I’m tired of this. I thought I was tired enough after watching Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises, a perfect encapsulation of how Nolan manufactures credit for alluding to big issues while preserving a critical incoherence about politics that let him avoid offending any potential customers. And I’m even more tired after a stint at the Television Critics Association where people said repeatedly that the shows they’d created had no politics. By that, they mean that their shows are not partisan, which is something I can see legitimately avoiding (though having politicians on television have no party affiliation or fake party affiliation is disingenuous). But they end up implying that they’re afraid to claim their own ideas instead. It’s okay for pop culture to have ideas. In fact, it’s necessary. And pop culture can be deeper, and riskier, and more exciting, the action and the relationships it portrays can have higher stakes, when those ideas are about how the world should be run, about what conditions are necessary for equity, and stability, and justice.
I’m tired of this. I thought I was tired enough after watching Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises, a perfect encapsulation of how Nolan manufactures credit for alluding to big issues while preserving a critical incoherence about politics that let him avoid offending any potential customers. And I’m even more tired after a stint at the Television Critics Association where people said repeatedly that the shows they’d created had no politics. By that, they mean that their shows are not partisan, which is something I can see legitimately avoiding (though having politicians on television have no party affiliation or fake party affiliation is disingenuous). But they end up implying that they’re afraid to claim their own ideas instead. It’s okay for pop culture to have ideas. In fact, it’s necessary. And pop culture can be deeper, and riskier, and more exciting, the action and the relationships it portrays can have higher stakes, when those ideas are about how the world should be run, about what conditions are necessary for equity, and stability, and justice.
This consideration of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy contains mild spoilers for The Dark Knight Rises.
Halfway through Batman Begins, Alfred (Michael Caine), the Wayne family’s loyal butler, points out to Bruce (Christian Bale) that his anti-social behavior and strange injuries will invite comment, and suggests that he find a way to live a public life to minimize prying. “What does someone like me do?” Bruce asks him. “Drive sports cars. Date movie stars. Buy things that are not for sale. Who knows, Master Wayne?” Alfred tells him. Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, complete this weekend with the release of The Dark Knight Rises, has been an extended meditation on the power of symbols, the juxtaposition between fascism and anarchy, and recovery from trauma. But it’s also intermittently a story about what billionaires are for and what they do, a question The Dark Knight Rises seems to want some credit for posing, but not responsibility for actually answering.
Nolan’s vision of Gotham has always been sharply divided: we see billionaires and the very poor, but with the exception of the prisoners on the Joker’s barges or the ticketholders to the football game that Bane bombs, and the police themselves, there is no visible middle class in the city. The poor and the criminals who prey on them are often literally an underclass. In Batman Begins, district attorney Rachel Dawes (Katie Holmes) drives Bruce below an underpass to confront crime boss Carmine Falcone, telling him “They talk about the depression as if it’s over, and it’s not.” Poverty goes unseen because it is physically subterranean. In The Dark Knight Rises, an orphan who lives at the same boys home where Blake (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a young police officer who maintains his faith in Batman even as Gotham has reviled the vigilante as a criminal, grew up tells Blake that the boys who age out of the program, which has cut back on services because the Wayne Foundation’s funding has dried up, are disappearing into the sewers because “they say there’s work down there.”
While the trilogy is clear that threats to Gotham rise from that underworld, Nolan also appears significantly pessimistic about the ability of charity to permanently ameliorate the conditions that contribute to crime. “Gotham’s been good to our family. But people less fortunate than us are suffering,” Bruce’s father tells him as the family rides the monorail to their fateful night at the opera. “So we built a new, cheap public transportation system to unite the city.” That same monorail becomes the delivery weapon for Ra’s al Ghul’s weapons later in Batman Begins. In that same movie, Alfred reflects on the elder Wayne’s strategy after Bruce decides to return to Gotham, noting that “In the depression, your father nearly bankrupted Wayne Enterprises combatting poverty. He believed that his example could inspire the wealthy of Gotham to save their city.” When Bruce wants to know if the strategy worked, Alfred tells him “In a way. Their murder shocked the wealthy and the powerful into action.” When Bruce Wayne and Harvey Dent have dinner during The Dark Knight, Bruce promises Dent that “you’ll never need another cent,” after Wayne throws Dent a fundraiser. But it’s not enough to secure the fortunes of a promising politician if he goes bad. Reform is a process, not a dinner party. In The Dark Knight Rises, Bruce is bitterly critical of the approaches of those who emulated his father, complaining that the proceeds of a charity function sponsored by the investor Miranda Tate will only go to pay for a lavish spread, rather than reaching their intended recipients. “It’s about feeding the ego of whatever society hag put it on,” he tells her.
Though The Dark Knight Rises is deeply skeptical of the charity of the wealthy, more than any previous movie in Nolan’s trilogy, it also expresses a clear disgust for irresponsible or capricious stewards of Gotham’s economy. The Wayne Foundation’s funding has dried up because Bruce Wayne’s neglect of the company means it’s no longer profitable. Specifically, he bet big on a renewable energy project championed by Tate, only to halt production when the reactor showed some risk of becoming dangerously unstable. “If you funnel your entire R&D budget into a fusion project you mothball, your company is unlikely to thrive,” Lucius Fox tells Bruce drily after his boss emerges from seclusion. His decision to put Gotham’s safety ahead of Wayne Industries profits may have been a good one, but there’s something disturbing about his drift from the company afterwards. In one of the movie’s critical setpieces, Bane prepares to execute a daring con at the Gotham Stock Exchange. The movie lingers on traders who are getting their shoes shined. “Wayne coming back is change,” one of them declares confidently. “Change is either good or bad. I vote bad.” “On what basis?” asks his friend.”I flipped a coin,” the original trader tells him, amused by his own arbitrariness. Bane’s amused when the man mistakes him for a simple bank robber, and reduces the brokers to shrieking, hapless hostages strapped to the back of getaway motorcycles.And Gotham’s poor finally have a spokesman more compelling than Joe Chill, the poverty-stricken criminal who murdered Bruce Wayne’s parents, or the Joker, a prophet of the distorting effects of social dysfunction who preaches “whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stranger,” and worships anarchy for aesthetic rather than social reasons. Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway) arrives on screen as a maid working the Harvey Dent Day celebrations held at Wayne Manor, and immediately begins skewering social conventions. “You wouldn’t beat up a woman any more than I’d beat up a cripple,” she tells Bruce, who finds her lifting his mother’s pearl necklace out of an uncrackable safe after she’s delivered on a silver tray. “Of course, sometimes exceptions have to be made.” They meet again on the dance floor at Miranda Tate’s fundraiser. “You don’t get to judge me just because you were born in the master bedroom of Wayne Manor,” Selina tells Bruce. “When you start out doing what you have to, you don’t get to do what you want to…You think all this can last? You and your friends better batten down the hatches. There’s a storm coming…You’re going to wonder how you could live so large and leave so little for the rest of us.”
The storm arrives in Gotham the form of Bane, a hulking pseudointellectual strawman with whom Batman does vigorous, fisticuffed combat in the city’s sewers. Given Bruce’s hiatus from Batmanning, or any other form of productive social interaction, Bane’s a more than worthy physical antagonist for Batman, and Nolan shoots their brutal fights without a score to distract from the sound of fists on flesh. But he has none of the Joker’s visionary verve or coherence, and is the occasion for some of the worst writing in The Dark Knight Rises. “We take Gotham back from the corrupt…the oppressors who have kept you down with myths of opportunity,” he tells a crowd of reporters at Blackgate Penitentiary, where he’s convened them to read a speech Police Commissioner Gordon wrote, but never delivered, that reveals the truth about Harvey Dent’s false legacy, which has been used to justify suspending paroles for Gotham prisoners. “The powerful will be ripped from their decadent nests and cast out into the cold…Courts will be convened. Spoils will be enjoyed. Blood will be shed. The police will survive as they learn to serve true justice. This great city will endure.” In Bane’s formulation, people who are concerned with income inequality are conflated with, and rendered invisible in favor of, violent criminals.
Nolan’s said repeatedly that his inspiration for The Dark Knight Rises is Charles’ Dickens tale of the French Revolution, but there are no Gaspards or Defarges here, and no honest or extended exploration of what “myths of opportunity” mean in Gotham. Nolan gives us kangaroo courts without exploring the frustrations of those denied justice elsewhere, the wealthy turned violently out into the streets with no regard for the plights of the aged and infirm without seeing what might make the jarring redistribution so appealing to Gothamites. Bane doesn’t represent, as Rush Limbaugh suggested, Bain Capital, though he is briefly allied with a vulture capitalist, and he doesn’t stand in for the Occupy movement, either. He doesn’t represent any real constituency, any actual scheme of reform advocated by anyone, and it makes The Dark Knight Returns a less powerful contest as a result. The briefness of the movie’s residence Bane’s Gotham also makes it less entertaining. The time we spend in those mock courts, presided over by an entertainingly familiar character, provide The Dark Knight Rises with one of its few truly striking images, and the resistance network made up of cops and Wayne Enterprises board members gets a sadly cursory treatment. Splitting The Dark Knight Rises into two features might have produced two more balanced and intellectually rich movies. At almost three hours, the current movie still manages to feel cramped, slighting important issues and potentially terrific plots.
Among those is the time Catwoman bides in Gotham. There’s no real disappointment in watching Selina’s growing disgust at the arbitrariness of Bane’s rule, because he never posed a credible alternative in the first place. She’s initially sourly amused when Bane’s con bankrupts Bruce. “They’re letting me keep the house,” he tells her. “The rich don’t even go broke the same as the rest of us,” she responds in one of the truer statements about inequality in the movie. Later, as she and a friend wander through apartments that have been turned into squats, Selina remarks “This was someone’s home.” “And now it’s everyone’s home,” her friend says. “There’s a storm coming, remember? This is what you wanted.” It’s not, really. In Nolan’s trilogy, there are no social institutions other than law enforcement—the police in The Dark Knight Rises become the occupiers, sleeping in tent cities and clashing with Bane’s mercenaries—and the boy’s home where Blake grew up, and no visions for systemic reform outside of Harvey Dent’s anti-crime crusade. Bane’s rule doesn’t disprove anything, because it doesn’t actually stand for anything.
In The Dark Knight Rises, a convenient dodge lets both Nolan and Bane off the hook, a tactic that serves Bane better than the man who conjured him. Nolan’s always stood above other comic book movie directors precisely because he gets credit for using the medium towards more elevated ends than the simple joys of watching the Hulk batter around Loki like a rag doll. “The city needs Bruce Wayne, your resources, your knowledge. Not your body,” Alfred tells Bruce in The Dark Knight Rises. Nolan might deserve all the credit he gets for transcending genre if he was willing to weigh that proposition seriously.
by Chris Randle
When the title character first appears in The Dark Knight Rises, staggering rather than triumphantly leaping, it’s as a distorted reflection. The film’s other intimations of ambiguity prove to be far less memorable. Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman charms me in spite of its shambolic flaws, because the disparate elements – Anton Furst’s anachronistic production design, the parallel Prince/Elfman soundtracks, Michael Keaton’s wry resignation, Jack Nicholson’s lascivious camp – achieve a certain idiosyncrasy, flecked through operatic pulp that’s aware of how ridiculous either lineage can be. If a John Waters character gave up on scandalizing the norms and resolved to just slaughter them instead, it might sound like Nicholson’s Joker: “Now comes the part where I relieve you, the little people, of the burden of your failed and useless lives.” When the “homicidal artist” spares a Francis Bacon painting from his henchman, recognizing a kindred blemish, I still laugh, partly because the moment seems ever more alien from the current wave of superhero movies. Velázquez reinterpretations, gas that makes you laugh yourself to death – neither interests a director like Christopher Nolan.
This film makes it increasingly clear that Heath Ledger’s own brilliant invocation of the character was an aberration within Nolan’s Batman trilogy – within the same movie, really, given that The Dark Knight eventually reveals his climactic plan to be moral parable rather than flamboyant spectacle. Before that tedious business with the twin ships, however, he’s the man shorn from context amidst a convoluted mythos, who delights in improvising his origins. Ledger successfully wriggled out from under Nolan’s boy-intellectual compulsion to imbue every line and action with solemn significance. Grant Morrison often writes the Joker as “super-sane,” suggesting that no one adapts to the capitalist metropolis better than a mercurial sociopath. He also thrives in any screenplay where conversation otherwise involves people exchanging aphorisms and maxims. Without that autocritical incongruity, watching The Dark Knight Rises sometimes feels like being held at mounted-cannon-point by a party’s biggest bore.
As when forced through entire backstories next to the salsa, there are distractions. The plot follows the same techno-espionage mode as Batman Begins – influenced by Denny O’Neil, who co-created the integral Ra’s al Ghul character – but eschews its unbelievable contrivances and ludicrous doomsday weapon (I did hear Carl giggling at the casual “this is now a nuclear bomb” announcement). When he’s not making habitually frenzied cuts, Nolan produces a few striking images: explosions blooming across Gotham City; Batman flickering through darkness towards a mercenary; Jonathan “Scarecrow” Crane settling into his metier as the new regime’s show-trial judge, cheerfully dispensing aribitrary executions from the summit of an unhinged, paper-heaped bureaucracy. There is also, depending on one’s tastes, the rival spectacle of Anne Hathaway’s fickle, witty Catwoman and Tom Hardy’s supermassive Bane (rewriting the etymology of “tank top”), though Nolan invariably consigns the few women to chocolate bar roles (© Margaux Williamson, 2012).
(Can we talk about how fucked up it is that Catwoman, after gulling and robbing various rich men in a quasi-romantic partnership with her female accomplice/companion, suddenly gains a new reverence for property rights + desire to date Bruce Wayne upon stumbling across this photo of a nice blonde family in their ransacked home? And how I’m not sure Nolan consciously intended any of those implications, because he understands sexuality or women or general human behaviour in similar terms as that guy who asks permission to “play devil’s advocate” at every college seminar?)
Of course, the film’s grim politics hardly end there. The Dark Knight Rises is not a direct critique or allegory of Occupy Wall Street: the script was written a year before that movement erupted, and Bane’s rhetoric, a melange of economic populism and unsubtle George W. Bush quotations, is an admitted ploy. He wants to annihilate Gotham City, not collectivize it. Yet this disingenuousness only makes the resulting scenes more reactionary, a Reign of Terror that plays out like a slasher movie – just replace the gleeful schadenfreude with dour admonishment. The citizen uprising against corrupt oligarchs descends into venal, murderous rancor immediately, as if Gotham is full of would-be Berias; later, we’re invited to cheer on a long column of cops (or, given the director’s tendencies, nod gravely) while they charge towards the revolutionaries. Nolan is too cowardly to show any of those working people who used to be redistributing fur coats among them, but it still felt appallingly fascistic. The cringing deputy commissioner even rediscovers his sense of Man-Purpose by firing wildly into a mob, at last crumpling upon the snow as some Haymarket pieta.
You could always listen to the villain instead. Heath Ledger’s voice was central to his Joker, skipping along in harlequin steps (“you’re a freak…like me!”) before clenching with terrifying fury. The original Bane is a smart brute, hulking yet calculating, and Tom Hardy magnifies that one good idea by giving him tones marvelously jaunty and genteel. His threats glint inside oblique mockery. (The film’s one politically astute line comes from Hardy’s hidden mouth: told mid-attack that the Gotham Stock Exchange holds no money, he sneers, “Then why are you here?” Invisible capital!) Along with the voice, there are moments of unnerving gentleness, as when Bane strokes his erstwhile employer’s shoulder, about to brush him from existence. Would I misread to wonder if Dark Knight Rises, a film very much in the paramilitary mode of 21st-century superhero adaptations, presents this costumed tenderness as another sign of evil? Why does Nolan think that a reactivated urban-assault prototype (formerly the Batplane) hovering overhead is a more comforting sight? Standing outside the theatre afterwards, Carl groused: “I don’t go to a Batman movie to watch people dodging missiles.”
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A slightly odd line from Gavin Mueller’s post about The Dark Knight Rises:
The Dark Knight has nothing to do with Occupy, and no one who sees it will make that connection, unless they gleaned everything they know about Occupy from newscopter footage.
Isn’t “newscopter footage” precisely where most people will have got most of their knowledge of Occupy from? Likewise Gavin’s quibbling about how the villain, Bane’s, authoritarian command of his loyal mercenary band is unlike the leaderless process-fetishism of Occupy: yes, the bad guys in The Dark Knight Rises aren’t a very accurate representation of what the Occupy movement is actually like, but they do accurately represent a right-wing media narrative about Occupy. In this story, Occupy is a carefully orchestrated plot by ACORN or Saul Alinsky or somebody designed to spread anarchy for some ill-defined elitist purpose (I guess Frances Fox Piven is Ra’s al Ghul). Hence we get Bane wandering around Gotham making hollow populist-sounding speeches, in scenes which I found a bit boring because this revolutions-as-elite-plots story is so old, going back to nineteenth century reactionary theories about the French Revolution being the work of freemasons. This is primarily a right-wing position, although perhaps it is accepted by some liberals in the form of claims that militant actions are the work of “outside agitators.” Presumably the familiarity of this plot, though, plays a part in the success of the film, as following an old script makes the film’s political references legible and widely acceptable (I don’t necessarily mean that audiences agreewith the politics of this story, just that they recognize that the film is “saying something” political).
I think Gavin makes a similar mistake in his claim that the economics endorsed by the film are feudal rather than capitalist:
Batman/Bruce Wayne is not a capitalist. Sorry. This Batman-as-financier stuff is a trick played by casting the actor whose greatest role was a psychopathic i-banker. Yes, Wayne is rich, but that’s not the same as being a capitalist. The guy running the bodega down the street is more of a capitalist than Bruce Wayne. Wayne has no interest in profit, in accumulation, in investing his wealth to produce more wealth. If you don’t see M-C-M’ you don’t have capitalism.
Again, I agree that Bruce Wayne in the film isn’t an accurate representation of the way capitalists actually function, but that’s, again, not the point: Wayne does accurately represent a particular story about capitalism, and this story about capitalism is a relevant one because it’s the misunderstanding that capitalist society has of itself: that capitalism is defined by individual control of private property. As Marx puts it in the Manifesto:
We Communists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing the right of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a man’s own labour, which property is alleged to be the groundwork of all personal freedom, activity and independence. Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean the property of petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form of property that preceded the bourgeois form? There is no need to abolish that; the development of industry has to a great extent already destroyed it, and is still destroying it daily. Or do you mean the modern bourgeois private property? But does wage-labour create any property for the labourer? Not a bit. It creates capital, i.e., that kind of property which exploits wage-labour, and which cannot increase except upon condition of begetting a new supply of wage-labour for fresh exploitation.
In other words, the political economy of The Dark Knight Rises isn’t, as Gavin says, a feudal defense of the aristocracy; it’s a defense of capitalism from the point of view of the bourgeoisie’s own (mis-)understanding of capitalism, a liberalism descended from Locke and underpinning the position of almost everyone in America except Marxists. You can see it, for example, in Chris Hedges’ insistence that he is not opposed to capitalism as such, only to “corporate capitalism,” or those populist anti-Romney ads Newt Gingrich was running. Once again, the film isn’t making a particular political point as much as it is presenting us with an inflection of political “common sense.”
