https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=0MUsXqCRjr0
When I was 13 years old, I read the Batman comic book The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller. It quite blew my burgeoning adolescent mind and opened up my sensibilities to storytelling in ways that I had not yet foreseen. And then following that experience, I was hooked on Batman until the end of my teenage years at least. I had even drawn a giant Batman on my bedroom wall at the age of 15. I see now that my attraction to that character would be part of forming my understanding of visual storytelling through the medium of comics, but most of all it forged some of my symbolic understanding of the dynamics of the periphery, of the edge, and how its different elements fit together. Now after years of meditating not on comics but on patterns in the Bible and in other stories, I’m quite happy to revisit the hero of my teenage years and show all of you just how closely the story of Batman maps on to the biblical story of the fall of Adam and Eve. The origin story in Batman follows very well the origin story in the Bible. So before we get to the bat, I need to lay out the first story. Adam and Eve are naked in the garden. Their innocence in their nakedness is in a way a form of completeness, and the Garden of Eden is a place which is safe from death and the hostility of the world. They’re tempted by a snake to eat the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. And so they come to know the opposition of good and evil. They enter a world of duality and conflict which tends towards fragmentation and corruption, this corruption which is death itself. In the moment of the fall they also notice that they’re naked and so they desire to cover themselves. Now noticing one is naked is seeing one’s own vulnerability, realizing that one is in danger and therefore making us want to cover ourselves. But this can be seen in a more encompassing light as realizing our own insufficiency and therefore a need to add to ourselves, supplement our insufficiency in order to stave off death. In the Bible this is represented by several things. First this insufficiency is compensated for by work. God tells Adam to work the ground to keep death at bay. Second, it is represented by clothing which is the most immediate image of the supplement, adding a layer of protection around you. And in the Bible this is represented as a tough layer of animal skins. The image must be understood as using these dead animal skins against death. So putting on a layer of death to fight off death, somewhat like a vaccine is made of the disease, or an antidote is made from the poison which is there to which it’s meant to protect you from. The last example of this process of supplement begun as a reaction to the fall and its consequences is of course technology. In the genealogy of the fall we can see the descendants of Cain developing technology, cities, metallurgy, weapons, all in an attempt to protect themselves, but ultimately to fight within a world of increasing corruption and increasing duality. That is the origin story in the Bible. In Batman, the origin story lays itself out almost perfectly onto that pattern. Bruce Wayne, a young boy, is with his father and mother walking out of a show or a movie. They are content, they are complete, they are innocent of the possible danger around them. They are also rich, which is an important symbol for their sense of sufficiency. In that way they are unaware of their nakedness, they are unaware of their vulnerability. So they move out into an alley, and an alley is like a snake. Okay, I bet you didn’t expect that comparison. One of the important aspects of the serpent is that it is an image of chaos and the undefined, because it twists and it turns from left to right. Like the shifty, slithering creature, an alley is this strange space created by the inevitable area between tall buildings. I mean, although it can somehow function as a street, it’s not fully a street or a park or like other official public spaces. In the end, an alley is the side effect of a city, we could say. So it’s normal that we tend to associate alleys with illicit activity like prostitution, crime, drug use, homelessness, and everything else. So the sense of sufficiency in the Wayne family is inappropriate. They should not have gone so brazenly into a crime-ridden space. So too, in the act of eating the fruit of the tree, in order to be like God, Adam and Eve exhibit a sense of false self-sufficiency, which will finally turn upside down into a consciousness of what they lack, that is realizing they are naked. So the family moves innocently into this alley and they’re confronted with the duality of good and evil. Wallace, Joyce, come on, fast. A criminal tries to rob them and in the robbery, kills Bruce Wayne’s parents. Bruce cannot do anything to stop the death of his parents. By standing there helpless, facing their murder, his nakedness is exposed. He realizes his insufficiency. He’s ashamed and he feels guilty for not being able to save his parents. It was my fault, I made you leave the field if I hadn’t gotten scared. It was nothing that you did. His confrontation with evil becomes also his own original sin, that is that which he will spend the rest of his life trying to compensate for. So how does Bruce Wayne compensate for this initial moment of loss? The first thing he does is fully inhabit the mode of duality. There is corruption, there is evil, there are criminals and he will fight them. But in order to do that, he must supplement his nakedness. Like Adam, he must work and Bruce’s work takes the form of training. Now the second thing Bruce does is put on a garment of animal skins. Now if in the tradition this notion of the garment of dead animal skins is meant to represent this layer of death, of animality and this coarseness to protect ourselves from death, so too Batman chooses the imagery of the bat for all its dark implications. He uses darkness against darkness, turns the fear that he felt in his childhood tragedy against the criminals who had caused him fear. What bats? Lost the way. Bats frighten me. It’s time my enemies shared my dread. And using the imagery of the bat, Batman also participates in the aesthetic of the gargoyle, those dark monstrous protectors on the outside of buildings, which are the architectural version of these garments of skin. If in the story of Adam the hiding of nakedness is very direct, here the hiding of nakedness happens more subtly. Bruce could not defend his parents, he was exposed as incapable and naked. And so Batman effectively hides Bruce Wayne under a veil of darkness, hides the person who was shown to be insufficient by putting on a mask and a persona, by changing even his name. Of course we cannot fail to see how we often do this in everyday life, we hide our weaknesses and insufficiency and even our sins under some forced virtue, some excessive humor, some constant defiance or any other psychological mask that we can put on. Batman also accumulates advanced technology, all these amazing vehicles and weapons, not to speak of his bat computer. This is in line with the notion of technology as a version of this supplement which we saw in the lineage of Cain who built cities and ultimately weapons of war. All of these are like extra layers of protection put on by Batman to fight criminals and corruption. And if you’re not yet convinced, added to all this are also some extra biblical traditions which actually show Adam and Eve living in a cave under the mountain of paradise after the fall. Living in a cave is a primordial example of using the dark covering of earth itself as a kind of shield to hide and protect oneself from the hostile outside. And so too Batman has a bat cave under his original Eden under the estate of the family which he has lost. And this cave acts as a dark covering for his own war on crime. Now what is interesting, and this is the case of many other stories as well, is that when we look at the elements of Batman, his name, his costume, the training, the technology, the bat cave, one might not see immediately how all these elements naturally fit together in such a satisfying manner. But once we have seen them through this more primordial lens, we can easily understand why Batman has become one of the most iconic characters of the late 20th and early 20th century.