On the image of vigilantes like Batman and Bernhard Goetz, who became famous in the '80s after he shot a group of teenagers who he said tried to rob him on the New York City subway
"Vigilantes are particularly complex scenarios because any sophisticated intellectual person, if you say to them, you know, 'Is vigilante justice good for society?' they will say, 'No.' But when people hear a story about a real vigilante, with very little information — all that they know is that a peaceful person was attacked and responded with force and basically took justice into their own hands because no one was going to help them. In that kind of slightly defined abstraction, people like the idea of a vigilante. It's like Batman.
"But as soon as that vigilante becomes a real person, as soon as Bernhard Goetz starts saying things about his life and his worldview and we learn details about how he lives and we see what he looks like and we see all these things about him; suddenly then the vigilante becomes very problematic again.
This is often described as somebody's image "falling apart."
"The irony is that it's actually someone not falling apart; it's actually someone being put together. I mean with someone like Bernhard Goetz, or with the fictional idea of Batman, if you don't know anything about a person, you only put good things into the shell."
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