Bats and Trauma: How The Dark Knight Trilogy Deconstructed Batman | Video Essay 

"This video will be boring." Don't lie to us.

"And through all of this, we learn that we can all be like Batman." But, given everything you just said... Do we want to be?

The idea of Batman being incompatible with Bruce Wayne but they both exists as a defense mechanism to past trauma...That hit way too close to home. Thks for shining light on this interpretation.

It's amazing that each film basically ends with one of Bruce's three distinct personas (Batman, the rich playboy and the real Bruce Wayne) taking over the others: - Batman Begins ends with him having Batman being his main persona - The Dark Knight ends with him having to lie and adopting his reclusive rich man persona - The Dark Knight Rises finally ends with him coming to terms with his tragedies, discarding his other identities and being at peace with himself.

Bruce’s journey, rather than Batman’s journey. A simple observation, but a powerful one. Canonically speaking, Batman is the dominant personality and that absolutely formed my perspective on the character in the films. Bruce at the cafe always seems like a throw away rather than a legitimate alternate take on the character of Bruce Wayne. I’d never considered how subversive the Nolan trilogy is on that fundamental level.

Its been 7 years since the trilogy finished and the fact that people are still making RU-vid videos on it shows that it still remains a masterclass in cinema, acting, themes, film score, rising tension, dialogue, action and story writing. Batman begins is the perfect opening and has the some of the best story structure I've ever seen, The Dark Knight is phenomenal with establishing and building tension, perfectly crafting the ultimate villain and while Rises seems a bit sloppy, Nolan still delivers what is a truly epic film that is a far cry from bad, oozing with themes and a gold mine for film analysts. It remains as one of my all time favourite movie trilogies alongside lord of the rings. No superhero movie will top The Dark Knight, step aside Endgame.

Christian Bale did a great job as Batman

These movies are just a gift to cinema in general. The dark knight trilogy is a character study film disguised as a summer comicbook movie blockbuster and a true testament to Nolan's ability as a filmmaker. He's truly one of the best director of this era. Also great vid👍

Don’t know how you can turn out so much high quality content so quickly. Kudos.

I like to think that “The Dark Knight Rises” and “Logan” are both great companion films. They both tell the end of a beloved heroes journey . There are only two ends for a superhero you die like Logan or you come to peace with your past and move beyond it like Bruce. Both men at the beginning of both films are mourning lost loves that they are personally responsible for killing. Logan runs away and never really moves on from the death of Jean, and is slowly committing suicide until he has to sacrifice himself for X-23. Bruce allows himself to open up and move on once Alfred tells him about Rachel, and has a whole new life thanks to Selena..

these movies feel like a Greek Tale, The Oddysey of the Batman

Dark knight is still one of the best superhero trilogies

How in the name of Chronos can you talk about the formative effects of trauma.. this eloquently?! I'm gonna sue the English language for having so inadequate a number of words to describe how magnificent this video essay is.

Finally, someone said it out loud on RU-vid. I honestly get so pissed when I see reviewers or "critics" saying that Bruce should've died, that the idea that he can leave Batman behind is herecy, that the ending is weak because Nolan didn't have balls to kill Bruce, or (and yes, I've seen that somewhere) that in the end Bruce gives himself up to trauma because he chooses to live his life as Bruce Wayne, not as Batman. The ending of TDK trilogy is one of the best franchise endings I've ever seen. It shows a man who was able to move on, to leave his pain behind and to start a new life, hopefully - a better one. And I think this ending is actually more badass that Bruce dying for the city. It would be so easy to kill Batman in the end - but it would destroy all deeper meaning behind Bruce's journey (and boy, do I have a lot to say about that, lol). Of course, the third movie would've been different if Heath lived, but I believe the ending itself wouldn't have been that different. And as a side note, yes, TDKR is flawed. But it doesn't mean it's not good. We live in the age of this subjective vs objective discourse, and for some reason a lot of people kinda forgot that flaws don't necessarily ruin a movie to a point of it being bad. A lot of good movies have flaws. A lot of great movies have tons of flaws. But what makes them good or great is the fact that they don't have flaws and flaws only. They also have things to appreciate, to discuss, to love. This is the most important thing. And I would rather watch a technically flawed movie with substance than a perfectly crafted but hollow one.

This video hit me in the feels. Thank you.

I’m an editor and a writer and this video essay is phenomenal as a tool to help distill the hero’s journey for writers of all stripes. I’ve always pointed to this trilogy as a great example, but this video will help immensely.

Damn I can’t wait for this channel to get big. These videos are amazing, keep up the high quality!

