This is the final installment of our three-part holiday special, American Art at the Opera. Part one here, two is here, and if you received this article by forward, feel free to subscribe, give a gift subscription, or consider elevating to our paid subscriber level, for access to our extensive archive as well as additional, subscriber-only articles.
Now raise a glass to the new year, as we consider one final American opera buff, Batman, and his secret identity . . . Robert Kahn?
I. Unaccompanied Minors.
It’s a striver’s fantasy. If you cleared a boy of his past and gave him time, money, and resolve, what could he become?
Gaston Leroux gave a dark, French answer in Le Fantôme de l'Opéra; Batman gives an especially American one, in technicolor. Like Leroux’s anti-hero, Batman is a mélange of pulp fiction tropes — the masked-man operating at the edges of polite society; the dutiful manservant with strange links to the Far East; a spooky subterranean headquarters and a ton of gadgets. You can find these elements in the pulp magazines, The Shadow, The Spider, The Black Bat, The Crimson Ghost, but when comic books arrived in America in the 1930s, they plucked a minor element from Le Fantôme and made it a rule: Comic book heroes are orphans.1
Exiting a movie theater, a screening of The Mark of Zorro,2 the wealthy Wayne Family is accosted by a mugger. Young Bruce Wayne’s parents are gunned down before him, and so he vows a “war on crime,” devoting the vast resources at his disposal to perfect himself as a tool of justice — the ultimate citizen.
It’s a notion with a fine Enlightenment pedigree. Jean-Jacques Rousseau rendered the thought experiment in his 1762 Emile, or On Education, imagining “an orphan . . . snatched from prejudice,” whom he would personally “teach to live rather than to avoid death: life is not breath, but action, the use of our senses, our mind, our faculties, every part of ourselves which makes us conscious of our being.”3
Batman’s creators similarly “snatched him from prejudice” and sent him on his way toward self-mastery: “As the years pass, Bruce Wayne prepares himself for his career. He becomes a master scientist, trains his body to physical perfection until he is able to perform amazing athletic feats.”
The super-man of the twentieth century has no past: no heritage, no family, no hobbling prejudices or benighted superstitions.
What about the creators of that forward-facing model of moral rectitude?
II. A Cast of Thousands.
There’s very little of the Batman that arrived on newsstands in 1939 that can be attributed to Bob Kane beyond his signature. By some accounts, he came up with the name and a bit of the backstory, but all the trademarks of the character we recognize today — pointy-eared mask, gloves, black-blue costume — were worked out by others, piece-workers who went largely uncredited. The supporting cast dribbled in over decades at the hands of other creators: Robin the Boy Wonder, in 19404; the Batcave and butler Alfred in 1943,5 and on through Ace the Bat-Hound in 1955 and Batgirl in 1967.6 This is what it is to found a franchise, to mint “intellectual property”: the Batman story unfolds over decades, in the hands of thousands. Kane was more a “management auteur” — a Henry Ford of comics, he didn’t know how his creations worked, but he assembled the shop and pushed units out the door.
That’s not the way he put it. Kane’s autobiography is incredible — genuinely unbelievable — complete with a childhood spent knocking neighborhood gang-members out cold and receiving career advice from Babe Ruth.7 But Bob Kane’s sole true creation may have been the persona that attended the signature.
Bob Kane was born Robert Kahn in the Bronx in 1915 to parents of Eastern European Jewish extraction. His father was an engraver, and Kahn built upon some innate drafting talent with classes at Cooper Union and the Art Students League.8 Movie studios were hiring scenic artists and animators9 when Kahn joined the workforce during the Depression — Kahn joined Fleischer Studios, home of Popeye the Sailor-Man and Betty Boop. Then he set up a shop of his own, assembling a small team of artists to ink, write, and fill-in backgrounds. It was a miniature guild system, but run entirely by working class Jewish kids from the Bronx, the Lower East Side, and Williamsburgh. The shop produced a few forgettable comic strips in the mid-thirties, but when Superman debuted in 1938,10 the publisher reached out to Kahn for a Superman-like property.
Over a long weekend, Batman was created — and so was Bob Kane.
III. The Lengthened Shadow of One Man.
None of this shows up in the pages of Batman, or Batman and Me for that matter. Kane doesn’t mention his Jewish heritage, nor that of Jerry Robinson, Bill Finger, or Will Eisner — nor their instrumental contributions to Citizen Kane’s Bat-empire. And the Batman is just as assimilated: Bruce Wayne is a wealthy playboy/businessman, living not in the row-houses that Kane knew from childhood, but leafy mansions.