More generally, I’ve been wondering about the tendency of people to read the Nolan Batman films didactically, that is, to see them as presenting a more-or-less coherent political philosophy. Now, in a blockbuster industry dominated by Michael Bay and Zach Snyder, Nolan’s ability to come up with neat ideas and present them in reasonably coherent narratives shouldn’t be dismissed, I suppose, but that doesn’t add up to a reason to take his films seriously. Perhaps his films are read as directly political more than those of his competitors because Nolan himself is an extraordinarily literal film-maker, as seen, for instance, in his widely-praised preference for model shots over CGI. K-Punk pointed out that, despite being a film nominally about dreams, Inception is aggressively anti-oneiric, rejecting any uncanniness or confusion for a logic of place and causation which is, if anything, even more strict than reality.
Likewise, although characters in the Batman films are always talking about symbolism, the films themselves seem designed to strip the character of any mythical or symbolic resonance at all, for instance with the insistence on explaining in detail the R&D and supply chain behind Batman’s costume and gadgets. This seems pointless in a superhero film; if you want to make a film about superheroes, why undermine the mythical quality which gives superheroes their appeal? And if you want to make a realistic film, why include superheroes at all, when the superheroic elements will just look silly, as the (presumably toy-marketing-led) transformation of the Batmobile into a motorbike did in The Dark Knight, or as Ra’s al Ghul and Bane’s Dr-Evil-level supervillain plots did in Batman Begins and The Dark Knight Rises?
It is a commonplace, at least in the West, that the current regime in Russia is authoritarian, if not totalitarian. A line can be drawn—with caveats about scale and severity—from Putin straight back to Stalin, while others can be drawn sideways from Putin to the dictators he has befriended and supported: Assad, Qaddafi, Chavez, and Saddam Hussein. (If nothing else, Putin seems to have an oddly consistent and unlucky way of choosing his friends.) The recent protests against him only confirm the neatness of this symmetry.
We think we know what authoritarianism is and why it survives, but our notions about it have not changed much since the 18th century, when Montesquieu contrasted the capricious rule of a despot, who holds power through fear, with the bounded governance of a monarch, held in check by law. In our political language, monarchy has evolved into democracy, but despotism remains despotism (or authoritarianism). In comparison to monarchies and democracies, each in their own time, despotism has always seemed archaic. The gleaming military uniforms, Tolkienesque titles, and Orientalized imperial paraphernalia of modern dictators like Idi Amin, Pinochet, and Qaddafi evoke the 19th century; leaders who are truly modern are supposed to wear self-effacing suits.
If authoritarianism is a relic of a pre-democratic age, Putinism, like the late regime of Putin’s friend Silvio Berlusconi, is not authoritarian. Regimes that see themselves as successors to democracy are not rare—fascists and communists were equally convinced that liberal democracy belonged in the dustbin of history. The difference is that Putinism is partly right in seeing itself as post-democratic, which is why the problems it poses are so vexing. It represents one answer to a set of contradictions that exist not just in Russian democracy but also in contemporary democracy in general.
These contradictions are well known in the United States and Western Europe, on the right as well as on the left. One of them is that while democratic discourse constantly represents the electoral process as a canvassing of the will of the people, in reality political and media institutions police the field of acceptable alternatives so strictly that the choices that can be made are rudimentary at best. Moreover, the participation of multinational elites and large-scale capital flows in the political process means that individual electorates are always pitted against forces much larger than they are, as the Eurozone crisis most recently has shown. The old American conservative fear of international institutions like the United Nations reflects a similar worry. The premise of 19th-century liberal democracy, which envisioned national communities as largely self-enclosed and politics as localized debates on the common good, becomes less tenable with each passing year.
Democracy arrived in Russia with many of these contradictions already exposed. It had long been a staple of Soviet propaganda that American democracy was a mockery controlled by finance-capital puppet masters and served by a craven media, whose business it was to play down racial, economic, and gender inequalities. Soviet ideologists, like Soviet citizens more generally, knew little about real life in the West, but they closely followed the struggles of Western leftists who were making similar arguments. Ordinary Soviet people were not usually skeptical of such claims: to believe in the decrepitude of the Soviet system or the wonders of the free market, as many did, did not demand allegiance to American-style politics. Up until the last months of the Soviet Union’s existence, most reformers (and supporters of reform) thought they were building a social democracy that abolished the unfree aspects of the Soviet system, not buckling to global capital.
The catastrophic 1990s—which Putin, for whom they are an ideological keystone, famously labeled “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century”—put paid to this dream. For a long time the Soviet state had nurtured close-knit networks of local elites in its many different regional units, from Union republics to autonomous ethnic enclaves. After the collapse, these became powerful engines of decentralization: not only did they form the governments of the post-Soviet states, they also retained control in Russia of their own regions and even their own industries. Unchecked by any functional central authority (the government itself effectively being a Moscow-based clique), state and “private” interests coalesced into corrupt and unaccountable oligarchies that fought pitched battles in Moscow’s streets. Runaway inflation and fraud destroyed the savings of ordinary citizens, while a series of poor harvests, beginning in the late 1980s, created chronic food shortages. Assassinations of political and business leaders became routine, so that a political class governed by anything other than fear and greed never even had a chance to form.
It would be unfair to blame the abandonment of social-democratic dreams on the forces of global capital itself, but it is hard to deny that they took full advantage of the ensuing crisis. Neoliberal economists nurtured by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund arrived in Moscow in droves, promoting an agenda that the ruling clique adopted wholesale, quickly foreclosing any possible alternatives for the post-Soviet future. Given the weakness of the state and the impotence of public institutions, it was hard to imagine other outcomes after 1991; the “shock therapy” treatment supposedly ushered in by Yeltsin’s economic team was largely a contentless label for a state of chaos the central authorities were unable to do anything about anyway. Still, the involvement of the IMF and other Western financiers was significant for two reasons. First, they provided massive loans that were used to support a colossal and unsustainable system of government bonds that enriched the new oligarchy and then were made to disappear by the 1998 default, leading to an economic collapse that fell hardest on ordinary Russians. This was a wholly undeserved injection of funds that only expanded the gulf between the new rulers and the people they so obviously failed to govern. Second, these loans were contingent on lip service being paid to the Western economists and advisors who appeared like toadstools after the rain. Their influence was a constant, humiliating reminder that the Russians were not masters of their domain, creating resentment Putin capitalized on in the early years of the 21st century.
Although the Western advisors presented themselves as apostles of liberal democracy and civil society, their guiding role in economic policy helped ensure that Russian democracy would be hollow from the very beginning. In order to push through even nominal liberalization reforms, Yeltsin and his clique needed to thoroughly rig the political process.
Two simultaneous crises made this feat of engineering both possible and necessary. The first was the need to keep at least a shred of control over the division of state-owned assets and somehow hold back the complete collapse of the economy. The second was that the first Russian parliament had no interest in the politics that were expected of it. Its unwillingness to cede power to President Yeltsin in 1992 and ’93 led to a constitutional crisis that culminated in the Duma being shelled into submission by army tanks. The parliamentary constitution of the early post-Soviet years was replaced by a presidential one. Even at its height, Yeltsin’s support in the Duma fell far short of a majority; the dominant players either had no coherent political vision at all (like the Liberal Democratic Party, a mouthpiece for inchoate nationalist populism that continues to control a large number of seats) or were structurally marginal (like the Communists). By the mid-’90s, the Russian political system had taken the shape that made Putinism possible. Yeltsin, with a hand-picked cadre of oligarchs and foreign economic advisors, made the real decisions, while a squabbling and impotent gaggle of parliamentarians filled the airwaves with noise that resembled the discourse of a real democracy.
The appearance of democracy was held up by an explosively growing media, largely controlled by the same oligarchs who were running the country. Western commentators frequently cite this period of ferment as a triumph for liberalism and rights in Russia, but they neglect to mention that the media’s ability to catalyze bottom-up change was as circumscribed then as it is now. In short, Russian democracy became a caricature of the caricature once drawn by Soviet propagandists: it was a pseudo-politics serving only to conceal the controlling hand of moneyed interests. Unlike in Western democracies, however, in Russia everyone was aware of the deception. Yeltsin’s erratic behavior, incompetence, and alcoholism could not have been concealed by the shrewdest public relations team, yet it was clear that no other politician or bloc could exert any sort of countervailing force.
One of the most influential and representative texts of the period, which last year was made into a star-studded blockbuster movie, was Viktor Pelevin’s novel Generation ‘P’ (1999), set in Moscow during the Yeltsin era. At its climax, the protagonist Tatarsky, an advertising copywriter, is invited into the basement of the mysterious Apiculture Institute. There he discovers a room full of SGI workstations busily engaged in the business of Russian democracy. The politicians, he learns, are digital models that exist only on television, and the news programs on which they appear are edited according to the whims of corporate sponsors. The entire political system, including Yeltsin himself, is the creation of a figure whom Pelevin clearly intends to represent the media-capitalist unconscious. Political participation, needless to say, is revealed to be senseless.
Pelevin’s satire of post-Soviet Russia spoke most directly to intellectuals, who felt increasingly adrift in a world that appeared incomprehensible and even absurd. (The Tatarsky character is a university graduate with a degree in “translation from the national languages of the USSR.”) But Pelevin’s sentiments were also shared more broadly, by a population that had become even more cynical than it was under the Soviet system in the 1980s. Then, there still appeared to be a consensus around Soviet values (social justice, equality, and peace) even though the Soviet order was no longer functional. By the late 1990s, as data from opinion polls shows, the very idea of liberal democracy had been delegitimized. (In one of Generation ‘P’’s most striking moments, a character decodes the Russian equivalent of moolah, le-ve, as an abbreviation for “liberal values.”) Public speech that made any value claim at all was automatically assumed to be hypocrisy in the service of self-interest, as in fact it usually was. Russia on the eve of Putin was a democracy in which any discussion of the public good was automatically foreclosed, and without the mystification provided by democratic history and tradition, the new system’s lifespan seemed likely to be brief.
Putin’s rise to power, like Hitler’s, is often framed in terms of an exhausted population opting for stability over freedom, but Putin’s ideological appeal was distinct. Unlike most dictatorial regimes, which typically rely on the rhetoric of nation and tradition, Putinism appealed directly to cynicism. It promised Russians a quasi-democracy that combined a totally neutered political sphere (expertly stage-managed by chief ideologist Vladislav Surkov) with a theoretically rigid central “vertical of power.” The substance of the appeal was not the preservation of democratic institutions but their increasing irrelevance. Everyone knew the score, and it was by virtue of knowing the score that one became a supporter of the regime. The liberals who were singled out for harassment by one or another branch of the apparatus never had any significant degree of influence within Russia because their earnestness was viewed as a mark of either stupidity or treason. By 2003, four-fifths of Russians agreed with the statement, “Democratic procedures are pure show business.” In an American context, these words would sound like an angry call for reform. In Putin’s Russia, they were a pledge of allegiance.
Putin was most appealing, of course, to his principal clients: the new state-private-criminal oligarchies that took power all over Russia in the 1990s. Publicly, the systemic reconfiguration that took place in the early 2000s was represented as “suppressing the oligarchs,” a narrative the Western media echoed as it breathlessly reported on the expropriation of magnates such as Vladimir Gusinsky and Mikhail Khodorkovsky. In reality, the political veneer of “sovereign democracy” provided the oligarchies with a shred of legitimacy while making it understood that the rules of the game had not changed at all. The most glaring example of this new contract was the case of Chechnya. In the 1990s, the Islamist-dominated Caucasian republic defeated its former imperial master in a war of independence. When Putin fought to reclaim it, he essentially offered one of the more prominent rebel leaders a deal: practically unrestricted power within Chechnya as long as the republic formally remained part of Russia. The gamble paid off: in last year’s elections, the Chechen political machine delivered 99 percent of its votes to Russia’s ruling party.
This politics of cynicism was most apparent in foreign policy. The omnipresent reality of Russian foreign relations after 1991 was the ongoing, failing struggle against the United States. The expansion of NATO, the war in Kosovo, and eventually the Orange Revolution: Moscow perceived all of them as transparent attempts by Washington to extend itself into the former Soviet sphere of influence. This, in itself, was not offensive. Most Russians understood, however unwillingly, that they no longer had the authority to dictate terms in the region. What baffled and angered them was the United States’ unyielding insistence that it was no longer playing the old game of spheres of influence at all, that human rights and democracy were causes it was willing to defend at the risk of its own interests. Putin, freed from the obligation to grovel for IMF credits, gave voice to this frustration: his government, like his constituents, came to treat protestations of humanitarian or liberal-democratic innocence simply as a subversive evolution of cold war great power politics. In contemporary Russian parlance, this is the meaning of the term “soft power,” and its symbol is Ukraine’s Orange Revolution.
It is easy to see, then, why allusions to State Department meddling were on the lips of every Putinist apparatchik both during and after the recent Moscow protests. A movement that used the language of democracy and liberal values unironically, without the demystifying caveat that it could be no more than a disguise for self-interested claims, was as much of a challenge to the Putinist regime as a mass movement founded on demystification would be to any contemporary Western democracy. During a protest in December, government-funded provocateurs posted a series of gotcha clips on YouTube. These consisted of interviews with ditzy-looking protesters, who were each posed the question, “How has Putin’s rise to power personally harmed you?” Their confused responses were presumably meant to demonstrate the unseriousness of the protest movement, but what these interviews really showed was the blinkered vision of the reigning ideology. It actually cannot imagine a protest movement grounded in something other than self-interest.
How did such a movement emerge in the first place? A number of more or less compelling explanations can be adduced. One revolves around the internet. As the Russian print and broadcast media was evacuated of any challenging content, political discussion gradually moved online. Ten years ago, only a tiny percentage of Russians could go online, and they were unlikely to cause any trouble. As internet access radically expanded, however, and the Russian LiveJournal–based blogosphere came into contact with the Russian diaspora, online dissent became more unified and much more difficult to control. (The government is currently implementing an online censorship bill that at long last seems to be a serious attempt to clamp down on internet activism, though its stated justification is protecting children from immorality.) Another explanation is purely Maslovian: a new middle class has emerged, and a large segment of the population can finally pay attention to more abstract needs than security and shelter. Corruption is of particular interest to this new social force, since it is a direct threat to its economic prospects.
At least as significant, however, is the fact that the government’s behavior diverged from its antipolitical line. While the four-year rigmarole with President Medvedev may have been intended as a play to a knowing crowd—and certainly Medvedev was not taken seriously at the beginning of his term—by 2009 significant numbers of Russians had been persuaded to buy into the new president’s program of reform and modernization. Many Russians began to become aware of the possibilities of idealistic collective action. They organized local groups to fight developers, corrupt officials, and deficiencies in public services. At first, the aspirations of these activists were limited, but it could not have been long before they awoke to the fact that corruption was not simply an incidental part of the Putinist system.
This faction possibly even included Medvedev himself. It seemed as though the authorities not only had discovered Russia’s urgent problems but also had become willing to solve them through the political process. They began to speak the suspect language of “civil society” and “rule of law,” although always in adequately controlled contexts. (A Russian newspaper recently released a file of leaked government notes on the Public Chamber, one of the foremost civil society groups that emerged in the High Medvedev period. These notes make it clear that almost every single member was a paid and protected stooge of the government; the new civil society, in other words, was neither organic nor spontaneous.) This turn was so at odds with the self-interested tunnel vision long encouraged by official ideology that it looked like a credible threat. By the time Putin put a humiliating end to the charade on the eve of the presidential campaign, the number of people who were willing to take up the government on its offer of political participation was no longer negligible. The democratic movement, in short, was as much or more the product of internal government intrigues than of any putative CIA front organization.
Moreover, it was crucial that the government did not move immediately to suppress marches and protests, neither the early ones, in 2009 and 2010, nor the much larger demonstrations that took place between the fall of 2011 and the spring of 2012. Throughout the Putin era, gay-rights marchers and members of Garry Kasparov’s rump opposition movement could never count on the right to assembly; the police broke up their demonstrations even when the participants numbered in the single digits. The new democratic movement associated with Aleksei Navalny, who is not a radical but a centrist nationalist, encountered just enough difficulties that organizing a march felt like a moral victory; it never dealt with the level of resistance that would have blocked it completely. Police violence and legal reprisals were rare enough that each new march emboldened new waves of supporters. While the state media relentlessly downplayed the scale of these events, there was never a serious effort to suppress them.
In retrospect, it is obvious that the government’s goal was to demonstrate how unthreatened it was by the popular opposition (and to show itself in a favorable light on the eve of Russia’s admission to the WTO, which is now in its final stages). Putin’s resounding election victory and subsequent gloating amid a pro-government crowd sent a clear message. The years of High Putinism, with its superficial adherence to democratic institutions and ideals and controlled space for public engagement, were over. Putin, evidently more frightened than he cared to admit, had become a classic authoritarian president-for-life, more Assad than Berlusconi.
Protests at Putin’s inauguration in May, and at every subsequent march, were met by ruthless beatings and indiscriminate arrests. These early confrontations with the Moscow police were accompanied by observations, on both sides, that protest suppression in the West is considerably harsher. There is more truth to this than most of us would like to admit. The Moscow police, for all their brutality, have generally preferred familiar weapons, nightsticks and mobile detention vans (avtozaki), to kettling, tear gas, rubber bullets, and sound cannons.
In response, the opposition changed its tactics. After the inauguration protests were suppressed, an occupation formed in a Moscow park around a statue of the Kazakh national poet Abai Kunanbaev. Its name, ОккупайАбай, unapologetically rhymed Abai’s name with a direct transliteration of Occupy. At the encampment, activists who had participated in the American Occupy movement taught the Russian protesters how to organize general assemblies and express their opinions on resolutions. Taking its cues from Western authorities, the Moscow police dispersed OkkupaiAbai within a few days. United Russia has since pushed through a law imposing massive penalties for participation in “unsanctioned demonstrations.”
There is much common ground between Western Occupy activists and the Russian protesters. The oligarchical elites that benefit most from Putinism have little faith in the future of a country they themselves are responsible for pillaging, so they usually end up moving their money, families, and property to Europe, and often Britain. There they form part of the network of international elites that is responsible for the corporatization of politics that Occupy opposes. The Russian oligarchs, even less accountable and bound by convention than the indigenous ruling class, have had a uniquely radicalizing effect on the culture of the elite.
Meanwhile, the growing tactical and ideological solidarity between the Russian protesters and Occupy seems to be paralleled by a shared sense of hopelessness. Where does the protest movement go from here? Where is the chink in the armor of the regime? Occupy has struggled to answer these questions ever since its encampments began to be dismantled; with the once-unifying call for fair elections no longer a going concern, Russian activists are beginning to do the same.
Sympathetic discussions of Occupy have often suggested that escalating state violence in suppressing protests is effectively an admission that the state cannot defend itself in other ways. In response, protesters have begun to focus on defending their rights of assembly and expression, and showcased police violations. In the West, this strategy has had mixed success; in Russia it threatens to be fatal. Putinism (and its predecessors) severely damaged any political strategy based on abstract claims of rights. Even without electoral manipulation, Putin’s cynical politics would have won a majority of the vote. In the eyes of this half of the population, nothing will succeed like success, and nothing bespeaks failure like Western liberal arguments based on checking the tyranny of the majority.
