Hi, I'm Dr. Travis Langley

Psychology professor,

author of the book, Batman and Psychology.

[intense music]

I am here to talk about

each and every Batman movie villain.

[intense music]

Batman, the Cape Crusader, Dark Knight,

superhero without superpowers.

He is defined by his psychology,

so his enduring enemies have to be defined

by their psychology as well.

I am Dr. Daka, humble servant of His Majesty Hirohito.

Our first villain is Dr. Tito Daka

from the 1943 serial Batman.

The year was 1943, at the height of World War II.

Dr. Tito Daka was not directly a character from the comics.

He was a type.

He was both the stereotype and a villain type.

He fit that alien menace.

It's why xenophobia, fear of foreigners and strangers,

played a role in this racist story.

It is a racist depiction.

It is a character who is acting very haughty,

reflects mirror image perceptions.

A mirror image perception during a conflict

is when each side's perception of the other

mirrors the other side's perception of them.

Americans were looking at a villain such as Dr. Daka,

wanting to see him as being egotistical, arrogant.

Well, that was how Americans were seen as well by others.

So each side's perception

mirrored the other side's perception of them.

Look at me, Martin.

Oh, no, I won't!

But you will!

Next up, The Wizard from 1949 movie serial

Batman and Robin.

This is the only appearance of the villain anywhere.

And it really seems like the writers themselves

did not know for sure who The Wizard really was.

I think they changed their mind part way through,

but by the end, he is revealed to be

not this scientist himself,

but the scientist's servant's evil twin.

The evil twin trope also comes out of

our fear of our own dark sides.

Our fear of something that's not us imitating us.

Changelings, doppelgangers, copying people,

duplicating them to do evil deeds

that they themselves will be blamed for.

You're going to temporarily extract

every bit of moisture from your body.

Let's talk about The Penguin.

He wants to be a crime lord,

and he wants to be a tycoon.

He wants both.

This is reflected in him wearing a tuxedo all the time.

He has what is informally known as a Napoleon complex,

the small man who wants to be big.

His hat adds height.

His umbrella extends his personal space.

If he could lose some of that belly,

he would not because it helps him be bigger.

Tim Burton has turned Penguin into

a physically penguin-like little guy.

Great speech Oswald.

[shouts]

And my name is not Oswald!

It's Penguin!

I am not a human being.

I am an animal.

When The Penguin, after some failures, says,

I am not a man. I am an animal.

And he's blaming his physical differences

in order to explain why people won't accept him.

They were accepting him!

It's his own behavior that has caused his failure.

But he's looking for an excuse.

This one hits on some of what

psychologist Alfred Adler called an inferiority complex.

Adler felt that most of us

are largely driven by a need to become

superior to whatever we are,

whatever we have been,

that in some people they do in healthier ways than others.

But for the people who feel

particularly inferior,

those who feel outcast,

those who feel alienated,

that they will be obsessed with that need

to overcome their own deficits,

to try to feel superior.

[The Joker laughs over upbeat music]

Next up, The Joker

in the 1966 film Batman: The Movie.

This is the first film appearance by The Joker

played by Caesar Romero,

who would not shave his mustache for the role.

We don't see anything that really sets him apart

from the rest of them beyond his laugh.

[The Joker laughs]

They're all shallow.

And The Joker is the shallowest of them

in this particular movie.

[intense music]

Now we start getting greater depth of character.

In this film, The Joker is Jack Napier,

a gangster, a psychopath

who is already thought of as a bit reckless,

even for the criminals.

Jack is dead, my friend.

You can call me Joker.

When he says, Jack is dead,

that's not really how we think of people in psychology.

Yes, we can undergo drastic changes.

Our self concepts can change.

Trauma may alter us in ways

that we may never come back from,

but the same psyche is still there.

[intense film music]

This is absolutely not the hilarious Joker of the 1960s.

