Queering Batman (or Not): Reflections on Prince, Bat Nipples, and a Cultural Obsession

Growing up, on nights of idle channel flipping, Batman was king. Not only was it on with stunning regularity, it had something for all the family viewers: nostalgia factor and good-looking actors for mom and dad, Tim Burton cool factor for their wannabe-goth daughter. Plus, my dad and his brother have been said to resemble Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson respectively, so we imagined family rivalry as our hero and villain fought over Gotham’s soul and the attentions of blonde, dull Vicki Vale. On my first round of VHS collecting, I happened upon a copy. Its combination of too-dark-to-see lighting fiascos, Prince soundtrack, and nostalgia made it a necessary purchase. So Lily and I settled down for my first ever from-beginning-to-end viewing (having only seen bits and pieces in the aforementioned channel flipping). As of writing this introduction, we’re about a third of the way through, and already I have a lot of thoughts.

The set-up to the film is a lot duller than I remembered, and oddly reminiscent to another VHS classic, Dick Tracy. A baroque web of criminal activity produces a Cartoonish Baddy; an unpleasant caricature of Crime-Ridden Urban Landscape that can only be solved with tough policing and/or vigilante justice: none of this is appealing. There is intrigue in the opening scenes of Batman as urban legend, glimpsed by the characters as he seems to fly, survive an onslaught of bullets, and just disappear. I’ll hand it to him; Batman, like his foes, is a master of the personal brand. Unfortunately, most of this mystery is immediately solved by Batman’s obsessive gadgetry and the audience’s presumed background knowledge that it’s motherfucking Batman. Of course he’s real. But my big, end-of-the-day takeaway is that Batman, as a character, is just really damn boring. He literally blends in to the background.

Most of what I remembered from catching glimpses of the film growing up was Nicholson’s Joker. Dancing to Prince, splashing garish colors, broadcasting sinister commercials, delivering speeches about art as destruction, Nicholson’s a damn good performer, and the Joker gets to do all the fun stuff. No scene was more ingrained in my memory than the Joker defacing fine art while Prince’s Partyman blasts from a boombox. Nicholson is colorful, kinetic, fun, while Batman is monochrome and static. He spends a lot of the movie thus far just looming, frightening criminals and shocking law enforcement with the mere menace and authority of his presence. He’s literally just a wall of masculinity.

Sylvester Stallone credits this film with changing the nature of the American action movie. Instead of the spectacle of the actor’s muscular body, we are presented with the spectacle of special effects. Whether or not Keaton is actually ripped doesn’t matter (and he was indeed feared unfit for the part by fans). Instead, it’s his armor, the iconic Batman shape and cowl, the illusion of muscles and mass, that wows the audience and his onscreen foes. No wonder there’s such an emphasis on gadgets, on the Batmobile, on the look. Maybe we could draw a line from this shift in attention to today’s special-effects sensations that dominate the box office, and blame Batman for the current comic-book movie trend. I’m not the cultural expert to do that, and I don’t want to shame anyone for loving popcorn movies (they’re fun, damn it). And emphasizing costume and effects over the actor’s bodies isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In some ways, it might actually be queerer.

Think about the Batman costume as a big, manly prosthetic muscle suit, equipped with abs, that Bruce can take on or off. It’s a bit like a drag queen’s breasts: creating an effect, provoking a response (in Batman’s case, fear), and consequently revealing the imitability and inherent performativity of certain gendered roles not only at the level of costume but at the level of the body itself. This could be incredibly interesting and weird and cool. The trouble with a Bruce Wayne Batman is that its masculinity all the way down. Built or not (and Keaton isn’t a shrimp), an unsuited Wayne possesses an extraordinary amount of power. Beyond the demographic privilege of a white man, Wayne is rich as shit, possessing an accumulation of wealth and cultural capital that gives him a seat next to the mayor at press events and explains his accumulation of bat toys. We as viewers know from basic cultural context that as soon as we see this handsome well-dressed man stroll through his exclusive gala in his literal castle (in a city, where property values are rather steep): this is a powerful man. In putting on the suit, Bruce is just swapping one kind of masculine power for another. Snooze.