What remains is what Navalny and his crew are already doing with renewed strength, exposing the commonplace rot that is so integral to the Putin regime: misappropriation of government contracts, extortion, theft. Realistically, revealing the machine’s worst excesses is unlikely to collapse it, even if the legal system works well enough to punish well-connected offenders. In fact, Navalny’s meliorism may even strengthen the regime in the long run by resolving the most urgent symptoms of its failure to govern.
The best that can be expected is that, like Occupy, the Russian protest movement will become an enduring and inspiring symbol of the possibilities of collective action. The large-scale volunteer effort to mitigate the effects of catastrophic flooding in the southern town of Krymsk have already shown how the movement’s spirit might permeate Russian society. By highlighting the authorities’ inability to deal with the summer catastrophes that have become annual events in Russia, the volunteers are not just poking the regime in the eye but are also drawing on the profound moral authority accorded to volunteerism in Russian culture. It would be hard to choose a better strategy for building popular consensus.
Image: Image courtesy of whatwouldjackdo.net.
*SPOILER ALERT
A few weeks back, I watched the BBC documentary on ‘Terror! Robespierre and the French Revolution’. True to classic British Liberalism, the documentary presented the image of the main protagonist of one of the world altering events in the history of the modern world as a delusional paranoid who would sacrifice thousands of lives for his ideal. While the Marxist critic Slavoj Zizek provided a single line of defence to the man, whom it wouldn’t be an excess to call the ideological patriarch of modern revolutionaries, the structuring of the documentary as such was tilted towards British historian Simon Schama, who was portraying an image of Robespierre as this megalomaniac, blood thirsty monster (oh, that’s what radicals are to liberals/conservatives anyway). Among other nice things he has said in the past, Mr. Schama has also defended Israel’s pounding of Lebanese cities in the Israel-Lebanon war. But that’s another story.
Let us talk about Christopher Nolan’s final (hopefully) movie in the Batman trilogy, the Dark Knight Rises. Though he has apparently claimed that the movie has nothing to do with politics, the political and social undertones in the movie are too obvious to miss. To give a brief summary of the story, Gotham City has been peaceful after the events in the previous movie ‘The Dark Knight’, and the Batman has retired. However, the ‘terrorist’ Bane enters this scenario and after a few attacks on Gotham, instigates the wretched of the city to revolt against their masters and to wage civil war to take power, using explicit revolutionary phraseology, in the process, exposing the lie on which peace in the city was built – while secretly conspiring to destroy the entire city as such. Though he severely cripples Batman in a fight, the protagonist returns for a final fight. No guesses on who wins.
So why start with the French Revolution?
“Tale of Two Cities to me was the most sort of harrowing portrait of a relatable recognizable civilization that had completely fallen to pieces. The terrors in Paris, in France in that period, it’s not hard to imagine that things could go that bad and wrong.” No, it wasn’t Mr. Schama further demonizing Robespierre referring to Charles Dickens’ literary work that excessively criticizes the alleged ‘excesses’ of the French Revolution.
The statement is of Jonathan Nolan, brother of Christopher Nolan, and co-writer for the movie, responding to a question on the movie’s inspiration in an interview by Buzzine. The inspiration, Dickens’ classic, was steeped in English liberal thought. “We know there are a lot of problems with the existing system, but hey, revolutions are worse.” And as the novel portrays the revolutionaries as possessed fanatics (with far greater finesse though) the movie portrays Bane and his comrades, and condemns Bane with the vehemence that Mr. Schama condemns Robespierre.
The result is the caricature of what in real life would be an ideologically committed revolutionary fighting structural injustice. Hollywood tells what the establishments want you to know – revolutionaries are brutal creatures, with utter disregard for human life. Despite emancipatory rhetoric on liberation, they have sinister designs behind. Thus, whatever might be their reasons, they need to be eliminated. Watching this treatment of Bane in the movie felt like sitting through the BBC documentary on Robespierre all over again.
But why such a harsh disposition towards Bane when a character like the Joker was dealt with (relative) lenience in the earlier movie? The Joker, calling for anarchy in its purest form, is almost impossible to be true. Though he critically underscores the hypocrisies of bourgeois civilization as it exists, his views are unable to translate into mass action for the sheer strength of will and ‘decivilization’ it would require from any individual attempting treading that path. Imagine a political person completely beyond morality and norms of any kind, beyond categorizations and compartmentalizations. Simply put, either one is the Joker or one isn’t. His threat to existing order and its guardian, the Batman, is more philosophical than physical. And the Truth that he waved in the face of Batman was combated by a lie, to save the abominable liberal capitalist society that is Gotham.
Bane, on the other hand poses an existential threat to the system of oppression. He is the FARC in Colombia, the Tamil Tiger facing Sri Lanka, the PKK guerrilla combating Turkey, or a Maoist in Dandakaranya. Or the Jacobin in the time of the French Revolution. His strength is not just his physique but also his ability to command people and mobilize them to achieve a political goal. He represents the vanguard, the organized representative of the oppressed that wages political struggle in their name to bring about structural changes. Such a force, with the greatest subversive potential, the system cannot accommodate. It needs to be eliminated. With such a theme, Sri Lankan cinema would’ve made a propaganda movie against the Tamils’ struggle. Nolan gave us The Dark Knight Rises.Revolution vs Reaction
Catwoman’s presence is largely unworthy but for one significant symbolism. Selina Kyle, from a proletarian background, a master thief by profession, does not join her ‘natural ally’ in Bane, but embraces the Batman, quite literally, and saves his life. The lumpen seduced by the fascist? The relation Bruce Wayne/Batman has with the two main women in the film is characterized by physicality primarily.
Bane, on the other hand, with all the tough veneer, reveals the source of his hardness – love. In a fleeting, but touching moment, through a tear, the ‘monster’ tells the story of his becoming that Che Guevara so eloquently phrased decades back: “Hay que endurecerse sin perder jamas la ternura”. One must endure, become hard, toughen oneself, without losing tenderness. While Batman was brought into his line of work through a personal loss, Bane’s initiation was an unselfish act of love, which came with enduring terrible suffering and sacrifice. The ideal was not limited to his personal fetishes. As love goes, the ideal in itself was total and absolute. Contrast a Batman, inconsistent with both his personal and political lives, and a consistent Bane who saw no difference between the two. In this sense, Badiou is right in saying that the truly subversive thing in the world today is not sex, but love. No wonder, the chap who sleeps around represents the liberal system while the committed lover, the terrorists!Endurance… Sacrifice… Love!
As for morality, ironically, the Batman proves the Joker right in this movie. The Joker had said, referring to the moral standards of the system that Batman defends, in the previous movie that “their morals, their code, it’s a bad joke. Dropped at the first sign of trouble.” With the trouble, the radical threat to Gotham’s system, that Bane posed, the Batman first threatens to kill him, and later, endorses his murder. Soon after that, Batman, who claimed to be morally opposed to killing, is directly responsible for the death of another main antagonist.
This signifies a crucial point in the series – morality is a matter of convenience as determined by circumstances. In Batman Begins, the protagonist is a liberal claiming that the system can be defended with morally acceptable methods. In Dark Knight, he recognizes that his old methods won’t work, and he taps into an entire city’s phone conversations, besides using torture to pry out information. In the final instalment, he reveals that he will not even stop at murder to defend his system. The age old statement that the oppressors have been saying from Paris Commune to Mullivaikaal – the harder you resist, the harder we’ll hit. But the system shall remain.
Isn’t that what happens in this movie? The Batman has his back broken. Viciously stabbed. Passes through a nuclear explosion (!). But yet, he saves the day, emerges unscathed and moves on with a normal life, with someone else to replace his role defending the system. This brings us to the other crucial point – capitalism is the end of history. Batman’s changes and continuity symbolises capitalism’s persistence despite various crises inherent to it depression, war, genocide, fascism, colonialism etc. But at the end, there is no alternative. Watching the climax of the movie, I was convinced of Zizek’s argument that Hollywood can even imagine the end of the world, but not of capitalism. And the system’s old defenders will be replaced by new ones, probably with a new series of movies on them as well!
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Dark Knight and Occupy Wall Street: The Humble Rise
Posted by Tyler O'Neil on July 21, 2012 · 4 Comments
The new Batman movie has become a consequential film, but it also rises to the noblest level of Western art.
In the run-up to the release of the long-anticipated The Dark Knight Rises, political commentators on the Left remarked that the name of a principal villain, Bane, resembled Mitt Romney’s old firm, Bain Capital. A YouTube video humorously portrays this idea, but most Americans know better than to take the villain’s name as a serious critique of the likely Republican Presidential candidate.
Tragically, a shooting at a midnight showing in Aurora, CO left twelve dead and dozens wounded, the Washington Free Beacon reports. The shooting led the New York Times to call for stricter gun laws, and conservative organizations to call for looser ones. While the alleged shooter’s motive remains unknown, the film provided a setting for senseless violence and murder.
Despite these tremors among current political fault lines, the film appeals to the center of America’s tradition- the ideal of noble sacrifice for the common people. Batman must humble himself to be exalted, and lay down his life to find a new one. The Dark Knight truly rises, but he has to bend the knee first.
WARNING: Spoilers Ahead
The film opens with a speech by Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman), who continues to hide the truth about Harvey Dent. Dent has become the public hero of Gotham, as his efforts against organized crime allowed the cops to imprison every syndicate, bringing a new period of justice to the streets.
But, as Dark Knight afficionados know, Dent tried to kill Gordon’s son before Batman saved him. Dent fell to his death, and Batman took the fall for the Dent myth, allowing himself to be demonized as Gotham’s villain.
The gas-mask villain Bane (Tom Hardy) reveals this truth, using a written speech Gordon had prepared for the occasion. Trapping the police underground with charges, and condemning the rich and powerful, he calls on the common people to “take your city back.”
As the Washington Free Beacon’s Sonny Bunch pointed out, Bane is the ultimate Wall Street Occupier, calling on the 99% to band together and overthrow societal elites. He robs the stock exchange, bankrupting Wayne, and sets up a nuclear bomb to destroy the city if outside forces like the federal government get involved. He aims to finish the work of his mentor, Ra’s Al Ghul, destroying Gotham by setting its citizens against each other.
He promises to restore the power of the people, but his court assumes the guilt of everyone who comes before it and Bane does nothing to help the orphanage that Wayne and the rising officer Blake (James Gordon-Levitt) care about. In scenes reminiscent of the Nazi occupation of Paris, the streets become littered with crime and villainy. Indeed, officer Blake himself looks like Marco Rubio, a politician well known for his opposition to the Robin Hood tactics of Occupy Wall Street.
Cat burglar Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway) plays the part of the disillusioned Occupier, stealing from the rich in order to redistribute wealth. She brings Batman’s alter ego, Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale), out of isolation, but after seeing Bane’s true colors, she turns on him.
After Bane takes control, she says of a plundered house, “this was someone’s home.” Her friend responds by throwing her own words back at her: “now it’s everyone’s home. There’s a storm coming, remember? This is what you wanted.”
Like Kyle, Wayne stands in need of redemption. The millionaire has taken an early retirement from the world, since he lost his love, Rachel Dawes. His butler, Alfred (Michael Caine), wants the best for him- a new life with a loving wife and children.
While he brings Batman back, Wayne cannot face Bane at the beginning. In a chilling fist-fight, Bane sorely defeats him, breaking his mask, and leaving Gotham’s defender in the very prison from which he once escaped.
Echoing the earlier films, the movie shows Wayne’s father reaching out to him, saying, “Bruce, why do we fall? So we might learn to pick ourselves up.”
Motivated to save his city from Ra’s Al Ghul’s own child, he trains himself again. Climbing up the walls of the prison, he leaps without a rope for safety. His new love for Miranda Tate (Marion Cotillard) also inspires him to save the city.
Having restored himself, Batman returns to Gotham, faces Bane, and defeats him. But Miranda Tate turns on him, revealing herself to be Ra’s Al Ghul’s true child. In a stunning twist, the Wayne Enterprises board member and societal benefactor has turned against the city to finish the work her father started.
Unable to disarm the bomb, Batman must fly it out of the city, sacrificing himself to save the people. It explodes over the bay, allowing Gotham to live on. An ultimate Christ-figure, Batman sacrifices himself to save others.
As order returns to Gotham, the people raise a statue of Batman, and officer Blake assumes the weighted name “Robin,” Nolan adds one final twist. Following Wayne’s funeral, Alfred finds him eating lunch with Kyle, alive and happy, in the new life his butler had dreamed of.
While Batman’s survival from a nuclear blast remains unexplained, his happy life answers the fundamental plot of the film- Batman saves his life by losing it.
In short, the film does not primarily champion one political philosophy over another, but presents the central premise of Western civilization.
Alfred notably quotes an ending passage from Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.”
But even Dickens’ words rise from an older tradition. The culture of sacrifice rises from the Spartans at Thermopylae, George Washington at Newburgh (when he denied the crown), and Jesus Christ at Calvary.
“For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it. For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” (Matthew 16:25, 26 KJV)
For Batman, love and sacrifice are one. He finds a new life only by giving his own in the service of his people. The rich man becomes poor, and rises richer than he ever was before.
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By Slavoj Žižek.
Exclusive on Boitempo’s Blog.
Para a versão em português, clique aqui.
Warning: the following article contains spoilers of The Dark Knight Trilogy.
The Dark Knight Rises attests yet again to how Hollywood blockbusters are precise indicators of the ideological predicament of our societies. Here is a (simplified) storyline. Eight years after the events of The Dark Knight, the previous installment of the Batman saga, law and order prevail in Gotham City: under the extraordinary powers granted by the Dent Act, Commissioner Gordon has nearly eradicated violent and organized crime. He nonetheless feels guilty about the cover-up of Harvey Dent’s crimes (when Dent tried to kill Gordon’s son before Batman saved him, Dent fell to his death, and Batman took the fall for the Dent myth, allowing himself to be demonized as Gotham’s villain), and plans to admit to the conspiracy at a public event celebrating Dent, but decides that the city is not ready to hear the truth. No longer active as Batman, Bruce Wayne lives isolated in his Manor while his company is crumbling ling after he invested in a clean energy project designed to harness fusion power, but shut it down after learning that the core could be modified to become a nuclear weapon. The beautiful Miranda Tate, a member of the Wayne Enterprises executive board, encourages Wayne to rejoin with society and continue his philanthropic works.
Here enters the (first) villain of the film: Bane, a terrorist leader who was a member of the League of Shadows, gets hold of the copy of Gordon’s speech. After Bane’s financial machinations bring Wayne’s company close to bankruptcy, Wayne entrusts Miranda to control his enterprise and also engages in a brief love affair with her. (In this she competes with Selina Kyle, a cat burglar Selina Kyle who steals from the rich in order to redistribute wealth, but finally rejoins Wayne and the forces of law and order.) Learning about Bane’s mobilization, Wayne returns as Batman and confronts Bane, who says that he took over the League of Shadows after Ra’s Al Ghul’s death. Crippling Batman in a close combat, Bane detains him in a prison from which escape is virtually impossible: inmates tell Wayne the story of the only person to ever successfully escape from the prison, a child driven by necessity and the sheer force of will. While the imprisoned Wayne recovers from his injuries and retrains himself to be Batman, Bane succeeds in turning Gotham City into an isolated city-state. He first lures most of Gotham’s police force underground and traps them there; then he sets off explosions which destroy most of the bridges connecting Gotham City to the mainland, announcing that any attempt to leave the city will result in the detonation of Wayne fusion core, which has been taken hold and converted into a bomb.
Here we reach the crucial moment of the film: Bane’s takeover is accompanied by a vast politico-ideological offensive. Bane publicly reveals the cover-up of Dent’s death and releases the prisoners locked up under the Dent Act. Condemning the rich and powerful, he promises to restore the power of the people, calling on the common people to “take your city back” – Bane reveals himself to be “the ultimate Wall Street Occupier, calling on the 99% to band together and overthrow societal elites.”[1] What follows is the film’s idea of people’s power: summary show trials and executions of the rich, streets littered with crime and villainy… A couple of months later, while Gotham City continues to suffer popular terror, Wayne successfully escapes prison, returns to Gotham as Batman, and enlists his friends to help liberate the city and stop the fusion bomb before it explodes. Batman confronts and subdues Bane, but Miranda intervenes and stabs Batman – the societal benefactor reveals herself to be Talia al Ghul, Ra’s daughter: it was she who escaped the prison as a child, and Bane was the one person who aided her escape. After announcing her plan to complete her father’s work in destroying Gotham, Talia escapes. In the ensuing mayhem, Gordon cuts off the bomb’s ability to be remotely detonated while Selina kills Bane, allowing Batman to chase Talia. He tries to force her to take the bomb to the fusion chamber where it can be stabilized, but she floods the chamber. Talia dies when her truck crashes off the road, confident that the bomb cannot be stopped. Using a special helicopter, Batman hauls the bomb beyond the city limits, where it detonates over the ocean and presumably kills him.
