Abstract
A selection of films and books is offered this month for your holiday consideration. The film A Beautiful Mind is important enough to warrant two reviews because of its potential to influence attitudes to schizophrenia over a wide audience.
With best wishes for the festive season.
Jo Beatson
Will Brooker
London: Continuum, 2000
ISBN 0 82644 949 2 pp.358 $51.50
When the title Batman unmasked appeared in a catalogue of forthcoming books of academic interest it proved irresistible. Batman, Superman and Dick Tracy comics were staples of my preteen years when reading something considered somewhat disreputable by one's elders only added to the enjoyment of the activity. What seemed on offer was proof that those adults were misguided, at least with respect to Batman, a delicious excuse for regression!
The catalogue entry was brief, but the subheading ‘Analysing a cultural icon’ suggested a psychoanalytic treatize with some sociology thrown in for good measure. The promise of a psychoanalytic treatize was not fulfilled. This was not, in the end, a disappointment. Batman unmasked provides an interesting ride through the ups and downs of the Batman genre since it first appeared in comic form in 1939. How world events during the last sixty-plus years affected, or failed to affect, Batman, is of particular interest. For example, Batman comics thrived through the Second World War and the Vietnam War, in neither of which Batman was involved in any real way. Through these events he simply continued to do what he had always done – fight crime in Gotham City. Was it the reassuring continuity with events before these wars that underpinned Batman's popularity? Author Will Brooker thinks so.
Brooker is an academic in the field of cultural studies and an avowed Batman fan. The field of cultural studies is new and, by Brooker's account, not yet taken altogether seriously. Hardly surprising in the case of ‘Batman’, when the subject of discourse is a superhero who has been accused of contributing to juvenile delinquency and sexual ‘perversion’. Brooker pursues his task unabashed by accusations of frivolity, to satisfying effect.
He provides a disturbing and fascinating account of the deeds of a psychiatrist, Fredric Wertham, who treated boys and young men in the Quaker Emergency Service Readjustment Center for overt homosexuals, and published a book entitled Seduction of the innocent in 1954. This work was mainly an attack on horror comics for their supposed contribution to juvenile delinquency, but attained notoriety for suggesting that the relationship between Batman and Robin was homoerotic in nature.
Wertham succeeded in having the content of comics censored with respect to violence and sex via a Comics Code put in place soon after the release of his book. Batman comics were affected by this code, but only in so far as it related to marriage and sex.
The relevant edict of the Comic Code was as follows: ‘Illicit sexual relations are neither to be hinted at nor portrayed; treatment of love-romance stories shall emphasize the value of home and the sanctity of marriage; passion or romantic interest must never be treated in such a way as to stimulate the lower and baser emotions; sex perversion or any inference (sic) to same is strictly forbidden.’ (p.144). Politically correct indeed!
Twenty-four out of 29 crime comic publishers went out of business within the next few years, mainly because of the comic code's stringent restrictions on depictions of violence. Batman comics were not overtly horrific, so Batman survived, albeit with the introduction of Batwoman in 1956, to ward off homosexual accusations.
To return to Wertham, whose methods offer an object lesson for psychiatrists who would influence the public mind in one way or another. He published a series of articles presenting his concerns about violence and perversion in comics in popular magazines, such as Saturday Review and Reader's Digest in the late 1940s, and Ladies Home Journal in the early 50s, before publication of Seduction of the innocent. The magazine articles were written in an accessible and chatty style, and fell on fertile ground. He was politically active, being involved in the Senate Subcommittee hearings into the relation of comics to juvenile delinquency in 1954. He was even invited to be Comics ‘czar’ – head of the American Comic Book Association – but declined. Perhaps he had accomplished what he wanted with the introduction of the Comics Code!
Any psychiatrist wishing to influence politicians and the general public could learn much from Wertham's methods. One hopes, of course, that such a psychiatrist would seek influence for causes more honourable than Wertham's, whose activities almost certainly contributed to the persecution of homosexuals in America in the 1950s.
Batman unmasked is a thought-provoking read, especially for those who enjoyed Batman comics, the television series, or more recently, the Batman movies. For me it proved a piece of nostalgia with sociological leanings. Anyone for the definitive study of Superman, Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen?