Arkham Asylum: A Serious House On Serious Earth. Set in the infamous Arkham Asylum psychiatric facility, where many of Batman's greatest foes, including the Joker, Two-Face, Scarecrow, Black Mask, Clayface, the Mad Hatter, and Killer Croc are locked up, Batman faces his most formidable enemy yet: his own mind. After Arkham's inmates usurp control over the facility, Batman is called in by Commissioner Gordon to deal with the situation directly. Little does he know, however, that the cesspool of evil contained within Arkham will cause him to lose grasp on his own morality.
At its core, Arkham Asylum is not a superhero story, but it is, however, still a Batman story. That is because Batman himself, through Morrison's eyes and McKean's artwork, is not a superhero. It can be argued that the heavy crime genre influence on some of the most popular Batman stories of all time supersede their superhero elements. There is also the fact that Batman himself has no superpowers. When viewed through this lens, the ethos behind Morrison's writing and McKean's haunting art becomes even more clear: Batman is not a superhero, but a deeply traumatized man struggling to make peace with the sheer amount of evil he witnesses as Gotham's Dark Knight.
When viewed outside the realm of being a superhero, Batman enters much more compelling, and disturbing, territory, which Morrison takes full advantage of in crafting Arkham Asylum's terrifying story. Their writing uses gothic story elements such as madness, the psychiatric hospital setting, and psychological torment. Coupled with McKean's deliberate obscuring of Batman's appearance throughout the comic, the gothic atmosphere of Arkham Asylum is more in line with gothic literature such as Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart than standard superhero fare. Unlike a great bulk of superhero stories, the conflict at the heart of Arkham Asylum is not a struggle between good and evil, but a struggle between distinguishing whether or not one's actions are truly separate from evil to begin with.
Instead, Arkham Asylum is a story that picks apart the moral pitfalls of the superhero genre's most popular conventions. The first of these is the lack of action with minimal fight sequences rendered to deliberately obscure Batman's body in combat. Aside from being a bold stylistic choice, it is also because the comic's conflict cannot be solved through physical means ordinarily expected of Batman, but rather through psychological and moral examination. This is not a comic meant to bolster images of Batman's physical prowess against his foes, or even his ability to outwit his enemies with his detective skills, but to reveal the darkest corners of his mind.
The Evil in Arkham Asylum Is Psychological, Not Physical.
The comic's departure from the superhero genre hinges on the role that psychology plays in the story, namely as a means to examine the ways that evil exists in Gotham. Superhero comics have long been concerned with depicting the fight against good and evil, with each moral force seen as an innate quality embodied by the heroes and villains. For instance, Lex Luthor is clearly an evil person, which stands in sharp contrast to the wholesome goodness exemplified in Clark Kent.
The psychological emphasis in Arkham Asylum is at odds with the superhero genre because evil does not exist on the same digestible moral paradigm as most superhero comics. Rather, evil is shown to be a psychological quality found in humans, rather than an external force or ideology that can be easily defeated through combat. And while this might seem like it asserts a dangerous dynamic where mental illness is inherently evil, Morrison avoids this by showing how Batman himself may also be mentally ill.
This makes for a very different take on evil, one that is as horrifying for Batman to discover as it is for the reader. The most devastating aspect about it is that the psychological evil that permeates Gotham cannot be "cured," whether medically or through crimefighting, because it is a human trait. This calls into question the usefulness of a hero like Batman to begin with. Evil cannot be defeated by superhero fights, because it cannot be defeated at all.
There Are No Heroes In The Story, But Victims And Perpetrators.
Psychology then assumes the role that a conventional superhero would have in this story. It is expected to be the white knight that rids the city of its bad seeds, comfortably explaining away the existence of evil in Gotham. Through Amadeus Arkham's storyline, psychology is shown to be over-relied on in people's attempts to understand evil. Arkham tries to treat the man who horrifically murdered his wife and daughter, only to later kill him after enduring months of brutal descriptions of their deaths.
Similarly, the insistence that, for someone like the Joker, there must be a psychiatric explanation or diagnosis for his behavior instead exposes the ways that humanity is ill-equipped to reckon with the reality of evil in Gotham. As Morrison's writing reveals, the obsession with painting villains like the Joker as deviant on an invisible, cellular level is done to separate them from the general population (hence their exile to Arkham Asylum). In expelling them, Gotham is made to feel safe from the illusion that evil has been ousted. But in reality, evil is something any person is capable of, demonstrated by Amadeus Arkham's actions, and the specific taunts that Batman is subjected to in the asylum.
Crucial to Morrison's departure from the superhero genre is the characterization of the villains that Batman comes across in Arkham. Instead of being safely larger-than-life figures, as is typical for the genre, the villains are deeply depraved and grotesque visions of Batman's greatest fears who assault him in highly personal ways. The Mad Hatter, for instance, tells him, "Sometimes I think the Asylum is a head. We're inside a huge head that dreams us all into being. Perhaps it's your head, Batman. Arkham is a looking glass. And we are you." The "looking glass" that the Mad Hatter speaks of refers to the way that Batman's life has been shaped by harm, which in turn has led him to seek reprieve from it through apprehending criminals.
Arkham Is A Reflection Of The Costs Of Being Batman.
Batman's function in the story, then, is not to defeat the evil in Arkham, but to discover that there is little that separates him from the foes who live there. He effectively becomes a stand-in for society and Gotham at large that finds it easier to isolate examples of evil within a few individuals without acknowledging the broader social conditions that allow evil to proliferate. As Batman leaves Arkham at the end of the story, the Joker tells him, "Enjoy yourself out there. In the Asylum. Just don't forget–if it ever gets too tough... there's always a place for you here." The Joker shows that evil is not contained in Arkham, despite the illusion that it is, because of every human's capacity for it.
Arkham Asylum does not envision Batman as a superhero because it goes at great lengths to not characterize him as an easily digestible moral ideal. Instead, he is just a man in a suit–a man capable of evil just as much as the man who calls himself the Joker, a man capable of doling out as much harm as he is receiving it. There is nothing inherently special about Bruce Wayne or Batman in this story, except for his willingness to stare into the depths of Gotham's most repressed images of itself.
In Arkham Asylum, Grant Morrison shows that Batman is not a superhero ready to swoop in at a moment's notice to protect the moral sanctity of Gotham. Instead, Arkham Asylum documents the limitations of the superhero approach in general. Seldom does might ever completely rectify human suffering, and it certainly never does if it is done under the guise of black and white moral righteousness.
When viewed apart from the conventions of the superhero genre, Batman is freed from expectations of both physical and moral exceptionalism. Instead, he can be seen for the deeply wounded person that he is, living in a city so corrupt that the only effective curse of action he finds is violence unto himself and unto others. It is difficult for Batman to be seen as a fantasy when the effects of it are described so excruciatingly in Arkham Asylum. Removed from this world, Batman emerges as a fascinating character study into the limits that the human mind and body will go when it believes it is acting on behalf of millions. The psychology of Bruce Wayne's decision to dress as his childhood fear and deliberately venture into the decadent moral center of Gotham with nothing but his familial wealth and combat training has proven to be endlessly inspiring for generations of Batman writers. And Arkham Asylum is just one piece in this portrait of a troubled, and yet honorable, man.