Kane and Batman were equally WASP fantasies: solitary actors and captains of industry. It wasn’t unusual to anglicize a Jewish-sounding surname for institutional success in comics, as Jack Kirby and Stan Lee did11 — but Kane pushed both Batman and his own image to an extreme. Bruce Wayne didn’t hail from the neighborhood of immigrants that his creators lived in12; he was a son of the American Revolution, the son of doctors and scion to a vast family fortune that left him one of America’s wealthiest businessmen and most eligible bachelors. Batman stalks the night as an apex predator, a man without past or obligation, while his alter ego, billionaire Bruce Wayne, stalks the boardroom by day, an arch-capitalist without need for a support team.
The franchise grew from comic books to serial films in the 40s to TV in the 60s and feature films in the 80s — and Kane lived the celebrity status, performing light feats of drawing on talk shows and exhibiting his own fine-art paintings “in the style of Modigliani” at galleries in Los Angeles. (Years later, these turned out to be the work of “ghost artists” as well). Kane attached himself as a creative consultant to the big Hollywood movies of the 1980s and 90s, but appears to have had no function beyond meat-skin mascot. His life traced much the same course as that of Everrett Shinn13 — starting out with drawings in the newspapers and arriving as a professional celebrity.
IV. The Mark of Nolan.
Batman’s saga grew as well — albeit in that corporate way, with editors guiding the details from teams of writers through the corporate approval process at the parent company, Time-Warner. In this way, a long biography of the Bat-man continues to be revised and smoothed over into a single canonical text, with the more colorful elements weeded out.
When the franchise landed in the hands of Christopher Nolan in 2005, the canon seemed in safe hands. Nolan knows how to honor a corporate parent, and his favorite color is gray. 2005’s Batman Begins retells the story of its hero — “who he is and how he came to be,” and it runs faithful to the approved message — sweater-wearing scion of a powerful family goes to the shapeless Far East to learn how to deploy its mysteries against the superstitious little minds of the West, and where does he get those wonderful toys!?
But there’s one point where Nolan departs oddly outside of canon. When the curtain rises on the decisive moment in young Bruce Wayne’s bildungsroman, it reveals the family not at a showing of The Mark of Zorro, but at an opera.
It’s not a big change, but it’s notable, given how far Nolan went to affirm the gospel of Wayne.
When I first watched the movie, I thought this was the inertia of the class-aspirations of the franchise. Batman is the story of a man rising to the height of society and then transcending it; transcendent figures like Bruce Wayne enjoy the finest art, the finest wine, the finest women, the nicest homes, the tallest skyscrapers. Just as Everett Shinn and Gaston Leroux understood the Grand Opera to be the very height of Western culture, Nolan must have understood that the Waynes don’t go out to see the latest Michael Bay flick — they put on tuxedos and go to the opera. Nolan is just polishing the goyish striverism that has been the core wish-fulfillment function of the Batman franchise since Year One.
But as I got more into Christopher Nolan’s oeuvre, I started to understand Nolan’s own philosophical commitments. Nolan is a sort of empiricist, showing you a series of pictures with the understanding that the “story” is assembled in the viewer’s mind: everything you see is a bit of evidence, a clue.14 What clue was being provided by Bruce Wayne’s visit to the opera? It occurred to me that I had never stopped to wonder which opera the Waynes go to; I had just assumed it was Die Fledermaus — Johann Strauss’s farce about a playboy in a bat costume. That would be on-brand, right?
I went back and checked: it’s not Die Fledermaus, it’s Arrigo Boito’s Mefistofele. Mefistofele retells Goethe’s story of Faust, a man of science who trades in his brief life of reason for immortal youth and pleasure. It’s not “on-message” for Batman at all: science is humiliated, magic and superstition are vindicated, and justice comes to no one.
It also re-situates Batman in a more Nolanian terrain.15 The very first lines of the movie are “You are in hell, and I am the devil.” This is Nolan’s worldview: eternal perdition, trapped in motion by our own guilt. His heroes always live in a horizonless, tubular world wrapped around itself — a self-enclosing dreamworld, a spinning space-station, a siloed dungeon, the hollow tower of a windmill16 — a cave. This lets you know that they can go around and around in their heroic quest, but they will never complete it. Since Nolan’s heroes are their own tormentors, they never escape: they are doomed to quest eternally.