A brief detour here to say that it’s little wonder Burton’s Batman is dull. The rest of Burton’s oeuvre demonstrates about as much interest in traditional masculinity as I have (read, not much). The traditional Burton leading man sports elaborate hair and heavy make-up, with an undeniably gender transgressive aesthetic. He is as likely to swoon, or let out a sincere “golly gee” than throw a punch. Edward Scissorhands and Ed Wood, both of which I’ve recently re-watched, may be the most obvious examples. Edward, with his pursing lips, sits still as Peg, the sweet Avon lady, tries to find him the right foundation to cover his pallid skin. Ed Wood, as is historically accurate, takes comfort in angora sweaters and feathery blonde wigs. He may have fought in WWII, but he did so in a brassiere. The Eds’ unabashed interest in women, if anything, only adds to the queerness. “Are you a fruit?” Ed Wood is asked by a producer, only for the latter to get a lesson in the distinction between gender expression and sexuality. As a friend of mine pointed, Edward Scissorhands has the ultimate in lesbian innuendo surnames. And these feminine men are always the hero of the story. Burton doesn’t seem to know what to do with such a masculine fantasy as Batman.

In realizing this, Lily and I wondered if Burton might have found a more suitable Batman in Prince, perhaps the least expected member of the Batman creative team. Prince didn’t just write the song that the Joker grooves to while vandalizing boring paintings; he wrote five, most of which don’t appear in the movie. The most bat-related, Batdance, is less a song than a Batman-themed sound collage, which didn’t stop it from reaching number one in the US charts (but perhaps explains why it’s little remembered today). Though the Prince songs weren’t Burton’s choice, and the funky sound is several aesthetics away from Burton’s hyperstylized goth, the gender-play Prince is famous for makes him a more likely protagonist. The two music videos that accompany these musical oddities (Batdance and Partyman) feature Prince as a character called Gemini. Theoretically a half-Batman half-Joker hybrid, with half of his hair colored green and half of his face painted clown-white, his dancing performance is all Joker. By the Partyman video, Prince drops the Batman cape for an all-purple Joker-ish suit. Even the Batman dancers who appear in the Batdance video trade the muscles for skintight body suits. Other than chanting Batman’s name, and demonstrating more sexual interest in Vicki Vale than Keaton and Nicholson combined, Prince doesn’t express much more interest in the titular character than Burton.

But think of the potential, Prince’s lithe, 5’2 form slipping into the Batsuit (purple of course) like changing into another body. Or, since we can’t have Prince, why not his second coming, Janelle Monae, famous for her Dietrich-ian tuxedo and queer music videos. For starters, I trust a queer black woman from a working-class background to handle community policing a heckuva lot more than a tricked-out billionaire who imagines every crook killed his parents. A Monae Batman would be superhero as gender fluidity, a costume of butch performance, fake muscles, real manhood. Just as real as Keaton’s anyway. Monae wouldn’t portray playboy billionaire Bruce Wayne but perhaps a grassroots organizer, local politician, or volunteer. A fem woman who gets things done, she soon realizes that working within the system isn’t enough for her community and turns to vigilante justice against the powerful, choosing a male persona both to throw prying eyes off the trail and to harness the privilege of a masculine silhouette. Genderfuckery is a superpower, as Monae, like her mentor Prince, knows well. It should be treated as one. Besides, a Monae Batman just seems inherently more fun. The cape could be not just for Lugosian menace, but for flamboyant flouncing, a playful foil to the hyper-masculine leather daddy potential the batsuit’s always had. The Batmobile would come equipped with an excellent stereo system. Ne’er-do-wells who use their social position to exploit would face the bat. And, as pointed out to me, Tessa Thompson would play Catwoman.

