Mask

Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight, Issues #39, #40
Written by Bryan Talbot, 1992


What would you do if you woke up one morning in a hospital bed, not knowing how you came to be there, with doctors and hospital staff telling you that everything you know about yourself is the result of a mental disease? Your life isn't real. The things you think you do everyday are a delusion, a hallucination, a glorified dream created by your own mind.

In the first part of a two-part story arc from the nineties' Batman: Legend of the Dark Knight, titled Mask, this is exactly what happens to the caped crusader. After easily breaking up an attempted robbery, Batman collapses from weakness and dizziness in an alley, and wakes up days later in the hospital, only to be told that he is an alcoholic bum with an affinity for dressing up in a bat costume.

Copyright DC Comics

Bruce Wayne, restrained to the hospital bed and receiving a continuous IV drip of anti-psychotics and tranquilizers, to keep him from "violently attacking" the staff (which he is told he has a history of), is too weak to do anything but listen as a psychoanalyst explains his history, one much different than he knows, and resulting condition.

Mike, the "shrink", is friendly enough, but Bruce can't shake the feeling that his enemies as Batman are behind his hospital stay, and it is part of a clever plot against him. However, after several days of being told in great detail about how his parent's death led to him living in an orphanage and subsequently on the streets, and his massive amounts of trauma and alcoholism had created issues with amnesia and dissociative identity disorder, which causes his "delusions of being a billionaire by day and costumed vigilante by night", Bruce's confidence begins to break. Mike drives the nail in deep by bringing out Bruce's "costume": a heap of trash bags, cut-off jeans, and rubber gloves. Bruce, feeling weak and shaken, and haunted by memories of his parents and of Batman's foes, seems to give up for a day, though he keeps an eye on the news, hoping that Batman will be mentioned.


Many philosophers and spiritual doctrines claim that self-discovery, or knowing one's true self, is one of the more difficult but important tasks we have in life. Lao Tzu and the Taoist philosophies call a clear self-identity "Enlightenment". But the reason it is so difficult is because it seems almost impossible for us to have a clear self-perception. Our minds are just simply too powerful to allow us to see ourselves as the world does.


Think of the last time somebody close to you made an observation about you that you absolutely didn't agree with, or never would have thought about yourself. That's not what you think about yourself, so how does that fit? 


This brain power can be a friend or an enemy. I always find it hilarious that articles with titles such as "Be More Organized!" or "Have a More Productive Day!" always tell you to make your bed. Make your bed, that's it. The key to being an organized person, and your mother or grandmother or grandpa the veteran probably told you the same thing. What does making your bed actually do for the stack of papers and bills on your desk? Does it help you get your presentation finished faster? Does it help you remember your doctor's appointment? No. It doesn't do anything. Just makes the bed look nice. But what this act does accomplish is to tell your brain, every time you do it, that you are "more organized now". How many times do you think you have to tell yourself before it sticks--before it becomes part of your self-perception? Probably not that many. After about three days, you'll be running around telling your friends you have gotten so much more done because of your new, more organized persona.


I have recently had the pleasure of getting to chat with a person who, among other skills and talents that focus on well-being and health, offers career and goal coaching. As part of my assignment during our last conversation, I am to tell myself, and remind myself throughout the day that I AM an author. Not want to be, not someday. Am. It seems almost too simple, that just saying four words a couple of times a day would completely change your perception of your own reality. 


On the other hand, is it reality? A few years back, I visited my sister in New York City, and I loved it. I wanted to pack my family up, move there and never come back to the Midwest again. I also at that point had a five month old baby, and therefore a considerable amount of crazy hormones coursing through me that made any emotion or desire a full-on ordeal for me. So, one day, on a stroll with baby around the fairly nondescript park in my fairly nondescript neighborhood, I thought: "I could just tell myself I live in New York. Obviously not an apartment in Manhattan, but maybe a neighborhood that has some older houses, and some green space."


And it worked. For a couple of days. Then I got over the hormone-fueled discontent and went back to "real life". But for those two or three days, I just went back and forth between the park, and my house, and I lived where I wanted to live. And that's what I knew--how I perceived things--so it was my reality, right?


Sounds psychotic and delusional? But we do it all the time. Maybe not on such a grand scale as believing you live somewhere else, or believing you are a hero crime-fighter when you are really just an alcoholic bum. 


