The character of Batman is not just a defining superhero from DC Comics. His enduring presence in pop culture across media has made him one of the most iconic fictional characters full stop. With six actors playing different incarnations of the character in live action movies, and countless more on the small screen, in animation, and in the comic source material itself, different generations have their own definitive incarnation in mind. What is less considered than the character’s oft-told origin story or rogues gallery is his implied and prolonged queer history, until Vera Drew’s The People’s Joker (2022) came along and reopened that door.
Batman’s early comic career was coloured by controversy. Fredric Wertham’s 1954 Seduction of the Innocent warned that the comic book industry was encouraging “problematic behaviours” in America’s children, including but not limited to violence, drug use, and – gasp – homosexuality. Batman was included as a notable example of what Wertham considered a homosexual agenda. Reference was made to his relationship with young sidekick Robin, an orphaned boy he adopts and trains in the way of crime fighting. This proposed dynamic is undeniably a problematic one for reasons unrelated to homosexuality (and profoundly not the authorial intent), but while Seduction of the Innocent has been criticised by many academics in his field, many audiences still view it through this lens.
The 1950s – the ‘Golden Age’ of comics – tended towards episodic stories, preferring light-hearted adventure over considered character drama. Batman was not afforded much in the way of a stable female love interest, and thus readers looked elsewhere, and too deeply into Robin, dressed in a tight-fitting spandex suit. The sixties television series adapts this style of camp serialisation, and Adam West and Burt Ward’s take on Batman and Robin inspire much of the same analysis. Ward wrote in his biography that he considered that Batman and Robin’s relationship could’ve been a romantic one, and any attempts at giving either of them an interest in the opposite sex (such as Eartha Kitt’s Catwoman in Batman (1966)) comes across as overcompensating. Andy Medhurst’s “Batman, Deviance, and Camp” describes the series as “a touchstone of camp” and argues that queer audiences engaged with the characters, who became icons due to being some of the first characters being attacked for perceived deviance and homosexuality.
While nineties comic books continued the industry’s trend into grit and pulp, Batman became inspired by such popular characters of the era as Marvel’s skull-chested Punisher and violent Wolverine. Tim Burton’s Batman comes as an expansion on these ideas, and strays toward serious over silly in its depiction of Gotham City. A further two Batman movies pick up from Tim Burton’s incarnation, Batman Forever (1995) and Batman and Robin (1997) but these could not be further from their predecessors. Directed by gay filmmaker Joel Schumaker, these films take the very slight silliness of Batman (1989) and Batman Returns (1992) and dial it up to eleven. Jim Carrey’s unfairly maligned Riddler is introduced as working as a tech expert at Bruce Wayne’s/Batman’s company, making a device to beam television signals into your brain, and becoming obsessed with the playboy billionaire. His descent into villainy comes after his rejection by his idol (Val Kilmer), but this rejection runs deeper subtextually than not investing in a television signal. His breakdown comes because of a crush unreciprocated, played like a vindictive ex-lover in Carrey’s portrayal. The move into spandex is, like his infatuation, only to be expected.
His breakdown comes because of a crush unreciprocated, played like a vindictive ex-lover in Carrey’s portrayal.
The introduction of the Chris O’Donnell portrayed Robin character into this universe was marked with similar queer undertones. The Robin costume, much like Batman’s, was mired with controversy for the inclusion of the prominent nipples and codpiece on the former. While Schumacher has described the decision as one to emulate the Greek gods (“they are anatomically correct), the implication to audiences was that it resembled the dress from queer and kink subcultures. Slate Magazine wrote at the time that Batman was a “sugar daddy”, with a “rough-trade” Robin, further adding “[Batman Forever] wasn’t queer subtext, it was queer domtext.”
Dr. Chase Meridian (Nicole Kidman) serves as Batman’s love interest in Batman Forever, introduced at a similar time to Robin. Batman spends the film choosing between his public life, the heterosexual potential relationship between Bruce Wayne and Dr. Meridian, while the ‘closeted’ life of Batman is represented through his relationship with his partner Dick Grayson. The climax of the film has Carrey’s Riddler trapping both and forcing Batman to choose between Chase and Dick. He saves both. He can have both. Continuing the suggestion of Batman wrestling between the two relationships, this moment serves as an implication of bisexuality – you don’t need to choose between genders you’re attracted to or whether you are Bruce Wayne or Batman. The rest of the film’s aesthetic is a similar level of camp creativity, with the colourful world of Gotham City extending to neon lights and Two-Face’s (Tommy Lee Jones) drag queen dressed girlfriends, Sugar (Drew Barrymore) and Spice (Debi Mazar).
