Given the wildly differing portrayals of Batman, his allies, and his rogues gallery over the past 80+ years of comics and other media. It's not shocking that there are a ton of interpretations of the Dark Knight and his cast of characters. So much so that it needed its own page.
Batman himself
- Batman has been subject to numerous alternate Canon interpretations. Some depict him as a noble crusader against crime; others make him a borderline psychopath barely removed from the lunatics he spends his life fighting. And even if he's not as bad as the lunatics he fights there's still the question of whether or not Batman himself could be classified as legally insane or not.
- In recent years, it's been theorized that Batman is somewhere on the Autism spectrum, given his obsessive nature, rigid routines, high intelligence, minimal need for social interaction, and lack of interest in most things that aren't tied to being Batman. His "persona" of Bruce Wayne has also drawn comparison to the concept of "masking", which is when Autistic people mask their symptoms to more closely blend in with society. Some newer interpretations have acknowledged this, by portraying Bruce as obsessive and having struggles socializing before the trauma of his parents' murders.
- One of the core issues, which underlies many of the more specific questions below, is the entire nature of his motivation. His parents were killed by a criminal, but is he more interested in getting vengeance on law-breakers, or in protecting the innocent to make sure they don't suffer the same way?
- His relationships have also come under examination; debates about his sexuality rage wildly. There are tons of easy targets for jokes about that last part.
- The various interpretations of Batman are the inspiration behind this image
◊ merging Batman with Dungeons & Dragons Character Alignment. - Why does Batman so rigidly adhere to his One Rule? Is it because he's idealistic and will spare people in hopes they can be reformed; it is arrogance because he thinks himself above his enemies and won't stoop to their level; is it restraint to stop himself from crossing a line he can't come back from; is it him in some small way honoring his surgeon father (Hippocratic oath, and all that); is it stubbornness because he won't let his enemies get a moral victory by pushing him that far; or is it delusional self-righteousness since he has no trouble inflicting physical trauma on the crooks he beats up and tells himself that's better than killing them.
- Much like the dispute of who is the true persona, Clark Kent or Superman, one of the most raging questions about Batman concern his civilian identity Bruce Wayne. Is he simply a mask that Batman wears during the day, a popular interpretation since Batman: The Dark Knight Returns? Or is Bruce a natural person who's made the rational - within the DCU - decision to fight crime while dressed as a bat? The stories that most support the former view are those where Bruce most throws himself into the Millionaire Playboy act. When he tries to take an active role and takes up civic involvement in Gotham's problems, it shores up the latter interpretation.
- There's also his culpability if a Batman Gambit he prepared gets hijacked by villains, citing Tower of Babel and the Brother-Eye in particular. While a check-and-balance idea against superpowers is logical, Batman's methods of enforcing it and his continuing refusal to apologize are regarded by some as stemming from a mindset that is more self-righteous and dangerous than his Beware the Superman fears.
- This is strongly lampshaded in the short story "Viewpoint", where a newspaper publisher hires a bunch of writers to give him their own interpretations of Batman in the hope to make their common element - the truth about Batman - more clear. He's very disappointed to find out that their visions have nothing in common.
- This is also played with in Neil Gaiman's Whatever Happened to The Caped Crusader? in which different characters tell stories that show their contradictory interpretations of Batman.
- Through they all have one thing in common - in all the stories told Batman dies because he refuses to (or maybe cannot?) give up. When he finally dies for real, he is reborn on another Earth, as infant Bruce Wayne, to one day become Batman once again.
- Another big argument about Batman is the common negative interpretation among left-wing critics (for a particularly clear and aggressive example, see the Marshal Law story "Kingdom of the Blind") of the character as a "rich guy who gets his kicks beating up poor people" who does nothing to use his wealth and social power to actually improve society. This is Depending on the Writer, as some writers don't include anything in their works to challenge this while others depict Bruce as quietly doing a lot of charitable and political activity behind his playboy persona. Some writers just make the Big Bad of the story just as rich (at least initially), or part of an Ancient Conspiracy, which does at least deal with the "poor" part of the criticism.
- This is Lampshaded in an episode of Batman: The Brave and the Bold that was directed at the show's detractors. In it, Bat-Mite lectures a group of fanboys about how many character shifts Batman has gone through since the Golden Age and sums it all up by saying a Batman who goes on sci-fi adventures and cracks jokes is just as valid and true to the source material as a Batman who's a grim vigilante that slinks through alleyways while angrily screaming into the night.
