Batman: Is Wealth a Superpower?

When Batman is asked in The Dark Knight Rises why he donned the mask to carry out crime-fighting, he answers “The idea was to be a symbol. Batman could be anybody. That was the point” (425 [page refs to The Dark Knight Trilogy: The Complete Screenplays, Faber and Faber]). In case that wasn’t clear enough, late in the film he tells Jim Gordon: “A hero can be anyone. That was always the point” (505).

The thing that has separated Batman from the other major superheroes, that has made him the most relatable figure in the genre, is the fact that he has no superpower. This is somewhat of a cliche of comparative superhero discourse. It is also the view of the director of the Dark Knight trilogy, Christopher Nolan:

The thing about Bruce Wayne is he doesn’t have superpowers other than his extraordinary wealth. Really, he’s just someone who does a lot of push-ups. And in that sense, he’s very relatable[.]

So if Batman has no superpower, maybe anyone could be Batman. Why not? But while noting Batman’s lack of a true superpower, Nolan does mention the character’s “extraordinary wealth”. The implication, then, is that wealth is a sort of superpower, or at least a substitute for one.

Can we imagine Batman without his wealth? A superhero who not only does not have a superpower, but is also not that rich? Probably not. Throughout the Batman canon we find that the Knight’s exploits are wholly dependent on his wealth and resources. In Nolan’s final film in the trilogy, The Dark Knight Returns, for example, this is clear at many points. How could Batman defeat Bane without his gargantuan wealth? His wealth and resources count in several different ways:

1 His mind: Batman can know everything because he has access to police databases to track down Selina Kyle after she burglarizes his manor (369). Later his relationship with her becomes key to defeating Bane.

2 His body: Batman’s body manages to overcome wear and tear through the carbon fiber leg brace that makes him capable of physically competing with Bane. This leg brace is not exactly available through the Public Health Service, rather it is an advanced prototype developed by the research team at Wayne Corporation (395).

3 His appliances: He has The Bat, a flying car developed by the research team at Wayne Corporation in conjunction with the Defense Department. He uses this to fight criminals and later to transport the nuclear fusion bomb out of Gotham, saving the city from destruction (386). Without this specialised vehicle, Gotham is toast.

4 And, of course, he owns a secret and very well-equipped hideaway below ground in the Batcave, property he inherited from his father.

And all these resources despite being nominally an outlaw during this story, wanted for the murder of Harvey Dent, and despite having no official position in the police/military/government. It is clear, then, that Batman’s accomplishments could not be achieved without his wealth, and wealth is his real superpower, giving him resources beyond anyone else’s wildest dreams.

 

Bullshit and the Art of the Plausible: Thomas Carlyle and Harry Frankfurt

The most influential academic work on the rather unacademic topic of bullshit is Harry G. Frankfurt’s On Bullshit, first published in the Raritan Quarterly Review in 1986 and later in book form. Frankfurt goes to great lengths to elucidate the difference between bullshit and lying. Most strikingly, he argues that bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lying, and renders this paradox quite plausible.

Harry S. Frankfurt (1929- )

The liar, Frankfurt insists, must have a clear conception of the difference between truth and lies in order to lie successfully:

[I]t is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false.

Every true liar, then, has the capacity for honesty and knows very well what truth is. Yet now, consider the bullshitter. The bullshitter, for Frankfurt, may be telling the truth or a lie or (probably more likely, I would suggest) somewhere in the middle, a half-truth. The bullshitter  does not really know or care if he/she is speaking the truth or not:

Someone who lies and someone who tells the truth are playing on opposite sides, so to speak, in the same game. Each responds to the facts as he understands them, although the response of the one is guided by the authority of the truth, while the response of the other defies that authority and refuses to meet its demands. The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.

So, while both the truth-teller and the liar are very much concerned with what the truth is, in order to express it or to avoid it, the bullshitter has no relationship with truth at all: they would not know truth if they saw it, and don’t want to know. Such an alienation from truth is the real danger, not the expressions of direct untruth that a liar provides.

Frankfurt’s arguments provide a theoretical underpinning of a phenomenon that had not gone wholly unnoticed by earlier writers. Thomas Carlyle, in particular, dealt with this at the opening of his more-or-less forgotten 1833 essay “Cagliostro“. This essay was a biographical account of the eponymous Italian adventurer and forger (real name: Giuseppe Balsamo; also known as: Joseph Balsamo), a mysterious figure who had been implicated in the Affair of the Diamond Necklace involving Marie Antoinette. (Carlyle also wrote about this). Cagliostro held a fascination for late 18th and 19th century writers: Carlyle mentions that Goethe and Schiller wrote about him, and so, later, did Dumas and Tolstoy.

Carlyle declares Count Alessandro Cagliostro to be “the King of Liars” and “the Quack of Quacks” (English and Other Critical Essays, Everyman, 1964, 244, 248). And this purity of quackism is something Carlyle finds fascinating and even praiseworthy. He looks through the pre-Cagliostrian history of liars, and finds some notable specimens there, but concludes:

[It must] remain doubtful whether any of these comparatively were much more than liars from the teeth onwards: a perfect character of the species in question, who lied not in word only, nor in act and word only, but continually, in thought, word, and act; and, so to speak, lived wholly in an element of lying, and from birth to death did nothing but lie,—was still a desideratum. Of which desideratum Count Alessandro offers, we say, if not the fulfilment, perhaps as near an approach to it as the limited human faculties permit. (244)

Cagliostro so perfected the art of falsity that Carlyle concludes that he is “not so much a Liar as a Lie” (248). The interesting point is that Carlyle considers such a liar to be much preferable to

he who is neither true nor false; who never in his existence once spoke or did any true thing (for indeed his mind lives in twilight, with cat-vision, incapable of discerning truth); and yet had not the manfulness to speak or act any decided lie; but spent his whole life in plastering together the True and the False, and therefrom manufacturing the Plausible. (243)

Carlyle’s idea of the Plausible, then, occupies the same position external to the True/False dichotomy and destructive of this very dichotomy as Frankfurt’s bullshit. The liar must know truth, but the speaker of the Plausible lives in twilight, with cat-vision, and is incapable of discerning truth.

Count Cagliostro (1743-1795), the Quack of Quacks.

Carlyle goes on to note that the speaker of the Plausible – that is, effectively, the bullshitter – is motivated by concerns regarding his/her own social placement and advancement.

Wretched mortal, who with a single eye to be ‘respectable,’ forever sittest cobbling together two Inconsistencies, which stick not for an hour, but require ever new gluten and labour[.] What, in the Devil’s name, is the use of Respectability, with never so many gigs and silver spoons, if thou inwardly art the pitifullest of all men? I would thou wert either cold or hot. (243)

Carlyle would prefer someone to be hot or cold – that is, a liar or a truth-teller, rather than a speaker of the Plausible. Frankfurt would agree, as it is the latter who is the real enemy of the truth. It is the drive for respectability that creates such a discourse of Plausibility, in Carlyle’s view.

If we learn Carlyle’s lesson, then, we will acknowledge that bullshit is not of the individual. Rather, bullshit and the art of the Plausible are borne out of the individual’s wish to create a certain relation between the self and society (“respectability”), and to fill a certain position in society. It is perhaps comforting to reflect that in this conception we are not born bullshitters, rather we embrace bullshit as we try to fit into a society that seems to value the art of the Plausible and that, lip service aside, has limited tolerance for the speaking of truth.