[blockquote]The hero Gotham deserves… but is he one we could actually have?[/blockquote]
Batman – the most realistic of all the superheroes. With no superpowers to speak of, it seems plausible, nay, possible that the Batman could exist in the here and now! Paul Zehr, associate professor of kinesiology and neuroscience at the University of Victoria in British Columbia and a 26 year old practitioner of Chito-Ryu karate-do sets out to tackle the reality of Batman in his book, Becoming Batman: The Possibility of a Superhero.
What follows is neither a confirmation nor denial – merely an illustration of arguments put forward for our brainwave pleasure.
Comic books and movies have depicted Batman as an Olympian, worthy of a decathlon. Batman has been represented as the strongest and fastest of all of these. How realistic is this though? He isn’t Superman after all – if Batman was to really exist then what you’d really need to do is to be remarkably good at many different things – and with those things combined you get Batman!
But can these depictions translate into real life? Well, maybe. You could train someone to be an incredible athlete with a martial arts background and give them all the equipment and the gadgets, which in itself take a lot of training and you, could have the makings of the Batman – in fact we see this happen to Olympians in a very short time span!
How realistic is it though to take on 10 attackers at a time? To be honest this is realistic, for a number of different reasons. Firstly if you were to estimate how many times you could hit a person and how fast somebody could punch and kick, you end up with numbers of five or six people at any given time. This just isn’t plausible – imagine four or five people trying to tackle one man – there would be a lot of head banging to say the least!
If we were to go back to comic portrayals of Batman, Bruce Wayne goes away for a varying number of years – some say five, some say 8 and some even say 12. If we were to section physical changes and physical skills we may come up with different figure. Zehr estimates that for the physical changes to take place it should take 3 to 5 years. To develop the skills to be able to defend himself against his entire opponent, the time it would need to take would be 10 to 12 years. If there was one movie to pick that could be most realistic it would be Batman Begins. However to be this good and to have this extremely high level of skill would take maybe 15 to 18 years to train!
Going back to the comics and the Batman canon – it was estimated by Zehr, that Bruce Wayne started off that six-foot-two and 185 pounds in around or thereabouts. Zehr hypothesises that after 10 to 15 years of being Batman, Wayne probably weighs about 210 pounds after gaining 40 pounds of muscle and his bones will actually be more dense, kind of the opposite of osteoporosis.
On top of dense bones, Batman would have seriously messed up sleeping patterns because let’s face it the bats life is just that it’s the bat’s live – not for humans! In saying that, if Wayne was just a nocturnal guy, he would actually be a lot healthier and have a lot better sleep. However getting some sleep and some light during the day can be seriously messed up for the psyche!
So continuing on from this line of thought from Zehr, the most implausible aspect of Batman’s portrayal is the nature of injuries taken by Gotham’s thugs. In both comics and movies, Batman usually takes a good beating. There seems to be a breakdown in translating the breakdown in to a visible effect. Batman could be beaten senseless but the next day he’s out and about doing it again! Batman does get old however, and just before he retired his skills even let him down so he trains people to take his place.
So how long could the Real Batman last? Remember – Batman means never losing – Zehr makes an interested point but looking at professional fighters where the longest peak of their career is between two or three years. If we look at other athletes the time is really the same. So in that regard the time would not be really that long – if Batman did exist it would be hard enough to become in the first place and even harder to stay him!
“I’M BATMAN”…So is Batman possible? Well as Zehr himself says – given the amount of billionaires out there and given the amount of Olympians – we could be closer to Batman then you think…
*This article is based on Q&A with movement researcher E. Paul Zehr By JR Minkel which can be viewed here!