Heath Ledger did an amazing job playing

the most dangerous version of The Joker we've ever seen.

The Joker defies diagnosis.

His behavior doesn't neatly fit any specific mental illness

beyond his obvious psychopathy.

He has no conscience, no empathy,

no personal concern over right and wrong.

In this film, The Joker is shown

as someone with symptoms of tardive dyskinesia.

It's a long term consequence

of some antipsychotic medications.

When he makes these smacks of the mouth

or the flicks of his tongue,

those could be long-term consequences

of having previously been on antipsychotic medications.

I know a couple of professionals who are bothered by that,

and they don't want anybody to think

that real life individuals

with tardive dyskinesia are that level of dangerous.

[intense music]

This Joker is the bad boyfriend.

He is scary for the sake of being scary.

It is very superficial.

This Joker is a punk.

[intense music continues]

The character Arthur Fleck in this movie

is not the same as other Jokers.

Honestly, we can think of him as a different character.

He is psychotic.

And what we mean by psychotic

is that they've lost touch with reality.

The symptoms that we most likely call psychotic

are hallucinations, perceptions out of touch with reality,

and delusions, beliefs that are out of touch with reality.

So if you see a two-headed monster

because your brain is conjuring a two-headed monster,

that's a hallucination.

If you think you are a two-headed monster,

that's a delusion.

This is a character with hallucinations and delusions.

He sees some things.

He sees some people who are not there.

There are other things within the film.

When he gets beaten up by the yuppies on the train,

some of the movements they're making are oddly similar

to the kids who beat him up at the very beginning.

Through the entire film, there are things not to trust.

It just makes this wonderful psychotic movie.

Sic 'em, Hecate. Scratch out their eyes.

Catwoman in the 1966 film Batman: The Movie.

Catwoman gets a larger part in this movie

than the other villains

because she's playing a dual role.

She is also pretending to be

a Russian journalist called Miss Kitka.

Maintaining the dual identity

means you're lying all the time,

and at least one of your lives

with this kind of dual identity.

Hopefully, each is close to your heart somehow.

This is more extreme, much more extreme,

than how we will bring different personas

to different situations in our lives.

[intense music]

There are rituals people go through

to have symbolic death.

Ways of saying, I am no longer the person I used to be.

I am now going to be someone else.

Totem psychologically is a symbol

that the person embraces

in order to represent deeper part of their nature,

other part of their nature,

a spiritual side of themselves.

Historically, totems tend to be animal figures,

which again plays into this particular movie's animal theme,

with the bat, the cat, and the chili little bird.

With Selena and Bruce, they adopt these symbols themselves.

She finds strength from the cat symbol.

He finds strength from the bat symbol.

They are both becoming scary, dark creatures of the night

because they want to let their own darkness out,

while also managing it

and putting it to what for them is a constructive purpose.

They built from Catwoman's story in Batman Returns

but taken out Batman.

She is somebody who is very shy,

reserved, unsure of herself,

gets licked back to life by kittens,

emerges sexier, more aggressive, and that's it.

This Catwoman has some things in common with Bruce Wayne.

They were both orphaned at an early age,

and she understands what that does to an individual.

Catwoman grew up poor though.

She did not have a butler to be her confidant.

The version of Catwoman that we see in The Dark Knight Rises

is an extension of that.

They don't refer to her background,

but she's very much being played that way.

She does not neatly fit any disorder.

She is not mentally ill.

She knows what she is doing.

She is engaging in some anti-social behavior.

She steals. She breaks into homes.

Those are anti-social actions.

She has empathy toward others,

even if she tries to suppress it at times.

She is not as heroic yet.

This is more of a Catwoman who's on her journey

to becoming more heroic.

I see the way to do it.

Next up, The Riddler.

[chilling piano music]

The Riddler as played by Frank Gorshin in this film

was just manic, wired, driven by his compulsions.

The other villains keep having

to try to get him to settle down.