To an extent, Bruce Wayne did create Batman as an attempt to compartmentalize and deal with his issues surrounding his parents' tragic death, and the injustice he sees around him. He can't cope with it as Bruce, but as Batman he can not only handle it, but he can do something about it. Why should he be able to perceive the world differently just by creating another persona? As Mike the shrink explains to him during his hospital stay, the word "persona" actually means "mask", making the fact that Bruce actually dons mask to become his alternate persona fitting. 


This power of the brain has the obvious down-side in that it can do these tricks of manipulation without your conscious consent. This is where we see mental diseases, like Dissociative Identity Disorder, as Bruce is being diagnosed with in the story, schizophrenia, hypochondria, to name a few. Your brain is convincing you of a reality without you being in on it. How do you get someone to understand that the reality their mind has created for them isn't actually reality at all? And whose to say it isn't?


We all deal with this at some point: the reconciliation between the way we see ourselves, and the way others see us. So we all suffer from some level of delusion if we've created a self-identity that doesn't accurately reflect how other see us. Or we're creating a persona that we have to maintain, because we are aware that the way other's see us is not truly who we are. 


Let's take Bruce for example again. Bruce Wayne, carefree, occasionally dim, erratic billionaire playboy. That's how the world sees him, and he has to maintain that persona in public, but his self-identity more closely resembles the characteristics he embodies in Batman: just, calm, strategic, very smart, and caring.


But, even Bruce has a hard time acknowledging the finer aspects of his 'self'. In the first issue (written by Lost and Prometheus writer Damon Lindelof) of the new 2012 Legend of the Dark Knight series, Bruce sits in his vast dining room, bragging to Alfred about how he is invulnerable, and trashing his Justice League friends for their weaknesses to things like Kryptonite, and the color yellow. "God forbid he has to slow down at a traffic light," Bruce jokes of the Green Lantern. But he insists he is better than his teammates because he has no vulnerabilities, even betting his trusted friend and butler that he couldn't come up with one. He is sure that he has no weaknesses for anyone to exploit.

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Alfred, and anyone familiar with Batman, knows that's not true. So, Alfred stages a scene reminiscent to the night of the murder of Bruce's parents, and Batman is easily ensnared in the trap and forced to pay his butler the wager.


It is easy for some to repress the negative aspects, the one's they don't want to deal with on a regular basis. Trauma, and anger, sadness, and stress. But it is a part of you, whether you acknowledge it in your self-identity or not, and others are generally more perceptive of our own negatives than we are, or than we even can be. What is it, exactly, that keeps us from being able to see ourselves clearly?  


So, the ancient philosophers may have been wrong. It is easy for us to know ourselves, in a sense, because we can very easily create a self-identity that we are comfortable with and that we believe. That is the easy part. The hard part is determining if that is really who we are. And if one day, someone describes you exactly how you view yourself, then you succeeded in not only viewing yourself clearly, but representing yourself in a manner that is true to that identity.


We can also let other's perceptions of us become part of our self-identity. This is most commonly seen with abused children or spouses, who are constantly made to feel worthless and unwanted by their abusers, so much that they ultimately believe they are worthless and unwanted individuals. But again, it doesn't have to occur in such an obvious and prominent way. It could be something as simple as a family member always telling you that you need to clean your desk, eventually manifesting in your self-identity that you are disorganized. To go even simpler, if someone laughs at your joke, you think "hey, I am funny!" 


Sometimes, affecting someone else's self-identity can be done with agenda. Constant compliments and confidence boosters work to better friendship or help someone heal from physical or emotional trauma. Conversely, always pointing out the negative can give a person control, or so they think, over another's behavior. 


But as much as the hospital staff in Gotham told Bruce about his mental issues, his alcoholism, and his life as a delusional bum on the streets, he couldn't be convinced. "I should believe him," Batman thinks at the beginning of the second part of the Mask story arc. "It would be so easy." Ultimately, Batman was being held captive by a man who blamed him for his parents' suicide after the crumbling of their mob-polluted business at his hands. 


Batman decides he will never falter in the confidence of his identity again. Because in the end, all we have, and all we can experience, and all we know is what we create, and what we perceive. And anyone who tells you that you're someone you are not might just be holding you captive.