In The Dark Knight Rises, Bruce Wayne has romantic relationships with two ladies: Wayne Enterprises board member Miranda Tate and cat burglar Selina Kyle. The first one kicks off, and is consummated, in the first act. Miranda finds Bruce outside his manor. The power having recently been shut off, the two of them make love in the dark, then cuddle in front of a roaring fire.
“Nice, Bruce,” I thought. “I’ll bet that works with all the la–”
Then I stopped myself. Just how many women has Bruce Wayne slept with?
Midway through The Dark Knight, Rachel Dawes shows up at Bruce’s penthouse while the Joker inflicts chaos on Gotham City. He tells her that he’s going to turn himself in, but she pleads with him not to do so just for her sake. The two of them kiss.
… but do they sleep together? Rachel clearly stays the night: she’s watching the press conference on Bruce’s TV the next morning and gives Alfred a note for Master Wayne. But we don’t see anything that suggests that Bruce “visited the Batcave.” We also have plenty of reason to suspect that they wouldn’t have had sex: Rachel’s known Bruce for too long to have a one-night stand with him; she still has feelings for Harvey; etc.
Well, so what? The Dark Knight is PG-13; they can’t show any good stuff. But the MPAA rating alone shouldn’t be a bar. Consider Tony Stark, as depicted in the Iron Man movies. He sleeps with Vanity Fair reporter Christine Everhart in the first movie. While we don’t see anything explicit, it’s clear what happens. Consider also the James Bond series. These movies always make sure you know, with no mistake, just how many women Bond has slept with and when he’s slept with them (right after killing someone; right before killing someone; in lieu of killing someone; etc).
If Chris Nolan wanted to show Bruce Wayne enjoying an intimate moment with a lady in a PG-13 movie, he could find a way. He did exactly that in The Dark Knight Rises, but not in any of the prior movies. This forces us to ask: why not? What does this say about the Batman character?
Consider what we know about the history of Bruce Wayne. He loses his parents to a mugging gone awry at a very early age. When he has enough money and freedom to travel alone, he sets off around the world, studying the ways of criminals and the fighting arts. He pursues this craft with monastic devotion and little humor. There’s certainly a chance he could be picking up local girls in the Shanghai underworld, but it doesn’t really match what we know about the character.
Once Bruce returns to Gotham City, he adopts the appearance of a billionaire playboy. We see him with a long, anonymous string of gorgeous ladies – Brazilian models, Russian ballerinas, and the like. But these appearances are always brief and always in public. Whenever Bruce is at home, he’s studying crime scene footage, dressing in a bulletproof bat costume, or brooding. His sojourns with the ladies are part of his disguise. They’re not romantic, and Bruce is either too much of a gentleman or too preoccupied to take advantage of their attraction to him.
One could argue that Bruce Wayne doesn’t have a lot of romances because he has trouble relating to women. He’s a monomaniac, shaping every aspect of his life toward his pursuit of criminals. While this reading jives with how Bruce is depicted in the Nolan films, it doesn’t ring true. A man doesn’t need to relate to women in order to seduce them (some assholes insist it helps their chances). While Bruce doesn’t strike us as the love-em-and-leave-em type – thankfully, since it’s unheroic behavior – we wouldn’t be surprised if he used his billions to live that way. But he doesn’t.
In fact, given the efforts that Bruce goes through to maintain the persona of “Bruce Wayne, irresponsible playboy,” it would have to be harder not to sleep with these women than to sleep with them. What are we to imagine? Bruce rents out the dancefloor of Gotham’s hottest nightclub, packs it with supermodels, leaves with one in a flurry of paparazzi flashbulbs, then . . . drops her back at her hotel? Word must get out. And yet this is the life that we must presume Bruce leads, since Nolan would depict Bruce bed-hopping if he wanted us to think otherwise.
Christopher Nolan doesn’t want us to think of Bruce Wayne as a sexual creature. Why?
Master Bruce, you’re ignoring your guests.
