Bruce Wayne wakes up from a nightmare inside of a prison cell. A form of sleep where our mind harnesses our mind’s biggest fears and creates something we have to confront when we should be at our most peaceful. Pain and fear care not when we try to avoid it. Mentally, we are always susceptible to the fears that plague us from the second we get rid of it, to the moment it returns. For all of us, fear has a beginning, an origin story if you will, and for some of us, it never ends. It only evolves into something greater, or more dangerous. For Bruce, his literal descent into fear at the bottom of a well implants an image of fear into his mind at a young age. This is the beginning of his origin story. In this moment Bruce’s confrontation with fear expands when that fear comes in the form of blood, bullets, and shiny white pearls. His father lay on the ground muttering his last words to Bruce, “Don’t be afraid,’ Thomas Wayne’s affirmation that it’ll be okay, just as it was when he fell. This is his father’s reminder to Bruce that fear, failure, and falling are a part of the journey, but it is how you approach it that makes it something you can control. This is the case made by Liam Neeson’s Henri Ducard as he trains Bruce to harness his fear and devote himself to becoming something more than just a man subject to the cages of fear. How he can rattle that cage to become the master of his own fears by turning the emotion of fear against those who prey on the fearful from a nightmare, into a reality.
For Bruce he is taught by the League of Shadows that combating fear is a balance between the mind and the body. Bruce masters this and channels that into becoming the Batman. For Bruce he is looking for a way to ground his fears. To channel that into a specific outlet to distance himself from the fateful night where he lost his parents. Like many people who live a life fearful of the unknown, the abstract, those with anxiety, we are looking for a way to combat the horrors that exist within the peripherals of the mind. That’s not to say that we’ll turn to crime fighting and serving justice to the unjust to free ourselves from the shackles of anxiety, but to channel that into something else so as to master it, is where we should turn.
Bruce finds himself at a crossroads in life. He’s imprisoned, Bruce Wayne is written as “dead”, and Ducard extends a branch for him to escape the pit of dying in a prison alone. This in the form of, The League of Shadows. A secret group of overwatchers who restore balance in places they see fit. Here, Bruce finds himself coming face to face with fear and the weaponization of it. That fear created from the blue flower Bruce must bring to the League upon entry. This is essentially Bruce’s first step in facing his fears thanks to finding this flower that is to be reborn as his fears. Next comes Bruce’s training, discovering his boundaries, his code, his rules. His turn to vigilantism is what he deems necessary to becoming something more than a man plagued by fear. This challenges the code of the League, and their reaction follows. Bruce enters the phase in his journey where he is starting to grapple with fear and how to control it. It is still eluding him, but the approach is there, and that’s progress.
Shortly after, Bruce molds himself into becoming Batman. A physical, imposing deity that disobeys all sensible and coherent forms of logic, reality, and undoubtedly, fear. Batman is a figure that Bruce gives into. He is indulging in his fears, but backdoors it by reframing what it means to live in fear by turning fear on it’s head. When we realize that the only reality he understands is a life plagued by the very thing that his costume symbolized, we see that as a man defined by fear. Physically, Bruce is a powerhouse. An entire being that defies what it means to be induced by anxiety when they are chiseled to perfection as a Greek God would be. That’s because fear is not a weapon that deteriorates the physical, but the mental. For Bruce he has accomplished the physical aspect of being imposing, but where does he lie mentally? Any realistic medical diagnosis would say that Bruce has clearly lost his mind, but this is his coping mechanism. Mentally he has decided that the only way for him to live a mentally stable life, is to turn to crime fighting as the very thing that created this identity. As Jonathan Crane says, “I respect the mind’s power over the body.” This is something that has stuck with me for a while now, and that’s because our mind is strong enough to create something as powerful as anxiety, and something equally as powerful as creativity. Bruce has anxiety and creativity meet halfway. By harnessing the fear that plagues him into something that instills fear in criminals, he has mastered the biggest challenge of his life.
In the final act Bruce faces his master, Henri Ducard, the real Ra’s Al Ghul, and all the lessons learned come to a point. In a battle less physical than most superhero movies, Bruce and Ra’s respective ideologies on fear come face to face. Bruce’s justified approach to Ra's more judicial approach symbolizes Bruce’s embracement of his identity as a man plagued by fear. Ra’s intends to reset Gotham by never trying to reckon with the idea that fear is a natural part of most people’s lives, and there is no way to keep that in order. It is fascinating to see that approach when you realize that it was personified through Jonathan Crane. Someone who tried streamlining fear into these tangible objects like rabbits and teddy bears as a means to expand the tendrils of fear. Crane and Ra’s don’t realize that creating literal fear will only turn it back on themselves and kill them, or destroy their minds more.
This is why Bruce wins. His journey to defeating his villains that live in the literal versions of fear came from his rise of embracing his own fears. Spending time channeling his identity into his own form of abstract fear on those who prey on the helpless. This comes to fruition when Rachels shares with Bruce, “It’s not who you are underneath, but what you do that defines you”. As someone who has been living with, will live with anxiety and my mind trying to doubt myself, this quote is an optimistic reminder that the brain within this body will not define me. All of the negative, exhausting, and troubled days it brings me is not really me. The person I really am is how I choose to act despite what I have to endure. I live many days wearing a mask of who I am because it’s sometimes the only way I know how to cope with living with something a part of me that I can’t control. It’s why I resort to exploring myself through the writing I share.
It is sometimes the only instance where I am free from the cage, and I hope you feel that.