Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises saw Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) pushing himself mentally and physically to escape from a prison known as The Pit, and this place has a deeper meaning than you think. After coming across Ra’s al Ghul (Liam Neeson), Carmine Falcone (Tom Wilkinson), and Scarecrow (Cillian Murphy) in Batman Begins, and the Joker (Heath Ledger) in The Dark Knight, Bruce Wayne was pulled back into action in The Dark Knight Rises with the arrival of Bane (Tom Hardy), who was part of a bigger plan to bring Bruce and Batman down and destroy Gotham City.
Set eight years after the events of The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises saw Bruce putting on the Batman costume again in order to confront Bane and his henchmen, but Bane was a lot stronger, smarter, and more brutal than Batman could have anticipated. Bane broke Batman’s back and sent him abroad to a prison cave known as The Pit, where Bane had grown up along with Talia al Ghul (Marion Cotillard), Ra’s al Ghul’s daughter. Bruce healed while at the Pit and managed to escape, and while the prison is seen as a metaphor for Batman’s rebirth, its meaning is deeper than that thanks to its comic book inspiration.
Dark Knight Rises’ Pit Is The Nolanverse’s Lazarus Pit
As pointed out by a Reddit user, The Dark Knight Rises’ Pit prison is the Nolanverse’s equivalent of the Lazarus Pit. In the comics, the Lazarus Pit is a pool of experimental chemicals accidentally discovered by Ra’s al Ghul. The pool has restorative chemicals powerful enough to heal those close to dying, but the healing properties of the pool come with a price: those who enter the pit are temporarily driven insane. The Lazarus Pit can not only heal the sick and injured but can also resurrect the dead, and in some cases, it has also decreased the age of the user, but it can only be used one time. Now, Nolan’s Dark Knight universe was more realistic and didn’t have any magical/fantasy elements, so the Lazarus Pit was adapted as a prison, where some characters healed and came back to life, though not in a literal way.
As mentioned above, when Bruce was taken to the Pit, he had just had his back broken by Bane, so he went through a physical healing process in the prison, but he also went through a mental and emotional healing process. At that point, Bruce had lost everything, but his healing process allowed him to regain life, and he came out of the Pit physically and mentally stronger than before. The vision of Ra’s al Ghul that Bruce has while in the Pit, in which Ra’s al Ghul tells him there are “many forms of immortality” might be a reference to the Lazarus Pit, but in the Nolanverse, Ra’s reached “immortality” through Talia, who was born in the Pit and managed to escape when she was a child, and later carried on with his legacy.
Why The Lazarus Pit Didn’t Work For Bane In The Dark Knight Rises
If the Pit in The Dark Knight Rises is the Nolanverse’s version of the Lazarus Pit, it raises the question of why it didn’t work for Bane the way it did for Bruce. Just like Batman, Bane had already lost everything after helping Talia escape, after which he was attacked by the other inmates (this is another possible reference to the insanity provoked by the Lazarus Pit). Bane was left severely injured and didn’t get his heal-and-get-stronger moment like Bruce did (in part due to the incompetence of the doctors who attended him), but he did become Bane while he was there, so it was a different, darker type of rebirth, though he still had to be rescued.
