Super Heroes, Fashion and Ethnocentrism: Batman Case

Review:PASCARELLI

Batman does not have superpowers, neither he will have like Spider Man and Super Man. Batman is the unique heir of a fortune which made him compensate the absence of physical skills investing in technology.

The loss of his parents did not contribute to a gradual psychic growth, but instead in the search for justice confused with revenge.

The high technology is in Bat-Cave, in Bat-Car and in Bat-Clothes that protect him from fire, from falling and permit him to jump off great heights and even to fly! There is also a Bat-Belt, possibly inspired on the old Swiss penknife Victorinox.

Batman’s first appearance was on May, 1939 on the North American magazine Detective Comics.

The World War II that lasted from September 1st, 1939 to September 2nd, 1945 improved and transformed the character Batman and created other superheroes that served to the ethnocentric ideology of the North American people.

USA dominated the technology, conquered the technology and prevailed the rules of fashion. The same occurred to the British who for centuries dominated the naval technology and this is currently happening to the USA that is dominating the atomic technology.

Both American and British societies are heir cultures from their own that do not see “the other for the other”, but judge the rest of the cultures by their proximity or distance from their way of life – The American Life.

Abstracting from the cultural relativism, it imposes a globalized world through an aggressive marketing and a savage warlike capitalism with their ethnocentric values.

The ethical position implies on the ability to see “the other for the other” and not to judge the other from your cultural lens. It is a difficult culture relativism ability which opposes to all ideological impregnation.

According to Guimarães Rocha: “Ethnocentrism is a vision of the world where our own group is deemed as center of everything and all the others are thought and felt through our values, our models, our definitions of what is the existence. In the intellectual plan, it may be seen as the difficulty to think the difference. In the affective plan, it may be seen as feelings of strangeness, fear, hostility etc.” (“O que é etnocentrismo”, São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1999. Col. Primeiros Passos.)

Batman brings in his clothes all warlike technology that symbolically reflects the American culture that is ethnocentric and imposes to the rest of the world their democratic model through war. The U.S.A. which is the greatest world-wide economic power and has won the greatest amount of Nobel prizes is also the one with the biggest population in jail and of inmates in psychiatric hospitals. Why? Batman is sad, has a vampire aspect, affectively gotten dull, unpredictable and violent, despite all the technology he carries in his indestructible clothes. Gotham City is dark and underground, a sick city that remembers Chicago of the thirties, dominated by the Italian Mafia. Gotham City needs to have heroes to live without fear. But the terror is always latent because from the culverts and openings of Gotham City it appears enemies with flabbergasting technological powers: Joker, Cluemaster, Penguin and Mr. Freeze – all of them as psychotic and powerless as Batman.

Batman’s enemies carry in their clothes the evil that characterizes them. The hero’s ethnocentrism is the driving force to destroy them since they are different and incorrigible and cannot live in Gotham City pacifically. Both in Batman’s 60’s and 70’s series and in the films the hero transforms himself with elegant bat clothes while his enemies wear eccentric clothes that make them look ridiculous. That is the way the ethnocentric culture sees and judges the others: in a bizarre way, savage and always kitsch. The mission of this culture is to convert the others or, if impossible to convert, destroy them through the fine methods of the powerful warlike technology that it possesses – the ethnocide.

Translator: Renata da Silva.

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Super Heroes, Fashion and Ethnocentrism: Batman Case Originally published in Shvoong: http://www.shvoong.com/entertainment/movies/1939911-super-heroes-fashion-ethnocentrism-batman/