Okay, one more hearty swing and then we'll officially retire this straw man we've been beating the stuffing out of for the last couple of points. No doubt you've come across this one before, and may even have been the smug so-and-so who thought it was an incredibly original and accurate insight. So the accepted dichotomy is that Bruce Wayne is a normal guy, and he puts on the Batman identity so as to protect his everyday life. Oh but wait! What if the Dark Knight is who he really is, and Bruce Wayne is the mask? What if Batman is what has always been lying inside of his psyche, and the billionaire playboy act is just that - a performance? Woah, amazing, we are so smart, nobody's ever thought of that. Well, first of all, yes they have, and all those previous geniuses were wrong as well. It's the sort of thing that first occurs to a 13-year-old and which they share with their school yard chums, either before a series of shocked gasps or a well-deserved beating. It's an accepted truism that emphasises Batman's modus operandi, that he is dedicated to eliminating crime from Gotham City 24/7, 365, and that the daylight hours he spends running Wayne Enterprises, wearing fancy tuxes and bedding scores of beautiful women is just...we dunno, keeping up appearances for some reason. Yeah, when you think about it for more than five seconds, it doesn't make a lick of sense. If he was actually Batman underneath, there would be no point in maintaining the Bruce Wayne identity. He actually could just dedicate himself to fighting bad guys all day, every day, for the rest of his life. What's more accurate is that he exists in multitudes, that he is both Bruce Wayne and Batman simultaneously, in the same way that every one of us is a different person depending on the circumstances, and often focussing a little too strongly on one aspect of ourselves leaves us feeling a little unfulfilled, a little nutty. It's just most of us don't get to let of some steam by grappling with Two-Face.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
