64. Batman: Year Two (1987).
65. Batman #47 (1948); Batman #673 (2008).
66. Batman: Year Two (1987); Batman: Full Circle (1991).
Case File 6–1: Bane
1. Batman: Gotham Knights #48 (2004).
2. Murray (1938).
3. McClelland (1961); McClelland, Atkinson, Clark, & Lowell (1953).
4. Secret Six #36 (2011).
aAt the end of which, he added, “I am going beyond my facts and I admit it, but so have the advocates of the contrary and they have been doing it for many thousands of years,” so his beliefs were a little less radical than he often sounded (Watson, 1930, 104).
bThe Joker, who later cripples Junior’s sister and murders his stepmother.
cSeriously, science fiction. For more on where Batman’s toys do and don’t stand up to real science, read The Science of Superheroes (Gresh & Weinberg, 2002) or The Physics of Superheroes: Spectacular Second Edition (Kakalios, 2009) or watch the Discovery Channel TV series MythBusters, season 5, episode 17, “Superhero Hour.”
dWhich seems ironic for a personality disorder.
7
The Halloween Party
Why All the Costumed Crooks?
After the arrival of its costumed hero, Gotham City sees a proliferation of costumed characters, most of them criminals whose theatrics and preoccupations rival the Dark Knight’s. Does Batman inspire their histrionics no less than he inspires new heroes, does he attract creative crooks to Gotham, or does Gotham itself create them all, vigilantes and villains? These villains are not simply out to steal. They seek excitement, they need challenges, and they want attention. Quietly stealing a fortune and getting away with it won’t feed their other needs. On top of the psychopathy and antisocial personality disorder that the previous chapter covered, the most famous felons in Batman’s rogues gallery show extreme behaviors that transcend those of everyday criminals.
Serial Crime
A serial criminal (e.g., serial killer, rapist, or arsonist) commits a series of three or more crimes of a specific type with a “cooling-down” time—a varying interval of weeks, months, or more—between separate lawbreaking incidents. Some seek attention, others do not. How does a serial criminal differ from any other repeat offender? The lack of ulterior purpose plays a role. Whether a hired assassin like Batman’s enemy Deadshot1 kills cold-bloodedly or gains personal satisfaction from the act, the main thing that contract killer gets from each specific kill is a fee or other clear external benefit. A terrorist kills and destroys in order to instill terror and advance an agenda, however sensible or insensible that agenda may be, as the Joker does throughout the 2008 motion picture The Dark Knight. The serial murderer kills for killing’s sake, satisfying an emotional drive. Gotham’s nihilistic serial killer Victor Zsasz—who cuts hundreds of tally marks on his body, one for each person he claims to have murdered—keeps himself from feeling depressed about the meaninglessness of life by “liberating” others from the burden of breathing.2 So why don’t we say “serial vandal”? Why don’t we call a kleptomaniac who repeatedly steals for thrills and then loses interest in the stolen items a “serial shoplifter”? As popularly used, the serial terminology clearly denotes heinous violation of the rights of others.
