Harley Quinn made me love Bane
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Bane was the worst thing about Batman comics before he became the worst thing about Batman movies. Now he's taking over Harley Quinn, and I love it, and I love him. In A Very Problematic Valentine's Day Special (streaming Feb. 9 on HBO Max), Harley (Kaley Cuoco) plans an awesome February 14 for girlfriend Poison Ivy (Lake Bell). That's a sturdy plot for a 45-minute snack between seasons. But a side story about Bane (James Adomian) — the masked juicehead who taaaaalllks like THIIIIISSSSS!!!!!! — steals the spotlight. His journey is outrageous, absurd, and kinda cute. Thirty years after his misbegotten invention, Bane has arrived.
Turns out the big fellow is alone on Valentine's Day. We should've known. On Harley Quinn, he's always been the villain who annoys villains, an uncool wannabe desperate for Harley's attention. He spent a whole season upset nobody from a canceled wedding returned his present (a pasta maker). "I was born in Hell and I demand respect!" he once screamed, a marvelous sentence heel-turning from pride to pity.
DC Universe Bane on 'Harley Quinn'
This version of Bane draws from various sources, all ridiculous. There's the wrestler costume with neon-green steroid hoses injected into his Hulk-sized body. Adomian is a talented impressionist, and he nails the burptruck nasal Tom Hardy adopted for 2012's The Dark Knight Rises. This all means it's funny when Bane acts normal. In the special, he bemoans his single life, uses a dating app, and drinks out of a coffee mug. (Caffeine Is My Reckoning, I want it!) Season 3 vaguely rom-com-ized Bane — he did Carrie Bradshaw narration! — and now he gets a meet-cute.
We're a million miles from his first appearance three decades ago. The feeling back then was regular supervillains were no longer enough. Eccentricity was out, muscles were in. Bane arrived right after Doomsday, the Superman killer who spoke in wordless roars. Doomsday initially wore a green mask with red goggles. Bane was that but dark blue, endless talking, and inflatable muscles.
The strenuous bad-dudery replaced one kind of silly (laughing-gas costumed evildoer) with another (see: inflatable muscles). I was 7 reading it, so I bought Bane as pure monstrosity. In Batman #497, an exhausted Bruce finds Bane at Wayne Manor. He wants to end Batman and rule Gotham: That's it for Why He's Bad. A separate origin issue had dramatized the baddie's murder-prison upbringing. Here, Bane just explains: "I lived in the hell of a dark hole thousands of miles from here." The caped crusader damns him with heavy praise: "You may well be the single greatest source of madness and evil I've ever faced."
Then Bane breaks Batman's back. In penciler Jim Aparo's famous splash page, Bane looks merely body-builder huge. Kelley Jones' cover art is more hysterical. Bane flexmorphs across the page: tricep veins, tree-trunk neck muscles, his tiny head an island in a hairless skin ocean. Without Aparo's movement lines, Bane seems to slooooowly fold Batman across his kneecap. The Batcave's T. Rex stares at us wide-eyed, like I'm a freaking dinosaur and this is way too much for me.
DC Comics 'Batman 497'
That showdown remade a scourging from 1986's The Dark Knight Returns, wherein Batman gets ravaged by a proto-Bane ganglord with apex pecs. Returns' Dark Knight wins a rematch by fighting better. That's how Bane usually goes down, too, with the additional whoopsie quirk that cutting off his inflato-serum makes him powerless. The ideal Bat-adversary demands some lateral thinking — out-riddling the Riddler, out-joking the Joker, out-duality-of-man-ing Two-Face — but when a baddie's whole thing is strength, the response tends to be just more strength. There isn't an obvious second act with Bane, and no immediately rich pathology. He pummels, then screams when someone breaks his bodypipes. This was the comics mainstream in the early '90s: Loud thoughtless brutality signifying nothing.
There is debate about Bane's ethnicity. Cartoons and video games spun the Caribbean backstory and luchador mask into somewhat questionable accents. The movies went two different bad directions. In 1997, Batman & Robin made him a voiceless henchman. Rises megaphoned him into an anti-wealth revolutionary blowing up a city for his dynastic-terrorist lover. Here's the precise moment gritty blockbuster realism turned ridiculous: Christian Bale's Batman punches Bane's airtubes in Rises, there's a punctured-balloon sound effect, and Hardy screams "Ahhh, AHHHHhhh!" in a da goggles do nothing! voice. Fox's deranged Gotham variation was funnier and more coherent, skeezing one-time teen heartthrob Shane West into a military Judas with a steampunk chest plate.
Making Bane a corrupt U.S. agent sneakily undercuts the character's origins in a very '80s flavor of action-guy masculinity. Back then goodness was strength: Schwarzenegger, Stallone, baby oil on weight-lifted bods. You can tease retroactive satire in Bane's comically easy defeats — he's nothing without steroids! — but a certain HGH mood was taking hold in comics and culture. (Look closely at that cover art again; even Batman has torso muscle-orbs.) So Bane's screechy-poignant Harley Quinn persona is deconstructive in a new way. The point isn't Joker-ing up a serious backstory. The show started out just making fun of Bane. In the process, it nailed down (maybe created?) his fundamental psychological wound. It found the little guy inside the big man.
Actually, the special makes Bane ridiculous in a regular-human way before pivoting into mega-farce. Both moods land: Bane the sadsack, Bane the priapic colossus. That gives me hope for Harley Quinn's uncertain future. This weird little miracle has somehow survived the winding down of multiple DC multiverses. Corporate turnover has left every Warner Bros. employee with job anxiety now, and I sensed defensive thinking in last year's episodes. (Harley decided she was a good guy, real Deadpool 2 stuff.) I miss the renegade season 2 instincts that slew Penguin and Mr. Freeze in the same month. Still, if the show's next act is less icon-exploding bloodbath bonanza than weirdo relationship sitcom, it helps to have genuine weirdos in interesting relationships. Bane is not the single greatest source of madness and evil, but I still don't want him to be lonely.
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