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Batman Watches Porn: Caped Crusader Caught in the Act!
By Brad Berens

Note: I wrote this a few years back and never found time to try to publish it anywhere that might make sense. Then I ran across it a few days ago and thought to share it here.

No, it's not a tabloid headline. No, it's not a fake-'em-out promo in which Batman only watches porn to save Robin from some twisted plan by the Joker.

Here's the story.

Issue #56 of Batman: Gotham Adventures hit the comic shops way back on Wednesday November 27, 2002. I bought it, read it, enjoyed it, but didn't notice the porn until I reread it last week, in 2004.

Porn, I hear you say, is usually hard to miss.

Here's the story.

In that issue, the Dark Knight battles a blonde, bespectacled, hippy-dippy dude, wannabe-supervillain named Kim who blows up bits and pieces of Gotham City in an obscure riddle meant to torture Batman by confusing him. (I'm not making this up.)

Meanwhile, The Riddler (you'd know him if you saw him: green suit, lots of question marks, kinda high strung) gets monumentally pissed off at Kim for being a stupid copy cat, tracks him, and picks a fistfight. This fight, by the way, involves about as much testosterone as watching the Professor bitch-slap Mr. Howell on Gilligan's Island.

Batman deduces that Kim's riddle has something to do with sight, sound, hearing, taste, and smell, but the grim avenger realizes that he doesn't need to solve the riddle because Kim has left a traceable video camera behind at a crime scene. Batman and Robin race to Kim's hideout.

The Riddler wins the geekarama by zapping Kim with his giant electrified question mark cane (!), whereupon he orders Kim to explain the riddle. Kim's art-for-art's sake crime spree is an homage to Nagisa Oshima's famous art-house movie In The Realm Of The Senses. Batman busts in and arrests the two evildoers. The Riddler tells Kim that Oshima is way too obscure. Batman, it turns out, has heard of Oshima but never seen one of his movies.

As Kim and Riddler get hauled back to Arkham Asylum, Kim says that Riddler should do more to improve himself: "It's what life is all about." Taking this to heart -- and in the comic's final panel -- Batman sits down to watch In The Realm Of The Senses late at night in the bowels of the batcave. A little exercise in self-improvement by the senior half of the dynamic duo.

Closing the comic book I thought, "Oh boy is Batman in for a big surprise."

Y'see boys and girls, In The Realm Of The Senses (1976) is a pornographic movie. It's also an art movie. I saw in a retrospective series put on by the Brown University Film Society back in the Pleistocene era when I went to college. Art, yes. But it's definitely porno. Sexy. Nasty. Scary. We're talking dirty with more Rs than a Christina Aguilera video. It's a wonderful film, but it makes Last Tango in Paris look like The Sound of Music and Henry and June resemble the It's A Small World ride at Disneyland.

Did I mention that Batman: Gotham Adventures is the subsection of the Batman industry made for kids? It's based on the noir Batman cartoons from the 1990s and the new Justice League cartoon. Do you want your seven-year old asking you to rent a porno movie because Batman watched it?

How did this happen? I see two explanations. One. Writer Scott Peterson had a great hook for a story and needed a movie title that involved the word "senses." (There actually aren't that many: check IMDB to see for yourself.) A cursory search at his local Hollywood Video turned up the Oshima movie, but he never bothered to watch it. Nor did anybody in the DC Comics legal department. They have no idea that they've made Batman watch porn. Two. Peterson knows the movie is pornographic but figured that nobody reading the comic would get his private little joke. If it's two, and if Scott ever reads this, then I expect he'll think, "oops."

But whatever the explanation, I must confess that this comic leaves me worried, profoundly concerned, maybe even a little panicked about the mental well-being of the caped crusader. What's he going to think when he hits Kichi and Sada having explicit intercourse for the first time? Will Batman blanche under his cowl when he watches Sada go down on Kichi and then sees Sada spit rather than swallow? Will he ring the bell and ask Alfred to make some nice cucumber sandwiches when he sees Kichi dip his sushi into Sada's vagina? Will it be time for Robin, the boy wonder, to start sleeping with his Wayne Manor bedroom door locked when Batman watches Sada and Kichi practice erotic asphyxiation? Or, will Batman simply lean back as he watches the big screen in the batcave, gloved fingers lightly moving south of his utility belt?

The end of the movie is where things become dangerous for Batman's psyche. (Skip to the next paragraph if you plan to rent this based-on-a-true-story bad boy.) Sada wraps her silk belt around Kichi's throat and accidentally chokes him to death while they're having sex in a cemetery. Distraught, she then cuts off his penis with a big carving knife and wanders the streets of post WWII Tokyo for two days before somebody notices the souvenir she's carrying and sends her to a rubber room.

Back in college, when I got to that little filmic gem I nearly fell out of my chair. And I don't remember sleeping well that night, either.

But I'm not Batman. I'm not a highly trained crime-fighting machine. More to the point, I'm not a lunatic who dresses up like a giant rodent and wanders the rooftops of a dangerous town looking for other costumed nuts to beat up. I mean, sure, I have my issues, but nothing like that! Ever since young Bruce Wayne watched his parents get gunned down by a mugger Batman's been hanging on by a thread. Could In The Realm Of The Senses be the thing that finally snaps the thread?

If so, who will protect Gotham City?