A criminal on a crime spree commits the crime at three or more locations over the course of hours or days without cooling down. In 1958, 19-year-old Charles Starkweather and his 14-year-old girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate murdered 10 people, including Fugate’s parents, during their eight-day killing spree across Nebraska. Spree murder’s swift nature and the frequency with which these killers end up dead make this phenomenon, already hard to understand, even harder to study. Few criminals get to go on more than one crime spree, much less an entire series of repeated sprees, in real life. Gotham’s criminals combine elements of series and spree with a bit of mass murder mixed in, as befits comic book series’ need for recurring villains and Bill Finger’s classic formula of pitting Batman against each foe three times per story: First Batman loses; next time’s a draw; and finally Batman wins. Whereas serial murder includes breaks over time and spree murder involves changing locations, mass murder involves killing three or more people in the same location without cooling off in between. Several of Batman’s enemies, not just the Joker,3 have slain entire families.4
Batman’s enemies range in the degree to which their crimes are instrumental in nature. They do steal for money. They kill, extort, and give fish clown-faces thinking to make money. There are better ways to make money, more effective methods that draw less of the authorities’ attention. Arguably the most instrumentally driven Bat-foes are the eco-terrorists Ra’s al Ghul and Poison Ivy, both out to protect nature from humankind. Both think globally, Ra’s more so than Ivy who can also be content for a time with the flora of an island5 or local park.6
Personality Disorders
The criminal nature of Batman’s foes seems so deep-seated in most of them that they often appear to have personality disorders. Your personality is your characteristic pattern of behavior, your set of dispositions and tendencies to act and feel certain ways—characteristic in that it characterizes you, it distinguishes you from other people; pattern in that it refers to your qualities that have greater consistency over time; and behavior broadly meaning both overt actions and covert mental processes like thoughts, feelings, attitudes, and beliefs. Someone with a personality disorder has difficulties so deeply ingrained in who she or he is as a human being that the central problem defines that person. This is not something that comes and goes simply based on circumstances. Medication, which may alleviate some resultant difficulties like depression over life’s complications, cannot cure the core problem—a pill does not give you a personality. People with personality disorders have never been enough like other people to grasp fully the depths of their own problems and how very different they are from everyone else. Rather than recognizing themselves as the true source of their own unhappiness, if they’re unhappy, they can mope, feel unhappy about how life isn’t working out like they desire, and get frustrated when everybody else fails to arrange the world to suit their tastes. They lack the insight and motivation needed to change. Personality disorders are also known as trait disorders because the person’s essential problems are their own traits, not simply transitory shifts in mood or coping ability like PTSD and major depression.
Clinicians do not diagnose children with personality disorders because, for one thing, no matter how clearly some people under 18 appear to be developing personality disorders, a few will surprise everyone and mature into healthier human beings. Symptoms do show up early. The most callous antisocial adult would have been a cruel child. In some cases, knowing a person’s childhood experiences may shed light on a personality disorder’s origins. A lot of Batman’s foes face ostracism in childhood—the Penguin for both physical and social oddity, the Riddler for being a smarty-pants—experiences that can lead to withdrawal, anxiety, resentment, paranoia, or aggression,7 though why one child in such a situation develops one way and a different child grows another remains a bit of a mystery.
The person with antisocial personality disorder isn’t the only one short on empathy. The four most dramatic or volatile personality disorders, grouped together as the DSM’s “Cluster B”8 personality disorders—antisocial (see chapter 6), borderline (chapter 2), narcissistic, and histrionic—all show psychopathic qualities.9 Lack of empathy, a pervasive pattern of grandiosity, an inflated sense of importance, and a need for admiration all figure into narcissistic personality disorder, that is, super-egotistical disorder. They know they’re great. “They possess excessive aspirations for their own lives and intense resentment for others whom they perceive as more successful, beautiful, or brilliant. They are preoccupied with and driven to achieve their own goals and think nothing of exploiting others in order to do so. Despite their show of grand self-importance, they are often troubled by self-doubt. Relationships with others, whether social, occupational, or romantic, are