The actors played into these themes as well; George Clooney speaks of his portrayal of the caped crusader in Batman and Robin that he played the character as gay. This is despite the inclusion of Poison Ivy (Uma Thurman), a hypersexual femme fatale who turns Batman and Robin against each other, fighting over who gets to receive the affections of the seductress. Ultimately however, the crux of the drama is a relationship breakdown between two men, Ivy’s femininity doesn’t do much in the way of convincing audiences of the heroes’ heterosexuality (whether this was the intention or not). There was also an introduction of two other romantic interests for the pair, but Julie Madison (Elle Macpherson) is comically underwritten, disappearing entirely from the narrative halfway through after a failed proposal to Bruce, while Batgirl (Alicia Silverstone) has a far more important central dynamic with her uncle Alfred (Michael Gough), her suggested relationship with Robin being pushed to the side. Ultimately, it becomes clear that Batman and Robin care far more for each other than for these shoehorned side characters.
Ultimately, however, the glorious camp heart of the Batman films was not to last. Audience reactions proved polarizing, the box office was disappointing and ultimately plans for a third Schumacher instalment Batman: Unchained never came to fruition. When Batman returned to the big screen, gone were the queer undertones, replaced with an attempt at the gritty realism of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy.
Christian Bale’s 21st Century Batman attempts to give the character a narrative trajectory. Batman Begins (2005) to The Dark Knight Rises (2012) showcases Bruce Wayne’s changes from mysterious urban legend vigilante to glorified cop. Nolan’s take on Batman starts with the simple motto: Batman takes on terrorism. While villain plans previously consisted of a cartoonish plot to freeze the planet for example, Heath Ledger’s mythologised Joker portrayal and Tom Hardy’s far less mythologised Bane conspire to commit acts of domestic terrorism. By comic-book movie standards, it’s as true to life as it gets.
The republican male wish fulfilment continues in the fact that this Batman is also the first to have a character arc fuelled by a female love interest. While all previous film’s short-lived romances were one and done affairs, his relationship with childhood friend Rachel Dawes (Katie Holmes, Maggie Gyllenhaal) survived the change in actresses to become a throughline of the franchise. Her role as the protagonist’s moral compass makes her largely in Batman Begins, and at the conclusion of the movie she rejects Bruce until Gotham “no longer needs its hero”. Their romantic tension continues into The Dark Knight (2008), where Joker correctly identifies Rachel as Batman’s greatest attachment, and so ‘breaks the bat’ by having her killed. While continuing the problematic comic trope of “fridging” – killing off a female character to service the arc of a male one – this also highlights the value of his childhood love to Batman. Previous incarnations of romance felt entirely forced, but Nolan centres the pairing, and by extension subdues any queer elements or readings.
The Dark Knight Rises is the last film in the trilogy, and the first not to include Rachel, but not to worry! Nolan finds time to introduce another female love interest in Anne Hathaway’s Catwoman, a latex-wearing seductive burglar, whose first scene is stealing Bruce’s “family jewels”. No wonder he’s attracted to her. Matt Reeves’ most recent Batman film also employs the Catwoman character (Zoe Kravitz) as a romantic interest to Robert Pattinson’s brooding emo take on the character. This time, they make her bisexual! In interviews… The actual character on-screen has a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it reference to a relationship with her roommate, and it’s never touched upon further. The bar sinks lower.
The actual character on-screen has a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it reference to a relationship with her roommate, and it’s never touched upon further. The bar sinks lower.
While the plot of The Dark Knight Returns ends with Batman sacrificing himself to stop a nuclear bomb from blowing up his city, a coda shows Alfred (Michael Caine) sitting at a cafe watching the bat and cat dining together, idyllically living out a regular (coded: rich) life away from superheroics. While the two don’t really share much screen time or chemistry, Nolan makes sure to have Batman’s happy ending arrive in the form of an attractive woman to spend the rest of his life with. The heterosexual ideal.