The Bat-Family
- Alfred. Is he simply a devoted servant to his master, supporting his efforts to make Gotham a better place? Or is he guilty of severe child neglect, never thinking that the young Bruce maybe needed therapy to get over his parents' death? By supporting Bruce in becoming Batman, does he act as an enabler, allowing Bruce to vent his near-psychotic rage out on the world's criminals? (Alfred himself actually did touch on this in one story when Commissioner Gordon had been injured and Batman refused to leave his bedside, Alfred, seeing this as the Dark Knight's obsessive quest gone too far, finally decided to resign from his service, saying "You are not a child, it is time you ceased acting like one. And it is time I stopped enabling you.").
The Joker
- The Joker. Though he started off dark and creepy, he spent most of the '40s, '50s, and '60s as a mostly harmless lawbreaking jester. Then, after Batman was remade into the dark and brooding hero he was originally, the Joker returns to his homicidal maniac origins; then we get to "The Killing Joke," in which he shoots Barbara Gordon (formerly Batgirl) through the spine, and then kidnaps and tortures Commissioner Gordon more or less for the hell of it. And then there was "Death in the Family" and countless other stories in which the Joker gets crazier as time goes on. Even in the movies, he has changed from one appearance to the next. The Movie of the 1966 series portrayed him as the madman crook. Jack Nicholson, famous creepy maniac, portrayed him as a former gangster turned creepy maniac making the best of his deformities by incorporating them into a costume. The Dark Knight's Heath Ledger appeared to be a suicidal nihilist out for nothing more thought out than causing chaos.
- Though he's traditionally portrayed as chaotic and capable of adapting on the fly to any situation, Grant Morrison's Batman & Robin run has suggested that, in fact, the opposite is true: as Ax-Crazy as he is, he's been able to survive confrontations with Batman for so long because he's Crazy-Prepared and already has a plan for everything. And the Monster Clown persona is a façade that lets him channel his homicidal urges. At heart, he's not a Monster Clown....he's just a monster.
- Also, does the Joker break the fourth wall for comedic effect at the whim of the writers, in which case anything he says while Breaking the Fourth Wall is barely canon? Or is his suggested "super sanity" giving him canonical awareness of the reality of comic books? In either case, does this extend to the other adaptations? Did Nicholson's mobster Joker go insane because of his accident-causing deformity or because it let him know that we're watching his misery for entertainment?
- If he knows that he's in a comic book, then his behavior might have been hand-waved in his own mind because his victims only exist to be his victims. Even the Gordon family and other named victims are not actual people in our level of reality. Maybe the only reason he keeps committing crimes and going up against Batman is because he doesn't want the comics to end. Because then it would be like he ceased to exist. And he doesn't want to die.
- This is supported in canon by his ongoing evolving consciousness in Emperor Joker. Once he’s finally so far ascended in godhood that he realizes how evil he is, he makes the only heroic decision he can: destroy the universe, reasoning that the universe has been enabling him the whole time.
- In fact, Joker might even be said to be committing horrible crimes to get Batman involved because otherwise the entire world he exists in would cease! Joker is forced to murder, rob and prank people to save the entire universe. He's not the hero Gotham wants, but he's the villain Gotham needs.
- Does the Joker believe in the nihilist sayings he prattles on about every so often, or are they all meaningless words to him, another part of the joke intended solely to screw with the minds of the sane?
- Batman: Black And White - Case Study by Paul Dini puts forth a particularly brilliant alternative; the Joker is completely sane. Back before the chemical vat incident, he was a crime boss who played his anonymity to the hilt in order to do whatever he wanted. Afterward, he knew that was no longer possible, so he created the "Clown Prince Of Crime" persona of Obfuscating Insanity solely so he would be sent to Arkham whenever he was caught - he purposefully invented Joker Immunity! The doctors are ecstatic when they discover an old report claiming this - and then orderlies drag Harley Quinn past, and she comments that she wrote that report before she started counseling the Joker. The Joker drove Quinn insane to invalidate her findings once he realized that she had figured out his scheme. And he left the report where it would be found just so he could Yank the Dog's Chain.
- Speaking of Harley, it's been suggested that their relationship isn't actually an abusive one, but a consensual dom/sub dynamic.
- Batman's refusal to kill the Joker despite all the horrible crimes he continues to commit and the Gotham City Police's apparent inability to contain and/or reform him - could it be that Batman is addicted to their conflict, the consequences be damned?
- "Death Of The Family" puts forth an alternate take as part of a larger alternate interpretation of Gotham as a whole; namely that Batman doesn't just kill Joker because he sincerely believes that another, far more serious/competent villain would fill the void. This ties into Scott Snyder's larger idea that the ultimate Big Bad of Batman isn't any of the supervillains but rather Gotham City itself.
