Batman: Broken Body, Broken Property, Broken Laws

A fun article in Scientific American sums up the physical toll being Batman would take on Bruce Wayne. Paul Zehr, an associate professor of kinesiology and neuroscience at the University of Victoria in British Columbia and a 26-year practitioner of Chito-Ryu karate-do, whose book, Becoming Batman: The Possibility of a Superhero, is due out in October, examines a number of issues. Such as:

What's most plausible about portrayals of Batman's skills?
You could train somebody to be a tremendous athlete and to have a significant martial arts background, and also to use some of the gear that he has, which requires a lot of physical prowess. Most of what you see there is feasible to the extent that somebody could be trained to that extreme. We're seeing that kind of thing in less than a month in the Olympics.

But the training regime is unrealistic and, moreover:

How would Batman get enough rest?
The difficulty for Batman is he's going to be trying to sleep during the day. He's going to be really tired, actually, unless he can shift himself over to just being up at night. If he were just a nocturnal guy, he would actually be a lot healthier and have a lot better sleep than if he were doing what he does now, which is getting some light here and there. That's going to mess up his sleep patterns and duration of sleep.

Wouldn't fighting Gotham's thugs every night take its toll?
The biggest unreal part of the way Batman's portrayed is the nature of his injuries. Most of the time, in the comics and in the movies, even when he wins, he usually winds up taking a pretty good beating. There's a real failure to show the cumulative effect of that. The next day he's shown out there doing the same thing again. He'd likely be quite tired and injured.

Great stuff. Go read the whole thing.

But I got to pondering: what about the cost to Gotham? Remember the main car chase in Batman Begins?

Just how many millions of dollars in property damage did Batman inflict on Gotham in that one night? And how are those poor property owners going to explain things to their insurance company?

Plus, if the mob runs the construction business and unions in Gotham, Batman's rooftop drives are helping subsidize organized crime.

And what if some of those crumnlig roofs had fallen through the ceiling of the top floor apartment and crushed some poor guy trying to get a good night's sleep?

It would probably be cheaper for Gotham to buy off the bad guys than let Batman run rampant.

And, as for Batman, he better hope his secret identity remains secret forever or Bruce Wayne is going to get sued into the poor house.

Update: John Carney notes that Batman/Bruce Wayne appears to be rampantly violating federal securities laws and state corporate fiduciary duty laws:

Wayne's criminality is exactly the sort readers of DealBreaker are all too familiar with. He seems to be a white-collar criminal, engaging in the kind of corporate crimes that attract our real-life two-faced prosecutors. He takes corporate resources to pursue his own interests, uses underhanded means to acquire a majority stake in Wayne Enterprises after encouraging an initial public offering, and intimidates a potential whistle-blower.

At the start of Batman Begins, Wayne Enterprises is a private corporation controlled by William Earle, who is portrayed a the typical evil corporate titan familiar to anyone who watches Hollywood movies about big businesses. In order to gain control of the company, Wayne encourages the company to go public. Wayne then uses probably illegal chicanery and subterfuge to buy up a majority stake in Wayne Enterprises and ousts the board and management. Already Wayne seems to be violating federal disclosure and anti-take over laws.

In The Dark Knight, Wayne is discovered by an M&A lawyer to be using corporate resources for his own purposes. Specifically, Bruce has converted the R&D division into a research program to create cool equipment for Batman. When the lawyer approaches Wayne's handpicked chief executive (played by Morgan Freeman) with his discoveries, the CEO intimidates him by pointing out that unmasking a guy who spends his nights beating people to a pulp is probably not a great idea.

Bruce Wayne seems to feel no guilt about exploiting the minority shareholders in Wayne Enterprises or pillaging the corporate treasury for his crusade. How serious is this? Remember that recently prosecutors and business reporters across the country went on a jihad against a minor corporate misdeed called "backdating." If the typical backdating CEO could be compared to a mafioso underboss, Bruce Wayne is the Joker

Viewed in this way, Wayne, his CEO and their buddies in law-enforcement are corporate baddies engaged in a war against street criminals. We can't help thinking that this gives a very different meaning to the Joker's idea that Gotham deserves a better class of criminal.