“There are 492 billionaires in the United States, and not one of those losers has decided to become Batman.” ~Pinterest meme
Since I was seven years old, I’ve been a fan of the Caped Crusader. First it was the TV show with Adam West, then the darker, more adult Denny O’Neill comics of the early Seventies. Then it was Frank Miller’s Dark Knight, then Tim Burton’s Michael Keaton Batman, then the Christian Bale Batman, and most recently Ben Affleck. Fifty-plus years in, and I still can’t get enough Batman.
I’m by no means alone in this: Google “Who’s the greatest superhero of all time?” and there he’ll be, at or very close to the top. And that’s distinguished company, of course; Superman, Spider-Man, Captain America, Wolverine – winners all, and worthy of our respect and adulation.
But Batman rises above them all, in the heart of the Grown-Ass Man, because he is a man. Superman? Alien. Spider-Man? Radioactive bug bite victim. Cap? Supersoldier experiment. Wolverine? Mutant. Batman is none of these; we are reminded of Bruce Wayne’s exchange with Barry “Flash” Allen in Justice League: “What are your superpowers again?” “I’m rich.”
Batman has no powers; he has only his mind, his wits and his resourcefulness. Billions of dollars certainly help, his wonderful toys are second-to-none; but Batman isn’t a superhero by chance or genes or science amuck – he's a superhero through sheer will.
This is what we love about him. He’s a man. Not an alien, not a mutant – a man.
He is often the superhero we want to be, the guy we wish we were. He prevails against the worst humanity can muster, not through overwhelming power, but overwhelming competence. His will is indomitable; he is an unstoppable force of nature because he chooses to be.
In our deliberations, we’ve covered Purpose at great length: the Grown-Ass Man builds his entire life around a purpose, some noble priority worthy of his deepest commitment and unending investment. That purpose comes to define him, to shape his mind and heart, becoming the doorway through which he enters the world. His purpose is the core of who he is.
That’s unquestionably true of Bruce Wayne. His fortune and Wayne Enterprises and even his benevolent Wayne Foundation are simply facades for his true purpose: spending his nights beating criminals to a pulp with his bare hands, in the words of his aide-de-camp Lucius Fox. Nothing, but nothing, stands between Bruce Wayne and his dark mission – not money, not his social duties, not a woman, nothing.
That’s a Grown-Ass Man; it’s not just the breathtaking competence and unshakeable will – it's the all-encompassing purpose to which they are applied. Without them, Batman is just another guy in tights, indulging his inner beast and taking out his moods on the local psychopaths.
It’s easy to point to the trauma that enabled the Dark Knight in the first place – the murder of his parents before his very eyes, as an eight-year-old boy – and wonder whether the entire premise of Bruce Wayne’s Batpurpose is entirely realistic. Let’s face it, the man is badly damaged; it’s probably just as well that he isn’t in a committed long-term relationship or a trend-setter in the Gotham social scene. His particular wounds are some pretty ugly shit; they certainly explain what drives him, and it’s reasonable to question whether any of us ordinary guys can muster such dark motivations from even our most traumatic experiences.
Maybe so, but this misses the point: the eight-year-old Bruce Wayne is unquestionably victim of the most horrific trauma a child can suffer, watching the life drain from both his parents’ eyes in a matter of seconds; but it is not the trauma that enables his Batpurpose – it's the fearlessness the trauma gave rise to.
Batman leaps off skyscrapers with no parachute. He faces down men physically powerful enough to lift trucks and drop them on him. He rushes maniacs unhinged enough to put live grenades in their mouths. He is without fear.
When you’ve watched your parents shot dead in cold blood, there’s not much left in the human experience that can frighten you more. Surviving such a horror leaves you looking at all the other darkness the world can serve up and saying, Bring it.
That place where fear persists represents our edge, the boundary of our selves, of our ambitions – of our purpose. Grown-Ass Men know where their edge is, and they live there, day in and day out. They are constantly pushing back the boundaries of fear, clearing new land on which to expand their purpose. Batman, the Grown-Ass Man we’d love to be, lives every day and night at his edge.
The rest of us may not have seen our parents gunned down, but we’ve all suffered at various times in our lives. The residue of that suffering is often dread, a lingering discomfort with the world, a permanent crack in our inner windshield. That suffering may not have been of the magnitude young Bruce experienced, but it did give rise to our edge. We all have an edge.
We can all choose to live there, to push it back, to face it every day and push it back relentlessly, clearing out more space for the life we really want but haven’t been willing to embrace. We can find our edge, and we can commit to living there.
Finally, Batman has a code. He has self-imposed rules by which he lives, by which he pursues his purpose and navigates his precarious edge, rules that are unconditionally inviolable – the highest of which is, while beating and wounding and even maiming his opponents are all on the table, he will not kill. Ever, no exceptions.
This is an arbitrary line, to be sure, but its value is not in where it lies, but that it exists at all. Batman holds himself to account; he has created meaningful structure to guide his pursuit of purpose, to maintain his ideals and values as he pushes against his edge, an edge that grows increasingly harsh, the farther back he pushes it. He has a code, and that code is the foundation upon which he builds his purpose.
The code of the Grown-Ass Man is as open-ended as his purpose. My purpose and the code with which I implement it are mine and mine alone, just as yours are. The code is as unique to me as my edge, but while my edge will shift over time, my code will not; it may grow, and I may refine it over time, but it will not submit to the randomness or chaos of the world; it will grow stronger in its face.
This is why those 492 pansy-ass US billionaires don't become Batman; they don’t go anywhere near their edges. They have nothing in their cushy worlds to push them there, nothing. Their billions are their purpose, and that’s no purpose at all; and without purpose, a man is indeed a pansy-ass, with no need – or even any concept of – a code.
We can and we do and we should love Batman. We can’t, of course, really be Batman. But as Grown-Ass Men we can find our purpose and live at our edge and commit to a code.
We can be superheroes.
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