“It takes more than that to kill the Batman!” is not an exact quote from Theodore (Teddy) Roosevelt’s campaign speech in an auditorium, soon after being shot outside a Milwaukee hotel, but it was close. Many of the details of the Batman story are, in fact, so close to the details of the Teddy Roosevelt story that many have claimed that Roosevelt may have been the inspiration for the creation of the fictional character we now call The Dark Knight.
The most impressive of these correlations involves the death of a parent, and the resultant post-traumatic growth that can follow:
Bruce Wayne lost both of his parents before he was a teenager, and Teddy Roosevelt lost his father when he was nineteen. In H.W. Brands T.R.: The Last Romantic, Brands alludes to the fact that most young men, on the precipice of becoming adults, deify their father. If that father dies prematurely, as in the case of Theodore Roosevelt Sr., this deification can become locked in, in the mind of the affected young man. The contrast being that when a young man becomes an adult in his own right, and he experiences the world for himself, he may find weaknesses in his father’s argument, advice, and/or lessons. Roosevelt was not afforded such a comparison, and when that was coupled with his grieving and sorrow, the result may have been a deification without objectivity.
Courtesy of Enhanced Buzz
Courtesy of Enhanced Buzz
As such, both Teddy Roosevelt and Bruce Wayne, would spend much of their trying to live up to the deified images they had of their fathers. Yet, if one were to compare the bios of these men, and their fathers, it could be said that both more than surpassed the accomplishments of their fathers. The point is not the line-by-line comparisons, of course, but the post-traumatic mindsets that resulted from them, and it could be said that the fictional Wayne character may have never become Batman were it not for the death of a father, and Roosevelt may have never become the man he would become were it not for the idealized image of the man he spent his entire life pursuing, and never accomplishing … in his mind of course.
This post-traumatic aspect of the life that Teddy Roosevelt led was what DC Comics writer, and president from 2002 to 2009, Paul Levitz believed was so engaging that he believed it could be used to connect his characters to readers. It could be said, in other words, that the deification of their fathers gave them the mission they needed to right wrongs and lead what they believed to be righteous lives. In the case of Bruce Wayne, and what Paul Levitz says about him, it gave the writer the perfect vehicle for what would be Wayne’s motive for doing what he would do.
The following was said by Theodore Roosevelt Jr., but all fans of The Dark Knight Trilogy, and Batman fans in general, could picture Bruce Wayne saying it to the butler Arthur in the many shared chunks of dialogue devoted to discussions of Thomas Wayne, Bruce’s father.
“My father, Theodore Roosevelt, was the best man I ever knew. He combined strength and courage with gentleness, tenderness, and great unselfishness. He would not tolerate in us children selfishness or cruelty, idleness, cowardice, or untruthfulness.”
Theodore Roosevelt Sr., taught Teddy that the best way to overcome his debilitating childhood illnesses that kept him indoors most of the time, highlighted by a severe case of childhood asthma, and the way to overcome older aged kids that beat him up on a camping trip, was to strengthen his way through it.
“You have the mind but you have not the body. You must make your body.”
Theodore Roosevelt purchased a home gym for his son, and hired a boxing coach to teach the son how to fight, and Teddy Roosevelt would later use all of that to achieve a runner-up spot in a Harvard boxing tournament.
Fans of The Dark Knight Trilogy could say that stark similarities exist between that father-to-son advice, and the resultant training scenes, in the first installment of the trilogy Batman Begins. The difference being that similar dialogue was said by the Ras al Guhl character played by actor Liam Neeson, as opposed to Bruce Wayne’s father. *Side note: Jonathon Nolan, brother of The Dark Knight creator Christopher Nolan, and co-writer of the other two installments of The Dark Knight movies, states that the Ras al Guhl character, in the Batman Begins installment, was based on Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, and the bin Laden crusade to “heal the world” through terror.![]()