Batman is now celebrated as a hero whose sacrifice saved Gotham City, while Wayne is believed to have died in the riots. As his estate is divided up, Alfred witnesses Bruce and Selina together alive in a cafe in Florence, while Blake, a young honest policeman who knew about Batman’s identity, inherits the Batcave. In short, “Batman saves the day, emerges unscathed and moves on with a normal life, with someone else to replace his role defending the system.”[2] The first clue to the ideological underpinnings of this ending is provided by Gordon, who, at Wayne’s (would-be) burial, reads the last lines from Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities: “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.” Some reviewers of the film took this quote as an indication that it “rises to the noblest level of Western art. The film appeals to the center of America’s tradition – the ideal of noble sacrifice for the common people. Batman must humble himself to be exalted, and lay down his life to find a new one. /…/ An ultimate Christ-figure, Batman sacrifices himself to save others.”[3]
And, effectively, from this perspective, there is only one step back from Dickens to Christ at Calvary: “For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it. For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” (Matthew 16:25 26) Batman’s sacrifice as the repetition of Christ’s death? Is this idea not compromised by the film’s last scene (Wayne with Selena in a Florence café)? Is the religious counterpart of this ending not rather the well-known blasphemous idea that Christ really survived his crucifixion and lived a long peaceful life (in India or even Tibet, according to some sources)? The only way to redeem this final scene would have been to read it as a daydream (hallucination) of Alfred who sits alone in the Florence café. The further Dickensian feature of the film is a de-politicized complaint about the gap between the rich and the poor – early in the film, Selina whispers to Wayne while they are dancing at an exclusive upper class gala: “There’s a storm coming, Mr. Wayne. You and your friends better batten down the hatches. Because when it hits, you’re all going to wonder how you thought you could live so large, and leave so little for the rest of us.” Nolan, as every good liberal, is “worried” about this disparity and he admits this worry penetrates the film:
“What I see in the film that relates to the real world is the idea of dishonesty. The film is all about that coming to a head /…/ The notion of economic fairness creeps into the film, and the reason is twofold. One, Bruce Wayne is a billionaire. It has to be addressed. /…/ But two, there are a lot of things in life, and economics is one of them, where we have to take a lot of what we’re told on trust, because most of us feel like we don’t have the analytical tools to know what’s going on. /…/ I don’t feel there’s a left or right perspective in the film. What is there is just an honest assessment or honest exploration of the world we live in – things that worry us.”[4]
Although viewers know Wayne is mega-rich, they tend to forget where his wealth comes from: arms manufacturing plus stock-market speculations, which is why Bane’s stock-exchange games can destroy his empire – arms dealer and speculator, this is the true secret beneath the Batman mask. How does the film deal with it? By resuscitating the archetypal Dickensian topic of a good capitalist who engages in financing orphanage homes (Wayne) versus a bad greedy capitalist (Stryver, as in Dickens). In such Dickensian over-moralization, the economic disparity is translated into “dishonesty” which should be “honestly” analyzed, although we lack any reliable cognitive mapping, and such an “honest” approach leads to a further parallel with Dickens – as Christopher Nolan’s brother Jonathan (who co-wrote the scenario) put it bluntly: “Tale of Two Cities to me was the most sort of harrowing portrait of a relatable recognizable civilization that had completely fallen to pieces. The terrors in Paris, in France in that period, it’s not hard to imagine that things could go that bad and wrong.”[5] The scenes of the vengeful populist uprising in the film (a mob that thirsts for the blood of the rich who have neglected and exploited them) evoke Dickens’s description of the Reign of Terror, so that, although the film has nothing to do with politics, it follows Dickens’s novel in “honestly” portraying revolutionaries as possessed fanatics, and thus provides
“the caricature of what in real life would be an ideologically committed revolutionary fighting structural injustice. Hollywood tells what the establishments want you to know – revolutionaries are brutal creatures, with utter disregard for human life. Despite emancipatory rhetoric on liberation, they have sinister designs behind. Thus, whatever might be their reasons, they need to be eliminated.”[6]
Tom Charity was right to note “the movie’s defense of the establishment in the form of philanthropic billionaires and an incorruptible police”[7] – in its distrust of the people taking things into their own hands, the film “demonstrates both a desire for social justice and a fear of what that can actually look like in the hands of a mob.”[8] Karthick raises here a perspicuous question with regard to immense popularity of the Joker figure from the previous film: why such a harsh disposition towards Bane when the Joker was dealt with lenience in the earlier movie? The answer is simple and convincing:
“The Joker, calling for anarchy in its purest form, critically underscores the hypocrisies of bourgeois civilization as it exists, but his views are unable to translate into mass action. Bane, on the other hand poses an existential threat to the system of oppression. /…/ His strength is not just his physique but also his ability to command people and mobilize them to achieve a political goal. He represents the vanguard, the organized representative of the oppressed that wages political struggle in their name to bring about structural changes. Such a force, with the greatest subversive potential, the system cannot accommodate. It needs to be eliminated.”[9]
However, even if Bane lacks the fascination of Heath Ledger’s Joker, there is a feature which distinguishes him from the latter: unconditional love, the very source of his hardness. In a short but touching scene, we see how, in an act of love in the midst of terrible suffering, Bane saved the child Talia, not caring for consequences and paying a terrible price for it (he was beaten within an inch of his life while defending her). Karthick is totally justified in locating this event into the long tradition, from Christ to Che Guevara, which extols violence as a “work of love,” as in the famous lines from Che Guevara’s diary: “Let me say, with the risk of appearing ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by strong feelings of love. It is impossible to think of an authentic revolutionary without this quality.”[10] What we encounter here is not so much the “Christification of Che” but rather a “Cheization” of Christ himself – the Christ whose “scandalous” words from Luke (“if anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and his mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters – yes even his own life – he cannot be my disciple”(14:26)) point in exactly the same direction as Che’s famous quote: “You may have to be tough, but do not lose your tenderness.”[11] The statement that “the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love” should be read together with Guevara’s much more “problematic” statement on revolutionaries as “killing machines”:
“Hatred is an element of struggle; relentless hatred of the enemy that impels us over and beyond the natural limitations of man and transforms us into effective, violent, selective, and cold killing machines. Our soldiers must be thus; a people without hatred cannot vanquish a brutal enemy.”[12]
Or, to paraphrase Kant and Robespierre yet again: love without cruelty is powerless; cruelty without love is blind, a short-lived passion which loses its persistent edge. Guevara is here paraphrasing Christ’s declarations on the unity of love and sword – in both cases, the underlying paradox is that what makes love angelic, what elevates it over mere unstable and pathetic sentimentality, is its cruelty itself, its link with violence – it is this link which raises love over and beyond the natural limitations of man and thus transforms it into an unconditional drive. This is why, back to The Dark Knight Rises, the only authentic love in the film is Bane’s, the “terrorist’s,” in clear contrast to Batman.
Along the same lines, the figure of Ra, Talia’s father, deserves a closer look. Ra is a mixture of Arab and Oriental features, an agent of virtuous terror fighting to counter-balance the corrupted Western civilization. He is played by Liam Neeson, an actor whose screen-persona usually radiates dignified goodness and wisdom (he is Zeus in The Clash of Titans), and who also plays Qui-Gon Jinn in The Phantom Menace, the first episode of the Star Wars series. Qui-Gon is a Jedi knight, the mentor of Obi-Wan Kenobi as well as the one who discovers Anakin Skywalker, believing that Anakin is the Chosen One who will restore the balance of the universe, ignoring Yoda’s warnings about Anakin’s unstable nature; at the end of The Phantom Menace, Qui-Gon is killed by Darth Maul.[13]
In the Batman trilogy, Ra is also the teacher of the young Wayne: in Batman Begins, he finds the young Wayne in a Chinese prison; introducing himself as “Henri Ducard,” he offers the boy a “path.” After Wayne is freed, he climbs to the home of the League of Shadows, where Ra’s is waiting, although presenting himself as the servant of another man called Ra’s al Ghul. At the end of a long and painful training, Ra explains that Bruce must do what is necessary to fight evil, while revealing that they have trained Bruce with the intention of him leading the League to destroy Gotham City, which they believe has become hopelessly corrupt. Ra’s is thus not a simple embodiment of Evil: he stands for the combination of virtue and terror, for the egalitarian discipline fighting a corrupted empire, and thus belongs to the line that stretches (in recent fiction) from Paul Atreides in Dune to Leonidas in 300. And it is crucial that Wayne is his disciple: Wayne was formed as Batman by him.
Two common sense reproaches impose themselves here. First, there were monstrous mass killings and violence in actual revolutions, from Stalinism to Khmer Rouge, so the film is clearly not just engaging in reactionary imagination. The second, opposite reproach: the actual OWS movement was not violent, its goal was definitely not a new reign of terror; insofar as Bane’s revolt is supposed to extrapolate the immanent tendency of the OWS movement, the film thus ridiculously misrepresents its aims and strategies. The ongoing anti-globalist protests are the very opposite of Bane’s brutal terror: Bane stands for the mirror-image of state terror, for a murderous fundamentalist sect taking over and ruling by terror, not for its overcoming through popular self-organization… What both reproaches share is the rejection of the figure of Bane. – The reply to these two reproaches is multiple.
First, one should make clear the actual scope of violence – the best answer to the claim that the violent mob reaction to oppression is worse than the original oppression itself, was the one provided long by Mark Twain in his A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court: “There were two ‘Reigns of Terror’ if we would remember it and consider it; the one wrought in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood… our shudders are all for the ‘horrors’ of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak, whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heartbreak? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror, that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror, which none of us have been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.”
Then, one should demystify the problem of violence, rejecting simplistic claims that the XXth century Communism used too much excessive murderous violence, and that we should be careful not to fall into this trap again. As a fact, this is, of course, terrifyingly true, – but such a direct focus on violence obfuscates the underlying question: what was wrong in the XXth century Communist project as such, which immanent weakness of this project pushed Communist to resort the Communists (not only those) in power to unrestrained violence? In other words, it is not enough to say that Communists “neglected the problem of violence”: it was a deeper socio-political failure which pushed them to violence. (The same goes for the notion that Communists “neglected democracy”: their overall project of social transformation enforced on them this “neglect.”) It is thus not only Nolan’s film which was not able to imagine authentic people’s power – the “real” radical-emancipatory movements themselves also were not able to do it, they remained caught in the coordinates of the old society, which is why the actual “people’s power” often was such a violent horror.
And, last but not least, it is all too simple to claim that there is no violent potential in OWs and similar movements – there IS a violence at work in every authentic emancipatory process: the problem with the film is that it wrongly translated this violence into murderous terror. Which, then, is the sublime violence with regard to which even the most brutal killing is an act of weakness? Let us make a detour through Jose Saramago’s Seeing which tells the story of the strange events in the unnamed capital city of an unidentified democratic country. When the election day morning is marred by torrential rains, voter turnout is disturbingly low, but the weather breaks by mid-afternoon and the population heads en masse to their voting stations. The government’s relief is short-lived, however, when vote counting reveals that over 70% of the ballots cast in the capital have been left blank. Baffled by this apparent civic lapse, the government gives the citizenry a chance to make amends just one week later with another election day. The results are worse: now 83% of the ballots are blank. The two major political parties – the ruling party of the right (p.o.t.r.) and their chief adversary, the party of the middle (p.o.t.m.) – are in a panic, while the haplessly marginalized party of the left (p.o.t.l.) produces an analysis claiming that the blank ballots are essentially a vote for their progressive agenda. Unsure how to respond to a benign protest but certain that an anti-democratic conspiracy exists, the government quickly labels the movement “terrorism, pure and unadulterated” and declares a state of emergency, allowing it to suspend all constitutional guarantees and adopt a series of increasingly drastic steps: citizens are seized at random and disappear into secret interrogation sites, the police and seat of government are withdrawn from the capital, sealing the city against all entrances and exits, and finally manufacturing their own terrorist ringleader. The city continues to function near-normally throughout, the people parrying each of the government’s thrusts in inexplicable unison and with a truly Gandhian level of nonviolent resistance… this, the voters’ abstention, is a case of truly radical “divine violence” which prompts brutal panic reactions of those in power.
Back to Nolan, the triad of Batman-films thus follows an immanent logic. In Batman Begins, the hero remains within the constraints of a liberal order: the system can be defended with morally acceptable methods. The Dark Knight is effectively a new version of the two John Ford western classics (Fort Apache and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance) which deploy how, in order to civilize the Wild West, one has to “print the legend” and ignore the truth – in short, how our civilization has to be grounded onto a Lie: one has to break the rules in order to defend the system. Or, to put it in another way, in Batman Begins, the hero is simply a classic figure of the urban vigilante who punishes the criminals where police cannot do it; the problem is that police, the official law-enforcement agency, relates ambiguously to Batman’s help: while admitting its efficiency, it nonetheless perceive Batman as a threat to its monopoly on power and a testimony of its own inefficiency. However, Batman’s transgression is here purely formal, it resides in acting oin behalf of the law without being legitimized to do it: in his acts, he never violates the law. The Dark Knight changes these coordinates: Batman’s true rival is not Joker, his opponent, but Harvey Dent, the “white knight,” the aggressive new district attorney, a kind of official vigilante whose fanatical battle against crime leads him into killing innocent people and destroys him. It is as if Dent is the reply of the legal order to Batman’s threat: against Batman’s vigilante struggle, the system generates its own illegal excess, its own vigilante, much more violent than Batman, directly violating the law. There is thus a poetic justice in the fact that, when Bruce plans to publicly reveal his identity as Batman, Dent jumps in and instead names himself as Batman – he is “more Batman than Batman himself,” actualizing the temptation Batman was still able to resist. So when, at the film’s end, Batman takes upon himself the crimes committed by Dent to save the reputation of the popular hero who embodies hope for ordinary people, his self-effacing act contains a grain of truth: Batman in a way returns the favor to Dent. His act is a gesture of symbolic exchange: first Dent takes upon himself the identity of Batman, then Wayne – the real Batman – takes upon himself Dent’s crimes.
Finally, The Dark Knight Rises pushes things even further: is Bane not Dent brought to extreme, to its self-negation? Dent who draws the conclusion that the system itself is unjust, so that in order to effectively fight injustice one has to turn directly against the system and destroy it? And, as part of the same move, Dent who loses last inhibitions and is ready to use all murderous brutality to achieve this goal? The rise of such a figure changes the entire constellation: for all participants, Batman included, morality is relativized, it becomes a matter of convenience, something determined by circumstances: it’s open class warfare, everything is permitted to defend the system when we are dealing not just with mad gangsters but with a popular uprising.
Is, then, this all? Should the film just be flatly rejected by those who are engaged in radical emancipatory struggles? Things are more ambiguous, and one has to read the film in the way one has to interpret a Chinese political poem: absences and surprising presences count. Recall the old French story about a wife who complains that her husband’s best friend is making illicit sexual advances towards her: it takes some time till the surprised friend gets the point – in this twisted way, she is inviting him to seduce her… It is like the Freudian unconscious which knows no negation: what matters is not a negative judgment on something, but the mere fact that this something is mentioned – in The Dark Knight Rises, people’s power IS HERE, staged as an Event, in a key step forward from the usual Batman opponents (criminal mega-capitalists, gangsters and terrorists).
Here we get the first clue – the prospect of the OWS movement taking power and establishing people’s democracy on Manhattan is so patently absurd, so utterly non-realist, that one cannot but raise the question: WHY DOES THEN A MAJOR HOLLYWOOD BLOCKBUSTER DREAM ABOUT IT, WHY DOES IT EVOKE THIS SPECTER? Why even dream about OWS exploding into a violent takeover? The obvious answer (to smudge OWS with accusations that it harbors a terrorist-totalitarian potential) is not enough to account for the strange attraction exerted by prospect of “people’s power.” No wonder the proper functioning of this power remains blank, absent: no details are given about how this people’s power functions, what the mobilized people are doing (remember that Bane tells the people they can do what they want – he is not imposing on them his own order).
This is why external critique of the film (“its depiction of the OWS reign is a ridiculous caricature”) is not enough – the critique has to be immanent, it has to locate within the film itself a multitude signs which point towards the authentic Event. (Recall, for example, that Bane is not just a brutal terrorist, but a person of deep love and sacrifice.) In short, pure ideology isn’t possible, Bane’s authenticity HAS to leave trace in the film’s texture. This is why the film deserves a close reading: the Event – the “people’s republic of Gotham City”, dictatorship of the proletariat on Manhattan – is immanent to the film, it is its absent center.
[3] Tyler O’Neil, op.cit.
[4] Christopher Nolan, interview in Entertainment 1216 (July 2012, p. 34.
[10] Quoted from Jon Lee Anderson, Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life, New York: Grove 1997, p. 636-637.
[11] Quoted in McLaren, op.cit., p. 27.
[13] One should note the irony of the fact that Neeson’s son is a devoted Shia Muslim, and that Neeson himself often talks about his forthcoming conversion to Islam.
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All of Slavoj Žižek’s books published in Brazil by Boitempo are avaiable in ebook form. If you’re interested, find out more in the links below:
Revolution at the Gates: Lenin – The 1917 Writings * ePub (Livraria Cultura |Gato Sabido)
The Parallax View * ePub (Livraria Cultura | Gato Sabido)
Welcome to the Desert of the Real! * ePub (Livraria Cultura | Gato Sabido)
In defense of Lost Causes * ePub e PDF (Livraria Cultura | Gato Sabido)
Lacrimae rerum: essays on modern cinema * PDF * (Livraria Cultura | Gato Sabido)
First as Tragedy, Then as Farce * PDF (Livraria Cultura | Gato Sabido)
Living in the End Times * ePub (Livraria Cultura | Gato Sabido)
Also, there’s an article by Žižek on Boitempo’s Occupy: Protest Movements that Took the Streets (along with David Harvey, Mike Davis, Tariq Ali, Immanuel Wallerstein and others) * PDF (Livraria Cultura | Gato Sabido)
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Boitempo Editorial is one of the most prestigious independent leftist publishers in Brazil, publishing house of radical thinkers from the classics of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Leon Trotski and Vladimir I.U. Lenin to György Lukács, István Mészáros, Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben, Perry Anderson, David Harvey, Mike Davis, Fredric Jameson and Tariq Ali. Among the Brazilian authors, publishes some of the greatest leftist intellectuals of our time, such as Emir Sader, Leandro Konder, Maria Rita Kehl, Michael Löwy, Ricardo Antunes and Vladimir Safatle. For Foreign Rights, visit our website or contact blog@boitempoeditorial.com.br.
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Fantastic series of short documentaries from Reel News about the crisis in Greece and the working class response. Featuring interviews with participants it paints a picture of the whole movement of community assemblies, workplace occupations, self-organisation and solidarity going on in Greece.
First Cut Preview: Community Organising from Libcom Dot Org on Vimeo.
From the teargas clouds of Syntagma Square emerged a new approach to the crisis. Community kitchens, clothing exchanges and other acts of practical solidarity. It’s not charity, it’s practical solidarity. “We’re not giving to the poor, we are the poor. Any one of us could be homeless next.”
That's Our Power -- Rank and File Organising from Libcom Dot Org on Vimeo.
The growth of rank and file committees, featuring the three longest all out strikes ever in Greece (steel factory, national newspaper & TV station), plus hospital occupations.
CRISIS - Don't Believe the Lies! from Libcom Dot Org on Vimeo.
Reel News try to explain the Greek crisis, how it relates to the rest of Europe and who is actually being bailed out. Features clips from the documentary Debtocracy, and an interview with the film maker, as well as the financial editor of one of Greeks biggest newspapers, which has been on strike for months.
It's still like being in a war zone -- Immigrants in Greece from Libcom Dot Org on Vimeo.
Refugees trying to reach safety in Europe get stuck in Greece: Once in Europe, they have to remain in the country they first arrived in. They speak about lack of basic support like housing, clothing and food and daily racist abuse. Not only by fascists like Golden Dawn, but also Greek people – and the police.
Our Present is Your Future: How to destroy public health services from Libcom Dot Org on Vimeo.
Out of 131 hospitals, as many as 50 will be closed. Patients already have to pay at the door when going to see a doctor. Procedures will have to be paid up front, and if you don’t have the money you will be sent home. “People will die.” “The cruelty is unbelieveable.” “This is a nightmare.”
It's not me anymore it's us now -- The Street Fighters from AlAnyA from Libcom Dot Org on Vimeo.
The Solidarity, Disobedience and Resistance movement take a practical approach to the problems people are facing. They close down motorway tolls, block ticket machines for public transport and reconnect electricity where it has been cut as punishment for not paying taxes.
Potato Movement from Libcom Dot Org on Vimeo.
While farmers don’t get a whole lot for their potatoes, in the shops they are rather expensive. In response, sales have plummeted. When farmers couldn’t sell their produce, and decided to give it away rather than have it go to waste, it was the start of the potato movement: Farmers and consumers are in direct contact on the internet and bypass traditional allocation structures, increasing the profit for farmers and lowering the prices for consumers.
