The Secret of Batman Begins Is It Made Bruce Wayne Real

Early in Batman Begins, Ra’s al Ghul, in the guise of Henri Ducard, critiques the vigilante efforts of his prospective student Bruce Wayne. A vigilante, he explains, is a man who can get lost in the scramble for his own gratification. He can be destroyed or locked up. But if you make yourself more than just a man? If you devote yourself to an ideal? And if they can’t stop you??? You become something else entirely: a legend.

When Batman Begins hit theaters 20 years ago, Batman was certainly already a legend. In addition to starring in four blockbuster movies from 1989 to 1997, Batman had long since carried numerous comics and cartoon shows. But despite the speech delivered by Ra’s, the goal of Batman Begins writer David S. Goyer and director Christopher Nolan wasn’t to make Batman a legend. Rather it was to unpack that legend and show the person behind it. The man, Bruce Wayne, who most definitely could (and eventually would) be locked up and broken by his enemies.

In fact, Nolan and Goyer take a full hour for Batman to actually appear onscreen in that first film, something which irritated executives at Warner Bros. at the time.

“They were not happy about that,” Goyer recently told the Happy Sad Confused podcast. For Goyer, executives didn’t get it because most Batman movies to that point had put little interest in Bruce Wayne. “No disrespect to the actors who played Bruce Wayne prior to this, [but] as moviegoers we were always twiddling our thumbs waiting for the character to get into costume and for the movie to begin.”

Goyer’s not wrong. Certainly Michael Keaton is a lot of fun as a nervy Bruce Wayne who is uncomfortable in his own skin, but he too played a guy who (as we saw in Batman Returns) just sits around waiting for the Bat-Signal to tell him he can get in the suit again. The other guys who portrayed Batman in live action—Lewis Wilson and Robert Lowery in the 1940s serials, Val Kilmer and George Clooney after Keaton—just played Wayne as either a blank canvas or a PR schmoozer.

To be fair, those guys were also following some forms of the comics. When Bruce Wayne appears in “The Case of the Chemical Syndicate,” the Bill Finger and Bob Kane story that introduced Batman in 1939’s Detective Comics #27, he’s described by Commissioner Gordon as a “boring” man who “seems disinterested in everything.” When the final panels of the story reveal that Wayne is in fact Batman, it’s a twist ending because the reader—like the citizens of Gotham—saw no similarities between an air-headed socialite and the Caped Crusader.

That moment established the dynamic of Batman and his secret identity. Like Clark Kent in his first appearances, Bruce Wayne was the false identity, a distraction from the hero who did his work in a cape. But whereas Superman and other superheroes began to put more emphasis on the human underneath the suit, especially after the advent of the grumpy Marvel heroes in the 1960s, Batman continued to make Bruce Wayne less human. Millionaire playboy soon became one more tool in Batman’s arsenal, no more authentic than the Matches Malone identity he would adopt to infiltrate the Gotham underworld.

To be sure, comic book stories certainly fleshed out the psychology of Bruce Wayne, as did the excellent Batman: The Animated Series and one of the movies that preceded Batman Begins, Batman: Mask of the Phantasm. That animated film continued TAS while putting emphasis on a young Bruce Wayne (Kevin Conroy), who finally decides to devote himself to Batman after losing his one chance at love.

But even in those stories, Bruce Wayne was a mask, something that Conroy indicated by pitching his voice slightly higher to play Bruce, just like he pitched it down as Batman. Likewise the comics of the era increasingly made Batman into a cynical loner, someone whose trauma made him completely antisocial (despite, you know, Robin and the Justice League), and granted him an almost godlike ability to solve any problem.

Not so in Batman Begins. Throughout that first hour of the movie, we see Bruce Wayne as someone filled with anger and sorrow and a longing for a normal life. We don’t even hear a hint of Batman when, early in the film, Wayne tells a bragging prison thug, “You’re not the devil, you’re practice.”

We similarly see utter helplessness, not extreme competence, in Wayne’s face as he listens to Carmine Falcone (Tom Wilkinson) monologue about how little the “Prince of Gotham City” knows about the town, and we witness nothing but impotent sulking, not unquenchable justice, when Rachel Dawes (Katie Holmes) slaps Bruce for even thinking about shooting his parents’ killer Joe Chill (Richard Brake).

Batman Begins gives us a radically different type of Batman, one who is a tool created by Bruce Wayne, not the other way around. To be sure, we do see him strategically employ the persona of a billionaire playboy in Batman Begins. He smirks his way through company boardrooms, acting more interested in flirting with the executive assistants, while biding his time to speak with Lucius Fox. Later he impulsively buys a hotel to imitate a callow one-percenter, or drunkenly rants at Wayne Manor’s guests while discreetly attempting to get them safely away from Ra’s al Ghul’s ill intent. But they last just for a moments onscreen. As soon as Citizen Wayne’s insulted guests are gone, Bale goes back to playing the real Bruce, a man who just wants to make Gotham safe.

He is a man who seeks to make his city better and so creates Batman as a radical form of activism. He even recruits a network of associates and benefactors to help the movement via Fox (Morgan Freeman), Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman), and Rachel Dawes.

Thanks to the success of Batman Begins, the movies that followed were allowed to put more emphasis on Bruce Wayne, to the point that Robert Pattinson‘s version in The Batman hardly makes a distinction between the Caped Crusader and his civilian identity. There is only Batman in that film. While that might be an overcorrection, it does point to the perhaps the greatest achievement of Goyer and Nolan’s movie: it made Bruce Wayne into a legend, worthy of big screen attention.