often distorted by the perception of others as tools for self-gratification.”10 Noting differences among narcissists, some personality psychologists11 proposed subtypes: amorous (sexually preoccupied and seductive while avoiding intimacy), elitist (upwardly mobile, flaunting accomplishments and status), and unprincipled (lacking standards for acceptable behavior). Any of these can exploit others, in different ways, for different reasons. The unprincipled narcissist shows antisocial tendencies. Unscrupulous, unremorseful, and untruthful, this arrogant individual, when caught breaking laws, blames victims for the fact that the narcissist got caught. A narcissist breaking laws and violating others’ rights often enough can also qualify for antisocial personality disorder; a person can qualify for more than one personality disorder. Nobody follows a cookbook when developing a personality, healthy or otherwise. These disorders are labels professionals made up to simplify the act of studying, discussing, and trying to predict patterns of behavior observed in different individuals. The Penguin is quite elitist. In most depictions, he has been a potbellied man, odd-looking with a beaklike nose, shorter than average but not abnormally so, and never with flipper hands until Tim Burton turned him into a circus freak for the film Batman Returns. Since then, depictions have gone back and forth in whether he’s “funny-looking” or freakish, his manner becoming more compensatory than in earlier days. He “compensates for his short stance and horrible appearance with an active sense of panache. He is constantly seeking attention to his small self, exhibiting histrionic personality tendencies as well as narcissistic tendencies.”12
The defining quality of histrionic personality disorder is constant attention-seeking behavior. This “drama llama” far exceeds the normal human need for attention. Histrionic essentially means theatrical, melodramatic. Many people who try too hard to get attention don’t qualify for this disorder because that yearning does not fully rule their lives. The histrionic person does whatever it takes to be the center of attention at any time. They make great shows of emotion, like wailing at the funeral of people to whom they weren’t particularly attached, only to switch readily to another expression if it gets more reaction. Those emotional displays are fleeting and shallow. Unlike the narcissist, even the compensatory narcissist, the histrionic person feels altogether inadequate and unworthy.13 While the narcissist expects to be the center of everyone’s world, the histrionic person does not expect attention and therefore frantically, perpetually strives to get it. Some histrionic individuals habitually tell lies, a symptom called mythomania, compulsively lying even when honesty seems advantageous, because the truth makes them uncomfortable. Lies protect them. If you don’t like the histrionic person’s lie, he or she doesn’t have to take that dislike personally because it’s not about anything real, whereas a scowl at something truthful could hurt deeply. Even those histrionic persons who don’t lie all the time exaggerate, inflate, and tell every story theatrically. They so desperately want you to find them interesting, it’s ironic that they fail to follow the number-one rule for getting others to find you interesting: You must show interest in them. Batman’s enemies may sometimes seem more narcissistic than histrionic at heart, but their outlandish antics scream for attention. As the Penguin once put it, “Where’s the thrill in committing the perfect crime if nobody knows it was you?”14
With few exceptions, Batman’s enemies know what they are doing. They know who they hurt and they know it’s wrong. For some of them, that’s what makes it fun. Roman Sionis, the first Gotham crime lord to call himself Black Mask (not to be confused with the second Black Mask, Dr. Jeremiah Arkham, who suffers psychotic episodes with hallucinations and delusions), applies cutthroat business practices in his efforts to take control of the underworld. When Batman finally captures him, Sionis goes to Blackgate Penitentiary, not Arkham Asylum—until, of course, his inevitable escape. The man likes torture. When he tortures Stephanie Brown, a.k.a. Spoiler, trying to extract information about Batman, this would seem to be an instrumental act driven by extrinsic motivation (drive to do one thing to achieve something else) because he is putatively torturing her in order to achieve another purpose.15 When he tortures Catwoman’s sister Maggie and brother-in-law, kills the brother-in-law, and forces Maggie to eat her husband’s eyes, this is an expressive act driven by intrinsic motivation, an expression of his own feelings, something he enjoys. This degree of torture serves no clear purpose. Catwoman doesn’t even know about the eyes until after she has already surrendered to Black Mask.16 Cruelty so deeply ingrained in Sionis’s personality might indicate sadistic personality disorder17 if his craving to hurt others, physically or psychologically, permeates most aspects of his life—not to be confused with sexual sadism, in which the person hurts others specifically to achieve a sexual thrill. More likely, he is a sadistic psychopath, demeaning and aggressive with no conscience but not always ruled by his sadism, however extreme it may be.
