Skip to main content

Someone arises from the dark

By
I saw The Dark Knight Rises for the umpteenth time today. I was struck by the movie's fascination with masks. Both the hero and the villain wear masks. But the reasons behind wearing them are the chief themes of the movie. Bruce Wayne wears a mask to hide his pain, to sign a symbol, and as a voluntary choice to fight crime; while Bane wears a mask to subdue his pain, and as a compulsion in order to survive.

While Bruce wears a mask to protect his loved ones, Bane wears it because he tried to protect Talia once. So the mask is an enduring symbol of what Bane had been and what Bruce is now. It signifies what Bane could have been. In a symbolic move, he shatters Bruce's backbone, letting him fall, and then picks up his broken mask, useless now. Later on the Batman rises out of his hole, dons on his mask, and shatters Bane's mask. It is the mask that somehow underpins the whole narrative.

Bane's mask looks animalistic in front of the more serene mask of the Batman. The mask's appearance emits the man behind it. While destroying the Batman's mask destroys the idea of the Batman, ie the anonymity of the symbol, destroying the mask of Bane will only destroy Bane.

The mask stands for the choice the Batman made. He can make the right choice, without caring for any repercussions to his person. Bane's mask stands for his lack of choice, it is a survival necessity for him. It is a constant reminder to him of his pain, and it has transformed him from a protector to a killer.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Sheep or wolf?

By
 If you are a good person, then you are most likely also not very smart. Smarter people around you will continue to take advantage of your goodness to get their work done.  So you are either a sheep or a wolf. If you are a sheep then wolves will keep on exploiting you, and if you are a wolf, you will have to keep on exploiting sheep; but if you are a smart wolf, the sheep won't even know that they are being used. Infact most sheep don't even know that they are sheep, or that wolves exist.  Even among wolves, survival is hardly easy. It is hard to find a sheep who is not already being taken advantage of by someone. Once you are a wolf, it is almost impossible to go back to working hard. So you are actually dependent on finding prey. Even though a wolf is usually smarter than its prey, it is actually weaker in the sense that it is purely dependent on the mercy of its prey to sustain it. It is far more prevalent to find wolves among the female population. Females have a natu...
1 comment
Read more

The ascent

By
  I was nineteen, oh what an age!  Soon college would begin. I was ensconced in a chair on the rooftop. The late spring afternoon had a fierce glow, which we called 'loo' in the local vernacular. A kite encircled a distant carrion in the azure sky. The kite was intent on the present, and I was thinking about the future that beckoned. Doubts nagged my conscience. Uncertainties clouded my sky. My failures haunted my present. Will I ever be good enough? Suddenly I lost the train of my thoughts. For a few moments I could not comprehend what my eyes recorded. A single thought overran everything else: who was I? After I regained myself from this brief escape, the kite's repartee with the descending sun seemed far away. The hot cemented rooftop seemed aloof. The searing, barren air seemed powerless. I felt a stark confidence coming to my rescue like an old friend. A tremendous calm had filled my being. After a very long time, I felt lucid. I realized the immense capacity for joy t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Is beauty truth and truth beauty?

By
In my Ayn Rand influenced adolescence, I used to mull over all idealistic musings that I came across. One of my favorites was John Keats ’s ‘beauty is truth, truth beauty’, which I almost internalized. When I was recently reading Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs , I came across a notion which formed the basis of Jobs' personality- that beauty and perfection have a common origin - love. But if love causes beauty, then going by what Keats said, it must also reveal a truth. This article has been written to understand more of this hypothesis and its consequences. Jobs always considered himself more of an artist than an innovator. His ideas appealed more to intuition than to logic. This is one of the reasons why he always had a larger worldview and could leapfrog the others, because intuition may be considered as the condensed version of logic and feelings. Intuition is what we may call instinct: the impulse that is generated out of the sum-total of our mind. In c...
Post a Comment
Read more