The Batman Moon Knight March Mental Health Jamboree
May is Mental Health Month for regular people, but for superheroes, it’s March. That’s what happens when you open the month with The Batman and end it with Moon Knight.
Star Robert Pattinson’s Batman gets the blockbuster release befitting DC Comics’ icon, while Oscar Isaac’s Moon Knight gets the streaming treatment for Marvel’s macabre eccentric.
Both characters exist in parallel: traumatized adventurers who lead double lives (and sometimes more than a double life), trying to right wrongs while fighting their inner demons.
Batman’s story is more well known. As a child, Bruce Wayne saw his parents gunned down by a criminal. He dedicates his life and inherited fortune to going after villains. He encounters bats, and they inspire his secret identity, the better to strike fear into bad guys.
The trauma of his parents’ deaths is emphasized differently across the comics and movies. Co-creator Bob Kane dealt with it differently in the 1940s than Frank Miller in the 1980s. Batman and Batman Returns director Tim Burton and his Batman, Michael Keaton, dealt with it differently than director Christopher Nolan and star Christian Bale did in Batman Begins, The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises. But it’s always there in some form.
The Batman Director Matt Reeves and Pattinson are going the noir route. In noir, there is a painful past under the surface. People are haunted, and they act on that. Violent pasts beget violent presents. That is one of many reactions to childhood trauma. Batman stories usually avoid making it the central theme, but, again, it’s always there. “I’m vengeance,” Batman says in one of the early trailers for the new film.
Moon Knight is less well known, having only come on the scene in 1975, 36 years after Batman. His origin is a bit more exotic than Batman’s.
Mercenary Marc Spector is betrayed in North Africa’s badlands. He dies in a tomb and is resurrected, or inspired, depending on how you interpret events, by Khonshu, a moon god. Spector takes it upon himself to right wrongs by becoming “the moon’s knight of vengeance,” as he says in 1980’s Moon Knight No. 1.
There are enough similarities to Batman that Moon Knight has often been referred to as Marvel’s version of Batman.
Neither has superpowers along the lines of Superman or Spider-Man. They rely on intelligence, fighting skills and prodigious wealth. They have cowls and capes. Batman flings Batarangs as weapons. Moon Knight flings crescent moons.
Most importantly, their mental health struggles shaped both of them.
While it’s a background thing mostly for Batman, it is a major part of Moon Knight’s story.
You see, Marc Spector is just one facet of Moon Knight’s identity.
There’s also Steven Grant, a rich playboy. There’s also Jake Lockley, a cab driver. There are some other folks that happen along as well, including a small child. Wait, what? Yeah.
Moon Knight has dissociative identity disorder (previously known as multiple personality disorder). Depending on who tells the story and in which medium, this is something he’s been dealing with since childhood. Or — it was that desert experience with Khonshu that fractured his psyche.
Regardless, it’s a part of who he is, why he does things, how he does things. And he is quite open about it.
In a 2016 Moon Knight series, he says, “I am sick. I know that. I will never be cured. This is always going to be who I am. But I can still live. I can still have a life.”
Batman and Moon Knight show two different paths for how a person tends to mental health issues, whether they have DID, post traumatic stress disorder, generalized anxiety disorder or anything else in the DSM-5.
Some people keep it inside, let it manifest how it manifests. Some acknowledge it, share the story, get treatment.
Batman, generally, isn’t much of a talker about it, even if it’s the primary motivator for beating the crap out of the Joker, or the Penguin, or the Riddler.
Moon Knight is aware of his disorder, plans for it, sometimes gets sidelined by it, but deals with it openly. Even while fighting the terrorist Raoul Bushman or the Egyptian deity Seth.
In each approach, there is a lot to learn about their mental health struggles — once Gotham City is saved and Khonshu is appeased.
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