[The Riddler laughs]

You're mad, Riddler.

The Riddler is often cited as

one of the most narcissist,

the most egotistical, most full of himself.

And the kind of criminals in real life

who send messages to authorities

tend to be pretty full of themselves, too.

In his case, the riddle-sending is a compulsion.

He does not see it as a compulsion

because he wants to do it.

And you see that in this film.

When the other villains are saying,

This time, just send a straightforward message.

Don't send a riddle.

And he grins and then laughs.

You can call me The Riddler.

Now we've gotten the fourth of the Big Four

who were all in that '66 movie.

Now we have The Riddler played by Jim Carrey.

There are some things

he definitely seems to be mimicking from Gorshin,

such as his laugh and some physical movements.

And there's a whole lot of Jim Carrey's sense of humor

in how he's playing this character.

This individual, Edward Nygma, as played by Jim Carrey

adores Bruce Wayne, hates Bruce Wayne.

There's a great book on borderline personality disorder,

titled I Hate You--Don't Leave Me.

The psychologist character,

Chase Meridian played by Nicole Kidman.

She talks about this stalker

who is sending the riddles to Bruce Wayne.

She's describing a lot of borderline personality

without ever using the term.

Patient may suffer from obsessional syndrome

with potential homicidal tendencies.

Some people with this condition

will go to great links to try to fill a void in themselves,

not just stalking a person, but maybe by emulating them.

And you see this rather drastically with Edward

when he even does something such as

wear an artificial mold to look like Val Kilmer,

who's playing Batman in this movie.

How's my mold?

Fine.

Rejection is hard on anybody,

but these are individuals who may not be restrained

by consistent traits.

And so, their emotional action will be more extreme.

[intense music]

Two-Face in 1995's Batman Forever.

This is the first live action depiction of Two-Face.

This version of Two-Face, as played by Tommy Lee Jones,

is almost a One-Face

because there's really not variety

in how he acts throughout this film.

He does not in any way act

like he has dissociative identity disorder,

the clinical term for what people commonly call

multiple personality disorder.

He's not inconsistent in his behavior.

He consistently wants to do wrong,

and this one version of Two-Face will even cheat.

He'll just keep tossing the coin

until it lets him do thing he wants to do.

Somebody with an external locus of control

feels that events are caused by what's outside themselves.

With Two-Face, as written throughout his history,

he actually has this internal locus,

but he's angry at the world,

he's upset about what has happened to his face,

and he wants to take out that anger,

but he also wants to be true to himself.

He doesn't want to think of himself as a bad person.

Two-Face in 2008's The Dark Knight.

Tommy Lee Jones did not play a complicated character.

Aaron Eckhart is playing a complicated character.

This is an individual

who very much has an internal locus of control.

He has made himself who he is,

but now his world view has been shattered by what happened.

He did not have control over getting abducted.

He is incredibly angry.

He's taking out his anger on the world.

He's starting with those that he feels deserve his judgment,

but he will also heard innocent people along the way.

Something we see with a lot of these characters,

just as with Jack Napier,

he had undergone his accident in the acid,

emerged as The Joker,

and it brought out some things that were in him already.

In the film that he was already nicknamed Two-Face

by a number of police.

And this has unleashed and augmented

some other dangerous potential that had been there.

[intense music]

This is the first film appearance of Mr. Freeze

in 1997's Batman and Robin.

The version being portrayed here

is pulling heavily from an episode of

Batman: The Animated Series for his origin,

in which his alter ego had been renamed Victor Freeze.

And he was motivated

by trying to save the life of his terminally-ill wife.

He is ruthlessly trying to do whatever it takes

to save her, regardless of what it does to anybody else,

regardless of how she would think about it.

One of the most poignant characters

in Batman's Rogues Gallery,

this man with the cold personality,

who had been warmed up by the love of this woman,

who for some reason was played by Arnold Schwarzenegger

in live action.