(I’m focusing on Bruce Wayne as depicted in the movies here, not in the comics. Bruce Wayne the comic book character has undergone several canonical revisions in the history of DC. It’s hard to say anything definitive about him other than (1) his parents are dead; (2) he’s a billionaire; (3) he dresses up like a bat. Besides, the comics storylines that have focused on how much action Bruce Wayne is getting have tended to be among the worst entries)
I don’t want to dwell on all the sex Bruce Wayne isn’t having in prurient detail, but it’s noteworthy if you place him among the pantheon of 20th/21st century action heroes, as Nolan’s blockbuster films have. There’s an unspoken understanding that a male action hero, as a means of demonstrating his virility, will have sexytimes with a desirable female. This has been true of North by Northwest, Lethal Weapon II, Cobra, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Braveheart, The Last of the Mohicans, Starship Troopers, Kick-Ass, Road House, Money Train, The Transporter, Striking Distance, The Bourne Identity, The Getaway (either version) … and so on, and so on.
The difference between those heroes and Batman, however, is that for most of those heroes the fight is personal. A man is betrayed by his employers, or loses his family, or is hunted by a determined enemy, and seeks revenge. We identify with him because he’s been wronged and we feel the slight in turn. In the Nolan movies, however, Batman doesn’t begin his crimefighting ordeal until after his parents’ murderer has been killed. His desire to fight evil arises not from personal affront but from a code.
The code of chivalry, as practiced in Western Europe, has no definitive text. It was a broad term, used by a variety of different authors – Guillaume de Loris, Jean de Meun, Christine de Pisan – to encompass knightly behavior. The general thrust was that a knight had a duty to protect the lower social classes and those who were martially weaker, to be faithful to God, and to treat ladies with courtesy. Real-life knights rarely lived up to this example, even though several civil and liturgical efforts – like the 10th century synodical Pax Dei movement – tried to enforce it. Chivalry was invented by storytellers, but then again, so was Batman.
Batman, as depicted in the Nolan films, lives by a very strict code. He won’t deliberately kill someone. He won’t set aside the mantle of The Batman until it becomes necessary to protect the city (as a scapegoat for Harvey Dent’s murder). Does the Dark Knight’s code extend to romance, as does the code of chivalry?
Or maybe it’s not a chivalrous code but a monastic discipline. Bruce denies himself the pleasures of the flesh in order to hone his fighting prowess and crimefighting acuity. It’s telling that, in The Dark Knight Rises, Bruce hooks up with Miranda shortly before going after Bane and losing. There may not be a Samson-esque connection between succumbing to a woman’s temptations and losing one’s strength, but perhaps it’s merely indicative of how far Bruce has fallen from his ascetic ideal.
Bruce Wayne has this in common with his inspiration: Doc Savage, the Man of Bronze. One of the early heroes of pulp fiction, Clark “Doc” Savage was a crimefighter, surgeon, scientist, pilot, and master of martial arts. Equipped with gadgets far beyond the capabilities of the time – the 1930s – he and his team of associates devoted their vast fortune to ridding the world of evildoers. But Savage never took a lover.
In his first adventure, “The Man of Bronze,” he gently puts aside the daughter of a Mayan chieftain who has fallen in love with him. In a later novel, “The Fortress of Solitude,” he rescues a cute girl from a kidnapping. The author goes into almost ridiculous detail describing how attractive this young woman is:
Fifi had the cutest form of any small girl Doc had ever seen. Short girls are usually spread out a bit.
[Doc] got down to the alley, got his car around there, got his passengers loaded into it without attracting anyone’s attention. He drove toward his headquarters.
Fifi slipped over and her head rested against his shoulder. She was the type of little thing that could look delicious when she was sleeping.
Several of Doc’s legendary assistants comment on how cute Fifi is at various points. From Doc, not a word.
Is a life of monastic detachment required of superheroes? In order to defend civilization – the trade of all costumed crimefighters – a hero must live a life apart. He wears a mask and changes his name to remove his identity. He devotes every free hour to the mastery of his craft – Doc Savage to his scientific techniques; Batman to the martial arts and the criminal underworld. But the temptation of the “real world” must weigh heavy on the hero’s mind. It nearly sways Bruce in The Dark Knight, when he promises to give up being Batman if Rachel will live with him. So to free himself of those temptations, he follows an unyielding code.
