Bat-Daddy: How Batman has Become Parental Figure

In Search of a Father: Mentor Worship and the Vacuum of Parenthood

It’s all about the mentor-disciple relationship! Or at least that’s what I was told time and time again. In search of meaning, purpose, happiness… and all that other idealistic stuff that religions often promise that they can provide, I had joined a religious group with a mindfulness practice at the center. Some of the ideas they espoused were nice, and the practice did help quiet the mind at times, so why not also get some community out of it? One of the things I could not wrap my mind around, however was how members were expected to see the infallible “mentor” with almost worshipful devotion. I tried to suspend my disdain and disbelief to be a team player, but I couldn’t do it. How could I see this guy whom I have never met, nor will I ever meet, who does not speak my language or cultural lingo, grew up very differently from me, and spews rather generic guidance (at least in translation) as my eternal mentor? In the end, it was one of the reasons I left.

In religions, there is often an idea of parentage. The primary figures are are usually seen as and even referred to in this language. In Christianity, God is literally seen as a father, and Mary is the ultimate mother… after all, she birthed God. The priests and teachers of a tradition, as emissaries of these parental figures, are in turn the mothers and fathers of practitioners. Catholic priests in many languages are termed “father.” This is not the case in every religion of course. Buddhism for example usually deems their leaders some form of a “teacher” such as roshi in the Zen tradition or mentor in my anecdote above. However, I see this as much the same, because what is a parent if not the teacher or mentor of your early life?

Why is this? I really do believe it’s because we’re looking for our parents. We are instinctually bound to seek out this relationship. A human child cannot take care of itself. It needs others to provide. But when your parents don’t do this or don’t do it very well, it creates a vacuum that needs to be filled. So you reach out for something, anything to take care of you. Even if you had great parents, it’s still not easy as an adult to stake it out on your own when you are doing something new or find yourself in a new environment. So you look for a facsimile. This is why religions and religious figures provide a parental figure, a teacher, an example to follow and make sense of things when you need it. I was certainly seeking this, even if not consciously when joining the religious group. I talked about how Batman in many ways acts as a religious figure in my last article, but what if like me you may reel at the idea of a religious mentor figure? This piece explores how, for those of us who lacked healthy parental models, Batman became more than a hero—he became a father figure.*

Batman, Guilt, and the American Mind

Enter Arthur Asa Berger, a retired media studies scholar from San Francisco State University. During my research, I came across two of his books from the 70s, each of which contain chapters about Batman: The Comic Stripped American (1974) and the TV-Guided American (1976). Both of which are my main inspiration for this article and I will pull from heavily throughout.

Although quite dated, I do still think they are relevant to today both as they stand and using them historiographically. For both art forms (comics and television), they were still relatively young and therefore Berger can provide us a look into how people viewed them at the time. There was still some level of curiosity and worry about how these media effect us. However, they were old enough to have gotten past much of the “pearl clutching” horror at new “corrupting media” forms such as the one we saw with comic books in the 40s and 50s. At the same time, they aren’t old enough to be as ubiquitous (almost forgotten) parts of our lives.

Two consistent themes throughout both Batman chapters is one of guilt and what I’ll call “filling the void.” As the book titles give away, he focuses primarily on American culture and history and aspects of the American psyche. First and foremost is pietist-perfectionism: we have very high and strong moral ideals and we make it our duty to follow and enforce these ideals. However, from our very beginnings, we have failed miserably. Our founding fathers espoused “all men are created equal” while owning slaves. We stand up for “free speech” and “due process” but arrested countless individuals for just knowing someone who at one point may have supported communist ideology. How could these contradictions NOT make you feel guilty.

Berger also argues that leaving our “fatherlands” gives the “American’s sense of having no past, of having escaped from history, tradition, institutions… yet having no past creates problems, for without a past it becomes very difficult to achieve a coherent sense of self. How does one act? What does one believe? Whom does one imitate?” (1973, 166). So if we have all this guilt as Americans and a void that needs to be filled… how do we resolve it? 

This is where Batman comes into the picture, for “if we are disturbed about the inevitable compromises we have to make in life and are upset by feelings of guilt, we can take some degree of pleasure in a heroic figure who redeems us by his magnificent actions” (1973, 167). Berger says that as an orphan who uses vengeance as a primary motivating factor, he “is in many respects an American archetype, and probably the most representative of this type of belief in the comics… Batman functions as a macabre manifestation of our collective sense of inadequacy and guilt… takes a load off our backs… he tells, ultimately that we live in a moral and just universe and those who laugh at us and break our laws ultimately will pay for their transgressions” (1973, 166-168).

Raised by Television (and Batman)

At the beginning of the Batman chapter in TV-Guided American, Berger tells a story about putting his 8-year-old son to bed. In a discussion about dreams, his son reveals that he dreams about Batman. Specifically that he is an inventor creating new tools for Batman’s arsenal (1976, 86-87). At which point he launches into a rather moralistic tirade about television. Perhaps he’s projecting his guilt that Batman is the subject of his son’s dreams and he isn’t.