I just gotta stop the video for a second, keep this up man. Even when nobody's watching, keep. This. Up, alright back to the video lol

I just really appreciate a video essay that challenges me to think. Many of the good ones feature those moments that couch the pithy or inspirational--and I like that, don't get me wrong. (The internet should be home to more than vitriolic, or even well-researched well-meaning, criticism.) But to be wise, and also challenging, that's a balance very few of these achieve. I just love your videos.

None of your videos are boring. Its like poetry, a gentle intellectual dance you take us on, a safe adventure you're allowing us to travel; that's how I feel whenever I watch your videos. ❤💜💙💚💛

He's learning to be Bruce again, remember what Rachel said at the end of Begins, "No, the Bruce I loved never came back home" Shame he only understood that after she died. (I don't know if he mentioned this I haven't finished the video)

I wrote a final essay for a mythology class back in college (in 2012) about the Hero's Journey in the Dark Knight trilogy. That same year I also did a final essay on the trilogy & Post-9/11 themes.

I want you to deconstruct and narrate *my* life now.

This wasn't even boring for me. Great video :)

The Dark Knight Rises is extremely underrated

These films really have many layers, one of my favourites is social aspect. Very good video, lots to think about.

So good, man. I appreciate your work! You do an amazing job deconstructing films and drawing back the layers of a movie from a viewer's perspective that understands the director's objective. Thank you.

I love how Christopher Nolan decided to make a trilogy about Bruce Wayne and his journey as Batman and seeing how it not only effects Bruce himself, but also Gotham City and those around him. It’s amazing how Nolan and company were able to craft a beginning, middle and end while putting Bruce Wayne up with different obstacles he not only has to overcome to save Gotham but to become a better person himself. I love the story of Bruce Wayne in this trilogy, I love Christian Bale’s performance as Bruce Wayne/Batman… I just love this trilogy. Great video man, keep up the great work!

This is a wonderfully well-made video essay on Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight trilogy. Your words about the Hero's Journey helped me get past the otherwise restrictive format when developing the framework of my personal years-long project/story.

Your editing is just amazing

"This video is going to het a bit boring guys." NEVER!!!!!

This, I like. So many of these essays can't let go of the impulse to criticize the execution of a piece of media. It's nice to see an acknowledgement of the ambitious themes in media, even of they're done imperfectly. You actually used the word "grandiosity" here, which suggested you were inspired by the essay about Spider-Man 3 by "Like Stories of Old", which examined a famously unsatisfying film from the standpoint of the challenging subject it attempted to address. Here, you are doing the same, acknowledging the bravery of The Dark Knight Rises for trying to tackle an emotional subject that makes the film's target audience deeply uncomfortable. Sometimes the subject itself is more important than how well it's expressed in the particular piece of media. And it deserves appreciation.

wonderful video to start the week, thanks!

Amazing deconstruction and explanation of the Dark Knight Trilogy's story! Amazing work!

such an underrated channel man

What a great interpretation. Beautifully done.

Bro, I really hope you do a video on Joker (2019).

Joker is out but people are still doing videos about Nolan’s Batman. I’m loving this.

amazing video, great channel. i'm glad to be around for the beginning.

Thank you for this and all the other videos 💪

Phenomenal interpretation! Thank you!

So amazing and not boring at all 👍

Love your content, man

Your videos are never boring, I’m sure you know that by now.

"I'm Batman". 🦇🦇🦇 (In Bales "bat voice")

Implicitly pretentious but I love it! This one was not boring at all, dont apologize for it!

I love your work. Found your channel about two months ago and i'm not regretting it. Have you thought about doing more Video game videos and would making a series of retrospective videos about each Star Wars trilogy leading up to The rise of Skywalker be a idea you would consider?

Nice! I just mentioned this to you few weeks ago. Glad it's out now. Could you do one for each movie.thanks man love your work

You’re right that Bruce was possessed by Batman.

"We can all be Batman, if we unlock the powers from the other side." Gotcha. I shall begin the ritual.

EL CAMINO I BEG OF YOU still love your stuff btw

The dark knight trilogy one of the greatest superhero movies of all time

This was a great video but did anyone else hear a high pitch ringing sound throughout the video?

Videos get better and better

"this video will be boring" This is BATMAN...

What’s the track that plays at the beginning of , “The Return,” phase?

My fav trilogy!

The dark knight is the defining Film of the kids born in the 90s!

12:47 Rises didn't need Talia. Bane should have been the main villain trying to succeed where Ra's failed by destroying Gotham and proving that he, who'd been loyal to the League of Shadows only to be kicked out because Bane's injuries from his beating by the Pit's prisoners reminded Ra's he'd left his wife to be raped and murdered down there was the better student.

