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So, anyway, Jezebel Jet as tragic mulatta. This is a much less clear-cut issue, but then I would argue that the tragic mulatta is a less clear-cut character type in general - because her defining characteristic is being between worlds, she is easily remodeled and recreated as an interstitial character whose otherness is expressed through factors other than race, but whose race is constantly represented as different.
jet is a character repeatedly identified as not fitting into worlds. When we first see her, she is notionally a part of the shallow "Wayne mask" world of jet setting and events. Wayne has travelled to London to attend an art show in which he is affecting not to be interested anyway. Jet immediately undermines this approach by making it clear that the art is for her a means to an end - raising funds and awareness. Of course, Bruce Wayne is using it as a means to an end also - to obfuscate, to reduce awareness.
Her race is not a clear identifierof difference, but she stands out from Bruce Wayne's women not only because of the colour of her skin but because of her alien culture - she does not belong to the Western world of privilege, even though she is privileged and even though she is associating with it.
The same yes-but-no takes place in the jump with Bruce Wayne - it is a Batman-like feat of skill, but she is doing it (in the company of the Batman, unbeknownst to her) for a different reason entirely, and trying pull Bruce-Wayne-who-is-Batman into the same worldview, where the jump has a non-Batman end. She cannot, however - their flightpaths diverge, both metaphorically and literally.
The ten-eyed date brings her hard up against the breaks between worlds. She is suffering because she is not a part of Batman's world, and as a result cannot believe that she is a part of Bruce Wayne's world either - she is perceptive enough (as a result of her own dislocation and double life?) to detect the problem but only at the point where Bruce Wayne is beating an assassin with a skillet does she realise the extent of the dysjunction. And. of course, this only takes her to another world that she cannot truly enter - she cannot sign up to the belief set that has a sinister gallery of grotesques putting overcomplicated plots in motion, and instead retreats to a position that satisfies neither the relation of Jezebel Jet and Bruce Wayne or the relationship of Jezebel Jet and Batman - that Bruce Wayne is Batman as we understand it, but is mad, and is Batman because he is mad.
I have a feeling that she is going to suffer for this inability to live wholly in the required world. However, this is from memory, so I may have missed some telling details. |
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