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Bruce
Wayne: Murderer?
&
INTRODUCTION
BW: M. This story is a reprisal of a plot line from the classic Bob Kane original Batman series of comics from the 1940s. Well, the premise anyway: “What Happens if Bruce Wayne is Arrested?” The original’s setup was pretty silly: a crook goes kills a man right in front of BW, holds his own hat up & shoots a hat through the top, then tosses the gun to BW who catches it and he does this all while shouting “Don’t shoot, Mr. Wayne! Don’t shoot!” The hat-shooting thing is a little over-the-top while I can’t decide if the execution as a whole was clever or crappy.
In one review of BW: M, a reviewer comments that
Batman is “talking to himself” which is in itself preposterous. At fist I’d had
no idea what the heck the dude was smoking, but then I realized the dude
misinterpeted Batman’s habit of talking to ghosts. I mean, obviously he only
does it while standing over a loved-one’s grave (mostly his parents’ grave) and
it’s cathartic. The man represses his true feelings deep inside of him and the
only people he confides in are the dead because he inherently has no trust for
the living because of their potential to betray him. Soliloquys are
time-honored tradition in drama (either the serious kind found in Shakespearean
tragedies or the funny kind in late night TV shows such as Conan O’Brien) and
anyone who still thinks people who “talk to themselves” are the truly deranged
ones. (Robin was created specifically back in the old days to give Batman
someone to talk to so they could avoid having him talk to himself to explain
the narrative. Uh, they invented a orphaned circus performer before they
decided to introduce a butler? Hello! Millionaire/butler is a no-brainer
combination.)
So, anyway, what are Batman’s thoughts on the setup?
From BW:F vol 2: To some degree, I must concede that my enemies have won. /
Bruce Wayne has been publically destroyed… and privately abandoned… / … and all
my enemies have been focused on that, on myself… while the other victims
have fallen through the cracks. / It should never have been this way. “I’m
sorry,” he says to woman’s grave, “… you deserve better, Vesper.” Better
than to have your life end as a pawn in an attack on the man that you loved. /
So many have sacrificed, and been sacrificed, for the sake of one man’s
pride.
PART
ONE:
A
FOOL’S ERRAND.
What happens is that Batman goes out on patrol (I’ll
discuss the events of the patrol later) with his bodyguard, Sasha Bordeaux.
She’s a new character, so new that he doesn’t even have her own pseudonym.
She’s hired to protect Bruce Wayne and she isn’t fazed one bit by the
realization that he’s really The Batman. She knows why he does what he
does: To keep what happened to HIM from EVER happening to another
soul. / To become the MAN who could KEEP that promise. And
even more, he’s: Doomed to FAILURE, again and again. / Because it is a
true fool’s errand. / Because his quest is impossible / … / even if (the
Rogue’s gallery) were LOCKED away securely FOREVER… / …parents would STILL
be murdered… / …children would STILL become ORPHANS. / And before someone
thinks that the FOOLISH errand makes the one who pursues it a FOOL himself, let
me CLARIFY: / He KNOWS all this better than ANYONE. / But he does it ANYWAY. /
Heedless of the COST to HIMSELF… / …painfully aware of the COST to OTHERS.
Sasha also realizes the irony of her being in his
employ: We TRAPPED each other. / He couldn’t FIRE me, let me GO
knowing his SECRET. / And I wouldn’t QUIT protecting Bruce Wayne, even if he
REALLY was the BATMAN. / If there’s one thing we TRULY share, it’s that: /
We’re BOTH too STUBBORN for our own GOOD.
There are many characters who know Bruce Wayne, many
who know Batman, many who know both Bruce Wayne & Batman seperately. But of the few who know that both men are
one-in-the-same, the one who has known him the least amount of time is gifted
with the perception to know him more deeply than anyone else. One of the
tragedies is that although Sasha understands him the best, she finds herself
incapable of actually starting a dialouge and getting personal to him.
We have a sense that Batman resents her: she insists
on protecting Bruce Wayne and won’t allow his putting on a mask to deter her
from doing so. Batman, however, insists that Bruce Wayne IS the mask and that
since Bruce Wayne doesn’t really exist and Batman has no use for protection
because he can watch out for himself, she is an irrelevant distraction from his
quest. With this whole dynamic barrier
between them, the go out on patrol.
THEIR LAST PATROL (PROLOUGE). <<< My title
for this segment for review purposes only.