Bruce Wayne, of course, probably isn’t a virgin. It’d be a little silly to think that Miranda Tate is the first woman he sleeps with. But, in Nolan’s eyes, we’re not meant to think of him as a sexual creature. If he has a sex life, it’s off-screen, unremarkable, and inconsequential to his heroics. In that way, Batman diverges from the 20th century notion of action movie heroism. It’s his devotion to a chivalric ideal, rather than his hypercompetency or raw power, that make him a hero.
Nice article. I think some of the ideas can be applied to a couple of roles Sylvester Stallone has played recently. I’m mostly thinking of the most recent Rambo and the two Expendables films. In all three he is CONSPICUOUSLY celibate and turns down beautiful women. Where these three cases differ is their much grittier and “realer” quality. That is, they’re not meant to be understood as mythical or mysterious (though they are). I’m sure there’s also a lot to be said about the fact that the women Sly turns down are “exotic” and he does so with a weird, paternal warmth.
This is a good point (and you can add Rocky Balboa, in which he’s mourning his long-dead wife and gently turns aside a big-hearted admirer). However, I honestly think it has more to do with Stallone’s age. The guy is now 66! I think once an actor hits 60, there’s a sort of unwritten Hollywood rule that he can’t be depicted shacking up with the models anymore.
Personally, I LOVE Stallone, but I am grateful I haven’t seen him make out with anybody in a long time.
You can shack up with hot girls in Hollywood if you are pass your prime, but you usually need to play a mob boss
I wonder if this is a necessary sacrifice in order to make the character successful as a cultural icon? We even have a control group, as it were, as the other modern hero explicitly modeled after Doc Savage not only had a relationship with a hot blonde, but had one with her twin sister too, and paid for it in box office receipts and comic book sales.
I’m speaking, of course, of Buckaroo Banzai.
I feel that if Bruce was that dedicated to the playboy alias then he is at least trying to have sex with these women, otherwise the way gossip works they would all seem like “beards,” and considering he is rich and handsome he is probably successful most of the time.
What ever happened to Robin?
I think this could actually work to his advantage. The best cover for a lie is an alternative lie that sounds like a truth you would want to cover up. If Bruce Wayne wants to throw people off the Bat-scent, the smartest thing he could do is lay some bread crumbs in the direction of a gay secret life – it explains the sneaking around without revealing his actual secret.
And that, my friends, is some quality overthinking!
I had exactly the same thoughts not long ago when rewatching The Dark Knight. It makes his move with the Russian ballet actually make some sense, instead of being weird and fridge logical. He takes them all, then abruptly vanishes for, like, a weekend. He can’t really hope to keep a lid on that, but if his goal *isn’t* to keep a lid on it, but to be, as far as most are concerned, conspicuously *not* having sex with a dozen Russian ballerinas, it makes perfect sense. And that goal only jives with a layered secret identity where he puts a gay secret life in the spot where Batman would be. Derogatory cultural assumptions about the masculinity of gay men further deflects those who might get to the point of realizing Batman would need Bruce Wayne levels of wealth to do what he does, and suddenly it doesn’t seem anywhere near as bleedingly obvious that Bruce Wayne is Batman as it would be if he didn’t have the secret gay backstop.
This is a great article. Suddenly, I WANT Bruce Wayne to be a virgin, because it FEELS right. Sex is something adults do, or at least adolescents. Bruce Wayne is, of course, eternally obsessed with and fixated on his childhood trauma.
Another way to look at it is via comparison to another proto-superhero, Sherlock Holmes. There’s another one with amazing powers who has dedicated his life to crime fighting. And pretty much the VERY FIRST thing we learn about him in the VERY FIRST Conan-Doyle story is that he’s celibate:
“He never spoke of the softer passions, save with a gibe and a sneer. They were admirable things for the observer–excellent for drawing the veil from men’s motives and actions. But for the trained reasoner to admit such intrusions into his own delicate and finely adjusted temperament was to introduce a distracting factor which might throw a doubt upon all his mental results. Grit in a sensitive instrument, or a crack in one of his own high-power lenses, would not be more disturbing than a strong emotion in a nature such as his.”
Sherlock Holmes brings up a possibility that I only glossed over, because it’s an unpleasant throwback: distrust of women as a “distraction.” Women provoke unpredictable, uncontrollable feelings in straight men, so fictional straight men who have to be in control of their feelings often have a cold, even hateful, attitude toward women.