[intense strings music]

Poison Ivy in 1990's Batman and Robin.

The villains of this movie

are each individuals who are extremely introverted,

perhaps some of the most introverted characters

in Batman's Rogues Gallery.

They both have some qualities that may suggest

that they're on the autism spectrum.

Let's go to the book.

In the movie, Poison Ivy says, I am not insane.

I've just been pushed too far.

Which brings us to that question,

Is she insane, as depicted in this film?

What is insanity?

Insanity is a legal term, reflecting psychological states,

in which the person is not responsible for their own action

due to an inability to understand

the rightness and wrongness of their own actions.

And she knows what she is doing.

Bane in 1997's Batman and Robin.

This is Bane's first live action appearance.

He had only recently appeared in comics

for the first time ever.

He was supposed to be Batman's bane.

He was created to be this enemy

who could crush and break Batman.

In this film, the chemical venom has pumped him up.

He's steroided up,

which was a popular topic of the time.

He's this thug who barely speaks,

who obeys Poison Ivy for reasons we don't know.

He is absolutely the most cartoonish version

of any Batman super villain ever brought to screen.

[intense music]

Bane in 2012's The Dark Knight Rises.

Aside from some superficial qualities,

he has very little in common with the previous version.

He's not even on venom.

He is a mix of the comic book version of Bane

and the al Guhl's faithful servant Ubu.

Of the three needs that psychologist David McClelland

identified as driving personality most heavily:

needs for power, achievement, and affiliation.

In the comics, Bane is mainly driven

by the need for achievement.

In the film, is more motivated by need for affiliation,

by his attachment to Talia al Guhl,

by his loyalty to her and his protectiveness of her.

Yes, he has things he wants to achieve,

and he has power that he is amassing,

but he is driven most by loyalty to somebody else,

which is not the comic book Bane at all.

You will never learn.

[Ra's draws his sword]

Ra's al Guhl in 2005's Batman Begins.

Don't be afraid, Bruce.

This is the first live action appearance

of Ra's al Guhl, or Ra's al Guhl.

He's something of a James Bond villain

thrown into Batman stories.

He is an eco-terrorist.

His motivations are to make the world a better place.

There are definitely some cult recruitment techniques

that show up in the way he approaches Bruce Wayne.

It is not the behavior of someone who's recruiting

just one of the minions though.

It is someone who is trying to recruit

a new right hand, someone to be at his side.

This is the first live action depiction

of The Scarecrow, Jonathan Crane, played by Cillian Murphy.

He is the only villain to appear in all of Nolan's trilogy,

which is appropriate because the trilogy is about fear.

How it is caused, how it's inspired,

how it's overcome, or how it's used for other purposes.

In 2012's The Dark Knight Rises,

they are brought to him afraid,

and they are sent out to be afraid.

You are Phillip Stryver,

Executive Vice President of Daggett Industries?

[intense music builds]

[ice cracks]

They could just be killed.

No, they're going to be killed in a moment of terror.

In these three movies,

we don't know anything about his background.

He is not the central villain.

And we don't really see his motives.

We see him using fear and his professional status

to skirt around the law and serve this other purpose.

But we really only don't know why he's doing these things.

What do you want?

I wanna know how you gonna convince me

to keep my mouth shut.

Next up, Carmine the Roman Falcone

in 2005's Batman Begins.

He is a mob boss.

His role in there is to be a mob boss,

and he wants power for its own sake.

The need for power is not a complicated motivation.

Even characters where we see this great need for powe,

we want greater complexity,

but with him, that is the thing.

He needs power.

[intense music]

Talia al Guhl in 2012's The Dark Knight Rises.

This is the first live action depiction of Talia.

Although she uses an alias, Miranda,

through much of the movie,

her goals are vaguely those of her father:

trying to get what she wants

and trying to make the world better and reshape it

to what she thinks it should be.

But she's never given the depth of characterization

of the other villains.