Yes, I’m talking about the patrol now. Hold your
damn horses! Anyway, one of the stops they make is on the roof across from the
building where Vesper Fairchild (Bruce Wayne’s ex-girlfriend). Like Vicky Vhale
of the live-action BATMAN movie, Vesper is a journalist. Sasha watches him peer
at Vesper with a set of binoculars. She doesn’t know what he sees. She doesn’t
know if he’s watching Vesper taking a shower or otherwise undressed, has how no
idea how far into voyeurism Batman’s interest goes. He sees Vesper working on
her computer, fully dressed, and drinking coffee but Sasha DOESN’T know because
she doesn’t ask him what he’s looking at or borrow his binoculars. Heck, what
woman wouldn’t be creeped out by watching a man watching another woman while
that other woman doesn’t know she’s being watched by the man?
But she does know that Vesper has become part of his
nightly routine, so he must be thinking about her, he must feel regretful for
having chased her out of his life by giving Vesper the impression Bruce Wayne
had been unfaithful to her with three floosies. To keep his secrets from being
leaked, he had thought it wise to cut the jouralist woman out of his life even
as she was falling for him. He deprived himself from the ordinary pleasure of
being in a loving, mutual relationship with a woman out of fear it would
conflict with his vigilantee pursuits. Sasha is pretty sure even if Batman knew
she loved him, he wouldn’t care that she does and she can’t bring herself to
tell them. The very moment she is about to speak to him, she is interrupted by
an explosion and we have no idea what could have happened if she’d had been
granted the few precious seconds to articulate herself.
Her moment is lost. The explosion is caused by five
unfortunate bank robbers (okay, so they’re robbing a “Currency Exchange,” but
so what?) who Batman quickly beats the crap out of. But, what are you going to
do? He told them “Surrender… or suffer” and they picked suffering. Sasha: This
is Gotham by NIGHT… / … chaos UNCORKED on a REGULAIR basis. Right after the
foiled robbery, he and Sasha rescue some victims from a fire. Batman saves two
foriegners who don’t speak English (uh, I don’t mean that how that sounds) and
he’s deaf to their thank yous for saving their lives as he watches an young man
zipped into a bodybag. He can NEVER be fast ENOUGH. He understands what
they are saying to him, but since he failed in rescuing this one person, he doesn’t
believe he deserves their praise. Perhaps he’s agonizing that if he’d just let
the robbers commit their crime, maybe he could have been at the scene of the
fire soon enough to make sure nobody died? How is this law student’s death
going to affect his entire family? And he’s certain that he’s to blame for it.
From there, they coax an escaped tiger back into
it’s cage (the ABSURD) and some Russian(the
OBVIOUS) mobsters shooting it out with the police (…they
go through a LOT of BULLETS. / A lot of PEOPLE suffer because of them. / It
makes him ANGRY. / He even scares ME when he’s ANGRY).
Batman takes out two mobsters simultaneously, tripping one and
uppercuttig the other. A third he knees in the soloplexus, a fourth he nearly
kicks his head off. The fifth points a gun at his back. Batman turns around
calmly, tells the man “I don’t like you” while staring right down a gun
pointed directly in his face, then disarms the gunman so fast that the guy is
completely shocked that his gun had disappeared so quickly despite the fact he
was holding it in a firm two-hand grip. The next frame has the gunman fly past
Sasha who watches him go and the illustration suggests the guy was sent flying
with a kick to the balls. (That’s pretty amazing considering Sasha was last
shown standing on the bridge over-looking the shootout. Did Batman actually
kick the guy THAT hard or did Sasha at some point come down to lower level?)
Either way… add a resounding OUCH!!!!!!!!!!!
sound here. That’s what you get for making Batman angry.
They split up as Batman responds to a “jumper”
(someone about to commit suicide by jumping off a building) and Sasha dives
down to deal with two low-lifes mugging a woman. A bald one is holding her arms
while the one with hair menaces her with a knife. Sasha stomps the bald guy “No
means no, boys” then the guy with hair grabs the woman. Sasha
knocks-his-block-off with her retractable staff.
They meet up again at the cave. Bruce has been
listening to the news-broadcasts and is shaken. The only fatality in the fire
had been that one person he’d seen zipped into the bodybag. She changes into
her civvies without his noticing she’s there. He’s more interested in brooding
over a death he could have prevented to notice a woman changing her clothes. (A
woman taking off one set of clothes, her being naked around him,
and her putting on some other clothes.) Gosh, they aren’t even dating and he’s
oblivious of her as a man married for seventy years would be of his own wife.
That’s the extent of her irrelevance in his eyes.
