Here’s a riddle:

Many people are able to see me in themselves.

Many others ignore me.

I am a perceived strength, if you can acknowledge me.

Living without me can destroy even the most precious relationships.

People who live without me are blinded, but not with their eyes.

When you use me, I never shrink, I always grow.

When you don’t, you relinquish your power to outside forces.

A lack of my presence can not always be seen, but it is felt by everyone around.

When you consistently ignore me, you will become a victim by choice.

What am I?

Accountability.

What begins with a journey and ends with a charge?

For those who haven’t seen it: The Batman portrays the Riddler as a heavily-alt-right-coded creep. He’s Angry About the Injustices of the System, Man, and he’s got a small legion of (apparently all-white-and-male) social-media followers who are really into guns and other tacticool military gear, and he plots with them to Take Action in a way that feels very QAnon / Jan. 6 / The Storm / whatever-you-want-to-call-that-thing.

My feelings about this are twofold:

1) My inner fanboy is mad, because that’s missing the point of the Riddler, 100%.

…I mean, this is a matter of personal preference. Like every goddamn Batman character, the Riddler has been a whole lot of not-very-similar things over the years.

But the best portrayals of the Riddler, in my opinion, are the ones where he’s an absolutely archetypical Batman baddie – which is to say, completelydriven by his own neuroses and foibles. He doesn’t care about politics, he doesn’t care about the wider world at all, he doesn’t even care about being effective, he cares only about showing off how smart he is and having high-stakes puzzle-hunt fun. Making him an avatar of a topical cause celebre feels like a tremendous insult, even more than it would be for any other Batman villain (except Scarecrow, I guess).

These days, of course, lots of people channel their neuroses and foibles into political movements. So yeah, I get it, there’s something there. But I feel strongly that the Riddler shouldbe a throwback to a better world, a more individualistic world where you channel your neuroses and foibles into wearing a ridiculous outfit and writing cryptic crosswords, where the crime is just a PR stunt for the overwhelming essential force of your personality.

I am also a big fan of that Neil Gaiman comic with the Riddler giving a TV interview – the one where he laments contemporary comic grittiness, and yearns for the days when supervillainy was gentlemanly and corny and fun and ultimately kind of softball. So seeing a Riddler who revels in carnage and destruction and death, for the sake of Making a Change, is also unpleasant on that front.

2) So the really weird thing here is that there’s nothing explicitlyalt-right, or right-wing at all, about The Batman’s Riddler. He doesn’t talk about race or gender; he doesn’t talk about wokeness; he doesn’t talk about Things Having Been Better Back Before; he doesn’t even have a demonized outgroup, apart from the Rich and Powerful. His political speeches, which are pretty vague in their content, could come straight from the mouth of a Marxist. He wants justice for the little guy, and he’s willing to do violence to get it, blah blah blah. All the right-wing coding is done with cultural cues: the white-male-ness of his following (and his own self), the love of tacticool shit, the vaguely-Kantbot-like discursive affect.

(In fairness…he apparently doesn’t believe that Gotham’s new black lady mayor will be any less corrupt than Gotham’s old white guy mayor. But no one in his position would have any reason at all to think that, except for someone terminally poisoned by the modern leftist flavor of demographic thinking.)

It’s jarring, when you stop to think about it, in this particular cultural moment. Because, as far as I can tell, the onlything that makes him a villain rather than a hero – according to the prevailing social script, I mean – is the cultural coding. If he were black instead of white, if he were pushing his followers to use baseball bats and bricks instead of rifles, he could be someone from one of the fringier parts of Black Lives Matter…and then everyone would be talking about how He Sure Has a Point Even If He Goes Too Far, just like they did with Killmonger from Black Panther.

Have we lost the ability even to pretendthat it’s something other than “Who? Whom?”

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