hen you think of Bruce Wayne you probably see a millionaire who’s secretly a vigilante, a man who dons a mask and fights crime in the cover of night. A man who has sacrificed a life of normality, and sometimes has to drag his own reputation through the mud, in order to become the protective watcher of the night. But I see it another way. Bruce Wayne doesn’t become Batman, I believe it’s the other way around. Bruce Wayne is dead. He died the night he saw his parents gunned down in Crime Alley, and in his place was born a vengeance that would turn Gotham’s darkness in on itself.
To the denizens of Gotham, Bruce Wayne is the only living descendant of one of the first families of Gotham. The Waynes helped found Gotham, they helped build it across generations. Through philanthropy and innovation the Wayne family molded and cared for Gotham, until other, more evil machinations slowly grew like weeds, and corruption began to choke out all the good they had done. To the people of Gotham, Bruce Wayne is literally the last of a dying breed. But what they have yet to face is that the Wayne family is already history, eternally present only in the distant past.
♦♦
“Some places have a hunger about them,” was what Dick Grayson’s father told him when they would come through Gotham in Haley’s Circus (quoting Scott Snyder – The Black Mirror), “You either feed them what they want, or you stay far away.” Gotham’s rapacious hunger took Thomas and Martha Wayne, as it was prone to do, always taking what it wanted – but that night it made a critical mistake. It inadvertently created something that would itself offer a challenge, a gauntlet thrown down that something else in its stead could be hungrier.
And all the while this insatiable hunger, this oncoming storm, grew inside the new man, and he had to learn to disguise it. He had to learn to laugh at parties, and drink champagne (i.e., apple juice) with Gotham’s patrician class, and attend social functions with supermodels on his arms. But, of course, all of it was an act. All that really consumed him were the criminals who were themselves filled with Gotham’s hunger; hiding in the shadows, feeding off the weak. He wouldn’t let it be for much longer.
♦♦
Only when he was alone could he show himself, though even he wasn’t entirely certain as to what he was. So he built himself. He brought himself to the peak of physical strength; simultaneously honing his detective skills and fortifying an unbreakable resolve. He became something that might withstand the arduous weight of Gotham’s will. But it wasn’t enough. It still wasn’t who he was. He didn’t want to merely withstand the will, he wanted to break it. Gotham was dark, but he intuited that he had to be more than opaque. And one night as he sat in the great estate of the Wayne Family, ever desperately grasping for his true identity, trying to find a way to set free who he really was, a bat broke through the window and landed on the bust of the long-gone boy’s father. In that moment he knew who he was, what he had become. And so he wore a symbol to show the underbelly of Gotham what it woke up that night in Crime Alley – to show Gotham’s dark forces what it will have to suffer for all it had stolen.
♦♦
♦♦
Picture the Batman attending political campaigns dressed like a Wayne and feeling his skin crawl as he watches another corrupt politician fraudulently buying himself into office. He goes to a wedding for one of the Falcone children and does everything he can to keep the wings from tearing through his suit at the sight of an entire progeny of organized crime. He wakes up in the night in cold sweats, reminded of what happened to a young boy and his parents one horrid night – something that has happened to far too many families in his city.
But when the sun goes down, and monsters are loose, he takes off his mask, and Gotham sees his true form: a creature of reckoning. He takes on those that the hunger has yet to satiate. The monsters in human skin that feed the hunger, that allow it to become their own. The ones with bleached skin and hair, and acid-burned faces, and tally marks carved into themselves. And not surprisingly Gotham too has attempted to put out this Dark Knight. It’s broken his back, and his heart, and tried to take away everything that he loves, demanding that he gives in to its will. But every time that Gotham endeavors to put him down, he sneers and rises. Challenging it once more. Telling it that it all belongs to him. That Gotham is his city, now.
♦♦
♦♦
Gotham has a hunger about it. And it believes that Bruce Wayne can be broken and eaten up like all the rest. But Bruce Wayne is only a mask, and the one who dons it is hungrier.
♦♦
Isaac Jon Enen is a writer originating from a small town in Illinois. He writes about what he loves.