No matter how much Nolan tries, however, he is ineffective at escaping the prolific queer reading of the Joker. The clown has historically been the dark knight’s archnemesis, and thus his inclusion in film has tended toward a mirrored relationship. The dialogue they share together is so ridiculously queer-coded that it’s a wonder Frederic Wertham didn’t crawl out of his grave to attack Batman yet again. The fact they are trying to kill each other is no less romantic. “Why would I wanna kill you? […] You.. you complete me” remains one of the most cited lines when discussing the famous adversarial relationship, and it is just one example of how much Joker fawns over the thorn in his side. The character is intrinsically tied to queer subcultures – just putting on clown makeup ties him to drag queen traditions. Regardless of the realism aesthetic Nolan goes for, drawing on history and current politics in his interpretation of the character, there’s no escaping just how queer the characters are.
When Zack Snyder got his take on Batman in the fledgling stages of his (soon to fall apart) DC Extended Universe, he didn’t think about a queer reading of the comic book characters at all. “Some people have said to me, ‘Your movie is homoerotic,’ and some have said, ‘Your movie’s homophobic.’ In my mind, the movie is neither. But I don’t have a problem with people interpreting it the way they’d like to.” While disregarding the decades of queer fandom surrounding Batman and DC’s other premier superhero Superman in Batman vs Superman (2016), Snyder still constructs the two as bitter rivals in opposition to each other. Both attempt to prove their masculinity to each other after Superman emasculates Batman by destroying his large – and phallic – tower. While Snyder is only interested as character to serve the themes of patriotism, masculinity, and the war on terror, this didn’t stop audiences from finding the pair’s dynamic homoerotic. Especially as the film’s release coincided with the internet’s rise in “shipping” relationships, and the culture of pairing two popular male characters.
Like many other villains I’ve already mentioned, Jesse Eisenberg’s Lex Luthor is queer-coded. The repeated framing of these villains as homoerotic foils to the protagonists in films which abandon a camp aesthetic reinforces historical ‘gay panic’ tropes, with the hypermasculine heroes positioned as a direct antithesis to deviant, predatory antagonists. Eisenberg’s portrayal draws on his star-turn as Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network. as well as Carrey’s Joker, blending the comic characters with real-world political and cultural figures. The mesh creates a tonal dissonance between what audiences familiar with the source material might expect of the character compared to what is received. The bald suit-wearing villain is so different to the atypical neurotic creep that Eisenberg delivers that it makes the tacked-on queer coding even more disappointing in this very heteronormative film.
The queer tension between protagonist and antagonist is enough of a staple of the superhero genre (and the Batman character) that it is satirised in The Lego Batman Movie (2017). This spin-off of The Lego Movie (2014) sees Batman (Will Arnett) repeatedly deny that Joker (Zach Galifianakis) is his archenemy – and doesn’t mean anything to him. The allusions to a romance between the pair is obvious even by kids’ film standards, Joker pleading that “you’re seriously saying that there’s nothing special about us?” To which Batman responds that “there is no ‘us’. Never will be.” While the hero’s character arc is about learning to trust and work with other people, the narrative resolution is his admittance that Joker really is his arch nemesis and only then do the two work together, literally and figuratively joining together in an embrace to stop Gotham City from destroying itself.
The caricature of the comic book film industry on display in the Lego Batman Movie demonstrates that this relationship between Batman and Joker is a recurring trope across adaptations. When Joker appears in the DCEU in Suicide Squad (2016), Jared Leto’s diabolical gangster swaggers on-screen with damaged tattooed on his forehead. It doesn’t work, from the script’s insistence on an edgy portrayal, and Leto’s try hard method acting. Leto’s Joker’s position in the story is to act as an abusive ex-partner who Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn doesn’t realise is toxic. Audiences rallied against this figure, and the film generally, mostly because it wasn’t particularly compelling. A simple shot in The People’s Joker of the Leto-inspired Mistah J lying on a floor of knives, taken directly from Suicide Squad, had audiences falling apart laughing at the mere reminder to the film’s existence. There’s also something to be said about the how uninteresting the Joker is when he is not interacting with his usual foil. Then they tried it again.
For a moment in time, before the sequel undid all goodwill, Todd Phillips’ Joker (2019) looked like it might revolutionise the comic book movie industry, and have it taken seriously by awards bodies. Joaquin Phoenix takes one of the most enduring fictional villains and uses him as a springboard for exploring mental health and a failing society. Unfortunately, stealing and reappropriating the best parts of seminal Scorsese classics (Taxi Driver, The King of Comedy) and handing them off to the director of The Hangover does not make for a compelling watch. Phoenix’s Joker is fascinatingly pitiful and uncomfortable on-screen, but his endless monologues and critiques of the vague “society” remain drab and frustrating to sit through. It came as little surprise, therefore, when general audiences rallied against more of the same in the musical sequel Joker: Folie à Deux (2024), even if they didn’t recognise the flaws in the original. The discussion of mental health is to be applauded in an otherwise thematically thin genre, but after the colossal failings of this sequel, it remains unlikely we will see something similar for a long while.
