I was very much a child in the fall of 2003, still protected in some sense by the insouciance of my age and upbringing, but not immune to events past and to come. Only two years prior had I witnessed, from my French class window, black smoke drifting across the city skyline, being told to remain in class, watching as the Senator’s daughter was collected and escorted by detail from the room. The world, the whole world, our collective memory and the trajectory of our lives on the grandest scale, was forever changed on that day in September. Two years later, the U.S. Government’s “War on Terror” had escalated into “Operation Iraqi Freedom” and the farce of the Iraq War.
These were things that, as a New Yorker with a budding sense of social awareness, I was cognizant of, saddened and disgusted by, anxious about, but not entirely invested in. When my folks volunteered to help at ground zero, I had the vague desire to help out too. If not allowed as a child to risk my life in rescue efforts, then maybe, I thought, I could assist with time and charity, donating supplies to frontline workers and families in need, making space for Muslim brothers and sisters who would become objects of reactionary hate. But at the end of the day, the tragedy of this new world remained at a distance, landing squarely on the shoulders of the adults that created it. And I, still very much a child in the fall of 2003, was looking forward to Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso taking the reins on DC’s Batman series.
Batman: Broken City was published hot on the heels of Jeph Loeb, Jim Lee, and Scott Williams’s legendary twelve-issue Hush story arc. DC needed to follow the wildly popular Hush run with something a bit different, but no less intriguing for their flagship title. Broken City was to be a six-part story arc (Batman #620-625) featuring the brilliant team behind Vertigo’s risqué 100 Bullets.
Azzarello was at the height of comic success with 100 Bullets and his take on the Bat, rooted in classic and pulp noir literature, was a dream for fans who liked their Dark Knight extra dark. His hard-nosed narration was complemented by Risso’s art style, so unlike the clean lines and lantern-jawed heroism of a George Pérez or Jim Lee. On offer from Risso was a deliberately uglier, grittier, more impressionistic vision of Gotham and its underbelly. Patricia Mulvihill, who first joined Azzarello and Risso on issue 15 of 100 bullets, colors notable rogues in stark contrast to the muddy gradients of the city, its inky shadows, and its brooding grayscale champion. With elegant, unobtrusive letters (speech bubbles/boxes) provided by Clem Robins, the Broken City creative team was a complete 100 Bullets import. Covers were provided by Dave Johnson and the book was overseen by a handful of DC editors including Bob Schreck, Will Dennis, Zach Rau, and Casey Seijas.
Broken City was highly anticipated. Readers were curious to see what Azzarello and Risso could do with DC’s caped crusader. Unfortunately, midway through the run, many readers began to sour on the narrative. And by the arc’s conclusion, several had turned away in complete disappointment. It was not at all the epic conclusion one would expect for such a larger than life hero. To this day, Broken City inspires hate-it-or-love-it reactions (in those who haven’t forgotten it altogether).
As a child, I remember feeling ambivalent about the story’s ending. As an adult, nearly two decades later, I consider Broken City a masterpiece. What many considered a lazy and bathetic (anti-climactic) conclusion finally makes sense to me. Why? Because like the above panels from the first issue of 100 Bullets, a thematic preoccupation of Azzarello and Risso was living with the unbearable guilt and grief of the unforgivable. How they chose to resolve the narrative of Broken City was by revisiting the unresolved.
Still very much a child in the fall of 2003, not entirely invested in anything other than myself, I couldn’t quite grasp the significance of an ending that wasn’t an ending at all—or a hurt that keeps on hurting.
“...forgiveness forgives only the unforgivable.”
—Jacques Derrida “On Forgiveness”
Algerian-French philosopher Jacques Derrida’s On Forgiveness was shared/written in response to questions posed by French intellectual journal Le Monde des débats in winter 1999. Derrida (1930-2004), if you’re not familiar, was a philosopher, theorist, and philologist largely responsible for a model of thought referred to as deconstruction. It is a quintessentially post-modern mode that challenges notions of authenticity, purity, idealism and insists instead that linguistic concepts and ideas can be broken into their constituent parts, ad-infinitum. A bit mis-en-abyme. Put another way, his idea is that no idea is original, that everyone and everything comes from somewhere, something else—and that elsewhere also comes from somewhere, something else. And on and on…until we’ve come to the realization that the structures, institutions, and concepts we take for granted as absolute are instead rather arbitrary and worth scrutinizing if we are to (asymptotically) approach something like “understanding”. “Precisely because the difficulty emerges in the name of and because of unconditional principles, it is therefore irreducible to these simplicities (empiricist, relativist, or pragmatist).” (56-57)
Languages are meaning-making matrices predicated on recursive reference. We understand words (concepts, ideas, objects) by referring to other words (in absence of the sign or object we’re attempting to name) because we don’t understand them at all. For example, we often describe the abstraction of “red” as passionate, romantic, urgent, violent (as in the color of blood), ascribing to it particular qualities not inherent to the thing itself. Or perhaps we understand and describe a particular color scientifically, red light as optically of a higher frequency and shorter wavelength than light approaching the blue end of the visible spectrum. You realize, there are so many ways to look at red—and that’s the joy and agon of Derridean deconstruction.
