, proselytizing, prophesying; they are hyperactive and euphoric.
The Fatherless, Bruce Wayne’s youngest son, is unchecked in his indulgence of violence and brutality and pitching fits until he is literally beaten by both of his biological parents and then killed. Entitlement and boys will be boys excuses until the system that buoys on that collapses on itself.
“The time has come to glance at a deeper past, a past now manifest in scattered monuments of stone.”
Unresolvable if we are to blame maiden or old man, mother or son, ever-present Ra’s al Ghul to blame for his daughter, Talia, or the old man and absent father of others, Dr Dedalus? Or, is she the villain? Her own absent mom? Everyone?
Is it blame and or fault all the way along the queue?
“Nothing is never enough.”