Personality disorders may be less permanent than clinicians have traditionally thought. The previous chapter pointed out that the elderly exhibit lower rates of antisocial personality disorder. In fact, all the Cluster B personality disorders become less prevalent in old age. They “have traditionally been viewed as disorders of immaturity, consistent with the relative rarity in the geriatric population of either the prototypical manipulative, self-injurious borderline woman or the criminally sociopathic man.”18 It is possible that these individuals suffer personality retardation, a developmental delay by which their personalities mature more slowly than other individuals’, thereby taking decades longer to learn to care about people, to become more comfortable with others and themselves, to establish more stable traits, or even to grow a conscience. The maturation hypothesis proposes that many individuals with Cluster B personality disorders become better able to manage their behaviors over the course of their lives.19 Then again, because these individuals are more prone to engage in dangerous activities, recklessness can get them killed. Threats, manipulation, and violence can push others into fighting back. Police kill more of them, as do other criminals, would-be victims, and Good Samaritans coming to someone else’s defense. Attention-seeking behavior might include suicide attempts that inadvertently succeed. Narcissistic or histrionic individuals feeling frustrated or underappreciated may choose to say good-bye to this cruel world that won’t show them enough attention. Alternately, the lower prevalence among the elderly may be an illusion created by weariness with life or reduced ability to act out the rotten things they’d love to do if only they still could.
Sensation Seeking
Some do it for thrills. Sensation seeking, “the need for varied, novel, and complex sensations and experiences, and the willingness to take physical and social risks for the sake of such experiences,”20 has emerged as one explanatory construct for the lengths to which some people will go in their pursuit of excitement. Why do some engage in legal, socially accepted kicks and adventures (non-impulsive socialized sensation seeking) while others might abuse drugs, break laws, gamble out of control, and endanger themselves or others (impulsive unsocialized sensation-seeking)? People are complicated. While Batman is not impulsive, his social acceptability remains arguable, and those norm-violating, lawbreaking villains aren’t all so impulsive. Some are quite meticulous, even patient, in forming their plans. Jet pilots (e.g., Batman’s Justice League colleague Hal Jordan, a.k.a. Green Lantern), skydivers, firefighters, riot control police officers, and race car drivers score high on sensation, but in different ways from drug addicts, juvenile delinquents, and other criminals.21
Psychologist Marvin Zuckerman identified four major components to this variable: (1) thrill and adventure seeking (physical activities involving danger, speed); (2) experience seeking (novelty—e.g., travel, art, noncomformist lifestyle); (3) disinhibition (seeking release through uninhibited social activities like wild parties or methods of identity concealment like wearing a mask); and (4) boredom susceptibility (restless discontent and aversion to repetition and routine).22 These qualities ov
erlap with the impulsive, antisocial, or unstable lifestyle seen among many psychopaths, but are separate issues from psychopathy’s callous, egocentric, unremorseful side.23 Batman’s flamboyant, thrill-seeking foes have both those subfactors covered well, as when the Joker both impulsively and remorselessly shoves a henchman into ongoing traffic for not laughing24 or hurls girlfriend Harley Quinn out a window without bothering to see if she survives.25
Sensation-seeking men score higher on thrill- and adventure-seeking, disinhibition, and boredom susceptibility; sensation-seeking women score higher in experience seeking—in general, not universally. A sensation-seeker himself, Zuckerman’s reflections on his own life take us back to the question of whether people with these ingrained traits really outgrow them. In his college days, he “reached my full sensation-seeking potential through drinking, sex, and hitch-hiking around the country,” and had imagined that upon retirement, he would spend his days hang-gliding, parachute-jumping, and doing many more adventurous things. Toward age 74, the need for physical adventure declined, but the need for new experience never changed.26 In the comics, the original Batwoman eventually trades in her costumed nightlife for the thrills of running her own circus.27 The Golden Age Batman retires from administering justice with his fists to take on procedural challenges by becoming Police Commissioner Bruce Wayne and marital challenges by becoming husband to the Catwoman of Earth-Two28—his life still revolving around crime and at least one criminal, still pursuing his passions even as he changes his methods of doing so.
Batman and Psychology: A Dark and Stormy Knight (Wiley Psychology & Pop Culture) Page 15