On Forgiveness applies this deconstructionist framework to the concept of “forgiveness” and the social expectations we tie to justice. Derrida examines larger geopolitical movements (South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the wake of apartheid, life after the Shoah, Algeria’s post-colonial condition) to further detangle and entangle our notion of what it means to truly forgive and he arrives at the idea that “…forgiveness forgives only the unforgivable.” What?
So what’s the point? “In principle, there is no limit to forgiveness, no measure, no moderation, no ‘to what point?’.” (27) This is Derrida’s intervention. He is troubling the notion of forgiveness as something that is, in essence, an impossible (unmeasurable) ideal. If forgiveness is a transactional proposition (whereby one forgives or is forgiven for a trespass by “doing time” or “paying penance”) then it’s just that—a transactional agreement. After the terms of the contract have been fulfilled, we still have to deal with the emotional and psychic scars of whatever happened.
When left to ourselves with the eerie, unsettling quiet that mirrors our souls, we are forced to confront certain truths about the choices we’ve made, the choices made for us, and the traumas that altered our staid notions of a just and balanced universe. And in those moments, we sit in judgment of all that we remember (and sorta remember) of the chronology that led us to this moment. Let’s not forget the end of Salinger’s Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut, in which a drunken Eloise pleas to her old friend Mary Jane “I was a nice girl…wasn’t I?”
What Eloise is looking for is some affirmation that she’s not a waste of space on this planet, that her life has meaning and that she is, however pained and blinded by circumstances, doing her best with what she’s been given. Many of us nurse this quiet ache in one way or another. Maybe this is what star-gazing is all about, the desire to understand the cosmic anomaly of the individual on an absolute scale, recovering humanity from a kind of moral or ontological dysmorphia. We have this propensity to underestimate the weight of our misdeeds or overstate our victimhood—because how could we ever properly measure the full weight and ramifications of our actions and reactions?
I’m not at all arguing for or against moral relativism. Rather, poorly parroting Derrida that there should not be an easy answer to these questions. And that’s unfortunate, right? Because I too want to fulfill my happily ever after. I want to know that “I was a nice girl…” Right?
“What I dream of, what I try to think as the ‘purity’ of a forgiveness worthy of its name, would be a forgiveness without power: unconditional but without sovereignty.”
There are several translations for the word sin. Judeo-Christian notions of sin were first coded in Koine Greek as ἁμαρτία or hamartia. Though this Greek term has origins in Aristotle’s Attic treatment of the tragic hero (hamartia being their tragic flaw). Christian hamartia (derivative of the Hebrew concept) is akin to an archery term meaning to have missed the mark. A sin is an error in judgment, poor aim, a mistake. And mistakes have consequences—some of which we might deem unforgivable, if for no other reason than they cannot be undone, unseen, unexperienced. Slavery, apartheid, genocide—these are irrevocable folds in the fabric of history and memory. Such sin, such trespass, of course exists between individuals on infinitely smaller scale with no less gravity. Sadder still are instances where only one person carries the burden of grief and memory.
So if forgiveness is impossible, what then? Are we meant to live with guilt and grief? If only there were some way to accurately gauge these questions, a way to adjudicate the weight of sin stacked against the griefs of those affected by it.
“What I dream of, what I try to think as the ‘purity’ of a forgiveness worthy of its name, would be a forgiveness without power: unconditional but without sovereignty.” (59). It’s no wonder the scale remains a symbol of equity and justice. It was a tool meant to measure disparities and adjust equivalences. But Derrida is arguing that, for true forgiveness, the tool must be thrown out. The offending party must perennially acknowledge their offense and submit themselves to the offended and the offended must…by some merciful miracle…remain unwilling to lord over the offender the compensatory weight of their offense.
At our best, we need the courage to accept the reality of what we’ve done or what’s been done to us. We carry our traumas bodily out of some primordial need to keep track of where not to go and what not to do. We were not meant to forget as a measure of forgiveness. Neither were we meant to live lives frozen in fear, in guilt, in shame.
Still very much a child in the fall of 2003, I couldn’t imagine that adulthood and maturity meant accepting the burden of our precarious responsibility to and for each other. But I would soon learn, as we all do, that life is complex and, more often than not, unresolved, irreducible.
Two things Broken City does notably well: prosopopoeia (a fancy academic word for personification) and bathos (a fancy academic word for anti-climax). Fair warning: a few spoilers for Broken City are ahead. Now is your chance, if you’d like, to read it and come back. This article will still be here and so will the option to…
From the outset, Azzarello’s text grants Batman/Bruce Wayne’s interiority a degree of theodicean frustration (theodicy: if God is good, why does evil exist?). God, of course, has no place in Gotham. Unlike Metropolis, inhabited by the deific embodiment of truth and justice, Batman must do the work of purging the city himself. He’s investigating the death of Elizabeth Lupo. He knows who murdered her (Killer Croc, here styled as a brutal and grotesque pimp), but after interrogating him, Batman realizes Killer Croc was hired to commit the crime by someone else. He soon suspects Elizabeth Lupo’s brother, Angel Lupo, a used car salesman and small time crook. He tracks Angel to a rundown hotel and, finally in hot pursuit of the suspect, Batman hears gunshots. Down a dark alley he finds a child huddled over his now dead parents. He assumes Angel shot them while trying to flee. The murder of this boy’s parents offers a curious narrative instance of gratuitous violence that triggers Batman’s guilt complex and the reaction formation that led him to don a mask and fight crime.
