Putting aside any other critique of Nolan's final installment of his Batman Series THE DARK KNIGHT RISES, at least for the moment, I'd like to say that I think his and Tom Hardy's rendition of Bane was impeccable. But I plan on writing more about Nolan's series as a whole another time (a little late, I know), so what I want to focus on in this piece is the color of Bane's skin. More than enough people have considered the move to make Bane a white guy when he is typically portrayed as some form of Latin American as racist, but I'll be honest and say I personally don't think it matters. Maybe it's only because I'm white, but I think there's a valid point to be made.
I recently read through (most of) KNIGHTFALL, the 1980s series in which the hulking master-strategist Bane was introduced and (spoiler...?) he broke Batman's back - an extremely pinnacle moment for Batman's career and overall comic book arc.
The beginning of KNIGHTFALL is an introduction to Bane's life. We never learn his real name, we never learn his mother's name, we never learn his father's name. We never even see his father, and while the boy who will become Bane is locked up in La Pena Dura serving his father's life sentence, we don't even know the details of the crimes that father committed. But with a country that's willing to force an unborn son to serve a father's sentence his crimes could have been as boring as him stealing an orange... Or whatever fruit they grow there. The point of all of this is that when you read the comics, and you see the depiction and description of Bane... Well... It's kinda hard to argue that he doesn't look like a white dude. I mean I'm probably stereotyping, but look at him:
Looks like a white guy with brown hair to me. He's half at best, he could certainly still be native to some Latin American island, but as I read further into it all I learned something. Bane's father's sentence came down from the courts of Santa Prisca, presumably the island that he and his wife lived on, and certainly the island from which he fled said sentence. The island is fictional, of course, but it's meant to be an autocratic Caribbean island. So I decided to look into autocratic Caribbean islands. Well, they were colonized by the Spanish first, and then later taken and colonized by British (no surprise there) and when I looked into the population of most such islands this is the piechart I found:
I couldn't be sure exactly which island this piechart was for (mainly because when I went back to site the chart I couldn't find it again so maybe this whole thing is just a lie), or if it was for more than one island, but I know it's a chart for the same kind of island Bane's family is from. And the majority of population listed is former Netherlands Antilles. Former Netherlands. As in white people.
It's possible that Bane's father was an Englishman, or some form of nordic ethnicity, and his mother could have been some form of Spanish decent.
Or, you know, the writers could have just been racist, because to be honest most of the inmates depicted within the prison looked just as white as Bane, and most of them had to have been, you know, not white. I think no matter what Bane was intended to be, there was definitely racism in its origins.
Either they made a man from a Latin American island a white guy and based his suit off of a luchador costume, or when others furthered Bane as a character (like bringing him into Batman: The Animated Series, where he was first voiced) his mask reminded them of that of a luchador's and they made him more Spanish that he was meant to be.
In the end, I'm not entirely sure how much any of it matters, and with incredible things like the Arkham video game series giving us a very "traditionally depicted" Cuban Bane, I think future film incarnations should meet somewhere in the middle. Everything is up to artist interpreting anyway. I think that his ethnicity should really come down to whoever is writing for him at the time, giving him their own spin, because he's the sort of character that you can take in a lot of directions. And I don't think there should be a finite Bane out there anyway, because him becoming more of a reoccurring, or more frequent character would be difficult considering that when Bane is true to character he's is an end-all be-all. He shows up once and he ruins everyones lives for a very, very long time. Bringing him in casually does him a disservice.
But in the end, I do think a lot of the villains and heroes in the Batman world should potentially get a race makeover at some point. Because, you know, again, everyone's kinda totally white.
Frankly I just want to forget about when they put him in a gimp suit.
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