Ta-Nehisi Coates did a great piece on Raymond Chandler and this attitude recently.
Another comparison to fictional characters: Francisco d’Anconia and Hank Rearden in Atlas Shrugged. They are portrayed as being generally dismissive of women, and are only attracted to those who mirror their highest values. Francisco, who plays the part of a billionaire playboy in public, explains his ability to stay celibate by saying “none of the women wanted to announce that they were the only one I rejected”.
For a moment, consider Bruce Wayne to be a superman in the classic Rand style. That would explain his single-minded devotion to the craft, and his kinship to Robin due to their shared passion for justice.
What, then, do his sexual preferences say about his values? Why is he attracted to Selina Kyle or Miranda Tate? Rachel Dawes was a perfect fit – she was a childhood obsession and her role as a public prosecutor matched his values. But what about the others?
Maybe we are overthinking this. Maybe he just can’t find a woman to make love to while hanging upside down from rooftops.
Very interesting article.
I was also thinking of Chandler and Holmes while I was reading it. I think you’re right that bringing up the “distrust of women” aspects would have clouded the main article, but I don’t think Doyle has anything to apologize for. Holmes is consistently misanthropic rather than misogynistic.
Chandler on the other hand clearly turns situations into issues of masculinity. It’s hard to say who’s button he’s trying to push at any given time… but he wouldn’t apologize in any case. { “P Marlowe has as much social conscience as a horse. He has a personal conscience, which is an entirely different matter.” }
Since I’ve recently finished a “Noir Style” short story where the theme of “relationship = vulnerability” is hinted at but never commented on I’ve been pondering this discussion a lot.
So the rest of this gets windy… sorry.
It’s definitely interesting that the thread of celibacy connects Holmes, Marlowe, and Batman particularly in light of the different motivations to which their celibacy can be attributed.
Aside from the incidental aspects the characterizations of Holmes and Marlowe have very few similarities. In fact Marlowe is in many ways an intentional counterpoint of Holmes.
I don’t have a thesis to work towards, but here’s a bit of a “contrast and compare” list.
Holmes: a rational quester in a rational world
No romantic aspirations. His celibacy reflects his total disinterest in anything but his work.
Family is almost non-existent. Mycroft appears or is mentioned in 4 stories out of 60.
Marlowe: a moral quester in an irrational world
Constant hope for finding the right woman, but each chance fades without notice. His celibacy is a result of his particular moral standards (he’s seeking a storybook heroine in a dirty world)
Family is non-existent.
Batman: a rational quester in an immoral world (?) {supposition: Nolan portrays a rational but unpredictable cause & effect world but constantly highlights the lack of Justice)
Romantic aspirations always tied to the dream of accomplishing his purpose and setting aside his duties. His celibacy is a form of chivalric discipline.
Family is an idealized memory.
These are definitely reflections much more than any sort of “point”. I’m throwing them into the conversation on the chance that they might turn into something useful.
Some of this might turn out to be incoherent, or not hold up under scrutiny… if so I give the same non-apology Chandler might; “I had a drink in my hand when I wrote that.”
“Women provoke unpredictable, uncontrollable feelings in straight men,”
Isn’t that basically the plot of Inception?
Isn’t that basically the plot of all of Nolan’s movies?
Some of the hints in Batman Arkham Asylum [That is the comic, not the videogame] made my the joker give a really interesting idea about Bruce’s repressed sexual attitudes. There are also some allusions to homosexuality and Robin’s role. Whilst this is in part the Joker attempting to mindfuck and piss off Batman as ever, the idea of Batman as sexually inactive, and deeply repressed, has always seemed fairly fitting to me.
made BY* the joker
This makes sense. I had similar thoughts after seeing Dark Knight Rises.
I think it’s worth emphasizing the code of chivalry you mentioned. There is something attractive of heroes in the modern era who have to give up things in order to be a hero. Abstaining from things is cool and admirable.
If we think about the modern era, where we could easily wipe most nations off of the face of the earth with a button, restraint is worth more respect than the “have sex with everyone” flair of James Bond.
