B:TAS reviews: Bane

(11/26/09)

When Bane first makes his appearance in his titular episode, he is preceded by shots of a crimson sky.  Gotham Airlines or whatever is responsible for his arrival continues what is a definite red motif.  Recently having seen Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Flight of the Red Balloon, in which the color red was used as a bright hopeful contrast to the bleakness of both the mise-en-scene itself and the character’s own troubling lives, I find myself interested in its apocalyptic overtones in Bane.  Even though his accent and Mexican wrestler garb compromise part of his menace, his enormous stature and assured upright disposition solidify him as a figure of terror and despair.

Though Bane is at its core a showdown episode, it is directed in its best moments as a horror film.  When Killer Croc evades the dynamic duo by detouring through the sewer, who but Bane shows up to remove his competition.  We see his exaggeratedly muscular arm strike its way through the sewer wall, hear his cry of rage, and we are then left to imagine how exactly Croc was left with multiple broken bones.  As Batman and Robin look on the tattered Batmobile, one gets the impression that Bane really is capable of damage beyond what is allowed by primetime animation.  Bane, a figure so enticing and so intimidating because of his physical presence, is left off-screen for us to form our own mental images of him, as if he were a beast so visually stunning that maximum effect can only be achieved by prolonging his full reveal.

Bane is not at any such level of visual bewilderment.  As already mentioned, his Mexican wrestling outfit diminishes his role as a perfect assassin, and the one thing that makes him threatening, his built, is communicated to us in the opening scenes. But the scenes that remove him from our vision do serve a few not entirely misleading purposes, the first of which is obviously to make us anticipate the level of destruction he is capable of.  The second is to enforce the idea that Batman must form his own mental image and an expectation of what Bane is, what he looks like, and what he is capable of.  We the audience are let in on a few hush-hush conversations between Bane and his cohorts, but when Batman breaks the window of Candace’s apartment because of Robin’s endangerment at Bane’s hands, we know for certain that he expects the worst.

Even though I have seen Bane several times, whenever I bear witness to the first fifteen minutes I feel tension, anxiety, suspense, anticipation and any such similar word that expresses the almost psychological threat that Bane poses.  The final act is inevitably an anticlimax then.  Batman battles Bane on a cargo ship, Robin the victim of a deathtrap.  Bane is slow, relies more on his rage than on his smarts, another facet of him that is communicated to us early on but that doesn’t quite get its due, and Batman defeats him by severing his venom supply, a physical weakness all too noticeable.  The denouement is a shame, presenting Bane as an ordinary fellow whose menace presumably derives solely from his drugs, Batman ever assured in his victory.  Surely there must be something more to Bane, his obsessive drives or his bold intellect, that makes him and him alone a perfect killing machine.