Bruce Wayne, meanwhile, is genuinely a good guy. He's rich, but his eyes are open to valid critique of other rich people. He blames them for throwing charity balls at which too little of the money goes to actual charitable purposes. He's concerned about unscrupulous business practices of others. But he certainly doesn't think that inequality per se is morally problematic, and the charitable work we see him directly involved with is the classic noblesse oblige cause of orphans. Crucially there's not even a question of whether Wayne deserves to be rich because he's a "job creator" or because he "built that"—everybody knows he hasn't done anything to get rich, but the appropriate response is to be a responsible steward of his riches and his family's legacy rather than to level the playing field.
When director Christopher Nolan and his brother and screenwriter Jonathan Nolan revealed that The Dark Knight Rises was inspired by A Tale of Two Cities, the Internet lit up with speculation. Would Batman growl about Gotham’s best of times, and worst of times?
Now that you’ve had a chance to see the movie, we can round up a few of the ways—explicit and otherwise—that The Dark Knight Rises draws on Dickens’ work.
Major spoilers ahead.
The most direct reference to A Tale of Two Cities comes at the end of the film, at Bruce Wayne’s (would-be) burial. Even on an IMAX screen you might not be able to make out the leather-bound book that Gordon holds in his hands, but it is none other than Dickens’ novel of the French Revolution. Rather than quote the book’s famous opening passage, however, Gordon flips to the end, to the novel’s less well-known last lines*:
THE villains in Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy are distinctive, even by the standards of summer-movie bad guys, in that they seek nothing but destruction. Money does not sway them, political power does not interest them, and any ideological posturing - Bane, the villain in "The Dark Knight Rises," poses for a time as a left-wing revolutionary - is a flag of convenience, a mask to be worn and then discarded.
by John Nolte 21 Jul 2012 post a commentFrom a purely cinematic standpoint, director/co-writer Christopher Nolan's "The Dark Knight Rises" is a genuine masterpiece. Actually, it's a triumph.
Surpassing the extraordinary hype and expectations surrounding the conclusion to his epic trilogy seemed impossible, and yet somehow Nolan achieved just that. The fact that I'm even debating whether or not "Rises" surpasses its perfect predecessor speaks volumes. Without giving anything away -- without telling you if it's tragic or happy or bitter or sweet -- let me just say that the final few minutes of "Rises" represent one of the most intensely satisfying movie moments of my life.
And beyond filmmaking skills that will surely place him among the all-time greats, what kind of crystal ball does Nolan have access to that gives him the prescient power to begin a project years ago that upon delivery would be as timely and relevant as the latest refresh of the Drudge Report? "Rises" is about many things, but it is mostly about a rousing defense of an America under siege by a demagogue disguising his nihilistic rage and thirst for revenge and power as a noble quest for equality.
Sound familiar?
It's eight years after Bruce Wayne/Batman (a never better Christian Bale) paid the ultimate price for choosing to be the hero Gotham City deserved instead of the one it wanted. Now a Howard Hughes-like recluse forced to watch from afar as the wicked Harvey Dent is annually and posthumously honored for a lie told by Batman himself, this is a broken man both physically and spiritually. Batman is lost -- a warrior without a war who sacrificed everything for a city that in peacetime dismisses those that make peacetime possible. Now smug and soft, Gotham is going about the business of letting down its guard -- a weakness that always invites aggression.
Aggression has already arrived in the form of Bane (Thomas Hardy), a hulk of a man burning with resentment against a society whose only provocation is being prosperous, generous, welcoming, and content -- instead of miserable like him. In Gotham's sewers, Bane recruits those like himself -- the insecure thumbsuckers raging with a sense of entitlement, desperate to justify their own laziness and failure and to flaunt a false sense of superiority through oppression, violence, terror, and ultimately, total and complete destruction.
No one in Gotham even suspects the cancer of dangerous childish resentment growing beneath their feet, and even those who dare remain vigilant are laughed at as relics of a bygone age. This includes Commissioner Gordon (a wonderful Gary Oldman), the only other man who knows the truth about Harvey Dent. Gordon isn't hated like Batman or a warrior lost without a war like Wayne, but he's still an outcast for daring to believe something inconvenient during Gotham's high times -- that evil exists and always returns.
If Gordon has an ally, it's Blake (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a workaday cop whose own painful life experience gives him an insight and instinct that is the stuff of heroes… and villains. Uncharacteristically, Alfred (The Mighty Michael Caine) has lost some of his perspective over the years. He's America's surrogate parent of our wounded warriors and only (and understandably) worried about his child's happiness and well being. In a world where evil is real, though, touching and noble intentions such as Alfred's only get in the way of a greater good that frequently requires unspeakable sacrifice.
Finally, there's Selina Kyle/Catwoman (a perfectly cast and incredibly enchanting Anne Hathaway), the cipher through which Nolan explores the morality of his morality tale.
As expected, "Dark Knight Rises" is a love letter to Gotham City: its flawed but ultimately decent people, its industry and generosity -- all of which are by-products of liberty, free markets, and capitalism. In other words, just as "The Dark Knight" was a touching tribute to an embattled George W. Bush who chose to be seen as a villain in order to be the hero, "Rises" is a love letter to an imperfect America that in the end always does the right thing.
And Nolan loves the American people -- the wealthy producers who more often than not trickle down their hard-earned winnings, the workaday folks who keep our world turning, a financial system worth saving because it benefits us all, and those everyday warriors who offer their lives for a greater good with every punch of the clock.
But unlike so many who disguise their resentment and hatred for America through the lie that criticism somehow equals patriotism, Nolan's love for this country is without qualifiers and symbolized in all its unqualified sincerity in the form of a beautiful young child sweetly singing a complete version of "The Star Spangled Banner" -- just before "Occupy" attempts to fulfill its horrific vision of what "equality" really means.
Nolan's genius as a filmmaker is without question. The pacing, editing, performances, and humanity of "Rises" will be talked about for decades. But his real genius is in how he expresses his vision and theme. While all of Hollywood embraces nihilism wrapped in irony, Nolan moves us with an inexpressibly touching faith in humanity. While all of Hollywood embraces CGI, the shaky-cam, and hyper-editing, Nolan sets his story in the real world and allows us to see what's going on. And as all of Hollywood embraces hollow, artless, left-wing tripe, Nolan delivers crowd-pleasing, thematically-driven classical art that ennobles the human spirit -- and while doing so, breaks box office records.
In a Hollywood lost in shallow, narcissistic depravity, Nolan has himself risen as the New Iconoclast -- simply for believing in what is good and being able to express it in a universal way that touches us all.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC
There’s a lazy, irritating strain running through the critical reaction to The Dark Knight Rises. It assumes that because the protagonist is a rich philanthropist and the villain an Occupy-soundalike terrorist, the film is taking a hard-right stand on today’s political issues. You see this move from some on the left, who go as far as calling the film fascist. Others on the right are eager to deny the supposedly legitimizing Bat-mantle to liberals or to tie the Occupy movement to Bane’s unremitting violence.
It’s true that Christopher Nolan’s films blanch at armed revolution, but it’s also true that his films have nothing specific to say about the main debates that define popular American politics. Rather, the real message of the trilogy is philosophical in character: Nolan is mounting a layered defense of liberal democracy against its authoritarian opponents. The Dark Knight trilogy is saying something that most Americans assume implicitly – that best government is one that respects the rights of its citizens.
To start with The Dark Knight Rises, if the is film a dig at advocates for economic justice, it’s an extraordinarily anemic one. Virtually no screen-time is dedicated to Gotham’s social dynamics or violence by the people against elites. It’s not clear if regular Gotham citizens, or just Bane’s mercenaries and hangers-on, are participating in mass looting depicted on screen. There’s no evidence of downtrodden masses cheering Bane’s arrival. By contrast, the film is peppered with little asides about the consequences of inequality: the traders at Gotham’s stock exchange are arrogant and self-absorbed, Selina Kyle’s jabs at Bruce Wayne’s wealth have bite, and Bane’s bankrollers are vulture capitalists. Viewed in this light, what’s wrong with Bane isn’t his left-wing “motivation:” indeed, that’s almost immediately shown to be an insincere fig leaf for public consumption. Rather, Bane is a villain because he uses the slaughter of innocent people as a means to attain his ends.
Giving Bane some slightly sympathetic lines is par for the course in this morally complex trilogy. Indeed, one clear continuity between the three films is that Nolan consistently puts legitimate critiques of Gotham in the mouths of the trilogy’s villains. No one, not even Batman, would argue with Ra’s Al Ghul’s claim that Gotham was a thoroughly corrupt city. Rather, Al Ghul’s mistake is concluding this entitles him to serve as Gotham’s executioner. In Batman Begins’ first act — in a scene suffused with class tension — Wayne refuses an order to behead a working class farmer as punishment for a crime. In The Dark Knight Rises, Batman’s first rule for Catwoman is “no killing.” Neither as Batman nor himself does Bruce Wayne argue that Gotham’s social structure as it stands is morally defensible. Rather, he suggests that the city is worth reforming rather than destroying.
The Joker’s nihilistic assault on “schemers” also contains some seeds of truth. When the Joker tells Harvey Dent that “no one panics when things go ‘according to plan’ — even if the plan is horrifying,” the example he uses highlights the differing ways society reacts to the deaths of soldiers and poor gang members versus rich leaders. That argument, that chaos is fair, is instrumental in transforming Dent into Two-Face. Gotham’s White Knight goes on a murder spree in part because the Joker isn’t completely wrong. Again, the reason these people are villians isn’t their diagnosis of society’s problems – it’s their cure, a murderous assault on the city’s existing political order.Ross Douthat and John Podheretz are right in this, at least: The Dark Knight Rises does indeed endorse a kind of Burkean small-c conservatism — a preference for incremental reform over convulsively deconstructive revolt. But that’s hard to square with the modern American conservative/Republican movement, which just produced a budget seeking to dismantle many of the social institutions Americans have relied on since the New Deal and the Great Society. Shoehorning Occupy into a “the Dark Knight movies are conservative” narrative requires a reductive stereotyping of the Occupiers, simplifying the nebulous movement into a collective of radical anarchists and ignoring its respect for liberal democratic forms — as demonstrated by the general assemblies — as well as the fact that it hasn’t really damaged anything other than public grass.
The best way to understand Nolan’s political argument, such as it is, is to step away from contemporary political disputes and pick up an old essay: Judith Shklar’s “The Liberalism of Fear.” Shklar argues that the most universally acceptable moral foundation for individual rights and democracy isn’t any particular religious faith or abstract moral theory – rather, it’s that we’re all scared. We’re scared of the unchecked power of both our fellow citizens and the state, and want a political system capable of reigning in both. As she puts it, “liberalism’s deepest grounding is in place from the first, in the conviction of the earliest defenders of toleration, born in horror, that cruelty is an absolute evil, an offense against God or humanity.”
Fear, of course, is the emotion that most suffuses the Dark Knight trilogy. In Batman Begins, terror of the powerful criminal underworld (the Scarecrow’s fear gas being the literal instantiation of the idea) overwhelms the power of social institutions to address them. Batman’s role, in Bruce’s words, is to “fight injustice” by turning “fear against those who prey on the fearful.” Batman is a terrifying totem meant to restore the balance of fear between the anarchic private world and the gutless public sphere.
In The Dark Knight, Nolan continues his examination of the terror of anarchy, as personified in the Joker, but introduces its twin concern for liberal theorists like Shklar: the potential for the state and allied institutions to abuse their enormous power. The universal surveillance device Batman uses to find the Joker, while seemingly necessary, is recognized by every character who encounters it to be too dangerous to entrust to anyone. Lucius Fox’s revulsion at the device — “This is too much power for one person” — is clearly shared by Wayne, as the machine is rigged to self-destruct after use. Bruce’s boast to Alfred that “Batman has no limits” is proven false: Batman must have limits. There must be lines he cannot cross, as no one person or institution — no matter how well-intentioned — can be trusted with unlimited power. Further, the film culminates in a heroic act of mutual respect between fellow citizens on boats rigged to explode, suggesting the answer to the Joker’s challenge isn’t to abandon planning but rather to broaden our range of moral concern for the harm power can do to our fellow citizens.
Finally, The Dark Knight Rises ties the twin fears together, suggesting that the fear that pervades our lives can be turned, as Shklar suggests, to productive purposes. Bruce can only escape the prison he is consigned to once he accepts his fear as an essential part of life. In other moments, Alfred chastises him for not trusting the citizens of Gotham enough — for turning away from communal life and shared institutions to the lonely Batmissions, for never wondering whether Gotham needed Bruce Wayne more than Batman. This resonates with Shklar’s claim that “when we think politically, we are afraid not only for ourselves but for our fellow citizens as well. We fear a society of fearful people.” By accepting his own fear and finally hanging up the Batsuit, Bruce comes to understand the basic motivation behind a liberal political order in Shklar’s terms: the amelioration of one’s own fear and everyone else’s.
There’s an important caveat to add here: Nolan’s treatment of the “democracy” half of “liberal democracy” is far more cursory. That Nolan doesn’t dwell on the social dynamics of pre-Bane or Bane-occupied Gotham suggests he isn’t interested in casting advocates for economic justice in a bad light, but it also means we don’t get a visceral sense of how the people feel about anything or how they express that feeling through Gotham’s democratic institutions. The most important democratic action in the films ― like the passage of the Dent Act ― happens off-screen, with at best questionable consequences.
Part of this is just Nolan’s style of filmmaking. It’s impersonal if one’s feeling charitable, cold if one isn’t. He tends to treat his characters as cogs in a narrative machine rather than flesh-and-blood humans. This style of filmmaking can be good for exploring broad themes, but it’s a bad vehicle for depicting democratic politics, which after all is the jockeying between the particular needs, moral beliefs, and cultural quirks of different human groups.
That said, Nolan does manage to make a case for the democratic part of liberal democracy, even if it’s done in super-abstract form. The central struggle between the Batman and Joker is often described as a “battle for Gotham’s soul,” but it’s equally well understood as a struggle for Gotham’s democratic character. Harvey Dent’s psyche is the key front in their war because he’s both seemingly incorruptible and one of Gotham’s elected officials, reforming the system from the inside. Further, the moment at which the Joker truly terrifies Gotham is when he mounts an assault on Gotham’s judge, police commissioner, district attorney, and, ultimately, mayor. Dent compares Batman to a Roman protector during a suspension of democracy, and Batman spends the rest of the film trying to extricate himself from that role and rebuild Gotham’s legitimate democratic governing order. Dent, an elected official, is the key symbol because he represents the possibility for Gothamites to take their city back through open and legitimate means.
These themes do carry over into The Dark Knight Rises, even if the somewhat weaker screenplay limits the complexity of the examination. While the fact that Dent’s legacy is a seemingly authoritarian crime act founded on a lie might undermine Dent as democratic symbol — though it interestingly suggests Bane might be blowback for the Dent Act — one of The Dark Knight Rises’ key sequences ends up supporting the prior film’s embrace of democratic values. Bane takes over the city not in block-by-block battles or inside city hall; he does it at a football game, one of the great gatherings in contemporary American public life and in the one time we see an en-masse congregation of Gotham’s citizens. He terrifies Gothamites (and, indeed, they’re clearly shown to be terrified) not only by threatening nuclear apocalypse, but by blowing up the Mayor — the elected official the Joker missed. That this takes place right after the last words of the National Anthem helps to drive the point home: Bane’s hostile takeover is not an attempt to liberate the people but rather to destroy Gotham’s democracy and the public sphere that works to sustain it.
While Bane and each of Nolan’s other villains attempt to exploit fear for ideological projects, revenge, or simple fun, Batman aims to channel it — to make his opponents’ legitimate grievances subjects for debate in an orderly system rather than through violent resolution. To entrust Gotham to heroes “with a face,” as he says in The Dark Knight, and to democratize Batman as a symbol that can be embodied by anyone. It’s not that Christopher Nolan is taking a side in our political debates. He’s simply defending a particular system through which we address them.
Dark Knight Rises Bane poster (Photo credit: marvelousRoland)
The third film in the Batman series is a direct polemical assault on the French Revolution and its political heirs, which includes Occupy Wall Street and perhaps Barack Obama. I would say that it is the exact opposite of so many revolutionary-wannabe films from Fight Club to V for Vendetta (which has provided the tell-tale Guy Fawkes masks to the Occupy movement), except that in order to be opposite, they must in some sense be comparable and DKR is far superior to the others artistically, commercially and philosophically. The crazed theater shooter, if he turns out to be as much of an attempted revolutionary hero of the poor, the depressed, and the downtrodden as his predecessor at Virginia Tech, will prove to be a better match for the villain in the third film than for the one in the second film.
While superficial analysis has tried to make hay out of the name of the villain, Bane, which is a homonym for Bain, the private equity firm founded by Mitt Romney, the truth is that Bane the villain is philosophically much closer to Bam the President than to Bain the firm. Spoilers from here on…Bane is a man who speaks for the ‘oppressed’ (his word) masses against the upper classes. He is Gotham’s revolutionary ‘reckoning’ who urges the people to ‘storm’ (again his words) Blackgate prison and release the prisoners within. That’s the moment in the film at which I became sure that the French Revolution theme was intentional. Bane, like Robespierre, the real life villain of the French Revolution, uses the freed prisoners as the vanguard of the revolution and as citizen brigades to roust the affluent from their homes and expropriate their property, dragging them before citizen tribunals before which their guilt is already determined based on their class. They are then executed, judged by the lawless element of the city which had until the revolution been festering on the edge of society.
This film shows no ideological sympathy for the Occupy Movement. Bane, the terrible villain of the film, literally occupies Wall Street, taking control of the trading floor of the stock exchange. Police are hesitant to deal with the problem partly based on class warfare complaints that it’s not their money at risk, but the money of the wealthy Wall Street guys. But a trader explains that it is indeed the cops’ money too: that it’s everybody’s money that is part of the financial system, including cops’ pensions.
Bane was created by Chuck Dixon and Graham Nowlan, two “life long conservatives”, which is pretty unusual in the world of comic book creatives. He is, as his name implies, a curse, in this case the curse of class warfare. Interestingly, Dixon complained about Rush Limbaugh’s misfire in trying to link the villain with Bain capital as part of some liberal media conspiracy.
How did things get so bad for Gotham? Partly it was a lack of profit. Bruce Wayne had become a recluse in his mansion, shrugging off the responsibility of running his company, and as his inner circle points out, where there are no profits there is no philanthropy. The Wayne Foundation ceased supporting the private religious program for at-risk motherless and fatherless youth who had aged out of the traditional government foster care system. The at-risk children became risky adults and became a feeder system for the army which Bane was gathering in the sewers beneath the city, literally chipping away at the foundations of the old order.
But it was not just a shortage of financial capital that ruined Gotham: moral capital was deficient too. Gotham’s social order was based on a lie: that Batman was evil and that the crusading District Attorney Harvey Dent died as a righteous martyr. As I pointed out in my review of the other two films in the series, the Platonic (and Machiavellian) useful lie is a major theme of the trilogy, and as I expected the lie would be found to be an inadequate foundation for long-term civil order. Alfred Pennyweather, the moral voice of the story, argues that it’s time to stop suppressing the truth, that truth must in the end have its day and be allowed to speak, whatever the consequences. Commissioner Gordon, the promulgator of the lie, is wracked with guilt and indecision about the lie and longs to correct it. Eventually, Bane uses the lie against the city, depriving it of legitimacy.
