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This article develops an interdisciplinary trauma-theoretical reading of Bruce Wayne in Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins (2005), asserting that Bruce’s development into Batman is not a story of overcoming unresolved childhood trauma rather a recurring psychic loop. Rather than achieving full recovery or integration, his vigilantism functions as a compulsive repetition of the original wound. The analysis draws on the concept of Sigmund Freud’s compulsion repetition, Judith Herman’s stages of recovery, Bessel van der Kolk’s ideas about how trauma is stored in the body, Dominick LaCapra’s contract between "acting out" and "working through," and Sara Ahmed’s theory of how affects such as fear spreads through people, objects, and spaces. Through close attention to the film’s nonlinear storytelling, recurring images of falling or descending, sound echoes like gunshots, and the recurring minor-third musical motif the essay shows how trauma shapes the film’s form.
Parul Srivastava. “Wounds Beneath the Mask: Unprocessed Trauma and the Construction of Vigilante Identity in Batman Begins.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, vol. 17, no. 2, Apr. 2026, pp. 889–900. DOI, https://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n2.57.
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