Does Batman Have To Be Copaganda?

Batman’s complex relationship with law enforcement, on page and screen

by Kevin Fox, Jr. // Illustration by Bhanu Pratap

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Batman, the billionaire vigilante, has been my favorite superhero since I was a toddler. His darkness—his typically black costumes, his tragic backstory and scarred psyche, the symbiotic and reflective relationship he shares with the aesthetic of his city—helped me define my early, dorky definitions of cool. The fact that he fights alongside and against characters with superpowers despite having none of his own—just a sharp mind, a trained body, and tons of gadgets—all set him apart among superheroes.

And yet as someone who believes billionaires shouldn’t even exist, who holds strong feelings about the role of police and the carceral system, and who pursues meaning in art and mass culture, I have to recognize this as an internal contradiction. The same gadgets and tools that made him so appealing to me are supplied and supported by an inherited fortune, one that justly makes him feel responsible to the city—a responsibility he tries to fulfill by punching criminals in the face.

Batman stories, at least as they’ve long been constituted, cannot help but propagandize for police. Like so many mainstream mass culture properties, Batman’s premise creates limits to his storytelling potential; DC Comics needs to be able to sell comics in perpetuity, and that means there must be a status quo to return to. For Batman, this is a status quo where the police in Gotham City are too broken to enforce the law, and a masked vigilante needs to step in to do so effectively. This ultimately makes policing itself seem necessary and noble, even as they perpetually fail to protect people in both fiction and reality. 

The Batman, the latest entry in the caped crusader’s cinematic repertoire, only serves to heighten this contradiction. Many of the most interesting Batman stories place him in a mutually-antagonistic relationship with the police (albeit always leaving an exception in the form of Jim Gordon), and the film goes out of its way to establish a contentious relationship with Gotham Police through dialogue, but it struggles to represent it visually from the outset. It tries to focus on the character as a ground-level superhero, “the world’s greatest detective,” but his role shifts as the stakes of the film change in the third act. The pacing problems that make the runtime feel long complement the confused politics about policing and corruption, which are run-of-the-mill superhero fare. It tries to give Batman a combative relationship with police, showing him both running from and fighting against them, but in the beginning and the end shows him in their throng. Batman’s arc, as ever, is to become integrated into institutional power as a semi-sanctioned vigilante—exactly as Bruce Wayne is integrated into institutional power as a capitalist oligarch. 

The Batman tries to give Batman a combative relationship with police, but still shows him in their throng.

Batman is better off when he’s not just a cop in a costume, but in practice the only thing that separates him from police is the fluctuation of his relationship with them. He is at his most compelling when he distrusts the Gotham police outside of Jim Gordon, and the police rightly return that distrust (if a man dressed vaguely like a bat starts using extralegal means to support the legal system, we have a serious problem). The Batman tries to communicate that distrust in the way police (besides Lieutenant Gordon) speak to and leer at Robert Pattinson’s Batman, and he makes his disdain for them clear when challenged—but from the first act of the film he is operating in their midst, and Gordon tries to cultivate a healthy working relationship. What’s more, unlike the look-the-other-way Gordon of Gary Oldman in Batman Begins (who won’t take money but professes that he isn’t “a rat”), Jeffrey Wright’s Gordon seems genuinely surprised that professional law enforcement is teeming with corruption.

Moreover, by the film’s third act the police have come around to trusting him. In the end, “Mr. Vengeance” (as Zoe Kravitz’s Selina Kyle sarcastically calls him) ends up working with emergency medical services and the National Guard (which means it’s likely the Department of Defense’s Hollywood liaison got script approval, just as they do with DC’s primary competitor, Disney’s Marvel Studios). 

The Batman is a movie more equipped—as a piece of art through its story, as a consumer product in contrast to the MCU, and as a film produced in a time of heightened awareness of widespread police misconduct—than any mainstream superhero movie before it to discuss not just the rot in the institutional floorboards, but to question why these institutions exist in the first place. Yet as superhero movies continue to perpetuate self-aggrandizing myths about the American national character in the 20-year wake of 9/11-inspired patriotism, The Batman struggles to accept or assert that the structures themselves are the problem. The film is conceptually interested in civic corruption, but also must communicate to its audience that these people are symptomatic of Gotham’s culture specifically, rather than liberal capitalism generally.

The Batman glances at and brushes up against the well-worn idea that money and power are inherently corruptive forces, illustrated through the police being largely under the thumb of a mob boss and the use of a city revitalization fund enacted by Batman’s father as a money-laundering slush fund. (Ironically, because this is a misappropriation of Wayne resources, part of what Batman is really discovering and fighting against is the robbery of his own wealth.) To the film’s credit, Batman discovering his familial link to these problems is explicit, alongside a reformist mayor-elect telling Bruce Wayne early on that he should do more for the city.

