WHY BATMAN ALWAYS FALLS FOR BAD GIRLS ?


With The Dark Knight Rises bringing writer-director Christopher Nolan’s Batman film trilogy to a close, fans who know the comic book stories wonder and worry about what the film’s criminals will inflict upon the Caped Crusader. Will Bane break Batman’s back? Will Catwoman or Talia al Ghul break his heart? The supervillain who dealt the Caped Crusader his greatest defeat is an obvious danger, but shouldn’t the risks in getting involved with a “bad girl” be obvious too? Why, then, does the masked man who swore to wage war on all criminals fall hardest for women on the wrong side of the law?

Excitement:

Batman feels most alive when he’s in danger. Excitement from the danger can enhance other feelings. Through excitation transfer, arousal from one source magnifies other feelings, like when a roller coaster or scary movie heightens your attraction to your date.

Forbidden fruit:

The fact that he shouldn’t be with them makes him want them more. It’s wanting something you can’t really have” actress Lee Meriwether (who played Catwoman in 1966’s Batman movie) commented when we discussed Batman’s love life before a Comic-Con audience.

Challenge:

Bruce Wayne has spent his life taking on one challenge after another. He says he’d like to reform these women, they say they want him to walk on the wild side with them, and yet they all might get disappointed if any of these changes occurred. The line of law that separates them keeps things thrilling. As Catwoman once told him, “Honey, if I ever went straight, you’d never pay any attention to me.”

Sex:

People tend to assume, not always correctly, that the wilder woman will be wild in bed as well.

Narcissism:

Batman’s a bit full of himself. Aside from parental figures like Alfred, his most important relationships tend to be with people who remind him of himself. His enemies reflect, distort or invert aspects of Batman: Gotham’s other crime-fighters often dress like bats, his sidekicks look like he did when his parents died, and his most famous dalliance is with a woman who has directly based her persona as a cat upon his as a bat.

His truest self:

He’s always Batman. Everything he does as both Batman and Bruce Wayne somehow serves the Dark Knight’s mission. He has trouble respecting or even liking women who readily find Bruce Wayne’s shallow playboy act appealing. A woman attracted to Batman wants him for who he feels he really is.

Proximity:

They’re there. It’s practically an office romance.

Similarity:

Despite dueling adages that “opposites attract” and “birds of a feather flock together,” decades of research have failed to find any consistent support for the idea that people who are opposites will have successful relationships, no matter what exceptions or anecdotes may spring into your mind. The closest thing to a scientific law in social psychology is that we tend to prefer others as a function of how similar they are to ourselves. Why Heroines Don’t Work for Bats ?  Shouldn’t “birds of a feather” make Batman want heroines more than villainesses? The same goes for proximity and several other arguments on this list. Why have Batman’s occasional attempts to date heroines, super or otherwise, lacked passion and quickly fizzled? Why yearn for Catwoman instead of Batgirl, and why can’t non-super good girls like Vicki Vale get him to open up?

Guardedness:

Batman holds back. Revealing himself fully to anyone feels wrong. In the 1950s, his flirtations with Batwoman always seemed trite. When his previous main romantic interest had been a catty criminal, their respective roles justified withholding information like his secret identity, which (perhaps ironically) meant he got to wrestle with his feelings instead of dousing them. Operating on the same side of the law, he and Batwoman had no reason not to remove their masks and become a real couple, other than the fact that he just didn’t want to unmask. That, in turn, cooled any fire that could have blazed between them. Julie Madison, Linda Page, Vicki Vale, Silver St. Cloud … a line of smart, capable women have walked away from Bruce Wayne directly because he wouldn’t discuss his dual life. Bad girls for a bad boy: Perhaps the principle reason he won’t hang onto good girls is that a heroine is a good person and he believes that, deep down, he’s not. ( By Travis Langley from www.wired.com