Warning: Spoiler Alert
There’s a scene in the new Batman movie where the Caped Crusader gets a clue from the Riddler. The Riddler informs him that he will see him “in hell” in childish handwriting. What can this mean?
The villain is always one step ahead of Batman throughout the film, goading him. Batman racks his brain. It turns out “hell” is a very real place in Gotham City. It’s the mental hospital.
When I got my tickets to the new Batman movie, my hopes were high. The film did not disappoint. Clocking in at a hair under three hours, director Matt Reeves’s new vision of the Dark Knight presents a tormented hero doing his best to cleanse a grimy city of criminal scum. It's a fun flick
Batman wears body armor and a black pointy-eared cowl. He drives a cool car that seems to be powered by some sort of jet engine, though he also likes hopping on his motorcycle and tearing through the streets at night. He has some sweet combat moves. He’s got a daytime persona, too—playboy inheritor of the Wayne dynasty fortune.
The Wayne family, we learn, is linked to another name in the DC comic book universe—Arkham. Bruce’s dad married an Arkham. And the Arkhams have a very special place named after them—the Arkham Asylum. This, we discover in this film, is “hell.”
Arkham Asylum has a long history in the Batman universe. Named for a sanitarium dreamt up in a short story by horror pioneer H.P. Lovecraft back in the 1930s, Arkham first appeared in Batman comics in the 1970s. The first cinematic depiction of it is in Batman Forever (1995), which, coincidentally, is the first time the Riddler appears on the screen.
Played by Jim Carrey, the Batman Forever Riddler is highly ridiculous. He has spiky pink hair, wears a campy green bodysuit covered in question marks, twirls a question mark-topped cane, and drops lines like, “Was that over the top? I can never tell. Haha, haha!” The Riddler’s mind control device fries his brain, and he winds up brain-damaged in Arkham Asylum, flapping the loose sleeves of a straitjacket and claiming himself to be Batman.
Once onscreen, Arkham Asylum would return, again and again. It’s in Batman & Robin (1997), Batman Begins (2005), and The Joker (2019). In the latter film, it has become Arkham State Hospital, a bleak and institutional structure of social abandonment. In all of these movies, it is a bad place, somewhere between a haunted mansion and a prison. When the Riddler tells the Batman that he’ll see him in "hell," we shouldn't be surprised when this turns out to be Arkham.
Using mental hospitals as horror settings has a long pedigree in Western culture, dating back, at least, to English fiction and art in the eighteenth century. Edgar Allan Poe famously used a madhouse to make dark social commentary in “The System of Dr. Fether and Prof. Tarr” in 1845. Mental hospitals have been irresistible for horror creators ever since. The first time we get a fully-realized horror madhouse in the movies is probably The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari in 1920. However, creepy asylums can be seen on celluloid even earlier than this.
Batman films love Arkham because it is a convenient noir symbol for the kind of villainous psychotics that always seem to nip at Batman’s cape. Arkham taps into longstanding tropes that connect incarcerated madness to violence and criminality. In Arkham, bad things happen to bad people. The Joker, the Riddler, Mr. Freeze, The Scarecrow, Poison Ivy, and other Bat-foes have all been cast into in Hollywood’s Arkham.
THE BASICSIn the new Batman movie, the Riddler is given a psychotic makeover. He’s less a comedian than a serial killer. Inspired by movies like Seven, The Batman portrays the Riddler as a deeply-troubled murderer who kills in ghastly and creative ways and then taunts Batman about why he is doing his bloody work. When he’s finally cast into Arkham, he addresses Batman directly, with a combination of smirks, hoots, and howls. Interestingly, like Jim Carrey before him, Paul Dano's Riddler also makes deranged madhouse claims about Batman's identity.
At the end of the new film, the mentally-incarcerated Riddler is completely out of his mind. He literally laughs his head off and jumps around in his cell. This is an appropriate movie behavior for the asylum resident. Is it accurate in terms of actual mental health facilities? Of course not. But one does not expect accuracy in a movie featuring a rich guy in a cape fighting costumed villains with his gadgets.
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