User blog:Berrybrick/What's wrong with Batgirl?

The following blog is unfinished. Feel free to read it if you want to, but things are likely to change and commenting has not yet been opened.

So, I was planning on writing this article at least since seeing The LEGO Batman Movie, but last week when I was tucked away studying I learned that Joss Whedon is in talks with Warner Bros to work on a Batgirl movie. Okay then, DC. So what's wrong with Batgirl? Where do I begin? Because there are several ways I could go with this, and the route I will go will only be one, but they would all end up in pretty much the same place anyway. She's Batgirl. Batgirl. Batgirl. Bat-girl.

Batgirl is actually one of my favorite characters, even if a lot of the reasoning for that is loyalty and nostalgia. So anything I may say I say out of a wish for the character to get better. She has been a little broken.

We will start with The LEGO Batman Movie since that was the original (less powerful) impetus for writing this before I heard about the solo movie plans. What I really appreciate about The LEGO Batman Movie is the way that it deconstructs Batman's broody lonerness by showing him as a lonely self-indulgent jerk who doesn't know how to get along with people, and so enter Robin and Batgirl to help him out. Magnifique. More versions of the character could probably serve to look at him from that angle. While I could write more about Batman and LEGO Batman though (good and bad), this is about Batgirl. While TLBM makes Robin out as a goofy joke character (and go for it, though that's not what I'd want from most versions) Batgirl has to be a role model; even the role model when we remember what this Batman is like. What's interesting is how they do that: statistics and compassion, cleaning up Bludhaven, Harvard for Police, and becoming the new Commissioner Gordon.

I was a little surprised to see the direction that LEGO was taking Batgirl, since her father forbidding her from joining the police department is a pretty big part of her origin story (and I'd posit the most compelling part of it). But I was on board with this and willing to see what they did. And it was pretty eh. This Barbara Gordon isn't Wyldstyle. Her character is a bit more flat. She's strong and ridiculously (but not comically) competent. Which is okay. What they did worked for the story they were telling, and that was fine. They gave us Batgirl, and for that I am grateful, but they didn't fix her.

And probably they weren't really trying to. It's just that that is what got me thinking. Barbara as police commissioner isn't something I every really saw as her destiny, even though Batman Beyond did the same thing. And that's because, just like Dick Grayson grew out of Robin and Wally West grew out of Kid Flash, Barbara managed to grow out of Batgirl. Her story of growth is both more and less than theirs' though.

I'm talking about The Killing Joke, of course. And I don't want to do much talking about it. It was the subject of enough conversation last year with the negative reception to its animated adaptation. But, basically, Barbara appears in a few panels where she is shot and abused by The Joker: fuel for the fire of her father's character development. And now feminists decry this as a terrible treatment of her character, and I'm with them. At the same time though, it ended up turning her into a better character. Now that Barbara is stuck in a wheelchair, she is still determined to fight crime and turns her smarts to becoming the hacker Oracle, information broker for Batman and the JLA as well as the coordinator behind the black ops Birds of Prey. While disabled, she has gone from being another spandex-wearing Batman clone to an integral part of the DCU. Not bad.

Of course though, the origin of this is still haunting. I'm uncomfortable with superhero comics being so dark that Batgirl would be paralyzed and tortured. On the one hand, if she makes the best of her condition, that's a good character. On the other, in a world where people return from the dead all the time (and, as has been pointed out, Batman recovered from Bane breaking his back in the same period) it's maybe a little unfair that Barbara doesn't get to walk again. Usually it is written off as some conviction, but still.

But, for a host of reasons (basically what I've already said in favor of Batgirl on top of being the most iconic person with the mantle), Barbara is pretty much the only Batgirl of something like four others who ever shows up in media outside of the comics and, with the New 52 reboot in 2011, was returned to use of her legs in the comics. And now there's some weird pressure on the Barbara Gordon character. She really has to justify herself. And I mostly don't mean that in a feminist way, though I could go that direction. She has to justify her ability to walk. It's especially a little jarring when you do the math and realize that before The New 52, Barbara was Oracle for roughly half of her publication history; whether she existed longer as Oracle or Batgirl comes down to a matter of months. Moreover, with this in mind, it wouldn't at all surprise me to learn that she had made more appearances as Oracle and that Cassandra Cain, the first Batgirl with her own series, made more appearances as Batgirl than Babs ever did.

So who is Batgirl? I think that her existence as Oracle is really valuable. So much so that if we skip that transformation she is little more than a Batman spinoff and if she returns to Batgirl after being Oracle it feels like a downgrade. Batgirl just can't be as significant in the same ways that Oracle is. So what's the go between? What's the compromise? There's this tension in the character now where she has to be more than it seems possible for her to be. Even if Batgirl never is Oracle, can she be Batgirl forever, in the same way Dick couldn't be Robin forever? The LEGO Batman Movie and DCAU sidestep the division by giving her a place as the GCPD commissioner. Maybe that can work, but at the same time, these are in stories where she is a supporting character. But here I am concerned with Babs' story, and since her origin traditionally involves her father forbidding her from police work, it is perhaps more satisfying for her to go, "Well, okay then!" and to go into superheroics instead, growing into a greater destiny than the GCPD could ever give her. Like Batgirl is more than just another officer (or so the fantasy would have us believe), Oracle is more than Commissioner Gordon.

While I have some ideas of how to "fix" Batgirl and could point to various iterations which get it more right than others, it would be self-indulgent of me and still leave us without a clear plan of what to do with her, especially in a two-hour run time. Probably they should just combine the Batgirl and Nightwing projects into one movie and let that ship set sail.

What do you think?