IS BATMAN A RACIST BIGOT?

By Ben Macintyre

From The Times, 08.04.1992

The virus of anti-Semitism is spreading, but in America the debate over the world's oldest hatred has recently come to rest on two, rather unexpected questions: Is Batman anti-Semitic? Is Superman Jewish?

A recent article in The New York Times, under the headline "Batman and the Jewish Question", asserted that the new film Batman Returns by British director Tim Burton (which has already broken box-office records) is riddled with anti-Semitic stereotypes, and contains "biblical allusions and historical references which betray a hidden conflict between gentile and Jew."

Since publication, the newspaper has been deluged with letters. Some dismissed the article, by two students at Columbia University, as the product of "lurid and over-heated imaginations"; others agreed, and adduced further evidence to show that the film had "gratuitous bigotry embedded in its script and characters". A second article, published in the New York magazine The Village Voice last week, readdressed the question of how Jews are portrayed in popular culture and argued that Superman, the blue-eyed hero who leaps reality with a single bound, is in fact the "world's most famous muscle Jew".

Both arguments are worth examination, less because of any validity they may have than because the controversy they have generated reflects both the understandable self-obsession of many Jewish Americans, and a growing tendency among intellectuals towards reckless over-analysis.

The case against Batman Returns, which is also showing in Britain, focuses on the villain of the piece, Penguin, a rotund, slavering beastie with flippers, played by Danny DeVito. Penguin, wrote Rebecca Roiphe and Daniel Cooper, "is a Jew, down to his hooked nose, pale face and lust for herring...he is one of the oldest cliches: the Jew who is bitter, bent over and out for revenge, the Jew who is unathletic and seemingly unthreatening but who, in fact, wants to murder every first-born child of the gentile community."

The most ingenious, and least credible part of the argument points to Wagnerian overtones as evidence of the film's hidden anti-Semitic agenda: the cohort of live penguins that waddle after Danny DeVito are apparently Richard Wagner's Niebelungen; Penguin himself is Alberich from Das Rheingold and the huge rubber duck on which he navigates the sewers of Gotham City is an allusion to the Schwan der Schelde from Lohengrin. Their conclusion: "In the context of this movie, with its Jew-monster, Hitler's appropriation of Wagner's operas and the composer's own anti-Semitic politics re-emerge."

Evidence for Superman's Jewish origins is still more convoluted. Jeff Salamon argues that Clark Kent, Superman's bespectacled, cowardly alter-ego, is an anti-Semitic stereotype, from his undeclared love for Lois Lane ("the shiksa of his dreams") to his job as a journalist ("the perfect example of the 'parasitical' occupations European Jews have been accused of holding since the birth of capitalism"). When Clark Kent transforms himself into Superman, Salamon argues, he becomes the embodiment of an ideal of Jewish masculinity envisaged by Max Nordau, the Jewish physician and literary critic who called on Jews at the turn of the century to become "deep-chested, sturdy, sharp-eyed men" or Muskeljudentum, muscle-Jews.

Jacob (later Jerome) Siegel and Joe Shuster, the two Jewish men, who came up with the idea for Superman in 1938 had probably never heard of Max Nordau, any more than the children trooping off to see Batman Returns are familiar with the operas of Richard Wagner. Children do not see their superheroes as racial symbols, but simply as heroes. Perhaps the most telling response to the fracas over Batman's alleged racism came from a young girl, whose father read her the article: "It made me very surprised," she wrote, "when they said the Penguin had to be Jewish because of his nose and fondness for herring. For Pete's Sake, he's a penguin, give him a break!"

There is a vogue in intellectual circles to search for hidden cultural or political significance in subjects where it usually does not exist and is almost certainly unintended. Batman (a Jewish name, perhaps) is simply an engaging, if rather ridiculous gothic film; Superman is a realisation of childish fantasy; a cigar, as Freud pointed out, is sometimes just a cigar.

The over-analysis of fictional characters like Batman and Superman has spilled into American politics, and the politically-correct are bearing down on figures of entertainment and transforming them into cultural symbols, in a way that is new and often bizarre. Popeye was recently accused of bias on the abortion issue when Olive Oyl decided to send a baby doll she had received in the post "back to its maker".

The most disturbing aspect of the dispute over Batman, however, is the amount of intellectual energy being wasted rootling for anti-Semitism in harmless children's culture, when it exists so glaringly elsewhere. As in Europe, the canker of anti-Semitism is growing again in America. "We must not squander the precious currency of concern," wrote two leaders of the Jewish Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith recently.

Anti-Semitic violence is on the rise, the Ku-Klux-Klan has become slicker and more media-friendly, David Duke runs for office with the support of thousands. There are anti-Semitic villains on the loose in Gotham City and elsewhere, but Batman is surely not one of them.