I think the link to monasticism is on-target. Of all superheroes, Batman is the most like a Buddhist monk, pursuing his ideal by exerting control over his own physical nature. Lots of comic heroes have had successful romantic relationships, but with Batman all of his romances are associated with him falling short of his ideal. I think Nolan picked up on this distinctive feature of Batman in the comics and translated it effectively to the screen.
I always remember Superman when talking about restraint. He respects the human (american) value system, protects us and doesn’t expect anything in return, even thought he’s a god among men. He just does what he does.
But maybe this is not such a restraint. After all, he seems to do all this naturally. Does that make him a better or worse hero?
Think about all the years he spend trying to understand crime, to learn about the mind of the criminal before Lian Neeson turned him into an awesome Ninja. He probably spend a night or two with a prostitue alongside his criminal “friends” to understand their mindset of cause…
I don’t recall him having criminal friends in the Nolan films. He is set up for a robbery, but I interpreted it as him and another like-minded person trying to bust up some robbers. I see him studying criminals, but not actually joining with them.
I think you’re misremembering. In Begins he is clearly pulling a heist of Wayne Enterprise products somewhere in China. There’s no indication he’s “setup” or trying to bust any other robbers. He even says he learned the thrill and fear before a crime is committed, etc.
I’d say Doc Savage was more the inspiration for Superman, or atleast a antecedent to the themes that Superman represents.
The Shadow is more of a Batman analogue form pulp stories, and he’s got the same links to Zorro going on.
This is only the Nolan Batman we’re talking about. Burton’s Batman nailed Vickie Vale and there was no bones about it.
The problem with lovers is that they open you up to vulnerabilities. Nolan’s Wayne can’t have that. He has too many enemies and too many secrets. I certainly see him with one night stands which are implied in BB. No complications, no long term hassles. By the time of TDK he’s stopped all that because he’s getting beat up too badly. The scars are starting to show. The repressed sexuality is obliquely referenced in the interrogation scene with The Joker.
The whole point is to show that The Batman is not a fun guy. Pretty fucked up and not handling it well. It’s what makes him such a compelling character.
This was brought up in the (unofficial) “World’s Finest” trailer, where Batman chastizes Superman for letting people get “too close” (presumably referring to Lois, who has the hots for Wayne and Superman).
Funny, I was thinking about Burton’s first Batman movie just the other day. For a movie that was supposed to be primarily about moving the merch and secondarily about Burton’s usual tropes, it’s got some surprisingly sophisticated bits that have to do with its protagonist’s and antagonist’s relationships toward women. Keaton’s Bruce Wayne, while being sufficiently intense, and even just a teeny bit creepy, when he’s doing something related to crimefighting (really, Keaton should play more villains–see, for example, his work in Pacific Heights), is surprisingly tentative when it comes to his relationship with Vicki Vale; when they sleep together, he gets up in the middle of the night to hang from his gravity boots (in addition to showing him being all bat-like, he seems to be uncomfortable with the prolonged skin contact), and later when they have dinner they’re at opposite ends of a very long table. Later yet, he tries to have a conversation with her about their relationship, but it’s so clumsy (perhaps in part because he’s trying to bring himself to talk about his secret identity, but can’t quite do it) that she has no idea what he’s trying to get at.
The Joker, on the other hand, quite unlike most of his depictions in the comics where he doesn’t seem particularly interested in relationships (besides the obsessive one with his antagonist), spends quite a lot of time with the women in his life, although he’s also a raging misogynist to a degree that even Philip Marlowe might find excessive. When he confronts his former boss just prior to killing him, even though he’s got his Joker act down pat already, he momentarily loses it as he talks about his boss setting him up (and his resulting disfigurement) over his affair with the boss’ girlfriend. He later scars the same girlfriend with acid, then later kills her, while promising to do the same to Vale. Even though the main target of his hatred becomes Batman (Jack Napier is also portrayed as being not just very vain but also narcissistic, since he directly tells his girlfriend that he doesn’t care if she finds him attractive), he takes time out to humiliate and disfigure these women. Pretty heavy for a movie that was supposedly made just to sell T-shirts and action figures, eh?
BTW, nice seeing a reference to Doc Savage. I remember reading a ton of them in the library when I was a kid. I didn’t think anyone remembered them any more.
Nicely written article, if you really wanted to dig into it Bruce not sleeping with those women would keep with the behavior of a billionaire looking to avoid a paternity suit.
