"DETROIT -- A man dressed as Batman was arrested on Wednesday after police in a small Michigan town found him hanging off the side of a building and carrying concealed weapons including a baton and a can of chemical irritant spray.Police in Petoskey, in northwest Michigan, received a call reporting that a man dressed as Batman, a comic book hero and the subject of a number of blockbuster movies, was on the roof of a building in the center of the town of about 6,000 people.Officers found Mark Wayne Williams, 31, hanging off the western wall of the building. They pulled him back onto the roof and found he was carrying the baton, spray and a pair of lead-lined gloves.Williams was charged with several counts of carrying concealed weapons, one count of carrying a gas-ejecting weapon and another count of creating a disturbance, said John Calabrese, public safety chief in Petoskey."He really didn't offer us any explanation," Calabrese said when asked why Williams was in costume. "Our officers did not interrogate him at any length."Calabrese said it was not the first time Williams has appeared in public in costume. A few years ago, he caught the attention of police by dressing as the Crow, a figure from a graphic novel."
Not me.
The thing I like most about that article, other than the subject matter itself, is that they felt the need to explain what the word "Batman" means. Oh, is Batman a comic book hero and the subject of several movies? As an archaeologist reading this newspaper in the year 3457, I appreciate the helpful context.
The rest of us were, I think, well aware. The article isn't news otherwise. Look at the last sentence there--do you think this same guy made the internet rounds when he dressed up as The Crow? Probably not. That's partially because the Crow is less well-known*, but mostly because the story is not "Dude dressed up in costume when it wasn't Halloween".
The story is the picture. The story is "That guy thought he was Batman?" The media and the internet (not just this story, but the way it has been passed around) armed with the picture, turned what is probably a story of mental illness into a joke about masculinity. The real joke is on us, though; it just goes to show that our modern icons of masculinity are fictional characters. That's a step down from, say, the action heroes of the 80s and 90s, who were at least actual human beings. Theoretically you could be, say, Arnold Schwarzenegger** if you just lifted enough weights and maybe did some steroids. And he had human flaws, too, like his accent, or Kindergarten Cop. But Mark Williams is never going to be Batman, and neither are you.***
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*And rightly so--as a comic it's rubbish, although taken as the flailings of a moderately-talented artist filtering staggering amounts of rage, sorrow and guilt through therapeutic wish-fulfillment violence, it's at least interesting.
**I cannot believe I spelled that correctly without looking.
***I said waaaaaaaay back in my first ever post here that part of Batman's appeal is precisely the opposite--that you could be him, conceivably. That's true on a physical level--if you had his money, his determination, and his dead parents, sure. It's at least more reachable than, say, getting chosen by an alien race as the new recipient of magical powers. But it's still not something millions and millions of people should be aspiring to, because unreasonable standards make everybody unhappy.