She asks him about the jumper. He doesn’t hear her,
then he notices she’s talking to him. He glances at her for a second to listen
to her question, then he walks past her to the stairs. He doesn’t start to
answer until his back is turned so he doesn’t have to maintain eye contact
while speaking. He clearly isn’t thinking of the jumper he’d saved but of the
fire-victim he hadn’t and he doesn’t want her to read his sorrow on his face.
He goes up the stairs from the cave into the manor, leaves the clock-door open
for Sasha to close behind herself. She goes up the stairs between the first and
second floor of the manor, ignoring her offer of coffee. Could she be trying to
flirt with him again? She trails off, alarmed by his look of shock at something
she can’t see. She runs up the stairs and over-his-shoulder, she sees Vesper
lying dead on the floor. How the hell did that woman’s body get there?
THE DANCE: GUILT OR INNOCENSE.
That’s when the cops break down the front door and
arrest them. Unbenownst to either of them, Bruce has been framed for murder and
there’s a 911 tape with Vesper clearly stating he was trying to kill her. A cop
stands with his gun drawn at the back of Bruce’s head as he knees and embraces
Vesper’s body. A second cop has his gun shoved into Sasha’s face as she stands
with her hands raised in surrender. The cops mean serious business and they’ve
got their suspects at gun-point.
In-costume, Batman could easily dispatch the cops
easily, but in the guise of Bruce, he isn’t allowed to show any aggression. So
his only option is compliance.
Does he realize how similar the cops’ routine is to
the criminals? How blurred the line between law and lawnlessness has become for
him? Four men armed with guns out-numbering two unarmed suspects (a flaky
millionaire and his female bodyguard). How, like the criminals, the cops are
feeling the urge to pull their triggers and start shooting if the people
they’re holding up don’t accede to their wishes. Ofcourse their first
impression at this moment is that he is guilty. They’ve caught him standing
over the body of a woman they presume that he’d killed; a dead woman who in her
last moments of life had accused him of trying to kill her. Would he consent at
this time that the police are as “cowardly” and “suspicious” as the criminals?
We cannot know. The line of communication between Bruce and Sasha is all at
once severed as completely as the one between Vesper and the living.
Did I just do that? Did I just compare the police to
criminals? Yah. Deal with it. From this point on, the paths of both Sasha and
Bruce are uncertain. His dilemma is that while Bruce Wayne is being held in
custody, Batman cannot go on patrol. Who knows who could die while he is
detained? Sasha’s dilemma is that she could prove their innocense by exposing
their alibi: Bruce Wayne couldn’t have possibly murdered Vesper because he was
out with her, that he IS Batman. But she cannot imagine betraying his
confidence, especially since she loves him. He finds himself in the uneviable
position of being an innocent, accused man in a world where people believe he
is simply a weakling who’d snapped and been thrown to the wolves. Jim Gordon is
nowhere to be seen in the pages of this saga.
And, still, in a way, his spying on Vesper earlier
is a little suspicious. Can she really be sure he hadn’t killed Vesper and made
up the “jumper” story to get back to the mansion before her? She hadn’t heard
the report on the police radio because the reciever was in his cowl and she
wasn’t privy to that information. She hadn’t actually him talk down a jumper
either and he was hesitant to even talk about it.
So we have a new division.
A.)
The police who believe that Bruce Wayne is a
murderer and want to prove it simply because they enjoy causing the downfall of
someone who might have believed he was above the law (too bad they never
realize how close-to-the-truth this is…).
B.)
The civilians who also believe he is guilty and
laugh over the indignity he is “rightfully” suffering.
C.)
Batman’s allies who know his secrets and believe he
is innocent.
D.)
Batman’s allies who know his secrets and aren’t sure
what to think.
E.)
Batman’s allies who don’t have any idea why the heck
they are bothering with proving Bruce Wayne’s innocense because, well, isn’t he
just a flaky rich guy?
F.)
Bruce Wayne’s surrogate parents (Leslie Thompkins
& Alfred Pennyworth).
G.)
And one person who finally figures out the mystery
of Batman’s true identity.
H.)
And the villains who know his secret, killed Vesper,
and framed Bruce Wayne.
The double-identity gimmick certainly is milked for all it’s worth and yet the narrative is greatly compelling… with a few low-points.
Part
two:
Procedure
The level of detail shown is… impressive… and
distressing. Vesper has been shot four times in the back, we see the
bullet-wounds and the blood. There are also bullet-holes in the floor. An
over-turned table and phone off it’s hook where she presumably had called for
help. The police coldly go about their investigation, caring only for evidence.
She is no longer a woman to them, just a victim, another piece of evidence in a
crime. “Do it right, detectives,” their boss tells them, “I don’t want
this lost on a technicality.” So he was become part of a THIS
rather than an innocent man, an innocent man who selflessly and secrectly
crusades to save lives where the system fails.