Police corruption is seen as symptomatic of Gotham’s culture, rather than liberal capitalism generally.

In turn, The Batman’s most daring contrast with most Batman films is connecting the Wayne family to the Falcone crime family. Unfortunately, rather than explore either the “how?” or “why?” of Batman’s father—the late charitable billionaire Dr. Thomas Wayne—having a close personal relationship with Gotham City’s most powerful mob boss, it buys back this revelation minutes after offering it. After Bruce Wayne’s trusted butler, Alfred (Andy Serkis), refutes the claims, they end up being a further comment on the duplicity of Carmine Falcone (John Turturro), instead of complicating the Wayne family legacy. (There’s also a thread about Batman’s mom, Martha Wayne neé Arkham, having mental health problems that doesn’t go anywhere.) In discussing the need to take down the intertwined criminal and civic ruling classes, Kravitz delivers a single line noting the groups are “white” and “privileged,” yet the film otherwise manages to sidestep race entirely; that the mayor-elect is a Black woman is mercifully left undiscussed, but The Batman also fails to consider, for instance, how it might play that a Black lieutenant in a mostly-white police force is bringing around a vigilante to help him solve crimes. (The film also attempts to comment on class, giving the members of a gang Batman fights early on and the followers of the Riddler the appearance of unemployed workers.) 

There’s a longstanding joke-turned-criticism that “Bruce Wayne should redistribute his wealth rather than dress up like a bat and beat up the mentally ill.” Films like The Batman demonstrate that the popularity of this sentiment isn’t just because people are applying real life morals to fantastic stories, but also that the stories themselves keep drawing our attention to real-world problems while simultaneously rubbing shoulders with real-world causes. It’s a joke that the Batman films go out of their way to invite. 

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Cinematic depictions of Batman’s relationship with police have changed over time. In the 1966 Batman movie starring Adam West and Burt Ward, Batman and Robin were fully deputized agents of the law, even with their unknown secret identities. That relationship is less clear in Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman: Batman begins as an urban legend, but ultimately leaves the Bat Signal for the police at the end of the film, a narrative flourish that also appears at the end of 2005’s Batman Begins. Batman Returns (1992) sees Michael Keaton’s Batman briefly under police fire after Penguin frames him, a frequent tool of separating Batman from the police in stories. In Joel Schumacher’s Batman Forever (1995), Val Kilmer’s Batman is back to having a cozy position with the police, while in Batman & Robin (1997), well-heeled socialites brag that George Clooney’s Batman is the person who really protects the city, not the police. As Burton’s dark Batman gave way to Schumacher’s camp, Batman found himself firmly back in the police’s bosom. But when Christopher Nolan restarted the series, the relationship returned to being more consistently difficult.

The Dark Knight (2008), Nolan’s Batman magnum opus, has a handful of prominent political aesthetic themes. For one, it endorsed the surveillance state as a necessary evil (though Alex Parker of Ordinary Times posits that the film is arguing against the effectiveness of those methods). In that film, Batman uses advanced cell-phone sonar technology to surveil the entire city,  a decision which Wayne Enterprises board member Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman) condemns before offering his resignation—one which he implicitly withdraws before using the device exactly as Batman intended, because he knows he can turn it off permanently and immediately. This comes after a conversation earlier in the film between Bruce Wayne and D.A. Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) where Dent argues that the people elected the Batman like a Roman dictator by letting the city fall into the hands of criminals.

On the other hand, The Dark Knight also reaffirms the corrupt nature of the Gotham City Police Department, and its second act focuses on Batman determining which police officers have been compromised by organized crime because of their economic vulnerability. But perhaps this serves as another sort of pro-police message, suggesting that police are underpaid and not just stealing money in overtime from California to Massachusetts. (It couldn’t possibly be that they do bad things because they are the material expression of the state’s monopoly on violence and there’s no recourse to do anything against them.) Even in superhero films where a vigilante has to step in and protect people because the police are too busy lining their pockets, it is assumed that police corruption is exceptional, not the inevitable rule everywhere. (Although it is definitely the rule in Gotham, where Gordon responds to accusations by Dent by pointing out that it was impossible for him to form a unit without using officers that Dent had investigated in Internal Affairs.)

The Dark Knight Rises casts police as the scrappy resistance to Bane’s new order.