Out of these 3 films Batman Begins Is my favorite

Fantastic video on my favorite Movie Trilogy ever. I love when people talk about these films and I’m grateful you didn’t tear into The Dark Knight Rise too much because, flawed though it may be, I still think it’s a great ending and an exceptional movie. I love your channel and I love your thoughts on these movies and how you make me think about them on a deeper level. Keep up the quality content!

I asked and you delivered

Entirely unimportant and unrelated: this video reminded me how stellar the CGI on Two-Face is considering The Dark Knight was made in 2008.

How in the ever living hell do you make SO MUCH excellent content? You've been dropping 14-20 minute videos every three days it seems. We'll forgive you if you want to slow down!

First! xD Will edit this in after I watch the video. Expecting something beautiful ♥️

I never thought of this til now(of course on a video from 3 years ago assuring no one will actually read this🤦🏻‍♂️). Nolan always wanted these movies to be as realistic as that kind of material can be(there are obvious exceptions since certain comic book tropes can’t work in the real world) like “if this was real this is what it would be like”. They succeeded and they did it beautifully at every turn,the one I never thought of til now is that this is the only iteration that I know of where Bruce Wayne successfully retires from being Batman and goes on to live his own life unrelated to his time under the mask,there may be an Elseworlds or out of continuity one shot that I’m not aware of and I’m excluding Beyond or Kingdom Come since in both of those he’s still continuing his mission in a different way. What’s so cool about Nolan doing that is that it’s also how it would happen if it were real,they’d see it as a temporary operation with an end goal in mind. In a comic the goal can never actually be achieved because it would end the series so every story after a character’s origin is an endless second act,it has to just keep going on and on indefinitely. Idk why it took me so long to realize that final bit of verisimilitude in the DK trilogy and I just never even thought of what Bruce Wayne’s post Batman life would be like because there never is one unless it’s a plot device to set up his return. Well that was a rambling mess🤣

2019 and still talking about these awesome movies

Nice to see a Dark Knight trilogy analysis video that goes beyond Heath Ledger’s Joker. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great character and performance. But the trilogy has so much to offer too.

Puffs. The coco for which the antagonist goes cuckoo is in the form of puffs, not pops. - Joseph Campbell

Not sure about the deconstructed part. Everything these movies did with Batman in terms of important decisions he makes have been explored at some capacity in the comics. Bruce trying to murder Joe Chill as an act of revenge was done in Year Two. Bruce Wayne retiring due to a personal loss and change in Gotham's political climate was done in The Dark Knight Returns. Bruce living in apathy for 8 years also came from that. Bruce Wayne wanting to spend his life with Selina with cape no longer on his shoulders is from Batman #300. That's why these movies are so great to me. They serve the character properly instead of trying to fix what isn't broken.

I rewatched this trilogy not too long ago. And Gotdamn is it incredible!!!!!! I'm looking forward to this vid

Batman in batman begins really has a flat arc not that he doesn't change but he's not really going from believing a lie and get to know the truth. He's a flat arc because he already knows the truth but the lie is fighting back. It really works well.

Bro your words touched my damn soul. You were able to express what I already felt about the trilogy in words. Thank you so much for that 🌱🙏

'hi. i appreciate your videos . what were resources you used for this video? especially:"only way to overcome trauma is to not to restore yourself it is to completly reinvent yourself with the new narrative to approptiate the truamatic experience"?

Well made video! The kind that makes me motivated to try and making essays of my own. I'm actually a little surprised you didn't mention young Bruce asking that they leave the theater when they did _specifically_ because he saw performers dressed as bats. I think his initial feeling of guilt for the sequence of events (which is even referenced later by Ducard, showing that he still feels guilt as an adult) shows a solid connection between the trauma that created the fear and the trauma of his parent's death. Making it both poetic in how Nolan framed the events of the murders to tie so much into bat imagery, and a strong additional argument to your analysis.

And of course, always be yourself unless you can be the Batman, be the Batman.

I would love to see your take on Deadpool

Great video! I agree on mostly everything, but there's one thing I still can't explain to myself: the gap between TDK and TDKR, and what happened in those eight years. Gordon's (beautiful) final speech was one of both hope and resignation. He acknowledged that chaos and madness won't go away from Gotham, but also that a man - Batman - will always be there to fight them. A man, a hero, that is born from chaos itself, and so he can fight it without being corrupted or destroyed. Joker clearly states it, when he says "you and I are destined to do this forever". TDK's ending, to me, was that. Bruce realizes that he is indeed cursed to be Batman forever, but he also accepts that curse for the good of his city. Where, at the end of Begins, he had hoped that there would have been an ending term to his mission as Batman, in TDK he understands that's not the case. He's the only one that can do it, and so he must. He's the only one capable of enduring the same pain that turned Harvey Dent and the Joker into monsters... and still NOT break. Where losing Rachel broke Harvey, it didn't break Bruce. That was the whole point. So... how is that coherent with the fact that Bruce DID indeed give up the same night TDK ended? The conclusion is that Bruce and Harvey were not different at all. They just broke in different ways. P.S. I don't have the absolute truth in my pocket, so if someone got the Nolans' intentions better than me and has a different opinion, I'm more than open to dialogue :)

I know this may be odd, but since you did Master Chief from the Halo games in a previous video, can you be able to do BJ Blazkowickz from the Wolfenstein Series from Machinegames? The New Order, The New Colossus, and optionally in Youngblood and The Old Blood as well.