Batman on Montel would look bad.
Batman is basically a justice-nerd. He devotes all his time and mental energies to justice that he hardly has time for relationships. This is the exact myth my adolescent self adhered to: I would be among the sex-havers if I weren’t so focused on intellectual pursuits. Of course, there is another valid interpretation that Batman is the omni-competent lady killer and ace detective (Iron Man without the bravado) that allows him to appeal to people who didn’t identify themselves among the social margins. But (and perhaps I am imagining this) the increasing prevalence of people self-identifying as nerds and other such social outsiders makes the former interpretation of Batman the more important one.
Incidentally, the reason why Batman is a better avatar of nerds than Spiderman (a more explicitly nerdy superhero) is that Batman’s nerdiness is dynamic. Peter Parker is a nerd, but Spiderman is not, and the superhero is nearly always the ‘real’ self between the heroic and alter-egos.
Kind of riffing off of the idea of “Bruce Wayne as nerd.” Wayne is depicted as obsessive about crime fighting. Like anyone who allows one interest to subsume everything in life, I’d imagine that he’s probably fairly socially awkward to people in his life who don’t know his secret. There are still probably women willing to sleep with him because he’s rich, famous, and attractive, but maybe he’s not quite as charming in-person that they would expect him to be. (I read a comic that used exactly this excuse – Bruce acts like a jerk when he’s on a one-on-one date with a woman specifically so she’ll want to go home and he’ll have an excuse to respond to a Bat-signal.)
Don’t you people know that Batman is gay?
There’s actually a very thorough article that tackles this exact subject here: http://www.comicsalliance.com/2012/04/30/the-gayness-of-batman-a-brief-history-opinion-morrison/
The short version: Batman is simultaneously heterosexual and very gay.
A great deal of ink (and, uh, other fluids) has been spilled on this very subject by a number of people; Frederic Wertham of Seduction of the Innocent infamy made much of the Batman-Robin relationship, and even claimed that a shadow drawn under Batman’s armpit was a subliminal suggestion of pubic hair. All tee-hee-look-at-those-tiny-shorts-on-Robin snickering aside, though, the Boy Wonder was put in the comics as a way to attract and keep teens and tweens as comics readers with a deliberate audience-identification figure, and is justified in-universe by Bruce Wayne realizing, on some level, how fucked-up his own childhood was and trying to get other young victims of violence to get it out of their systems while they were still able to. The real “gay Batman” of comics is The Midnighter, formerly of The Authority and now of Stormwatch, created by Warren Ellis as a Batman-analogue who was in a long-term relationship with a Superman-analogue (Apollo).
Also, don’t trust anything that Morrison says in interviews; he’s been well-known for a long time as a deliberate provocateur who will say any old shit to get attention.
Wait, wasn’t stormwatch wiped out by xenomorphs?
“But the temptation of the “real world” must weigh heavy on the hero’s mind. It nearly sways Bruce in The Dark Knight, when he promises to give up being Batman if Rachel will live with him.” This sounds awfully like the Last Temptation of Christ. Of course, the devil doesn’t kill Mary Magdalene and turn, um, maybe Caiphas into Two-Face in that movie either.
Uh, Bruce Wayne has had three biological kids at different points in time: He has a daughter with Selena Kyle named Helena “The Huntress” Kyle, a son with Vicki Vale named Bruce Wayne Jr (Batman Junior), and another son with Talia al Ghul named Damian “Ibn al Xu’ffasch” Wayne. Oh, and after Barbara Gordan (Batgirl) broke up with Dick Grayson (Original Robin), Bruce Wayne had a long time affair with her. He may be a closeted gay man, he may not, but he’s not a virgin. In his Bruce Wayne persona, he’s quite a player.
Oh, My bad, Bruce Wayne actually has more than 3 biological children. He’s had a son with Viki Vale named Bruce Wayne Jr, but he’s also had 2 other sons with Kathy Kane and Julie Madison also named Bruce Wayne Junior. And there was also his sons Terry and Matt McGinnis with Mary McGinnis but they were the result of some dodgy fertility treatments at Cadmus labs. So, again, probably not a virgin after 7 kids even if you do discount the youngest two.