Reflection

Despite an overwhelming abundance of violent and downright disturbing images in Batman:  The Dark Knight Returns, one images that especially resonates is that of the feral bat–a terrifying visage of razor-sharp fangs, gleaming yellow eyes, and a gaping blood-red mouth, described as “the fiercest survivor–the purest warrior.”  This creature appears early in the comic during a flashback scene in which a young Bruce Wayne falls into a cave and “witnesses” the beast of his nightmares.  During this first encounter, Bruce Wayne describes the creature as “claiming him as his own,” the bat becoming a physical manifestation of his fears, his anxieties, his dread, and his anger.

There are many instances in the comic where Frank Miller visually connects the image of the bat-creature with Bruce Wayne/Batman.  Perhaps the most intriguing example occurs on p. 26.  Following a harrowing, visual re-staging of the murder of his parents, Miller portrays a powerful internal struggle within Bruce Wayne, his distanced “rational” side arguing with the “primal,” raging voice of the beast.  On p. 26, Miller visually brings these two warring sides into direct conflict through a visual rhyme.  A series of panels alternate between close-ups of Wayne’s face and a bat rapidly approaching a window.  Each of the window panes comes together to form a cross and this cross-image is displayed across Bruce Wayne’s face.  As the bat comes right up to the window, its wings form a diagonal across the panel, an image exactly replicated in the form of a diagonal cross over Wayne’s face.  This symmetry of images merges the bat with Bruce Wayne, and in the final panel of the page, the enormous bat-creature crashes through the window, and the sky rumbles and crackles as Batman returns in his full glory.

Along with the image of the bat, the other striking repeated image in The Dark Knight Returns is the television screen.  A significant portion of the story is told through news reports, television debates, and prime time shows, and each of these sequences are visually framed with television-shaped panels.  The manner in which television is portrayed in the comic invites comparisons between how both television and graphic novels frame stories.  On p. 69, the gruesome murder of a woman in a subway is portrayed using a series of action-to-action shots.  The events culminate in a television panel where the newscaster reports “woman explodes in subway station.”  The visual explosion is never explicitly shown, it exists in the gutter, left completely to readers’ imaginations.  By placing the image of a news station at the climax of the event connects the manner in which graphic novels frame narratives and the manner in which news reports frame narratives; facts are related in chronological order, certain details are expressed, but many are left to the imaginations of viewers.

In this respect, the television screens and the image of the ancient bat-creature are used to similar effect.  The citizens of Gotham receive the story only through the fragmented lens of television.  Forced to fill in the gaps with their imaginations, the events become exaggerated, more terrible, resulting in mass hysteria.  Like the graphic novel, the media acts as a distorted mirror, reflecting viewers’ fears and anxieties.  The gruesome bat-creature functions in the same manner for Batman.  On p. 55, Batman says to Harvey Dent, “I see a reflection,” and the following panel contains the creature, and the next panel–Batman again, “a reflection,” the terrifying image of the ancient bat both a reflection and a physical manifestation of Batman’s dark imagination, of his deepest fears.