The Monthly Salon: April
The Monthly Salon: April
The Batman Theory of Decline, and more
Welcome to the monthly salon here at the Abbey, which is a space for readers to talk about anything you’ve been burning to say, or just feel like coming out with, about life in the age of the Machine.
My prompt this month is an excuse for me to lay out out a grand pop culture notion I’ve been idly toying with. I call it the Batman Theory of American Decline.
Batman is the ultimate hero for the post-modern West. He’s an urban loner, he’s fighting for a better world, he’s driven by unresolved personal trauma, and his ideology and his identity are both fluid. On top of that, he’s a thwarted idealist, he has a love-hate relationship with authority, and he can never quite make up his mind whether Gotham is best cleaned up by thoroughgoing top-down reform or just by masking up and kicking the shit out of the baddies. Also, he has a technological fix for everything. When I was a child, I was desperate for my own utility belt, especially if it contained anti-shark spray.
My grand theory is that the representation of Batman at any given time in history mirrors the self-image of the America he walks through, and consequently the self-image of the West which lives in America’s shadow.
Here is Batman in 1966. Image: Swinging sixties campness in shiny pants and a sucked-in gut. Nothing really bothers him. He runs the world, so he can afford to muck about:
Here is Batman in 2022. Image: Policing post-invasion Iraq (or Seattle last Tuesday) in full body armour whilst musing on his white privilege in a world which has soured on him but still buys his action figures - though mainly online, due to covid restrictions and supply-chain disruption:
Actually, this would hold up just as well as the Joker Theory.
1966: Meet your slightly creepy, over-enthusiastic uncle.
2021: Call the exorcist! I repent!
Lest any of my American readers feel offended, I should say that those of us who come from gasping post-imperial nations are just as flooded with psychic Batman residue as you are. I grew up with 1960s Batman. I even had an excellent little metal Batmobile which fired real plastic bullets. When archaeologists of the future disinter the remains of our end-of-days culture, it’ll be Batman all the way down.
Of course, there’s no need to even mention any of this here. Feel free to ignore it entirely and talk about something more interesting. Over to you.
Thank You for all You've written. I look forward to Your "Divining the Machine" series, as I feel fairly sure I'll agree with most all.
In either event, I wonder if it has been precipitated by the supposed dominance of the left hemisphere of the brain over the right hemisphere. Are You familiar with Dr. Iain McGilchrist, M. Kingsnorth and/or anyone reading? He did 20 years of research and understood that, sure, both hemispheres do, indeed, perform virtually all the same functions as the other hemisphere. That's the conventional wisdom, which I gather still holds sway in a lotta places. Where Dr. McGilchrist varied in his analysis was that the two hemispheres weren't *physically* the same, and also that they didn't process information in a similar manner. Quite DISsimilar, according to his lights.
One hemisphere (left) pretty good at analyzing numbers and logic and *especially* reducing a whole into it's subordinate parts. The other (right) able to see the parts and the whole while simultaneously seeing, in the moment, their interdependencies and "lifeness" all of which the left-hemisphere is totally incapable of.
If anyone is interested his most accessible book is "The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning." $.99 and about an hour. Kindle only. He became somewhat famous for his 500-page book. And recently completed his 2000-page magnum opus. I need to reread those two in order to come close to fully understanding them. https://smile.amazon.com/Divided-Brain-Search-Meaning-ebook/dp/B008JE7I2M/ref=sr_1_6
Just thought I'd pass that along and HTH. And TYTY again, Sir Paul. :) On to reading what You "said" about The Machine.
Ah, 1966.
My 4 year old brother was jumping up and down on the sofa with the Batman music. He fell off, mom said "I'm Mr. Freeze, pssssssstttttt". and he didn't move for 15 minutes.
No one thought about our cars' exhaust, or much about the body counts on TV, We were trying to decide if Rachel Carson was right or not: verdict: we better be safe and assume she was.
We were like the villagers in Nietzsche's story, not seeing what was already arriving. The madman was right.