Salut! I’m Flo, a new therapist drawn to working with people in chronic pain. I wasn’t sure what to write about for my very first post — and then it came to me, after rewatching the film this post is about.
I should begin by telling you that I’ve loved comic books for forty years. Some of the most important lessons I’ve ever learned — and some of the earliest — probably came from a Batman comic.
So when I sat down to write this, I started where I always seem to start. In a pit.
I would like to reflect with you on the moment Bane breaks Bruce Wayne in their fight and drops him into the Pit — an ancient well of a prison where the only way out is a climb. When Bruce arrives, all beaten up, a fellow prisoner hangs him by a rope to set his spine, then punches the bone back into place. And then we see Bruce do the slow, unglamorous work of surviving his pain: he lies there. He waits. And when something in him finally turns, he rebuilds, one pull-up at a time.
When Bruce is ready, he tries the climb. There’s a leap in it — a gap that has killed every prisoner who ever reached for it but one. Bruce ropes in, the way they all do, so the fall won’t be the end of him. He jumps. He misses. The rope snaps him back into the rock. He climbs down, and he tries again. He misses again.
His cellmate tells Bruce something I have never quite gotten over. The problem isn’t the body, he says. The problem is that Bruce isn’t afraid. He has made his peace with dying, and he believes it has made him strong. The old man says it has made him weak — that a man with nothing left to lose has nothing pulling him toward the ledge.
So Bruce thinks about it, and on his next try, he takes off the rope.
And as he is ready to leap, bats erupt from the wall around him — which struck me as an echo of the same bats that terrified him as a boy, the first time he ever fell down a well. That fear was what he had spent his whole life turning into a suit of armor. Then comes the moment: he closes his eyes, takes a deep breath and stops trying to conquer it. Batman lets it loose. And it is the very thing that carries him up and over the edge. Below him, in the dark, the prisoners begin to chant. Deshi basara. Rise.
I was so taken by that chant. And I’ve found myself returning to this scene even more since I became a therapist. We’re meant to read it, I think, as a story about willpower — want it badly enough, harden, stop being afraid. But that is not the scene I keep watching. The one I keep watching is about a man who gets free only when he stops pretending he isn’t afraid — and about the strange truth the blind man understood: that Bruce needed something pulling him toward the ledge. For Bruce, of all things, it was fear.
What pulled one person up — would it pull you, or me, out? I don’t know. After all, we are not driven by the same things. Batman climbs toward saving Gotham. I can see so many more realistic reasons to climb out of a pit. One person climbs toward someone they cannot bear to leave behind; another climbs out of fury, or stubbornness, or a quiet refusal to let the pit have the last word. And some, I think, are not trying to climb out at all.
Is rising the same as healing, or can a person rise without ever being “fixed”? Does it have less to do with the climb and more to do with the rope — the careful, exhausting way we tie ourselves off so the fall can’t finish us, and how that very same rope can quietly keep us from ever making the leap?
I can’t say what rising, or taking off your rope, would look like for you. I think that has to be yours to find and decide. But I’d like this small corner to be a place where we can wonder about it out loud: where the pit is allowed to be real, where the fear is allowed to be there, and where you can decide how you will make the climb.
Deshi basara.
— Flo