06-24-2005, 06:05 AM
Rhydderch Hael,Jun 23 2005, 11:33 PM Wrote:Someone else on another forum pointed this out to me: the whole idea of Rachel saying that Bruce's mask was the one he wore without the Batsuit was probably a backhanded retort to what was said in Kill Bill, about how Bruce woke up each morning as 'Bruce Wayne' and had to put on a costume in order to become Batman.
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Actually this is a common thread through many of the Batman graphic novels and the continuity books. Batman's presence in Gotham isn't only a presence of "escalation" as the movie describes but also a not-so-subtle irony that the only person strong enough to battle the "crazies" is fairly psychotic by any rational standard. Batman's "real" face is the mask on the batsuit, because there is no Bruce Wayne. The entirety of his formative years were spent destroying any semblence of a person he was.
This concept is most notable in the "Arkham Asylum" graphic novel. Batman goes into the overrun asylum, trading himself for hostages, and the inmates put him through a gauntlet of torture. The first scene where he is in the asylum and the inmates are deciding what to do with him one offers the idea to take his mask off: "I want to see his real face". To which the joker replies: "oh don't be so predictable, for christ's sake! That is his real face."
The tragedy of the character is that he has spent his entire life disassembling his identity and creating another one based on the loss of his parents, but as time goes on, like everything, all the real connections he has to his parents (and his whole reason for being what he is) fades away leaving him a shadow of a person, stuck in the suit because it's the only thing he knows how to be.
There's a perfectly telling sequence in the recent "Broken City" series (Batman #620-625) where Batman is imagining back to the night his parents were shot and going through it the way he would have liked it to happen. In one scene he has all his martial arts knowledge and he crushes the mans hand, and in the other there is 3 shots instead of 2 and a scene of little bruce laying with his parents with a bullet in his head and a content smile on his face with him thinking "but it's just a lie. A dream that won't come true".