Batman Begins Heros Journey

Batman Begins: The Hero’s Journey

Batman Begins is a representation of the classic tale of the hero that was described by Joseph Campbell.   Campbell believed that every hero goes through The Hero’s Journey.   Campbell wrote that the heroes in every journey share similar mythic adventures and that these adventures all have the same basic elements.   He described the hero as the “hero with a thousand faces”, meaning that the story was the same throughout and that the hero could be different thus it was always one task performed by many.  
In Batman Begins, we view the life of Bruce Wayne as he steps through what Joseph Campbell describes as the “departure”, the “initiation” and the “return”.   Each of these major steps of The Hero’s Journey occurs in the film and there are several subsets to each step of the journey that the film captures.   I do believe that The Hero’s Journey is incomplete in Batman Begins and that the journey will continue in later adventures.   I do not believe that we have touched all subsets in The Hero’s Journey and I will explain each section in greater detail.
In the “departure” phase of The Hero’s Journey, our hero is “called to adventure”.   Campbell describes this as the point in life when everything is going to change either known or unknown.   A young Bruce Wayne, who is the son of a wealthy family whose values are based on using their wealth and success to bridge the gaps of the wealthy and the poor, suddenly has his world turned upside down when both of his parents are murdered by a desperate man.   Bruce blames himself for the death of his parents because he had a fear of bats from an earlier childhood incident and asked his parents to leave an opera early because the opera reminded him of that incident.   Since Bruce and his parents left the opera early, they crossed paths with a man who was desperate for money and Bruce’s father, who did not believe in violence and believed that everyone could be helped, chose not to defend their...