Jon Bernthal's The Punisher character is also an interesting journey of the anti-hero giving a visceral spin of the vengeful hero trope. Frank Castle already has PTSD out of the horrors of war, but there's a disconnect between his humanity and being a soldier, suffering is a byproduct of his war vocation, and knew about it ahead of time and accepted it for better or worse like many veterans. Forward to the loss of his family in senseless violence where he is just a man, he cannot explain away the pain, he is broken beyond human capacity. Where Batman has a noble war against crime so no one else suffers, The Punisher is on a constant suicide mission so no one else suffers. His goal is to give the death of his family meaning where there was none, and a soldier's death for that meaning will give him peace and closure. Unfortunately that drive is what makes him use every means to win in that time. He survives, he suffers further, his loss has meaning, he keeps fighting. He knows he will fall, but under his terms, his peace will be suffering more than his family in the end, but he kept fighting as he dies. Something his family never had a chance to do so

Whats the music at 2:10

There's a Screen Rant theory that The Joker is a former black ops veteran *&* / or is really trying yo save Gotham from itself--and Bruce's vigilantism

what is the music at the very end?

2:19

Love the videos, watched this one maybe three times. One thing that I have to say because I feel like it absolutely has to be. To say the dark knight rises is a flawed film is unfair by a long shot. To say it’s deeply flawed is just wrong. It’s considered lesser because you compare to it’s predecessor. Not fair and I’ll prove it. If you take the dark knight out of existence and you make TDR the second film in the series you would fighting people in the streets for saying Batman begins is better. Batman begins maybe the best origin story movie we’ll ever get but what super movie have we gotten that ends a entire that’s better then Dark Knight Rises? Endgame doesn’t count it’s a continuation without familiar characters. I know that’s arguable but so is that endgame is better then DKR. In my opinion it’s not. To me DKR is as good as any other super hero movie ever made. I remember the year it come out the same year as Avengers. I’ve never bought the Avengers on any platform but I bought the DKR the day it come out on DVD. I got the blue ray SE downloadable whatever. Keep in mind to most it is a disappointment compared to the Dark Knight but it had the balls to commit to a ending, something dark Knight did not do. All of this being said with all the work after Heath Ledgers (who won the first Oscar for a performance in a super hero movie) Death. They had to make a movie that would end Hollywood’s biggest trilogy since Star Wars without its breakout star. For a lot of the psychological reasons you point out this film trilogy has made a giant impact on my life. With the duality of hero and villains and the journey. How can you end something so epic filled with that much baggage and tragedy any better? Maybe if heath ledger survived and something else was made but probably out generations greatest film maker redefined cinema and story telling endings with both hands tied behind his back. So I don’t see how anyone could logically prove how anyone could have done better. Thanks for the videos your probably done reading If you still are at all but I at least appreciate it all and I’m also willing to defend my position against any troll that comes across this. Because that’s what Batman taught me?...

i never thought of selina like that after all she's the reason his spine got broken

Love this trilogy but his Bat voice always always made it hard for me to enjoy his Batman.

It isn't implicitly pretentious, it's just pretentious. Just kidding, love the videos

Thanks..... you made me realize more that the character depicted in this trilogy wasn't the Batman from the comics at all...... the Dark Knight was the best movie ever made with a guy called Batman in it...... But it wasn't a Batman movie..... it was a Joker movie with some Batdude bothering him.....lol

12:41

Sure, he doesn't murder a peasant but he murders the whole Order of Assassin by making the barrels explode, destroying the whole temple.

Bruce Wayne is The Bateman, Patrick Bateman

Why is it that in every dialogue in today’s dramatic movies are spoken in a whisper?

What does figma mean?

I was looking for this video not 5 days ago... weird.

What is the orchestral music… I think Beethoven or Canon??

a man of steel video in the future?

Cool

Enigma..... E-Nigma..... E. Nigma.... Edward Nigma?

"... this lie will come to estrange people from reality." EXACTLY why I don't to or condone lieing: it's giving others false data points--which disempowers them