I mentioned previously that the queer content of the Joker is undeniable, a flamboyantly dressed and effeminate character, but Phillips’ dreary direction sucks all the life out of him. The character is not adapted in anything other than name only, an IP to get people in seats (which undeniably worked, – crossing $1 billion worldwide). While this might in theory sidestep some of the problematic undertones that making this lunatic fringe figure into a queer icon might create, the duology still manages to slip into the some of the same problems, disregarding any positive representations in favour of sexual assault. Folie à Deux sees Arthur Fleck abused by the prison guards, with an equation of homosexual desire with violence and trauma. Similarly, Arthur enjoys a companionship with another effeminate inmate, and they kiss to the jeering laughter of the guards – homosexuality as another symptom of crazy. Reclaiming the Joker, a character with a history of adaptations erasing any queer undertones or adopting only the worst parts might be a difficult thing to do. But Vera Drew’s work in The People’s Joker does it masterfully.
Unlike many of the previously mentioned films which adapt the comic book mythos of the Caped Crusader, The People’s Joker is unapologetically and unabashedly queer. The film opens with a young version of our future protagonist – a trans girl not yet having discovered herself. She starts to question her gender identity at the debut of Schumacher’s Batman Returns, the real-life film existing within the world of the movie as well. This immediate allusion to the history of the character on-screen cements The People’s Joker as navigating within the landscape of the cinematic examples which have come before it, weaving a history and drawing out the queer undertones that have always been present.
This referential humour continues with a long series of cameos that persist throughout the film, which drawn on Batman mythos and microcelebrities whose comedic history intersects with the depiction of the Saturday Night Live parody. Bob Odenkirk cameos as Bob the Goon, Tim Heidecker appears as Perry White (in a parody of far-right commentator Alex Jones), while Robert Wuhl (a supporting actor in Batman ‘89) pops up as himself via a Cameo denouncing the film’s use of the personalized video sharing website in a brief gag that furthers the film’s positioning as adjacent to reality.
The film depicts many of the classic Batman rogues through a queer lens – a non-binary CGI plant interpretation of Poison Ivy (Ruin Carroll) serves as the muscle who ultimately disposes of both the antagonistic Batman (Phil Braun) and Lorne Michaels (Maria Bamford). Joker the Harlequin (Drew) is an obvious queer portrayal of the Joker, drawing on much of the imagery of Joker while also serving as a composite of Suicide Squad’s Harley Quinn. Her love interest Mistah J (Kane Carroll), a composite of Jared Leto’s Joker and the Jason Todd character, is where much of the conflict of the film lies. Initially presented as a troubled comedian with a history of trauma and predatory behaviour inflicted upon him by Batman, a deeply closeted far-right gay man here, his violent tendencies begin to manifest, and the relationship turns abusive, mirroring that of the comic book Joker and Harley Quinn. Jason is an atypical abuser when considering typical media portrayals of an abusive relationship, but this could still be seen as a step forward in the depiction of queer people. Showing trans characters on-screen should not make them unrealistically perfect pure souls, but instead should demonstrate the truth behind queerness, warts and all.
Showing trans characters on-screen should not make them unrealistically perfect pure souls, but instead should demonstrate the truth behind queerness, warts and all.
Other than Jason, the closing emotional moments of the film revolve around Joker the Harlequin’s relationship to her mother (Lynn Downey), a woman who faced with her own ineptitude at parenting her young child, forced her onto the ‘Smylex’ drug to deal with her growing gender dysphoria. There are brief attempts at an awkward, stilted, reunion which ultimately ends poorly, and with the mother in the hospital. By the crux of the film, as Mx Mxyzptlk takes the protagonist through the fifth dimension, her final wish (after the inspired choice of making the Penguin (Nathan Faustyn) into the new Batman) is to have one happy memory of her childhood. But Mxy tells her she already has. The film ends with the young Joker and her mother singing along in the car to “The Joker”, an emotionally resonant moment to the previous two-hour chaotic maelstrom. Comedy and parody and queerness brings audiences together in this celebration of superhero identity intersecting with pride, and this togetherness culminates in a heartfelt emotional moment made even more powerful by the experience of watching the film, but also the collective history of sixty years of Batman media.
Alex On Film 