Batman (Bruce Wayne)
The vigilante who will not let himself kill, and wonders what a city can bear to know.
film · 2008
In Christopher Nolan's film, Bruce Wayne is a billionaire who plays at frivolity by day and fights Gotham's mob by night, behind Batman's mask. He hopes that district attorney Harvey Dent will one day make his role unnecessary. Facing the Joker, who wants to prove that people's morality is only a veneer, he holds to a single rule, do not kill, and allows himself almost everything else. The film follows him through the choices that rule leaves him, up to the question of what he must tell the city.
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Justification
He lives on a lie: the frivolous billionaire covers for the vigilante. After the Joker's ultimatum, he nonetheless decides to turn himself in, to stop the killings rather than on a principle of truth. His acts place him on the side of , for the city as for himself: the vigilante exists only through a secret.
The Joker's ultimatum · The ending
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Justification
Batman has only one rule, do not kill, and the Joker knows it: his whole game is to make him break it. His other means are judged by their expected effect: he abducts a mob accountant from Hong Kong, beats the Joker in the interrogation room, has every phone in the city tapped, for one night. He thus holds an in the middle of a largely practice.
Lau's abduction in Hong Kong · The Joker's interrogation · The sonar · The final confrontation with Dent
Justification
His double life rests on a constant lie, to the city and to almost everyone he deals with; only a few close to him (Alfred, Rachel, Lucius Fox) know who he is, and an employee of his company who finds out threatens to reveal it.
Bruce Wayne's double life · The ending
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Justification
Batman wants to believe the city can do without him: he bets on Harvey Dent to lift it up through the law. This trust is not naive: he knows the city is corrupt and acts as though it could go wrong.
His conversations with Alfred about Harvey Dent · The ferries