“Buster doesn’t wear his heart on his sleeve does not mean that he doesn’t have one. Acting both through and around his deadpan, he knew how to let the audience figure out what he was trying to hide.
In The Haunted House, when a woman comes into the bank where he works and exerts her wiles to seduce him into opening the time-lock safe early for her, his face remains as set as granite, but every time he shakes his head in refusal we know exactly how much his resolve has weakened. Here the stone face hilariously counterpoints a spine of jell-o.”
- Buster Keaton: The Persistence of Comedy by Imogen Sara Smith
Odilon Redon (1840-1916, French) ~ Selon toute apparence, c'etait une maine de chair et de sang comme la mienne (To all appearances, it was a hand of flesh and blood just like my own), La Maison Hantée - 1896 (lithograph)
well aware that this is common knowledge but it'll always kill me that bruces grief will last forever. Batman is a concept, a character in a comic book and because of the nature of comic books lasting for like ever he's going to repeat the same plots and learn the same lessons over and over and over. Closure quite literally doesn't exist for Bruce Wayne because he'll be in that alley for eternity, he'll keep holding his kids in his arms as they die and failing to save people for eternity. Concepts are eternal, batman is eternal. His grief will last forever.