"The Thaw", by Contour Chromatic
CIA is himself experiencing a fight club-esque identity crisis. Doesn't the mantra "I'm CIA" strike you as the ramblings of a made man? He uses it to cling to what he thinks, what he HOPES he is. He wants a purpose. He can't be a monolithic singularity like Batman, Bane, or Raja Ghoul. We see his instability when he projects it onto his prisoners. The perfect canvases with their silent tongues and blank faces. "Who paid you to grab Doctor Puddle?". As we all know, CIA is himself being paid to grab Doctor Puddle. He's questioning authority and allegiance. "He didn't fly so good": here he refers to himself in the third person, in an out of body experience. He knows he's slipping, he's doing poorly, this plane trip isn't going to plan. CIA didn't fly so good. "A lot of loyalty for a hired gun". Why is he loyal to the CIA, so much that he considers them one and the same?
And of course, "Why does he wear the mask?". CIA doesn't know any more, he doesn't know why he rises every day and wears the mask of a steely-eyed and hardened CIA agent.
And that, my friends, is why he becomes his own Bane. Think for a moment. CIA and his underlings enter the plane with Doctor Pavlova, Bane, and the mercs. We're seeing all the events from the eyes of CIA. All we really know is that CIA enters and Bane leaves. Do we know Bane entered? Of course not! He wore the bag, and CIA/Bane left so many corpses on the plane, it isn't hard for him to imagine he is finally free of his law-keeping vessel, having left it with his brother, a representation of the shedding of his other identity. He embraces the bane of his existence.
Coupled with the heavy insectile metamorphosis imagery (shedding of the wings, the body of the plane hanging like a cocoon from which Bane springs and flies out anew, the blood sucking and the mosquito man, the body bang being opened like the amniotic sac of an embryo) I think it's fair to say that this is entirely canon.
Bravo, Nolan.
