Question

The second and third – classic, this time – antagonists in the graphic novel are former D.A. Harvey Dent (i.e. Two Face) and the Joker, “who threaten Gotham with terrorism and mass murder” (Finigan 2010: 23). In a sequence that uncannily forecasts real events, Two Face broadcasts a pirate TV message threatening to detonate a city landmark: “I stand here atop Gotham’s beautiful Twin Towers, with two bombs capable of making them rubble. You have twenty minutes to save them. The price is five million dollars. I would have made it two – but I have bills to pay…” (TDKR, 50) The Joker, on the other hand, remains somehow more faithful to the ‘chemical’ roots of the primordial Batman canon (see Morrison 2012: 21).7 The villain murders with “deadly smile gas” (TDKR, 131) the host, guests and audience of a talk show (The David Endocrine Show) – in which he is invited to promote his own psychological and social rehabilitation (TDKR, 126-129). Later on, he slays a group of children in a fairground through poisoned cotton candy (140), before being hunted down by Batman. These two antagonists respectively epitomise traditional, bombing attacks and biochemical terrorism. We might add that TDKR villains (Joker, Two Face and the Mutant Leader) all share a privileged relationship with television – as both ideological and physical space. This common trait exemplifies the historical trend by which, in the latter half of the twentieth century, “television became the primary medium for the terrorist story, and brought the anxieties generated by terrorist acts to a fever pitch.” Terrorists grew more savvy sic about television, they threatened to take control away from broadcasters. Identify the ways in which Batman is framed within a postmodern scenario, challenging his inherent modernity and raising complex ethical and political questions in this text.