We could speculate based on the way she grew up

in a prison in the middle of nowhere

that she was very motivated

to try to live up to her father's ideals.

We know from previous movies

that when al Guhl referred to his family,

he was talking about a family he had before her.

He was not talking about her.

So she was not that much on his radar as a person,

so based on her behavior,

she seems to be trying really hard to live up to her father,

and then the memory of her father.

Next is Harley Quinn in 2016's Suicide Squad.

Margot Robbie plays Harley in Suicide Squad, Birds of Prey,

The Suicide Squad, and surely more to come.

Harley Quinn is something of a social chameleon,

somebody whose personality

adapts to the people that she's around.

When she's with heroes, she's more heroic.

When she's with villains, she's more villainous.

When she's with Mr. Jay, she is more murderous.

She is a strong, capable individual

who sometimes does not recognize her own strengths.

In the comics, Harley is depicted

as the daughter of a very supportive mother

and a con artist.

Children of one parent who lies all the time

tend to go to two extremes:

either seeing the worst in people,

expecting them all to lie,

or they're in the habit of looking

for the best in this person who's lying to them.

They're in the habit of finding ways

to justify putting up with this person.

They will rationalize that other person's lies.

This creates a very gullible potential,

even though she is smart enough

that she has the ability to see through these things,

she doesn't always want to.

Max Shrek in 1992's Batman Returns.

A ruthless industrialist named for the stage name

of the actor who played the vampire Count Orlok

in the silent film Nosferatu.

He is a blood sucker.

This is his only appearance anywhere.

He has a strong sense of entitlement.

He is not completely psychopathic.

They give him a son to show that he has some human concerns.

He's just very ruthless

and sees a whole lot of these others as inferiors

or people who are in his way.

[glass breaks as a loud scream is heard]

He has grown up rich as well. That's very clear.

Becoming wealthy seems to be liberating to a lot of people.

People who become very wealthy,

a number of them have said

it frees them to be more of who they really are.

So the one who has been more obnoxious at heart,

they get to be very wealthy.

They'll do it more extremely.

The one who is a generous person at heart,

they get to be very wealthy.

They might finally get the opportunity to do these things.

When Max presents his public face,

he's showing who he really is.

[intense music]

Lex Luthor in 2016's

Batman Versus Superman: Dawn of Justice.

Lex Luthor is a character we typically see

in Superman stories.

He is manipulating Batman to pit him against Superman.

In public, he extols the greatness of his father,

but in private he disses dad pretty hard.

He is this rich boy who has grown up to be powerful,

to represent certain modern mega billionaires.

If affluenza were a real diagnosis, it might apply to him.

And so he does not seem to welcome anybody

as a potential fatherly figure in the world.

He is threatened by Batman and Superman,

especially Superman.

In some ways, he's the cruelest

of these villains that we have seen.

He will not just kill somebody.

He will make sure they know it's him.

He wants Holly Hunter's character to see the evidence,

to see the cruel joke,

and know that she's about to die

and everybody else in there too,

and she is terrified.

And he does that just for the sheer joy of it.

In 2022, The Batman,

we see three of the main villains that we've seen before.

Riddler, Penguin, Catwoman,

three-fourths of the Big Four,

everybody except The Joker

because we've seen a whole lot of Joker lately.

We get them each featured in different ways,

each representing different aspects of the history.

Catwoman and Penguin seem to fit

more recent depictions in the comics.

Her as more of a socially-concerned antiheroine,

Penguin as the nightclub owner mobster

that he likes to be.

And then the Riddler is a different version

from what we've seen.

The Riddler is the deadliest Riddler

we've ever seen depicted.

But it fits this story about Batman as detective

and Batman struggling with his own violence.

With Batman, when creators are coming up with a new villain,

they have to start with

what will challenge Batman as a person?

So there is this rich Rogues Gallery to go with,

this complicated hero.