I have no delusions that, short of some kind of hostile lesbian takeover, DC would ever greenlight such a transgressive superhero take. But it startles me that, in our current superhero glut, no one’s leaned in to the queerness of the supersuit. (At least to my knowledge. Aside from general cultural understanding, I’m no expert in action flicks, so if I’m missing something please let me know). Maybe this is because for the most part, superheroes still have powerful secret identities, either demographically (again with the white men) or societally. Even the rare non-white-guy superhero who headlines a movie occupies some kind of powerful position in their home society. So their suits and powers accent preexisting strengths rather than presenting a true alter ego. And basically none of them play with gender the way a genre based around costumes and secret identities really ought to.

Well okay, there might be one, but don’t hate me for mentioning it. Schumacher’s 1997 flop, Batman and Robin, traditionally credited with destroying the original film franchise, is another movie I’ve recently watched on VHS. And I’m not going to say it’s a good movie. Schwarzenegger’s Mr. Freeze enters by announcing “the iceman cometh,” somehow the best pun in the movie. Uma Thurman’s Poison Ivy does not so much chew the scenery as bring the scenery to orgasm. On the other, less fun side of bad acting, Batgirl goes for the automated voicemail school of acting, while Robin appears to have been shipped in from the studio of David DeCoteau. George Clooney is certainly in this movie, but he doesn’t seem all that happy about it. Upon seeing the movie for the first time last week, I went in with one piece of background info: bat nipples.

The aforementioned nipples.

Having been born a few weeks after the release of Batman and Robin, I have no idea how big a deal nipple-gate actually was, but fanboys have gotten worked up over a lot less. Whatever the actual reaction, it’s become the mammarian shadow, even more so that all the other crap, that hangs over the flick. Which is probably more than it deserves. Sure, a bat nipple serves no possible function, but neither do the sculpted abs on the batsuits worn by both Keaton and Afleck which, one presumes, are not Batman’s actual abs. Schumacher has said in interviews that the nipples were based on the torso of Roman sculpture, a model of masculinity just as valid (and uninherent) as the American bodybuilder. So why did the nipples cause such a stir? I’ve thought a lot more about bat nipples than anyone should as of late, and I’ve come up with an unprovable but probable sounding hypothesis.

The bat nipples disrupt the impenetrable hide of the batsuit with the wrong kind of masculinity, a feature that doesn’t serve a purpose of strength. Nipples are wrapped up in a whole host of associations – beyond being a word that sounds kinda funny, it suggests eroticism and even femininity, suggestions of sensitivity, possible lactation, etc. I’m not saying I want to imagine Batman breast-feeding Robin after a hard day fighting crime (just kidding, I do), but the batsuits protruding nips disrupt the illusion of perfect masculinity the suit previously contained. Considering the homoerotic base-notes already strong in the film – Batman acting like Robin’s daddy and dating a plot-irrelevant woman who might as well be named Susan R. Beard, the fact that Poison Ivy has to use pheromones to attract the leading men, literal close-ups of Batman’s ass – the nipples start to seem like a microcosm of a larger phenomenon. Batman and Robin jettisons the self-seriousness and allows its heroes to camp it up with the villains, and in turns reveals the queer potentials of the character beneath (or perhaps because of) the muscles. Batman is by far the better and more competent of these two films, but Batman and Robin is the queerer one, and consequently I had more fun watching it.

Probably, I won’t be seeing Marvel or DC introduce the genderfluid superhero of my dreams on the big screen anytime soon. Probably there’s already some savvy indie series or webcomic that’s already tapped into this. (Or, for that matter, I hear Steven Universe is gay as shit. Maybe I should check that out). It says something about the queerness of the genre when somehow the fuckboy’s fantasy has the queerest big release of them all. Next time you try that, directors of Hollywood, perhaps remember that campiness doesn’t preclude heroics, and don’t stop with erect nipples. Maybe see if Janelle Monae wants a paycheck. She can even write the songs, and then we can say with confidence that she’s a better actor than George Clooney.