Pride, An Analysis of Bane and Talia al Ghul's Relationship in The Dark Knight Rises
Bane was born in hell, but it wasn't the hell that Bruce Wayne mistook it to be. The child who would eventually become Bane was actually born in a Caribbean prison called Peña Dura. Had the Dark Knight had more time to contemplate his information on Bane, it would have quickly become clear that the masked mercenary was not born in the Pit. Bane was raised in darkness, and did not see the light until he was a man. The Pit is built around a central hole, and convicts are encouraged to attempt to climb to the surface to psychologically torture them. Light is omnipresent in the Pit.
The first time Bane saw light, as a young man, it blinded him.
Clearly, therefore, Bane was not born in the Pit, as Bruce Wayne deduced. In proof of fact, he was born in a Caribbean island prison, a place of total darkness reserved for the relatives of those accused of political crimes. Once public officials realized that Bane's mother had died in Peña Dura, they decided to free the young man in the interest of a twisted form of justice. Having only known a life of incarceration, however, the young Bane could never truly join society. He traveled from place to place for several months and eventually found himself in the Middle East, where he committed his first murder. As punishment for this offense, Bane was now confined to the Pit.
It was here, shortly after Bane arrived in the Pit, that he first met the young Talia al Ghul. Her mother had been incarcerated in exchange for her father's freedom and, like Bane, she had been born in a prison. In this small child's eyes, Bane saw the reflection of his past. Unlike Bane, Talia was still innocent and had hope for a life outside the confines of her present hell. But, as a girl, she was not safe. Her mother constantly had to protect herself and her daughter and lived in a state of paranoia. This watchfulness took a toll on Talia's mother until one day, when she died at the hands of the other prisoners. At this instant, Bane took on the protection and welfare of Talia, seeing a chance to preserve her innocence in ways that his had already been lost.
Bane began to acquire his hulking physique during this period as a means to protect Talia. He was constantly battling other prisoners for her sake, and when they were at peace, he always encouraged her to escape the Pit. For a child, he knew, it was possible to make the climb. One day, as Bane brawled with a dozen other men over the right to a few extra scraps of food for Talia, he looked upwards to see that Talia had made the jump. His heart both sang with relief and hardened with resolve. Bane fully believed that, though he had guided an innocent child to freedom, he himself was condemned to death.
Talia found her father and convinced Ras' al Ghul and the League of Shadows to return to the Pit and rescue Bane. By the time that they arrived for him, however, the prisoners had punished Talia's protector for his preferential treatment of her. Bane had been struck with a plague and, in the depth of his sickness, a group of other prisoners had viciously attacked him. The Pit's resident doctor, a morphine addict, had attempted to treat Bane's injuries, but instead had further maimed him. The League of Shadows exacted vengeance against Talia and Bane's tormentors in the Pit and freed Bane from his second term of imprisonment. Using Ras' al Ghul's significant financial resources, Talia provided Bane with a mask system that delivered anesthetic gas to help relieve his significant pain. From this point forward, however, Bane was never free of physical suffering.
At Talia's insistence, both she and Bane were taken in by the League of Shadows as trainees. Both were trained in agility, strength, misdirection, and League of Shadows ideology regarding failed states. Ras' al Ghul taught them both that Gotham City was the next failed state that the League of Shadows was destined to destroy. Secretly, however, Ras' was pained by Bane's presence in the League, seeing him as a reminder of his wife's incarceration and death. Over Talia's strong objections, Ras' eventually banished Bane from the League of Shadows, citing his tendency to physically devastate his opponents in combat. Ras' continued to train Talia as an heir to the League of Shadow's mission, and Bane became a mercenary. During this period, he may have further increased his physical prowess with steroids or experimental drugs. At any rate, by his and the Batman's first meeting, Bane was more physically powerful than anyone had ever imagined.
Events took a significant turn when Ras' al Ghul was violently killed in Gotham during the attempted execution of his own plan to destroy the city. Even as an outcast of the League of Shadows, Bane was still influenced by League ideology, and felt the pull of a perceived responsibility to destroy Gotham City. As time passed, Bane accumulated a significant army of mercenaries loyal to his cause, even being referred to in some circles as the de facto leader of the League of Shadows. Talia gladly allowed Bane to fulfill this role within the League, instead focusing her own energies on building her late father's financial empire. Bane continued his work as a mercenary until he heard of Wayne Enterprises' latest clean energy initiative, which involved the commission of a working fusion reactor. Pending research in former nations of the Eastern Bloc would most likely soon suggest that this fusion reactor could be weaponized. Recognizing that the al Ghul family's financial resources could be used to invest in and, thus, obtain access to, such a potential weapon, Bane contacted Talia to set in motion the first steps of an intricate master plan. As "Miranda Tate" first expressed interest in Wayne Enterprises' clean energy project, the Joker was languishing away in Arkham Asylum.