The film is not without some emotional, if not moral, sympathy for the foolish young idealists of OWS. Selina Kyle, AKA Catwoman, is a morally confused young woman who wages class warfare through jewel thievery. She takes from those who, in her estimation, have too much. She delights in the fact that “There’s a storm coming,” and that Gotham’s rich are living too well, and on borrowed time. But when the storm comes, she sees the evil of it. A young protégé reminds Selina that this is exactly what she has been calling for, but now that it’s here, Selina sees that it is far worse than what it replaced. This is Nolan’s way of saying “Hey, idiot in the Che t-shirt, smarten up. If deep down you are the decent person you claim to be, you’ll hate the revolution you’ve been wishing for.”
About halfway through the film, I turned to my wife and said “It’s Dickens.” By which I meant the movie is a modern retelling of A Tale of Two Cities, albeit much lousier with hovercrafts and nuclear bombs. Bane is Robespierre, Miranda (played by French actress Marion Cotillard) is Madame Defarge. Batman is Sydney Carton. Now every time I write something like this, some joker (pun not intended) writes to me and says that I’m reading too much into it, and sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and it’s just a movie. I think I dislike those comments even more than the purely oppositional ones because they wallow in their own laziness and ignorance.
Toward the end of the film, Gordon offers a eulogy in the form of a long quote which begins “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known.” That’s the speech which Sydney Carton, the former ne’er do well playboy-turned-sacrificial-hero, gives before offering his life in exchange to save another. I told this to my son, Christopher, and he pointed out that the co-writer of the screenplay, Jonathan Nolan, told his brother (and the film’s director) Christopher to read A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens before making the film.
The debate between left and right in the modern world has largely been a debate for and against the French revolution. Russell Kirk, the intellectual father of American conservatism, attributes the intellectual founding of the philosophy to the British statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke, author of the Reflections on the Revolution in France, the most important anti-revolutionary book ever written. The right argues for tradition; the left for revolution. In fact, the idea of ‘left’ and ‘right’ come from revolutionary era France. Those who sided with the old order sat on the right side of the French general assembly. Those who wished to overthrow it sat on the left side. In the Gospels, those who are destined for Hell are told to go to Christ’s left, while those destined for Heaven are set at his right. Let us be rid, then, of any delusions about a synthesis of leftist politics with orthodox Christianity.
In some ways the film is a throw-back to the original Batman, not the comic book one, but the one on whom the whole masked hero genre was based, the Scarlett Pimpernel, the nobleman cum masked counter-revolutionary hero who went about saving victims of ‘the people’s justice’ from the guillotine. Now conservatives have a new hero, and this time he has a much cooler name than “Pimpernel.”
Dear Reader,
This whole review’s a spoiler, so if you’re not prepared to handle an all-spoiler review, take a hike. (You know the drill.)
Yours in despair,
Eileen J.
So get this. At the end of The Dark Knight Rises, Batman/Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) is supposedly dead and gone, having sacrificed himself to save Gotham City without the public appreciating it—ungrateful bastards! Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) gives the eulogy at the sparsely attended funeral. In tribute to Batman’s heroism, Gordon reads Sydney Carton’s final lines from A Tale of Two Cities.
Yeah! He really does! The whole “It’s a far far better thing I do than I have ever done, it’s a far far better rest I go to than I have ever known” bit!
Now, this takes some nerve. Those are among the hammiest lines ever conceived by the human brain, and they take considerable justification to lead up to ‘em. Charles Dickens spent about 500 pages carefully building to the big lugubrious sockeroo. Sydney Carton’s noble death on the guillotine is an absolute triumph of careful handling by a master of lurid melodrama who was all for incremental social change but got very, very squeamish about revolution, no matter how necessary and justified…
Wait, hang on—why the hell is Batman being compared to Sydney Carton, the guy who saved an aristocrat by taking his place in the tumbril, sacrificing himself to a French peasant mob represented by Dickens as vile, bloodthirsty, and insane?
Well, it seems Christopher Nolan had hisself an idea, he and his writer-brother Jonathan, when writing this Batman-movie-to-end-all-Batman-movies. They thought they’d angle it so that the populace of Gotham City, finally rebelling against the vicious plutocrats in control and demanding a more just society, would turn instantly into a French Revolution-type mob and go all Robespierre on the rich and powerful.
First the Nolans pulled a lot of rhetoric straight from the Occupy movement and put it in the mouth of Bane (Tom Hardy), the masked, muscled-out gargoyle with the silly voice who’s the villain of the piece. Bane’s up on the steps of City Hall or wherever, exhorting the people to rise up and take back control of their city from the Wall Street thieves and billionaire bloodsuckers. But during this oration, Nolan never cuts to reaction shots of the crowd—he’s pulling the old camera trick of making us, the audience, the “mob.”
Take that, you 99%-ers, you mob-waiting-to-happen, you incipient villains! Let this be a warning to you not to listen to any charismatic rhetoric about your rights as citizens!
Because sure enough, the dreadful working class hordes dressed in sinister motley casual-wear—hoodies and the sorta thing—are manipulated by Bane to take back their city. So the first thing they do is buckle down to releasing all the violent psychopathological criminals in the prison—that’s the first thing protesters always do, it’s Step One in the Social Justice Playbook. Then they go around looting violently and attacking women in fur coats.
Later on, the brainwashed mob follows Bane through the streets to a confrontation with the cops, where the Nolan boys continue to get all topical on our asses. The brave men in blue, the vulnerable uniformed “thin blue line” of police, armed only with pathetic small handguns against tanks and assault rifles, and badly outnumbered, march right into the terrifying mob of savage sans-culottes, I mean protesters, who mow them down.
Ripped from today’s headlines, see, only reversed: now it’s the police who get mauled and the protesters who do the mauling.
Soon it’s hand-to-hand combat, cops versus protesters, in some of the rock-bottom worst staged fight scenes I have ever, ever witnessed. Has Christopher Nolan never even watched any news footage of street fights or riots? They’re generally scary-looking because they’re so ragged and random and chaotic, with surges of crowd motion and sudden bursts of mayhem, arms flailing, legs kicking, people falling and getting stepped on and tripped over, violent pile-ups in one area while other areas open up as people scatter. Nolan’s fight is so badly choreographed, everyone’s fighting in pairs, trading phony-looking, equi-powerful punches like guys in old Westerns, and all the pairs seem to be maintaining an even distance from each other like it’s a barn dance.
Maybe Nolan figured we’d be paying too much attention to Bane fighting Batman in the foreground to notice the rest, but seriously, you can practically hear Nolan yelling though a bullhorn at the extras to do another take, and this time try to punch more like John Wayne.
Still later Bane and the protesters and all the other bad guys have lost. The protester-perps are all kneeling down with their hands clasped behind their heads, guarded by the standing cops, as the cops gaze out manfully at the horizon. Virtue triumphant!
I go into all this at such length because the critics and bloggers who’ve already mentioned these embarrassing facts about The Dark Knight Rises aren’t getting half-enough play. The wild charge by Rush Limbaugh that the film is actually a left-wing smear because the villain Bane is meant to refer to Bain Capital, Mitt Romney’s corporation, is getting more traction than the film’s amazingly in-your-face pro-plutocrat, anti-protestor plot development.
Plus there’s so much other attendant madness swirling around the film, first the death-threats against critics who disparaged it, then the midnight-show mass murders in Aurora, Colorado, then the latest round of debates about violent media and its potential effects on violence-prone people—it’s hard not to feel addled by it all.
Critics who love and defend the film note the anti-99% rhetoric, but hurry to contextualize it as all part of Christopher Nolan’s dark vision, his wonderfully profound portrayal of a whole world gone mad, which is so great it justifies a certain “provocative” topicality. Here’s Andrew O’Hehir of Salon going absolutely bonkers over this film:
I would argue that Nolan is mostly being provocative with this tale of underclass resentment, of an uprising by the lower half of the 99 percent that is turned to evil purposes. If so, it works. In its tremendous, almost apocalyptic action sequences, “The Dark Knight Rises” suggests a reverse-engineered version of a Soviet-era revolutionary epic, in which the masses are the villains and their onetime overlords the heroes. Bane’s attack on a football stadium right after kickoff concludes a simultaneously brutal and elegant sequence, set against an angelic boy singing the national anthem, that’s worthy of Martin Scorsese at his best.
HAAAAAAA-HA-HA-HA-HAAAA!!! That idiotic football stadium scene, with its stupid cliché-kid singing a fey, tremolo “Star-Spangled Banner” as part of the buildup to bombing the place? I swear, I thought there might be some intentional black comedy going on there. But no—turned out to be UNintentional. Especially the finale with the football player running for a touchdown not realizing the field is exploding behind him, killing all the other players (is he a DEAF football player?), and turning around triumphantly in the end zone only to see a giant smoking crater. Far Side cartoons have been made out of images like that!
That’s “simultaneously brutal and elegant…worthy of Martin Scorsese at his best”?! Martin Scorsese!! Guy who did Raging Bull!! Scorsese oughta SUE Andrew Goddamn O’Hehir for defamation of character!!
Anyway, my point being…gotta calm down here…my point being, this movie isn’t just ideologically rotten to the core, it’s rotten in the regular way, too. Bad, stupid, lame, embarrassing, and seemingly interminable, full of main characters delivering long-winded speeches explaining their histories from childhood so we’ll be sure to understand their motivations, which are murky and trite in equal measure. Famous and excellent actors do their damnedest to put all this crap across. But don’t let all the cinematic embiggening fool you! Nolan lays on bogus profundity with a trowel!
See, you enamored critics and fans, you’re all giving Nolan way too much credit, you always have. Just because Heath Ledger gave a terrific performance as the Joker before he went to the Great Oscar Party in the Sky—just because the production designs are large and well-lit, just because Nolan’s cinematographer Walter Pfister can shoot some good angles—you all give Nolan credit for being some kinda deep, edgy nihilist showing us the infinite corruptibility of humanity or something. But Nolan signals who the good guys and the bad guys are just as simplistically and strenuously as any old-time Hollywood hack who used to rely on white hats and black hats to keep things clear.
We all know who’s “good” in The Dark Knight Rises, no matter what their tiresome human frailties are. Batman/Bruce Wayne, Commissioner Gordon, the “angry orphan” who sees himself in Batman (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), John Blake aka soon-to-be-Robin, Batman’s faithful flunkies Alfred (Michael Caine) and Lucien (Morgan Freeman), and all the cops who fight on Batman’s side, upholding law ‘n’ order no matter what.
Selina Kyle/Catwoman is also unambiguously good in this Batman, because she’s played by Anne Hathaway with her giant doe eyes and schoolgirl pertness, and more importantly, because she renounces “class warfare” at the end. Sickening little scene when Catwoman, portrayed here as battling her way up out of poverty and exploitation, comes upon a looted apartment and shudders with horror at the property damage. A framed photo of a nuclear family has been smashed! It’s unbearable, in a city of poverty and suffering, that the glass in this framed photo of blonde people should get broken!
Then she changes sides and helps Batman save the aristocrats from the tumbrils.
And who’s bad? Lessee. Bane, of course, who comes from some literal hellhole in the Mideast seeking vague revenge on Gotham City, and of course, the 99% proles who are manipulated into following Bane. A few of the evil plutocrats are bad, until they’re attacked by the working class, then they’re seen as victims of badly dressed upstarts and become good again.
The ultimate villain, it turns out, is Miranda Tate (Marion Cotillard), an environmentalist who’s always talking about her dedication to the cause of sustainable energy. Ain’t it perfect? She spends most of the movie gassing on about the renewable energy sources and saving the planet, then out of nowhere she sticks a knife into Batman.
Fucking tree-huggers—shoulda known!
So how much of a Tory bastard is this Chris Nolan, exactly? His devoted followers might not care, but all of a sudden I do. Anyone out there got insider info? I’m thinking of knitting his name into a shawl I’m working on. (It’s a Tale of Two Cities reference. Look it up.)
Personal circumstances prevented me from keeping this blog updated for a while, but I suppose the release of The Dark Knight Rises is as good an excuse as any to climb back in the saddle and see how many trolls my thoughts on Christopher Nolan’s third and final Batman film can attract in the comments section. I already gave my general opinion on the film on Dutch national radio last Friday, but for those few people who don’t understand this particular language or prefer more in-depth complaining, please read on. (Major spoilers and Batman criticism ahead…)
Right now, the film itself is all but overshadowed by the tragic attack on cinemagoers in Aurora, Colorado and the ensuing debate on gun control (as well as the predictably moronic moral panic about violence in popular culture). The impact of this real-life maniac’s actions does seem to have tempered the beyond-hysterical responses that fans were having to negative reviews of the film, unseen by most at the time. But it’s understandable that the obnoxious size of this Hollywood behemoth and the grossly inflated reputation of its popular predecessor The Dark Knight caused many fans to lose some perspective.
All of this illustrates, as several others have noted, the current hegemony of geek culture, which can now proudly claim the lion’s share of mass popular phenomena as emanating from its own domain, often proudly bearing its official seal of approval. The hostility and often sociopathic-sounding aggression that has met anything that bears even a whiff of criticism seems to indicate the end product of several decades’ worth of cultural marginalization and ridicule: “We’ve all agreed that Batman is cool now, so shut up already! This time it’s our turn.”
Now I don’t mind one bit that guys like Joss Whedon, Christopher Nolan and J.J. Abrams have become the ruling class of today’s Hollywood blockbuster industry. As Neal Stephenson once said, “we are all geeks now,” and the current wave of pop culture reflects this very accurately. What surprises me a little though is how absolutely and uncritically the majority seems to embrace this trend, leaving precious little space for reflection and discussion beyond the minutiae of individual texts, and their relationship to their source materials.
Following the discussion surrounding The Dark Knight Returns recently, I began to wonder whether there even could be such a thing as a ‘realistic’ superhero movie that wasn’t in some way problematic. The ones that I enjoy with the fewest reservations (Batman Returns, the Hellboy films, Ang Lee’s Hulk, Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy) all remain firmly anchored in the popular fantasy genre, and only very rarely strive for the kind of deliberately allegorical realism that Nolan has affected. More than most other superhero movies, his Batman films buckle under my ingrained belief that vigilante superheroes operating in the real world basically aren’t a very good idea. (Kick-Ass is one of a few films that plays with this question in a productive way.)
Another annoying aspect of Nolan’s style is what Woody Allen described as “total heaviosity” (a quip used by Dana Stevens in her excellent review): his emphasis on furrowed brows, threatening whispers, and pounding Hans Zimmer scores creates the sense that something terribly grand and important is going on in these movies, and that they’re therefore more than ‘mere entertainment.’ This air of pretentiousness would of course be much easier to bear if his films actually deliver the emotional wallop and thematic cohesion the style seems to imply. But instead, this form too often seems to masquerade an undeveloped mass of contradictions that rarely holds together under close inspection. In The Dark Knight, Heath Ledger’s performance brought some much-needed relief amongst all the heavy-handedness, but The Dark Knight Rises has far too little of this, and its pacing problems all but defeat its third act.
The most obvious set of contradictions in Nolan’s Batman movies relates to their politics. As Mark Fisher has pointed out about both Batman Begins and The Dark Knight Rises, the protagonist in these films is a right-wing champion through and through, standing up for a nostalgic, patriarchal form of capitalism that is entirely reactionary. And while all three films include rather desperate-seeming references to contemporary socio-political events, they tend to be right-leaning parables with all the ideological problems inherent in the unironic mythologizing of violent macho figures. As Sean Burns wrote in his excellent Philadelphia Weekly review:
The Dark Knight Rises pays a bit of lip service to our recent economic woes, staging shoot-outs on Wall Street trading floors and offering copious Occupy Gotham monologues. Still, there’s only so far you can go in this direction when your movie’s hero also happens to be a billionaire fascist who likes to dress up like a rodent and beat the shit out of people. Anyone who claims they can spot a coherent political agenda in this picture is obviously insane.
So even though its political agenda is obviously full of contradictions, The Dark Knight Rises certainly dramatizes for the umpteenth time the popular fantasy of a rich, white authority figure taking violent action, and inviting its audience to cheer along. It’s a fantasy that’s familiar and therefore comfortable as long as you don’t think about it too much – but when we’re asked to side with an army of policemen bearing down on a group of false revolutionaries who have literally occupied Wall Street, I do find the results somewhat chilling.
And finally, there’s Nolan’s weird problem with women, which once again raises its ugly head in this latest Batman behemoth. While it’s certainly nice to see more female presence than in the previous male-obsessed installments, the way women are included here introduces a whole other set of issues. For although Anne Hathaway’s Selina Kyle is by far the most enjoyable character in the film, the ending ultimately all but ruins it. Throughout most of the movie, Kyle is portrayed as strong and fiercely independent, and given her own set of narrative challenges to deal with. Hathaway plays her with a terrific combination of strength, athleticism and vulnerability, and it is strongly suggested that she is involved in a lesbian relationship, while using her physical charms to seduce and then rob gullible males. The blatant fact that she is costumed and framed as an obvious sex object is slightly mitigated by the screenplay’s attempt to transform her high heels into functional weapons with one of Catwoman’s many amusing lines. But the redundant and nonsensical ending, which incidentally robs the film’s central sacrifice of its poignancy, reduces her to that most offensive of Hollywood clichés: a strong and independent woman in charge of her own destiny, who is ‘cured’ of her lesbianism by the irresistible charms of the male hero.
Naturally, there’s much more one might say about The Dark Knight Rises, both in a positive and in a negative sense. Like its two predecessors, there are some nicely staged moments of spectacle and excitement that make the most of the New York locations. And as before, the cast is uniformly excellent, and populated with terrific character actors who pop up in little more than bit parts. On the downside, the overall plot seems to make little sense, there are some glaring continuity issues (like day suddenly becoming night in the middle of a high-speed chase), and the Nolan brothers quite obviously bit off more than they could chew with the whole urban revolution narrative. Yes, it’s more ambitious than most superhero movies. But ambition in and of itself isn’t necessarily a quality worth celebrating, is it?
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Significant portions of this essay were either actually written by or basically lifted from Mike Konczal and Corey Robin, who bear none of the responsibility, etc.[Before I go on blog-hiatus for a while -- explained here -- I literally could not prevent myself from writing about this movie, as in, physically couldn't do it. Sigh... Anyway, now for realz.]
The Dark Knight Rises is not about Occupy Wall Street, even though it does have a five month anarchist occupation of New York City, which lasts into the winter until a huge phalanx of NYPD officers flood into lower Manhattan and pound the crap out of them. It is a movie that works very hard at not being about Occupy Wall Street, in fact: it fills the screen and narrative arc with all sorts of bells and whistles, bloating its running time way beyond necessity, and generally wearing you down with all sorts of things that are not Occupy Wall Street until you don’t notice anymore that it’s all the fuck about Occupy Wall Street. I mean, for fuck’s sake, Bane and a bunch of his goons literally Occupy Wall Street at one point, and then they lead a leaderless revolution of wealth redistribution and general assemblies, that they apparently hope will by example (mediated through mass media) be replicated across the country. I think Batman even subpoenas Malcolm Harris’ twitter feed at one point.