Sasha and Bruce are interrogated seperately. Both
are forced to read out loud their rights and initial each right. The
implication ofcourse that the police think so little of Bruce that they suspect
he might try to claim not to have been read the Miranda to undermine their
investigation. Bruce’s initial reaction when Detective Allen enters the
interrogation room is to scowl at him out of revulsion. In the bright light of
flourescents and without the cloaking shadows or Batman mask, Allen finds
Bruce’s reaction amusing and he smiles smugly to himself. He is amused by this
expression that has stricken thousands of criminals with fear.
Bruce & Sasha are visibly shaken by the sound of
Vesper’s recorded 911 call. “Hard listening,” Detective Allen says, “Something
like this gets admitted at trial…” Bruce’s head is lowered, his eyes
closed as he listens silently to the words. Allen turns his face away as he
finishes, “…well, the words lethal injection spring to mind.” While he
isn’t looking, Bruce scowls at him again.
Bruce: “Detective Allen.” Detective Allen: “Yeah,
Bruce? You want to tell me what happened?” The scowl has fallen from
Bruce’s face when Allen looks at him again. Was he about to say he didn’t know,
maybe was going to find out? He finally settles for a petulant “I want my laywer.”
Part
Three:
(“Batgirl”
24,
unsure
of subtitle for this chapter)
A male and female detective (not the ones leading the investigation) wander, lost through Wayne Manor. Unknown to them, someone is listening into their conversation.
Male detective: “Ah. Mama and Pappa Wayne.” / “With
those two… I always thought Wayne would snap someday.”
Female detective: “Yeah, why’s that? They spank him
too much?”
Male detective: “You’re kidding? You don’t know the
story?”
Female detective: “What story?”
Male detective: “Thomas Wayne, brilliant surgeon and
philanthropist… Martha Wayne, devoted wife and mother to their only son Bruce…
they were Gotham’s Kennedys. But richer.” / “Until one night they take a
very wrong turn down a dark alley… and get their heads blown off.” /
“They find young Bruce kneeling in their blood.”
Female detective (not impressed): “Delightful.”
Male detective: “Couldn’t have been more than… eight
years old. Kid becomes a billionaire and an orphan in two seconds.” / “Tell me that
won’t mess with your head. You don’t see something like that and grow up
normal.”
Female detective: “You almost sound sorry for him.”
Male detective: “I almost am.”
Skipping ahead…
Part
Six:
No
Exit
While Bruce is being arraigned, Alfred rides a bus and is
dismayed by the gossip that the other passengers are passing around:
“…
so glad I could come down for the weekend! Tell me everything!
What’s
new in the big city?”
“… little bit of a scandal,
actually..”
“Bruce Wayne? A murderer?
Darlking, you must be joking?”
“I
know he’s a bit of a lady killer, but really!
The
man can barely tie his own shoes!”
“…
hear what happened to that reporter from N.P.R?”
“…
government conspiracy, man!
He was
dating that chick, right?
You
think he’d just freak out and off
her
without no warning in his home?”
Incredibly, people actually start tossing around theories
that Alfred or Dick Grayson might have been part of the fiasco in attempt to
frame him. So, the public face that Bruce had been spending years of
meticulously pretending to be a bungling, decadent playboy has blown up in his
face. He completely isn’t taken seriously, a joke. Either a clumsy, incompetent
or a crazy-wacko murderous lunactic. The judge, Schreck, is a bald, vindicative
man with a propensity to shout. When it comes to setting bail, he looks over in
Bruce’s direction. Bruce’s eyes are shadowed, he is silent, let his lawyer do
the talking and hasn’t spoken once. The judge sees him as being the picture of
a remorseless killer and denies bail. “Frankly, I find this whole affair a sickening
affront to the city. This crime is a brutal and grotesque even
by Gotham Standards.” / “Given
Mr. Wayne’s wealth and considerable resources, I feel that it is
in the best interest of the city that he be held without bail.”
The reporters confront Alfred and he squirms at the assault
of their badgering questions and the flashbulbs on their cameras. Dick runs up
and chases the reporters away. Outside, Alfred tells Dick the bad news and Dick
is horrified by the possibility that Bruce is going to be detained in Blackgate
Prison. Alfred asks Dick “what happened” and Dick has no idea, Bruce hadn’t
confided in him. Barbera meets with Bruce next and she tells him she’d taken a
correspondance course in law and is capable of serving as his lawyer and
refuses.
From the
Inside Out