That’s what the opera does in Nolan’s Batman: it exists in Bruce’s memory as the moment when he traded his parents and their world of reason for his dark road of magic, superstition, and immortality. His parents were doctors and Gotham’s first citizens; his life is spent outside the law, and to underscore his rejection of their world, the movie closes with him burning down the family home and destroying the mass-transit system they built to serve the city.
In Kane, the movie theater inspires Bruce to fight crime; in Nolan, the opera implicates Bruce: like Boito’s Faust, trading reason for magic makes Bruce the agent of his own damnation.17
It’s a subtle destabilization of the monolithic story of Batman, and it turns the Enlightenment thought-experiment on its pointed little ear. If you cleave off a person’s history, they might live forever, but what will they live for? Kane’s story is about universal competence, a man ready “to live at need among the snows of Iceland or on the scorching rocks of Malta.”18 In the telling, he founded an eternal franchise, but was left to do parlor tricks and commission forgeries of his own work,19 just to remain “Bob Kane, Creator of Batman.”
And thus the curtain falls on our night at the opera. What does it symbolize for the American artist, but an unobtainable sublime upon which we model our own shortcomings? For Shinn, it was the glamorous life that locked him into the rote pathways of a dead aestheticism. For Leroux and his Phantom, the opera was a collaborative art form that a toxic personality can only poison. These shades are ultimately the same as those that haunt any tale of gothic horror: trade your past — your heritage and home, your family, your flaws — for glistening immortality, and you may just get it.
Happy New Year, and thank you for indulging this oblique journey through a rabbit-hole of my interests and scattered reading habits of the last few years. Join us next week when Hanging Papers regathers its focus and launches into a new year of holding a magnifying glass up to the strangeness of art, artists, and their markets in America.
Cheers,
Jonathan
Superman, Captain Marvel, Captain America, Wonder Woman, Batman and Robin — they are models of human perfection. Following in the Enlightenment tradition, they all begin as blank slates. Cpts. Marvel and America are blandly parent-less, while Superman is launched in a rocket ship; Wonder Woman has a mother, but is formed out of riverbank mud. You don’t get much blanker than that.
This detail comes from the comics, and Kane emphasized it in his memoir (Bob Kane with Tom Andrae, Batman and Me, Eclipse Books, 1989); as a child, he recollected, he loved Douglas Fairbanks in The Mark of Zorrro, and when he started his own street gang, they were called “The Zorros.” Kane recalls how, as a young teen, he beat many a street tough to unconsciousness while leaping acrobatically around the neighborhood.
Quoting here from the Barbara Foxley translation, available here in full.
The work of Jerry Robinson and Bill Finger.
Both originated in an early serial film series, and later followed by the comic.
Batgirl originated in the campy 1966 TV series, and came into the comics to support the show.
Bob Kane with Tom Andrae, Batman and Me, Eclipse Books, 1989.
The League in those days was rife with urban social realists, and Kahn could have studied under Kenneth Hayes Miller (see our article on Miller here) or George Brant Bridgman, who taught Kahn’s friend and high school classmate Will Eisner.
Several Precisionist painters, not least Ralston Crawford (more on his development in our article here), spent time in Disney’s animation studios, while MGM hired George Gibson to helm its growing scenic art department for pictures like Wizard of Oz that launched the same year as Batman. More on Gibson here.
Action Comics #1 — created by another pair of Jewish kids, but from Cleveland. Being a good middle-manager ain’t nothing: Bob Kane stayed on top of his IP while Jerry Segal and Joe Schuster were left flat broke.
Jacob Kurtzberg, whose life was fictionalized in Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, created Captain America, the Hulk, Iron Man, and the Fantastic Four; and Stanley Martin Lieber created Spider-Man, and everyone else in the Marvel franchise.
Kane’s classmate at Dewitt Clinton High School, Will Eisner, would go on to write the first graphic novel, A Contract with God, chronicling the life of the neighborhood that Eisner and Kane actually grew up in. Kane, in a rare moment of candor, acknowledges that Eisner was the better artist, and it’s no secret. The highest award in the world of comic books is named for Eisner; Kane received a sort of life-time achievement Eisner Award at the end of his life, which must have burned.
See our article on Shinn here.
More on this in our article on his most recent effort, Tenet.
Nolan seems to love an opera as a setting; a big chunk of Tenet is set in one as well.
In Inception, Interstellar, The Dark Night Rises, and Tenet, respectively.
Another interpretation of Boito and Nolan emphasizes a different swap: Bruce’s trade of his father for his Ras al Ghul (Dr. traded for the Demon). A smart interpretation along these lines can be found here.
Rousseau’s Emile, again.