Via.This vacillation, ambivalence, even insistent disavowal is what seems to me to be, by far, the most interesting thing about the movie, and precisely the thing that so many “political” readings of it must almost bend over backwards to miss, as they struggle to claim it for various political persuasions. Take, for example, the honorable conservative Ross Douthat who tut-tutted yesterday — from his blog at the NY Times — against the “extraordinary overreactions from ideologically-inclined movie writers” like Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir, who he quotes as arguing:
“It’s no exaggeration to say that the “Dark Knight” universe is fascistic (and I’m not name-calling or claiming that Nolan has Nazi sympathies). [It has a] vision of human history understood as a struggle between superior individual wills, a tale of symbolic heroism and sacrifice set against the hopeless corruption of society. Maybe it’s an oversimplification to say that that’s the purest form of the ideology that was bequeathed from Richard Wagner to Nietzsche to Adolf Hitler, but not by much.
For the moment, let us skip lightly past the delightful spectacle of Douthat being scandalized at ideological movie reviewers, and take a look at his argument that the movie’s message instead reflects a “quiet toryism” (a term he hilariously gets from the ideology-free pen of the Weekly Standard’s movie critic). To open up space between what he sees the movie as being and the “fascistic” Batman of ideological crazies, Douthat tells us that this is what a fascist The Dark Knight Rises would look like:
[A] genuinely “fascistic” Batman movie would have concluded with the Caped Crusader using the chaos wreaked by terrorists and revolutionaries as a justification for setting aside Gotham’s existing political institutions and ruling the city by fiat, with Wayne Enterprises merged with City Hall, the bat signal emblazoned on every public building, and the collective will of the public channeled through the superior individual will of Il Batman (and his successor, Der Robin, presumably).
On the one hand, this is actually not that far from the sort of ambition that the Bat man has at various points. For one thing, the movie concludes with a Batman statue going up in City Hall and a succession system in place to keep creating new Batmans. Bruce Wayne might leave the city, but Batman will haunt it forever; the implication of the Batman Laws are that the culture built around the lies of Harvey Dent has been replaced by something more substantial, even permanent. This, it would seem to me, is very much like what Douthat said a “genuinely fascistic Batman movie” would conclude with, no?Bruce Wayne, in Batman Begins: “I’m going to show the people of Gotham that the city doesn’t belong to the criminals and the corrupt. People need dramatic examples to shake them out of apathy. I can’t do this as Bruce Wayne. A man is just flesh and blood and can be ignored or destroyed. But as a symbol… as a symbol, I can be incorruptible, everlasting.”
More broadly, let us never forget that Wayne Enterprises is (among other things) a military contractor — emphatically putting the hyphen in military-industrial complex — and the whole point of the Bat man in the Nolan movies is to mold the collective will of Gotham residents, exactly through the kind of mass spectacle that Douthat attributes to real fascism. Presumably the oh-so-clever reference to “Il Batman” and “Der Robin” (because German and Italian are fascist languages, get it?) is meant to remind us that because Batman is American — uniquely so, in this movie, in fact — he obviously can’t be fascist. Finally, the Bat man is also fascist if extrajudicial killing — cleansing the republic by restoring the kind of order which democracy can no longer provide it — are fascist. Your definition of fascism may or may not include secret police in the night, but I suspect that only if you think FDR and the New Deal are the ne plus ultra of actually existing fascism — and you forget that secret police are kind of an important part of what made fascism a no good, very bad thing — will it seem like Batman is anything other than at least Fascist-curious.
Via.I’m not saying Douthat thinks that, of course; I’m just saying he’s very confused about what he does think. But part of his confusion here — and the confusion of many critics — is the problem that the movie is totally confused too. It leans fascist, but it also pulls back at the last minute. After all, the previous two movies went to the darkest place in the American psyche — the places where we realize that America has become what it says it fights in the process of fighting it — and made it impossible to distinguish good from evil. Bruce Wayne pretty much learns to fight terrorism by going to an Al Quaeda training camp and the main difference between the Joker and Batman was their levels of denial (the Joker being self-aware in ways the ever serious Batman could never allow himself to be). In that sense The Dark Knight only extended the blowback argument of Batman Begins (which was all about remembering the time the US funded Mujahedeen in Afghanistan), and made it into a terror-on-the-homefront parable. But The Dark Knight Rises does the opposite of what its much more interesting predecessors did: instead of rendering it impossible to distinguish Batman from his enemy — and good from evil — it spends all its energy working to deny that Bane and Batman have anything at all in common, to make the diffference between good and evil as clear and bold as possible. And to do that, it has to categorically un-think important elements of Batman’s fascism.
For example, as Scott J at the “Occupied Oakland Tribune” pointed out yesterday, the logic of Batman’s counter-revolutionary purpose in this movie points inexorably towards one of true fascism’s favorite pursuits: the mass killing of Marxists, union leaders, and dissidents. Everyone always forgets that secret police love nothing more than throwing labor agitators in jail or in shallow graves, but the story of 20th century authoritarianism is usually left strategically incomplete with the omission of all those hundreds of thousands of leftists who were targeted for liquidation by various fascist regimes, from Nazi Germany to Suharto’s Indonesia and Ba’athist Iraq, and many more. One of the first orders of business for an repressive authoritarian right-wing regime, historically, is to start rounding up the leftists.
As Scott observes, however, “[h]aving Batman battle a reluctant Gotham while he unredistributes Bruce Wayne’s wealth would have been far more interesting but ideologically far too complicated.” It is a measure of Hollywood/Nolan’s chicken-shittedness — in that they love the spectacle of reactionary counter-revolution but don’t have the heart to show us dead leftists — that the entire 5 month period of “occupation” is resolved with barely a trace of lingering hard feelings, that after 5 months of dividing Gotham between collaborators and the resistance, everybody’s happy to just call it a day and worship the bat statue or something. The thing that made the first two movies good was the way Bruce Wayne became the terrorist and Batman became both torturer and operator of a mass surveillance system; it was exactly the point that in fighting the villain, he became the villain. If this movie had any guts, it would have — and almost did — show us Batman fighting against the people of Gotham: as they fall under the spell of Bane’s message of radical wealth redistribution, and as they turn against what used to be the status quo, the only thing Batman would find himself able to do is kill the bejeezus out of whole bunches of them. It mostly pulls back from that; the people we see the cops beating up are not citizens, but a hyper organized criminal conspiracy.
As Abigail Nussbaum perceptively notes
“Bane claims to be acting on behalf of the city’s underclass, and establishes a policy of violent persecution against the upper classes…we are kept entirely in the dark on the question of how the people of Gotham feel about this. Do they support Bane? Do they oppose him? Do they think he has the right idea but the wrong methods? Are they, as seems most likely, divided between these options according to their social status in the pre-occupation world? The Dark Knight Rises ignores all these questions…Gotham spends months under Bane’s rule–months that you’d expect to have a profound impact on the social, psychological, and cultural life of the city–but upon his defeat all we see are its citizens stepping out of their homes (as if they’d spent all that time indoors), ready to resume their lives as if the very fabric of their society hadn’t been ripped to shreds. What’s interesting is that the Nolans had an opportunity here to reinforce their authoritarian message and show why Batman is necessary–because when stripped of both their white knight, the lie of Harvey Dent, and their dark knight, the citizens of Gotham turn to Bane, a false savior. The film could have shown us Gothamites turning on one another, informing on their neighbors and signing up to do Bane’s bidding–the nightmare scenario that justified Batman’s choice to take responsibility for Harvey Dent’s crimes. Instead, the Nolans prefer to serve up a fantasy of docile, patient goodness, of a populace content to wait for Batman to save it without doing anything–good or evil–on its own behalf.”
With this in mind, I’d suggest that the distinction which Douthat works so hard to draw — between “fascism” and “quiet Toryism” — is largely one of degree and extremism, the distinction between a reactionary project that uses murderous extralegal violence to maintain what the order of the status quo, and the conservative project that doesn’t have to (though, of course, quite a few Tories have historically suported Fascism, too). The speed and ease with which the United States has adapted to an era of normal, routine, and banal extra-judicial killing, after all — yesterday was just another “Terror Tuesday” at the White House — only demonstrates how latent the fascism really is in most conservatives (and indeed, in most so-called liberals). All you need is for it to become manifest is for one of your own to order the death of all “military-age males” in a particular area, though it also helps if those people are racially marked. If that sort of thing is not at least a close relative of fascism, then the word means nothing.
Also, let’s not forget that calling Batman “fascist” is a little like accusing the Pope of being catholic, or hinting darkly that a particular bear may have, at some point in its life, shit in the woods.It may, in fact, mean nothing. Certainly I’m less interested in that question than is Andrew O’Hehir, for instance — who actually isn’t nearly as interested in it as Douthat makes him out to be — because the interesting question is how and why the movie turns back from the brink, refusing to follow the logic of its own plot to its natural conclusion. Calling the US “fascist” is just putting a name to what we all basically acknowledge to be the case: the state kills people with drones, without any shred of due process, because it has decided that doing so is necessary to get the job done and maintain the status quo, or something. Call it what you want, but that’s what it is, and it’s not a terrible thing because it has a terrible name like “fascist” attached to it. It’s a terrible thing because killing a bunch of random people just because you can is, you know, terrible.
So I’m not interested in calling The Dark Knight Rises names; I’m interested in understanding what it is. And what it is, it turns out, is an effort to evade the consequences of its own parable, just as conservatives never want to remember how closely aligned their tradition has been with actual fascism. They want to tell the story of a cold war won by the example of Ronald Reagan’s resolute command to “Tear down that wall!” and the accompanying fantasy that all you need is a hero, unswerving will, and symbols. They don’t like to remember the liquidation of half a million Indonesian communists in 1965-66, or the fact that the American embassy in Jakarta supplied Suharto’s secret police with a list of names. The cold war was not won by symbols alone; the US kept Latin America free of communism, for example, by sending money and guns to thugs with death squads.
* * *
But let’s get back to talking about the movie. Or, rather, to talking about how we talk about the movie. After all, most of the people who talk about the movie’s politics do so with a rather — let me be diplomatic here — un-theorized sense of what it means for a movie to be “political.” But they do this because, while all movies are political in a certain categorical sense (since everything is political), most movies are not campaign commercials, or at least the interesting ones aren’t. The fact that people of different ideological persuasions can watch the same movie and get different things out of it is an intrinsic part of what movies are. So in what sense can you really say that a movie is “conservative” or “liberal”? A more conservative movie you could not want than Act of Valor, I put it to you, and yet I have never seen a movie that made military life and death look less appealing than that one.
As I said, I liked the second Batman movie because of the extent to which it was genuinely difficult to say whether the movie was really on Batman’s side, whether he was really “good.” It wasn’t just that the Joker made a good case (though he did), it was that the joker was indistinguishable from Batman and inconceivable without him; the Joker was Batman’s blowback, or if we want to tag in Zizek for a second, he was Batman’s obscene supplement, the illegality that makes law possible, the perversity that makes beauty imaginable, and the chaos without which order can’t even be a thing. In other words, just as the Joker was unthinkable without Batman, the movie dared to suggest that Batman might be unthinkable without the Joker. In such a movie, “good” is polluted by its complicity and dependence on “evil,” to such an extent that it cannot be simply “political,” or at least not in the sense which many reviewers meant; it cannot be said to “reflect a message,” because the very manner of that message’s telling turns it inside out on itself.
This is not to say, of course, that a movie doesn’t put limits on our ability to read it in different ways. It manifestly does; The Dark Knight Rises is not, I can say with full confidence, a critique of Bain Capital. Movies are broadly polyvalent in some respects and they are more narrowly polyvalent in others, which means that some kinds of readings are plausible (“Batman is a fascist!”), and some are not (“Bane is Mitt Romney!”). So the way you figure out where the limits are is by looking at what ends up on the screen versus what doesn’t, the way the movie starts with a range of conceivable narrative choices and selects from them. To put this another way, a movie’s politics are not to be found in the material of the narrative itself, but in the constraints which the material onscreen puts on the kinds of narratives we can tell about it. Certain stories are plausible, and others are not; certain modes of reading and identification become plausible while others get shut down.
So is it “liberal”? Is it “conservative”? Both, a little. But more importantly, “liberal” and “conservative” are already both modes of narrative constraint, political just-so stories that define the limit points of what is politically thinkable and narratable. And by narrating the movie in the space between these two ideological poles, as the material of the film suggests we do, we descend into a political reality in which there is nothing but the incredibly narrow space separating liberal from conservative, a world in which there is no alternative. There is enlightened liberal capitalism of the Keynesian New Deal variety and there is the Hobbesian world of predatory Ayn Rand capitalism. This restaurant serves both kinds of Capitalism, the kind with “rights” on the side and the kind with “liberty” on the side.
This point is important because, of course, there are two programmatically disavowed alternatives in play: leftist revolution and reactionary fascism. And not coincidentally, these are the two obvious narrative possibilities which, by all accounts, should be in play, but aren’t: the latter because the cops (and Batman too) are essentially selfless, modest, and recoil from unnecessary violence; the former because the mass population of Gotham not only lacks a political consciousness but barely even exists at all.
After all, one of the most curious things about this movie — ostensibly about revolution and counter-revolution, and even somewhat shamelessly (if rather hopefully) based on A Tale of Two Cities — is the way the Batman universe has so little room for real class antagonism or the notion of a structural crisis in capitalism. There does seem to be some vague mumbling about poverty in Gotham — an orphan says that there might be work in the sewers, implying that economic despair leads Gotham’s underclass to join up with Bane — but this doesn’t really wash, and not only because the economy is clearly less of a problem for this kid than the fact of being an orphan in an orphanage. Do we see any real suffering in Gotham? I’m trying to remember a single homeless encampment, home foreclosure, or true picture of human poverty, and I find that I can’t. This may be because it was there and I forgot it — having paid more attention to a cockamamy subplot about whether or not Bruce Wayne will go to a charity ball or something — and then again it may be because the movie is clearly not interested in giving the people of Gotham any real motivation to rebel against the status quo. In the Batman universe, crime just is — for no other reason than criminals just are — and that underdetermination has, as its consequence, the evacuation of any possibility that economic despair (or any other “empirical” factor) might be a driving force for social disorder or open revolt. The only thing to do with criminals is to lock them up, forever. There’s a reading to be done on the franchise’s penological imagination, in fact, the way its prisons — from Arkham Asylum to whatever that terrible prison Bane and Talia come from is — demonstrate a particular kind of sociological conviction about what it is that prisons are for. The one thing they’re clearly not for, I feel safe in saying, is correction and rehabilitation.
Via.One of the strongest demonstrations of this fact, in fact — one which the movie glides past really quickly, but which is worth some comment — is that the movie allows Bruce Wayne to invent a technological solution to poverty, right off the bat, and then discard it. This goes by quickly, but let’s linger over this absolutely startling fact: in this movie, cold fusion just happens to have just been invented, by the way, oh yeah, we just happen to have the holy grail of infinite energy production over here, rendering all problems of human scarcity obsolete forever, but yeah, let’s probably not use it.
The movie’s disinterest in the existence of this technology — and even in making much of its transformative capacity — is not only scandalous, it’s revealing. Energy is, at the end of the day, the limit point of nearly every human endeavor, and industrial society is built on the exploitation of carbon, first coal and then oil. Virtually everything about modern society — its contents and discontents — is a function of how we have been made as a carbon civilization, and by the kinds of distributive networks that rise up alongside it. But in a world where a cold fusion energy has been invented, wealth inequality cannot be the real problem, and class no longer even makes sense. Think about this for even two seconds — which is more than the movie does — and you’ll see what I mean: if you have an infinite energy supply, the distribution calculus is no longer zero sum; the wealth of the rich is no longer a proportion of a limited total — such that it could be too much — but is now a fraction of infinity, which is also infinity, and so is the remainder left over for the poor. We’re now in Peter Frase territory.
And yet, even though he’s just solved the most basic problem of human economic existence forever, Bruce Wayne mothballs the entire project from before the beginning of the movie for reasons that don’t even make a little bit of sense: because the device could be turned into a bomb. #um #whatnow? As if Gotham exists in a world where nuclear bombs don’t already exist? Seriously, explain to me how that argument makes any sense at all; how do you decide not to hook up the “end-the-problem-of-material-want-forever” machine because someone might use it to re-invent the nuclear bomb? You may say: “Aaron, you’re taking this movie too seriously; the cold fusion whatsit is just the movie’s unobtanium, the MacGuffin it needs to get the plot moving.” And of course, you’d be right. My point is that the movie’s disinterest in thinking about what a technology like this one would mean is the substance of its politics, a categorical refusal to think about economics.
In my humble opinion, this act — this decision to not end poverty because you might release a weapon into the public sphere — demonstrates the real driving force for the movie’s morality, sense of history, and its understanding of civic virtue: the violence within, which must be contained. On the one hand, to say that we could solve all problems of human need and want, but we won’t, because it might become a bomb, is to assert that inequality is not what creates the specter of violence (it’s also, oddly, a lot like the argument that “people don’t kill people; guns kill people!”). The threat of violence is prior and separate from complaints over inequality, however much they might claim to motivate it. And indeed, this was the lesson of the first movie, the lesson Bruce Wayne learned from the death of his parents: you can build an awesome Keynesian super-train and fix Gotham’s economy forever, but some random street criminal will still murder you, because. Better to invest in a secret police force. Also worth noting: the other big summer blockbuster of 2012, The Avengers, also deals with humanity getting access to unlimited clean energy, eliminating scarcity and global warming, but must ultimately give it up because humanity isn’t capable of wielding it without their darker instincts taking over. This is during the summer where the temperature is breaking records and devastating crops. Fuck us.
This is why all the obvious references to the 1% and the 99% they put in the movie are just superfluous window dressing, words without any accompanying social meaning. It’s like trying to plant daffodils in a cement mixer: it just ain’t going to grow. And all that business from Selina Kyle, early on, is just a red herring; even she doesn’t believe that a storm is coming, in fact, or that people are gonna wise up and get theirs, or whatever, and well she shouldn’t. It’s nonsense in this movie, just empty words.
Instead, because all wealth is ultimately reducible to the power to kill, the trick is going to be to keep the power to kill in the hands of the good guys, and any threat of redistributing wealth amongst the people at large is nothing more than a breakdown of the state’s monopoly on violence. Or, rather, Bruce Wayne’s monopoly on violence. It’s vitally important that these weapons don’t fall into “the wrong hands,” as Lucius Fox puts it, and he not only doesn’t clarify whether he means the masses or the state, but that ambiguity indexes the irrelevance of the difference between. The people are just cattle, and when they are as easily swayed by symbols and metaphors and ritual as they demonstrably are, the difference between putting nuclear arms in the hands of the state and putting it in the hands of some random spectator in a football stadium crowd is about as salient as the choice between death or death by exile.
To put it more bluntly, the movie has nothing but contempt for people’s own apprehension of their condition. They don’t know anything but what their betters tell them, so why would their growing discontent because of inequality or something possibly matter? Remember, in this universe, ending all organized crime in the city turns out to mean ending all crime in the city full stop. The people only disobey the law when someone tells them to, because they are, essentially, sheep. And this New York has no apparent poverty anyway; what it has is resentment — the plebes might see the rich and hate them, out of envy — but there is no want or lack or suffering, at least none the movie has any desire to put on the screen.