The Rogues Gallery
- Does the Ventriloquist suffer from a split personality, a dissociative disorder, or is he right in his belief that Scarface is possessed by the ghost of every murderer hung on the gallows he was carved from? There's evidence to support all these theories, and the one that Wesker knows precisely what he's doing and Scarface is just a gimmick.
- This one is touched upon in a subplot during the Knightfall storyline, in which Wesker is trying to retrieve Scarface from police custody. He uses a sock puppet as a proxy during this time, as well as a variety of other hand puppets, nearly as psychotic, if not intimidating, as Scarface himself (assuming they do have a mind of their own, that is).
- Two Face. Tradition states that the two halves of his face represent his split personality. Normally, they have the non-scarred side represent Harvey Dent and the scarred side represent Two-Face; they give us scenes where he has a perfectly reasonable dialogue shown only in his non-scarred profile, only to flip out into ultraviolence shot entirely from his scarred side. But some writers claim the opposite is true: the non-scarred side is Two-Face, the monster with a face of an angel. The scarred side represents Harvey Dent, the wounded hero who lies crushed beneath.
- Supported in spirit by the non-canon Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, in which Harvey has his face restored to full normal- and proceeds to go completely evil; scratching both sides of his coins as if he has been "consumed by his dark side." At least both sides match.
- Moreover, before the 1980s Two-Face was not portrayed as a man with multiple personalities, just as someone who rejected moral responsibility and let random chance in the form of his coin make his choices for him. The multiple personalities first showed up when he got a new Post-Crisis origin. The idea of Dent having two personalities caught on so well it completely erased the character's first 40 years. Ironically, his appearance in The Dark Knight caused some protest when it was closer to his original portrayal.
- The whole idea of him having multiple personalities at all is prone to his own alternate interpretations; a minority of the more psychology-versed fans take it as yet another example of the staff at Arkham being a bunch of quacks and Harvey actually has something else entirely, such as Borderline or Paranoiac personality disorders, or actual paranoid schizophrenia rather than the Hollywood version officially ascribed to him (ie. multiple personalities). Evidence for this is that the Harvey "persona" only very rarely manifests itself even for the Split Personality trope, and thus could be dismissed as an outright and temporary delusion, along with some stories showing Harvey had dark and violent tendencies even before becoming Two-Face; who, unlike most alternate personalities, always responds to being called Harvey and is usually portrayed as thinking and acting as simply a darker, more violent version of the same man. Following that line of reason, the Arkham doctors could actually be making him worse because now, deliberately or subconsciously, Harvey can blame all of his behaviour on "Two-Face" rather than face up to the reality of his own crimes and actual psychosis.
- This article positions Two-Face as a dark reflection of Commissioner Gordon. One is a policeman who takes responsibility for a damned city and corrupt police force and works to clean both up, to the point of willingly working with a vigilante in a somewhat moral gray area; the other was a district attorney who revoked his own free-will, to the point that he is stuck perpetually in a Black-and-White Morality mindset that he must resolve through pure 50/50 chance. Though the article proposes that Two-Face is the Arch-Enemy of Gordon, they mostly lack the essential It's Personal aspect to properly classify them as such, and are more likely merely foils of each other (though curiously, many writers depict Gordon as bitterly rejecting any possibility of redemption for Harvey/Two-Face following his turn to crime, whereas Batman is generally more inclined to try and find a way to cure or redeem him).
- The Riddler: Insufferable Genius who's obsessed with proving his superiority over Batman, or a seriously ill criminal whose compulsion to tell the truth is what drives him to leave riddles?
- The Scarecrow: Mad Scientist who wants to continue his research or a man who obsesses over other people's fears to forget about his own?
- Talia Al Ghul:
- One of the major disagreements about Talia stems from whether or not her love for Bruce is genuine or simply selfish. In some interpretations, she genuinely loves him and struggles with Conflicting Loyalty because her desire to please him is equal to that of pleasing her father. In others, her attitude is more of an entitlement that seeks to claim him at any cost, and kill or ruin him if she can't.
- A lot of different writers and fans reinterpret how much of a moral conscience Talia has. In some stories, she is appalled by some of the depths her father is willing to go to remake the world and will oppose him because she believes in a (slightly) better way. In others, she completely agrees with her father's methods and often has even more brutal ones herself.
- The Penguin can either be a somewhat odd looking man or fully deformed, and a sophisticated aristocrat of crime or a brutish pig pretending to be such.
- Ra's al Ghul: A genocidal lunatic or someone who truly believes he's doing the right thing?