Broken City, Part 1, sets us up with the primary plot: why did Angel Lupo have his sister murdered? But the plot diverges in some unexpected and, I think, satisfying ways. In part due to this particular characterization of an icon we’re already familiar with.
Azzarello’s is a Batman haunted. He thinks of himself as the embodiment of a broken city, one he’s determined (til the very end and beyond) to heal, to repair. In this sense, Batman ventriloquizes Gotham. Here is that prosopopoeia. It’s not simply that Batman is Gotham and Gotham is Batman’s city. It’s that Batman is the broken city, city of hurt. And his determination to fix the city is also a determination to fix his own brokenness.
After the set up of the first issue, each of the succeeding five issues features Batman/Bruce Wayne waking from some variation on the same nightmare. He is subconsciously revisiting a foundational trauma.
Such is life, right? No matter how much work you’ve done in recognizing it was not your fault, no matter how much you’ve done to atone, no matter how much anger you’ve set aside—the grief remains, the memory remains, the pain remains. The fibrotic tissue of a scar, however healed, is never the same and forever after prone to tear in the same way, more painful, more brutal than before (especially if not taken care of).
With each nightmarish sequence, in each succeeding issue, we gather a more lucid picture of what happened the night his parents were murdered. And we soon realize why adult Bruce Wayne feels so much guilt.
Young Bruce threw a tantrum when his parents refused to take him to see The Mark of Zorro at the theater. Feeling a bit guilty themselves after their son’s tantrum, Martha and Thomas Wayne cave in (as kind parents are wont to do) and take him to see the movie anyway. At the theater young Bruce feels a bit awkward, realizing his emotional extortion was the reason they went to see the movie. Though victorious, he can’t quite enjoy the film, marred as it is by the bittersweet realization that his parents have taken their bratty, beloved child to the movies because they want him to be happy. Things only get worse when they’re confronted and murdered by an armed robber.
This is the guilt and shame Bruce Wayne carries. One that compels him, again, to fight crime. The best Batman writers understand the trauma and try not to personalize the crime that created him. That the murderer remain nameless and faceless is partly what haunts him (and us). It was a wanton act. One from which the murderer, the obviously evil and guilty party, was allowed to escape from. That fateful night, it was the innocent who suffered loss, and the child Bruce Wayne was forced to confront that ugly truth, that moral ambiguity.
When Batman realizes that Angel Lupo had not, in fact, been the one to order the hit on his sister (a mistake that leads to Lupo’s death) he’s left with yet another question. If Lupo wasn’t a killer, who killed the boys parents in Part 1?
Here comes the bathos. After Batman recovers the murder weapon, he decides to visit the child who’s now confined to a bed in hospital. He drops the gun in the boy’s lap and watches as, reflexively, the child, eyes wide and lifeless, picks up the gun and starts firing into the ether. We realize then, just as Batman realized, that it was the child who murdered his own parents. Detective Allen, a good cop working the case for the GCPD, walks in to discover the same.
An act of wanton violence—one that mirror’s Batman/Bruce Wayne’s own guilt. He too, in some cruel twist of fate, murdered his own parents. If he’d never thrown that tantrum, if they’d never gone to see that film, if they’d never turned the corner on that alley, they’d still be alive. And no therapist in the world could convince this billionaire who nightly puts on a mask and cape that it’s otherwise. This is, after all, how Bruce Wayne copes with his truth.
Several felt it was a lazy ending. But as an occasional adult reader of Batman comics, I think this was a unique and haunting spin on the character. It is deliberately bathetic, lacking the bombast of a traditional capes and cowls narrative. And, let’s face it, superhero comics are very much a part of the endeavor of American empire, privileging the whiteness under the mask, even if only aesthetically. But Azzarello and Risso’s Broken City, in choosing bathos, offers us pathos in a character typically scripted as larger than life. In so doing, the creative team made a small turn away from the super to plunges readers into the mundane, uncanny, and absurd.
There is no easy answer to how we deal with the ghosts that haunt us. Wounds demand a care and attention specific to their nature or they fester, get worse. The work of forgiving oneself or others is not at all glamorous and, more often than not, a messy and painful affair—one that frequently requires revisiting what cannot be undone. But you don’t have to don a mask and cape to make amends, to forgive the unforgivable (if such a thing is possible) or free yourself of the unspeakable burdens of trauma. If you have the courage to deal with your ghosts at all, you are, in my estimation, an admirable and (maybe even) heroic person. A better person for it.