While The Dark Knight showcased the Joker as a lone maniac disrupting the criminal political economy of Gotham City, its predecessor Batman Begins and sequel The Dark Knight Rises (2012) focused on the threat of small groups of radical extremists. The Dark Knight Rises also worked with anxiety toward the Occupy Movement and nascent twenty-first century American anti-capitalism, with Anne Hathaway’s Selina Kyle—a character who at one point warned Bruce Wayne that the system was coming apart and the rich would soon wonder how they thought they could get away with their decadent opulence for so long—deciding that the lawlessness that follows is not the revolution she had in mind, reinforcing in standard fashion the idea that the status quo should not be too upset. The villain Bane (Tom Hardy) likewise embodies this sentiment, operating as a charlatan to the people of Gotham and releasing a “freedom” that preys on people’s worst impulses, while acting as a true believer for the morally fundamentalist radical League of Shadows, a group that wants to cleanse Gotham in holy fire. The Dark Knight Rises casts police as the scrappy resistance to Bane’s new order, magnified in a climactic battle scene where Batman leads the police against Bane’s army, an image that vaguely parallels Batman’s crusade leading his conquered gang of self-mutilating “mutants” to secure Gotham’s streets in Frank Miller’s 1986 comic The Dark Knight Returns.

The Dark Knight Returns was, at least for a while, the most explicitly right-wing that Batman got, with many criticisms of Frank Miller’s seminal work on the caped crusader going so far as to call it crypto-fascist; yet even in that, the character wasn’t calling for a Fourth Reich or using terms like “blood and soil,” he was merely appropriating a ready-made army of hyper-violent cast-offs to enforce the law and order that the state had failed to administer. In that version of the DC universe, a long-retired Bruce Wayne returns as Batman around the same time that Commissioner Gordon retires from the Gotham City Police Department. Batman raises the ire of Yindel, the new police commissioner, who initially wants him stopped—before eventually realizing that, sometimes, Batman is needed to do the things the police can’t. This world view, a version of Gotham where society’s morals have fallen and the police are a combination of corrupt and feckless, is central to Batman’s existence. The exaggerated version that exists in The Dark Knight Returns is merely this same story taken to its logical conclusion. The next year, in Batman: Year One, Miller also imagined how the journey might have started: Gotham, familiarly rife with crime and vice, is patrolled by a trigger-happy corrupt police force (once again, aside from Captain Gordon), with a Police Commissioner and City Mayor who are content to let Batman do what he wants—that is, until he turns his eye toward government corruption.

Batman clashing with police has been reproduced in stories like Sean Murphy’s ongoing White Knight continuity, beginning with Batman: White Knight (2017-2018), in which the Joker recovers his sanity and proves to Gotham City—and to Batman—that Batman perpetuates the city’s problems. By the time of the now-running Batman: Beyond the White Knight storyline, Bruce Wayne is incarcerated for Batman’s crimes. Meanwhile, as part of the most recent line-wide reboot, DC published a “possible future” continuity called Future State, in which the comic The Next Batman focused on Lucius Fox’s son taking up the Batman mantle and confronting a corrupt, privatized, iron-fisted police force known as The Magistrate.

Reading through most Batman stories leads one to the obvious conclusion that Batman cannot help but perpetuate an ideology that upholds police as necessary to preserve a social order—one that is, apparently, the best we can do, even if the stories can also highlight conflicts of interest. The premise of nearly all Batman stories relies on a city suffering moral ruin, and in need of a savior; again and again, in movies like The Dark Knight and The Batman, in comics like Batman: Year One and Batman: White Knight, storytellers posit a relationship between those conditions and a greedy ruling class.

Yet Batman stories still tend to focus their action—and, in the case of the Arkham video game series (in which Batman is also close with the police), their gameplay—primarily on punching low-level goons in the face. Batman is not equipped to make structural changes and Bruce Wayne’s attempts must fail for the stories to continue. Super-criminals and supervillains are useful for rendering these critiques moot, because they elevate the nature of Batman’s war on crime toward the fantastic. As artist David Mazzuchelli said in the afterword of the 2005 edition of Year One, “The more ‘realistic’ superheroes become, the less believable they are.” This is in part because the more grounded the problems that Batman is solving, the less it seems he should be allowed to solve them.

The more grounded the problems that Batman is solving, the less it seems he should be allowed to solve them.

The clearest depictions of Batman I can think of that in no way lionize police are Superman: Red Son and Batman: Year 100. Red Son takes place in a version of the DC Universe where Superman’s ship lands on Earth in the USSR rather than in Kansas. The story paints a relatively typical U.S. depiction of the Soviet Union—deprived and despotic, etc.—until Superman takes it over. Along the way to improving society, Superman inadvertently helps create a terrorist Batman who’s bent on disrupting his new order. Batman: Year 100 casts Jim Gordon (grandson of the original) even more isolated in his department than usual, becoming the target of a corrupt federal government after discovering a small piece of a military coup conspiracy that Batman is trying to uncover. Even in that depiction, it’s a rogue cell of federal police rather than the police under his authority that are the problem, but Batman experiences very little collaboration. He doesn’t give police a Bat Signal to arrange meetups.

