Last Laughs

Abstract

Because it deals with a male “superhero,” Tim Burton's 1989 film Batman inevitably the-matizes certain issues concerning masculinity. Specifically, Burton's film foregrounds an anxious relation among “armored” masculine subjectivity, the male body, and the mechanisms of photographic and cinematic representation. The close reading of Batman presented here argues that the film articulates a specifically masculinist anxiety about the very medium of cinema, a constitutive unease about a mass cultural “technology of abjection” that both threatens and enforces the boundaries of normative, heterosexual masculinity. By thematizing its own material engulfment in the “feminizing” mass culture it attempts to transcend, Batman complicates the very terms of masculinity on which it insists.