Though I find much of Berger’s analysis compelling, I also question some of his assumptions about childhood media and emotional development. His discussion on television can often gear towards the preachy. He is quite judgmental about parents allowing their kids “too much” TV time, and while it is true that even when they have the time many parents don’t socialize with their kids, it is also true that not all parents have cushy professorships that allow them ample time with their children. In a modern context, some parents may have to work multiple jobs just to support their kids financially. Also, replace a few words and his chapter could sound like a modern tirade against AI or smartphones, or older discussions about comics making kids stupid or delinquent. With that said, Berger does make some good points. 

He extends the discussion of guilt and “filling the void” vis-a-vis American culture from his previous book and hones it in on parenting… or lack thereof. If a child has no parent to teach them, to guide them, what do they do? They can’t go out on their own, especially in a car dependent society. So a “real life” mentor like a religious figure is a non-starter. “Since we abandon our children to the television wasteland and leave them to fend for themselves, is it any wonder they become, in a real sense, strangers? If the average child watches fifty hours of television per week (or about 64 percent of his waking time) is it any wonder that Batman is his father?” (1976, 95).

There it is! For many of us, Batman is our father. On a figurative and near literal level. In my case, my mother left my father when I was still an infant. All my teachers were women. I had no father figure. No male example to look up to and learn from. On top of that, the parent that I did have was never present. She was so busy dealing with the demons in her own head, she didn’t have time for her son. In this dearth of parenting, I found what was available: Batman. Batman became my father. My teacher and mentor in life.

The Cape We Cling To: Why Batman?

“One reason that Batman may appeal to children is that he represents a traditional comic figure, the depreciated father, and as such, appeals to unconscious needs that are very strong but also deeply buried within them… Batman is not only Robin’s ‘father,’ but he is everyone’s spiritual father, and everyone (who watches the program that is) is his spiritual son. He is a mixture of the heroic and the comic, a figure to emulate and imitate but also to transcend… Batman is the ridiculous father who doesn’t recognize that he is absurd now, that he must be replaced, and it is all the young children of America, who go running around shouting ‘Batman! Batman! who are prepared to step into his shoes and do a really good job of capturing criminals and fighting crime.” (1976, 90-91)

As Berger clearly shows, I’m not the only one. Batman is everyone’s father (that enjoys him in some kind of media). In fact, when Liesa Mignogna began to put together a book comprised of individual chapters by different authors on superheroes who changed their lives, she said the one hero who came up the most was Batman. For Mignogna, “he appeared when I needed a hero–when I’d suffered through a series of traumatic experiences and felt completely alone and scared. His story saved my story” (XV). Austin Grossman uses him as an example of perseverance when things in his life just seem to be getting worse. Because if anything, “in the morning he [Batman] makes such a point of getting up again as Bruce Wayne” (Mignogna, 4). Batman brought color to the life of Joe R. Lansdale when everything was gray as a kid (Mignogna, 116). Countless examples like this could easily be found.

While Berger may seem to find it unthinkable–at times calling Batman “ridiculous” or “dumb”–for me, this just seems normal. There is no moral fault in this, no lack of intelligence on the part of the individual that takes Batman as their father. People are just making the best out of a bad situation. Fulfilling an instinctual drive: survival at its best. Even if we stick with it past childhood (which Berger also seems to deem unthinkable in a closing letter that pretends to be a child who has outgrown Batman). After all, if you happen to have good parents, you don’t just throw them out as a vestige of your childhood days. If anything, the longer we stay with these characters (our parents), the more entrenched they become in our lives and psyches. Like a parent, Batman has been with me through all the stages of my life and sticks with me through the good and bad times. Oftentimes, a piece of Batman media becomes imbued with a particular memory like a graduation because it came out around that time.

A quote from Berger’s introduction sums all of this up very well: “What I’m suggesting is that television is a way of knowing, a way of learning about the world, about how to fit into it, what it has to offer, and so on. It provides role models; it confers identity; it offers people subjects for conversation and may be one of the few unifying factors in American culture.” Replace television with whatever medium you enjoy Batman and this still applies. We learn about the world through experiencing the things of the world, learning from the examples of others, and Batman is a character that has almost a century of human knowledge, experience, suffering, love, and more baked into him.

This is of course not exclusive to Batman. I think this could be argued for many characters or franchises. Perhaps this is why fantasy and pop culture is such a big deal in American culture. We need to fill the lack of a history and community in some way and our characters fill that void. But what’s wrong with that? How is a character like Batman any less “real” than some national folktale or the belief in a monarch being granted their royal decree by the heavens? Batman carries a heavy burden. Pop culture icon. American archetype. Moral exemplar. Religious figure (as discussed last week). Parent. That’s a lot of hats. Fortunately for us though, he can carry them all. And as long as he’s still with me, maybe I’m not completely alone.