In all of these stories, Jim Gordon is the copaganda glue—the standout good cop. Whether he’s Lieutenant Gordon, Captain Gordon, or Commissioner Gordon, even when he’s morally imperfect, he’s the sign that things can be better—and it’s only when Batman loses Gordon’s faith that he also loses legitimacy, albeit always to be earned back. Gordon represents the hope that police can solve Gotham’s problems (and, symbolically, ours), that they will always be necessary even once Batman is not. In the eyes of a Batman comic, the best that can be done is cleaning up messes, not preventing them from being made, and with enough good apples the bad apples won’t ruin the whole bunch. 

The less Batman interacts with the police in any sort of civil manner, the better, and each new depiction of Gordon only serves to make the system of policing under capitalism appear in need of reform rather than replacement. Minimizing their depiction minimizes their appeal. In Year 100 and Red Son, Batman is treated like a criminal and a government target. Imagine a version of The Batman or The Dark Knight where the Bat Signal isn’t just called “malfunctioning equipment” as cover from the press, and where Batman is actively antagonistic toward it. One where Batman rejects or resents the beck and call of the police. Imagine a Batman story where Batman’s relationship with Gordon doesn’t have mutual begrudging respect as its basis, but relies solely on the ever-present theme of desperation.

From this perspective, The Batman comes close. But it still ends with Batman in the daylight, just outside the edge of news cameras depicting the mayor and the city’s heroic first responders.

A Batman story that doesn’t focus on laundering the image of police might bring Batman closer to behaving like Punisher or Daredevil, or like Rorschach from Watchmen. But it wouldn’t necessarily make for a better character. For it to be a better story, it would have to move away from focusing on working with police to solve police-level problems, either avoiding them completely or dealing with issues beyond their grasp. 

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Since 9/11, four-quadrant media in the U.S. has reached new heights of lionizing the military and “first responders.” This has grown to include EMTs, firefighters, and paramedics, but police have remained the primary beneficiary because their jobs are the easiest to idealize and spectacularize through glorifying violence in action movies and TV shows. Positioning police as heroes has a longstanding tradition in the U.S., but it’s become an essentialized part of mass media in the wake of the War on Terror.

This goes hand in hand with increasingly militarized police forces and expanded mass incarceration. The U.S. incarcerates more of its citizens than any society in the history of the world and operates a torture facility on the sovereign land of a neighboring island nation that the U.S. has been trying to overthrow for 60 years. This is a nation-state whose head-of-state and commander-in-chief have called for further funding police departments, many of which are setting new records annually. All this despite logical calls to defund them, as state-sanctioned murders by police have become more and more prevalent, with those of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in 2020 sparking international solidarity protests. Much of the mass media in the U.S. helps manufacture consent for all of this. Batman is not an exception.

Even without getting into notions of police abolition or restorative justice approaches, there’s a lot of evidence that it’s not police’s job to help people. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled police have no Constitutional duty to protect people in 2005, the Manhattan Supreme Court ruled in 2013 that a man couldn’t sue police for hiding in a conductor car while he was being stabbed on a train, and recent tragedy has shown that a high number of police working in the subway system or responding to a school shooting doesn’t necessarily protect people from violence, or even quickly resolve it. Jim Gordon—and, in Batman Beyond-adjacent stories, his daughter Barbara—are moral figures, accomplices of the vigilante Batman who consistently make policing appear aspirational. They have positions of political authority that they could not have accomplished without allowing some of the corruption their departments are rife with, yet they are depicted as having a firmer backbone and stronger moral fiber. As long as there exists a noble Gordon—or even a noble Yindel—in Batman stories, those stories will perpetuate the idea that police, while seemingly inadequate to Gotham City’s problems, are crucial because the system that needs them is the best system we can build.

Superheroes are fun flights of fantasy, and any social critique of them will be met with dismissal by some. But as superhero films continue to dominate box offices, their commercial importance contributes to their cultural importance, and many fans continue to demand they’re taken seriously. Batman was ahead of the curve on this, with each consecutive live-action reboot since 1989 (aside from Schumacher) more “realistic,” for better or worse. A grounded Batman means a Batman dealing with solving problems that a neglectful or incompetent police force is struggling to handle or complicit in creating. The only way for Batman stories to escape being police propaganda is to accept that police are not the cure, and crime is merely a symptom of the sickness. It’s a sickness that requires an excess workforce to keep demand for work higher than demand for workers, allowing wages to be suppressed. It’s a sickness that rewards greed and empowers people with resources to hoard those resources at the expense of people they are supposed to serve. It’s a sickness that criminalizes survival and that criminalizes any response to government corruption that might create change. It’s a sickness that imprisons and extracts labor and the resultant excess value from the imprisoned. It’s a sickness that, in real life, requires art to conform to its ideology to maximize profit.

The reason Gotham teems with corruption and graft is because of capitalism, and—despite all the tools in his cave and utility belt—Batman isn’t prepared to fight it.