At the start of the events that would bring Bane and the Batman into conflict, Bane allowed himself to be apprehended by the CIA as part of his plot to capture Dr. Leonid Pavel, the Russian nuclear physicist who eventually validated his theories about weaponization of the fusion reactor. Because Pavel's paper caused Wayne Enterprises to shut down and conceal the fusion reactor from the public eye, Talia in turn became more persistent in her desire to see the fruit of her investments. Bane's work as a mercenary had placed himself and his men securely on the payroll of John Daggett, a business rival of Bruce Wayne's and a member of Wayne Enterprises' Board of Trustees. Bane used Daggett's financial resources to move his base of operations into the sewers of Gotham, to start laying explosive concrete around the city, and to bankrupt Wayne Enterprises via a hit on the city's stock market. The latter of these events caused the return of the Batman to the streets of Gotham, but this proved no problem for Bane, who had already deduced the vigilante's identity long before commencing his machinations. Having secured control of the Wayne Enterprises Board of Trustees for Talia, Bane disposed of Daggett. Although Talia and Bruce Wayne developed an intimate relationship, Talia had no intention of killing Wayne at this time. Despite a wish for vengeance in her father's death, Talia intended to leave the actual death of Wayne to her lifelong protector and enforcer, Bane.
The first time that Bane and the Batman met, Bane was determined to physically and psychologically destroy his opponent. After breaking the Batman's back, he and his henchmen took Wayne to the Pit where he and Talia had once suffered. There, Wayne heard a skewed version of Bane's history from the other prisoners, including the morphine-addicted doctor who had inflicted Bane's horrific injuries. Once Bane had returned from the Middle East, he kidnapped the Wayne Enterprises Board of Trustees and obtained control of the fusion reactor, which Dr. Pavel weaponized. This was the first time that Talia and Bane had personally met since Ras' al Ghul's lifetime, but Talia played her part well. Bane detonated the explosive concrete planted within Gotham's sewers during a Gotham Rogues football game, all according to his master plan, and revealed the nuclear device to the citizens of the city. The only citizen with whom Bane would ever trust the detonator was Talia, and she held the detonator from the beginning. Although it was their shared ambition to destroy Gotham, Bane wanted Talia, the child who had once so closely resembled him, to have the final joy of fulfilling her father's dream. As he had promised the Batman, Bane gave the citizens of Gotham hope for the future knowing that, ultimately, he intended to destroy them.
Gotham City descended into lawlessness over the next five months according to Bane's precise plans. The citizens lived according to mob rule and punished the rich and powerful in kangaroo courts. Bane realized that, like the other Gotham residents held captive within their own city, he too would die when the nuclear device decayed to the point of detonation or was remotely detonated by Talia al Ghul. In the intervening months, however, he developed no escape plan or other alternative stratagem that would save his own life. In keeping with his extreme version of the League of Shadows' ideology, Bane intended to sacrifice his own existence for what he viewed as the purification of western society. Talia al Ghul was equally devoted to Bane's school of thought, having been raised to honor and respect the man who had protected her from death during her time in the Pit. Their vision began to be threatened a brief few days before their intended day of destruction, when a burning bat appears on one of Gotham's bridges. Like Talia before him, the Batman had escaped hell.
Bane prepared for a final confrontation with the Batman, secretly disturbed that a man he had so completely broken had been able to recover his humanity. An army of freed police officers, with the Batman among them, attacked City Hall on the final morning before the nuclear weapon's detonation, which could never be stopped as long as Talia was alive to flood the fusion reactor's chamber. Bane and the Batman met in battle once more in the streets of Gotham, but the Batman had clearly benefited from his time in the Pit. As Bane attempted to pummel the Batman to death by his own brute strength, the Batman took advantage of what may arguably be the masked mercenary's only weakness and fractured Bane's anesthetic delivery system. Gas hissed in the air as Bane's punches became more erratic and inaccurate. When the Batman sent his opponent through a glass window into city hall, Bane's body was wracked by excruciating pain and he himself could do nothing in resistance.
Telling Talia to guard the doors, still considering her an ally, the Batman violently interrogated Bane about the location of the nuclear weapon's detonator. In agony and unable to answer, Bane could only question the vigilante's resilience in the face of such intense physical and psychological torture.
The pain suddenly began to ease. Fighting through the nausea and other withdrawal symptoms wracking his body, Bane realized that Talia was before him, a blade in the Batman's side. Her fingers were quickly and precisely rewiring the broken connections of Bane's mask delivery system. As he returned to a normal consciousness, Bane began to hear Talia's words. She was telling the Batman that she was the functioning heir of the League of Shadows, and that it was her prerogative to complete her father's mission. This child, this life that he had rescued from the Pit so many years ago, had come into her own in the world. As the Batman's eyes widened at the depth of this perceived betrayal, Bane had no desire to claim his role in what Talia was explaining to the vigilante. As the heir of Ras' al Ghul, this was no more than what she deserved.
Talia attempted to detonate the nuclear device, but the Batman's interference had prevented the remote detonation of the bomb. When she rose to make her way to the device to detonate it in person, Bane realized, at the last, that this would be his and Talia's final meeting. She turned to him, and requested that he not kill the incapacitated Batman, so that he could feel the depth of his failure when the blast engulfed the city. To placate her, the mercenary assented. Talia, the innocent child who had suddenly become a mature woman in his eyes, touched Bane's face one more time.
Then, she was gone.
Bane walked calmly towards the Batman, helpless before him now. He knew that he would not obey Talia's request. But the fact that she had so efficiently assumed the role Bane had been fulfilling for years was rewarding to him. By saving Talia from the Pit in her childhood, Bane had truly granted the child a second life, and now, in theirs and Gotham City's final moments, she was living it.
"You will just have to imagine to the twelve million souls," he told the Batman.
He thought he heard a distant rumbling as he spoke those words. But his mind was only on one topic. Those last few moments, when Talia had bade him farewell.
A thunderous sound engulfed the room, and fire filled the air. Only one emotion filled Bane's final consciousness.
Pride.