This isn’t fascism; it’s more like the feudal rule of medieval despotism, in which — as Weber understood — wealth was a function of political power and violence, and political violence and power a function of wealth. But that’s exactly my point: fascism is about suppressing political consciousness and shifting the blame for economic pain onto demonized alien outsiders, and this movie has carefully removed any trace of either political consciousness or economic pain (and of course, Gotham’s position vis-a-vis the outside world is so incredibly confused and incoherent as to make it completely impossible to even know what the difference between a citizen and an outsider might look like).
“Hey Girl; I play Bane in the movie, but that’s just my day job. But enough about me. You look tired. Let me draw you a hot bath and hear about your day.”
This is why Bane is such an enigma, a character who has to wear a mask and take his motivations with him to the grave: he is, and must be, exactly as underdetermined as a class war is for people who don’t believe in class antagonism or the well-foundedness of populist anger. Occupy Wall Street can’t really be about wealth redistribution, such people muse, because no such thing as inequality exists! It must, therefore, be about something else; it must somehow be a tool for some other malevolent intent. And so Bane can’t really be trying to raise the political consciousness of the ordinary people — and isn’t — because they and he cannot possibly have one: the people will believe what their television tells them, and Bane must be a slavish devotee of another ruling willpower, Talia’s. There isn’t anything else to believe, or any other vector for knowledge. Democracy is a sham! Parade in front of them in a fucking bat costume and they step in line; don’t, and they don’t. Read them a letter you say is from Commissioner Gordon recanting on 8 years of received history and, apparently, the public is all like “yeah, sure, that’s cool. I mean, he’s a psychopath with a weird mask thing, but I guess it’s probably authentic, sheesh, things sure are different now I guess!”
Along with the total emptying out of the possibility of revolutionary consciousness — an echo of the cold war conceit that anyone advocating economic redistribution was really a puppet of Soviet foreign policy — the fact of Bane’s own blankness is what makes him interesting. After all, his origin story is oddly sympathetic, even though it isn’t the origin story we were initially told: at the last minute, his entire narrative — “child born in a prison, never knew anything but the darkness, only man ever to escape from it, etc” — evaporates in a whiff of exposition, or, rather, gets appropriated by the scion of criminal aristocracy to whom he’s pledged his lifelong devotion. Leaving behind what? Nothing. And that’s both exactly the point, and also the reason why he can be so handily and neatly dispatched, by a gun of all things. Once it becomes clear that he’s just some guy, the movie totally loses interest in him, to such an extent that he doesn’t get an interesting death scene and it isn’t even Batman who kills him. Could there be a more complete dismissal of a character than a totally forgettable and un-dramatic death?The way Talia appropriates his life story — and seriously, if Bane isn’t the guy who fought his way out of the prison he was born in, what the hell is he? — reminds me a little of that time J. Peterman bought Kramer’s life stories.
But the movie’s contemptuous disinterest in him — so profound as to be palpable — signifies in its own way. Think about it: Bane is a prisoner who had a brief moment of conscience, turned against his fellow prisoners to prevent a child from being harmed, was mutilated for it, and then (on being rescued) briefly became a charity case for the League of Shadows before they got bored with him and revoked his membership or something. Basically, he’s a class-traitor, the worker who crossed the picket lines and devoted himself to management’s interests long enough to get a desk job they eventually fired him from. And when cut-backs came, he was let go.
In the end, the fact that a “storm is coming” — as Selina Kyle puts it — has one clear purpose in this film, and that’s to make us all appreciate our umbrellas.
The main narrative purpose of the Occupy period in this film, after all, is to give a reason and purpose for Jim Gordon and Bruce Wayne’s lives. Both men are, at the beginning of the movie, sad and broken, without purpose or vitality or virility. Gordon’s family has left him while Bruce hides in the wings of his mansion; he doesn’t even have the energy to be a playboy millionaire, which is pretty much what he does. Meanwhile, the various elites — believing they are living through “peacetime” — mock both of them for not enjoying the fruits of previous struggles:the mayor is set to fire Gordon, and Wayne Enterprises is looking to ditch Bruce. The only cop worth a damn is an orphan who learned how to mimic mild signs of sociopathy from that time Bruce Wayne visited his orphanage.
As it turns out, those Elites will learn what’s what; all is not well, and the occupation will serve to both validate the true heroes’ suffering and give them a purpose, a struggle, for which to invigorate themselves. Taking a page straight out of Corey Robin’s Reactionary Mind, it is only by watching their city come under a(n underdeveloped and incoherent) challenge from below that Bruce Wayne can begin doing the million push-ups that are apparently what it takes to do massive recontructive back surgery while Jim Gordon rises from his hospital bed to become the leader of a police force worthy of protecting Gotham. Without an enemy, the virtuous warrior will lose his virile strength; without an uprising, the repressive capacity of the state will grow idle, and sterile.
This transition — from sterility to virility — might actually be the movie’s most important subtext, a sexualization of violent power that reaches its climax when Selina Kyle is turned into Bruce Wayne’s wife. As Dan Hassler-Forest points out, one of the weirdest things about this movie is the way it takes a character who is clearly coded as lesbian and makes her into a house-cat:
Throughout most of the movie, Kyle is portrayed as strong and fiercely independent, and given her own set of narrative challenges to deal with. Hathaway plays her with a terrific combination of strength, athleticism and vulnerability, and it is strongly suggested that she is involved in a lesbian relationship, while using her physical charms to seduce and then rob gullible males. The blatant fact that she is costumed and framed as an obvious sex object is slightly mitigated by the screenplay’s attempt to transform her high heels into functional weapons with one of Catwoman’s many amusing lines. But the redundant and nonsensical ending, which incidentally robs the film’s central sacrifice of its poignancy, reduces her to that most offensive of Hollywood clichés: a strong and independent woman in charge of her own destiny, who is ‘cured’ of her lesbianism by the irresistible charms of the male hero.
“Lesbian” is probably too specific, too precise; the thing about Selina Kyle isn’t that she is any one thing, but that she isn’t whatever it is she’s supposed to be. She is not “gay” in a safe and domesticated way; she is queer and undomesticatable. But this is exactly what it takes to restart Bruce Wayne’s jaded libido, it turns out: a woman who demonstrates a clear disinterest in men, and must therefore not only be conquered, but can only be won once her previous identity has been wiped. Should it surprise us that Bruce Wayne just happens to have a “tool” that will wipe her prior identity, leaving her a blank? And that this, it turns out, is what she secretly desires? This is why, as Eileen Jones observes, the movie goes to such annoying lengths to strip her of everything that’s interesting about her:
Selina Kyle/Catwoman is also unambiguously good in this Batman, because she’s played by Anne Hathaway with her giant doe eyes and schoolgirl pertness, and more importantly, because she renounces “class warfare” at the end. Sickening little scene when Catwoman, portrayed here as battling her way up out of poverty and exploitation, comes upon a looted apartment and shudders with horror at the property damage. A framed photo of a nuclear family has been smashed! It’s unbearable, in a city of poverty and suffering, that the glass in this framed photo of blonde people should get broken!
But this conquest is necessary, this ideological victory over wayward femininity. Selina Kyle is the real prize, the main villain that needs to be conquered. After all, Bane turns out, ultimately, to be irrelevant, a non-entity. And while Talia finally ends up being the real villain pulling the strings, let me be blunt: who the heck cares about her? In fact, I think the movie actually goes to some lengths to make Marion Cotillard less attractive than she could easily have been, or, rather, to carefully code her as “beautiful but not, you know, quite hot enough to be seriously interesting.”
This is how she looks in the movie:
And this is how she looks on the cover of Vogue, dressed and made up to be exactly as glamorous as the movie never bothers to make her:
Every aspect of a film’s look is controlled, planned, and budgeted, and these are profoundly different looks — in the beauty economy of Hollywood — which they deliberately chose between. They made her look the way she did — “nice girl” — because her function in the film is to scan as the kind of reasonably attractive, blandly suitable girl that Alfred wants young master Bruce to settle down with. But Bruce Wayne is precisely not interested in Talia because she isn’t dangerously hot like Catwoman; there’s no challenge to her, nothing to conquer (and in this movie, after all, this is exactly what is really dangerous, since the ease of victory will sap you of your strength).
By contrast, taking Selina Kyle and making her into the kind of bland [insert wife here] that is necessary to bring Alfred’s fantasy of domestic bliss to fruition, well, that’s quite an achievement, right? The conquest of the indifferent feminine by masculine virility is exactly what this movie needs to tie up its last symbolic loose ends (along with the succession narrative of Robin becoming New Batman). As Abigail Nussbaum puts it, to whom I’ll give the last word:
[T]he film uses the earnestness of Selina’s convictions to dismantle them. When she sees the violence that has accompanied Bane’s revolution, the suffering of the rich whom she had previously reviled, Selina repents of her desire for revolution, and by the end of the film she is fighting by Batman’s side to defeat Bane. The message here is clear–capitalism, however predatory, is still better than the alternative–and it’s Selina’s own believability as an enemy of capitalism that helps to sell it. What’s more, the fact that she’s positioned as a love interest for Bruce Wayne–the very representative of everything she despises–helps to undercut Selina’s convictions, which are overpowered by her affections for Bruce. One can’t help but compare this turnaround to Pfeiffer’s last scene in Batman Returns, in which she tells Batman “I would love to live with you in your castle … I just couldn’t live with myself.” That Catwoman had the strength to give up what she wanted for the sake of her beliefs; the Nolans’ Catwoman doesn’t.
This coming week brings us the last big Hollywood spectacle of the summer and, even allowing for the immense success of Joss Whedon’s “The Avengers,” the one that arrives burdened with the most anticipation and the most philosophical heft. Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight Rises” will apply the capstone to a trilogy that’s not quite like anything else in the history of cinema, a massively ambitious attempt to blend an existing superhero mythology, the cutting edge of technological spectacle and an auteurist personal vision. Nolan himself has co-authored the screenplays for all three films (with his brother, Jonathan Nolan, as co-writer on the second and third), and on repeat viewings it becomes increasingly clear how closely the Batman films are linked to themes he’s pursued throughout his career.
I had greatly mixed feelings about both “Batman Begins” and “The Dark Knight” on their original release, but even when I’ve felt frustrated with Nolan’s arch gamesmanship or portentous philosophizing, I’ve also been aware that he belongs to a strange and precious Hollywood tradition: arrogant, autocratic, visionary filmmakers who strive to twist the most mainstream, mass-market kinds of movies to their own devious purposes. If Nolan is too often compared to Alfred Hitchcock, that’s why, but you can identify other examples throughout the medium’s history, from Erich von Stroheim to Brian De Palma to Paul Verhoeven to Zack Snyder. Whether or not you like Nolan’s movies, I think you can argue that he has succeeded in doing this on a scale unmatched by anyone else.
I won’t see or review “The Dark Knight Rises” (in all its 164-minute glory!) for several more days, and before I do I thought I’d take a fresh look at Nolan’s first two Batman films, divorced from the uproar that surrounded their initial release. I was less looking to praise or nitpick than to figure out what sense I could make of the trilogy so far, and what kinds of themes and issues I might have missed the first time through. I’m going to pay absolutely no attention to avoiding spoilers, so if you haven’t seen “Batman Begins” and/or “The Dark Knight” and want to protect your innocence, this really isn’t the place for that.
I think the first thing to say is that these movies are highly impressive, and not just at the level of ambition — it’s also the degree of difficulty and the actual accomplishment. Yes, I admit it: I liked these bombastic, overly long Batman movies better the second time through! What I really mean, though, is that Nolan and his collaborators have done an admirable job of blending two distinct sets of Batman mythologies — the original DC Comics character, as invented by Bob Kane, and the revisionist, proto-fascist Batman of Frank Miller’s 1980s “The Dark Knight Returns” — into a new work that feels both authentic and original.
It’s my general proposition that Nolan is always playing a double game in these movies. He’s trying to deliver a faithful and canonical Batman story, and he’s pursuing his own agenda, which could be called subversive or allegorical, and which sometimes comes into conflict with the larger mission of mass entertainment. What I see in the Dark Knight trilogy so far is a critique of American ideology, and specifically the ideology of individual will and individual heroism — the basis of American politics since the Puritans, and also of American cinema — delivered by an outsider and in highly paradoxical fashion.
Of course a Batman movie cannot reject those things in the end; as messed-up and wounded as Christian Bale’s playboy zillionaire Bruce Wayne may be, Batman is the very embodiment of individual autonomy and nobility and self-sacrifice. Bale is too stone-faced a performer, especially with the mask and the Batman growl in place, to let us be sure how much the caped crusader responds to the fascistic, clean-sweep nihilism of Liam Neeson’s Ra’s al Ghul or the anarchistic, death-wish nihilism of Heath Ledger’s Joker. But the standard assurances of the comic-book universe — that good will triumph over evil, and that some people are incorruptible — are not necessarily beliefs that Nolan shares. (In fairness, the comic-book universe itself has grown to see those propositions as old-fashioned and highly conditional in recent decades.) As suggested in “Batman Begins,” and made repeatedly and thuddingly clear in “The Dark Knight,” Ra’s and the Joker are Batman’s doubles, Nietzschean supermen who long to impose their will on the universe just as he does. It’s not that there’s a thin line between him and them; from a philosophical perspective, there is no line at all, and the differences are semantic or aesthetic. Like the protagonists in Nolan’s films from “Memento” onward, Batman is not known to himself, and is afraid of his true nature.
This is really an aside, but: Mr. Heath Ledger! In that movie! Jesus H. Christ! It was all hard to calibrate when “The Dark Knight” came out, a few months after his death, but that character takes over the movie in much the same way that Satan takes over “Paradise Lost,” and possesses a similar level of depth and deception. What a second viewing made clear to me is that absolutely everything the Joker ever says is misleading or contradictory, including his heartfelt story about how he got his scars from an abusive dad (the story keeps changing) and his famous moment of introspection, while sitting in a hospital, dressed as a nurse, opposite Aaron Eckhart’s Two-Face: “Do I look like a guy with a plan?” We can never be sure whether his calculated cackle reflects mental illness or, like, a commitment to performance. I’m tempted to say he’s being honest when Batman comes roaring at him on the Bat-cycle, and the Joker stands stock-still in the street, murmuring, “I want you to do it. I want you to do it.” But then, two things can simultaneously be true: 1) He actually wants to die; 2) It’s a trap.
In all seriousness, about halfway through “The Dark Knight” I said to myself: Well, I sure hope they’re bringing that guy back! The character’s definitely not dead, but I haven’t heard anything about … oh.
This is an obvious thing to say, but Nolan departs from the more fantastical universe of Tim Burton’s Batman movies in numerous ways, mostly by making Gotham more … let’s not say realistic, let’s say plausible. This is a Middle American metropolis, sometimes but not always recognizable as Chicago, set in an alternate version of recent American history, one in which the crime and corruption and urban decay of the 1970s were never reversed. (One friend of mine quipped that “The Dark Knight” seems to takes place during the Walter Mondale administration.) I still maintain that there are numerous problems at the level of execution, ranging from Nolan’s frequently incoherent fight scenes (he does much better with big action set-pieces, like the beautiful flipping tractor-trailer in “Dark Knight”) to Tom Wilkinson’s ludicrous portrayal of a Mafia boss in “Batman Begins.”
Actually, the casting of Wilkinson, approximately the last guy in the world you would call when looking for an Italian-American criminal, raises a question for which I have no answer. How much can we assume that everything in these movies — made, after all, by a Hitchcock-style obsessive control freak — is the result of calculation rather than accident? I’m talking for instance, about the British-centric (or Commonwealth-centric) character of the films, which seems to underline the fact I mentioned above, that this is a critique of American ideology from an outside, love-hate perspective. Most of the actors, whether in principal roles or smaller ones, have been British, Irish or Australian (with a smattering of Europeans). The only white male American actor to play a significant part so far is Eckhart, as the Icarus-like crusading D.A. who steals Batman’s girlfriend — “Can I borrow Rachel from you?” he asks Bruce Wayne — and then is turned evil by her death. He’s the precise embodiment of a certain species of American hubris and arrogance.
Yes, the two actresses who have played Rachel, Katie Holmes and Maggie Gyllenhaal, are Americans. (As is Morgan Freeman, playing an iconic dispenser of gizmos and wisdom.) But even the switch from Holmes to Gyllenhaal suggests that Rachel, Batman’s supposed love object, is literally a dispensable and interchangeable part. And the love scenes, such as they are, are shot in a stagey, old-fashioned manner that isolates them from the main action of the story and distances them from the viewer. I’m not going all the way to saying that this was a deliberate and considered decision, but the effect is the same even if it isn’t, and in either case it results — like the fact that the Joker is a more interesting character than Batman — from the design of the whole enterprise.
As in “Memento” and “Inception” and other Nolan films, the girl — I use that word advisedly — is a receding vision, something lovely that is hoped-for but never to be achieved. His movies are always fundamentally “homosocial,” meaning that they’re about intimate relationships between men that are not sexual but take the place of romantic or sexual love. Ledger’s Joker has no intention of killing “the Batman,” whatever he may say to the contrary, although he’s willing to die at his hands. Bruce Wayne’s relationships with Michael Caine as Alfred and Freeman as Lucius are vastly more affectionate and substantial than his unconsummated, arm’s-length romance with Rachel — who dies anyway, because Batman saves the guy who took his girl, rather than the girl herself.
In “The Dark Knight Rises,” Nolan faces the challenge of bringing this mélange of mythology and philosophy and cultural criticism to a head, while introducing several new major characters and finding a satisfactory conclusion (at least for now) to Batman’s story. We get Tom Hardy, another British actor, as the supervillain Bane, threatening both Gotham and the borders of Batman’s psyche with some new vision of chaos and disorder. We’ve got Anne Hathaway as Catwoman and Marion Cotillard as Miranda Tate, both perhaps signifying the allure of adult female sexuality, in place of the virginal, shape-shifting and now deceased Rachel. We all understand that even if Nolan has Bruce Wayne grow up, burn the costume and launch himself into a new life, like some combination of Huck Finn, John Wayne and Dirty Harry, that won’t be enough to kill off the character for good. Inside, we all believe that we are Batman, the one decent night-spirit in an indecent world. Nolan’s point may be that we’re all wrong.
Attention conservation notice: contains spoilers and copious idle speculation about the Deep Political Meaning of popular cultural artifacts of the kind that is barely tolerable at blogpost-length, and surely intolerable beyond it. I saw Batman: The Dark Knight Rises on Saturday (I was a little nervous about copycat shootings).
I've been thinking for some time about how fandom reacts when its beloved auteurs fail. When someone like Aaron Sorkin produces something as preachy, self-satisfied, and misogynistic as The Newsroom, fandom reacts with dismay, but is that surprise justified? In Sorkin's case, all of these flaws were baked into his work going back as far as Sports Night, and they were ignored, excused, and forgiven because what he was producing was of such high quality. Is it really surprising that a writer who has been showered with unconditional praise and adulation should feel free to indulge their worst impulses, and revel in bad habits they might previously have worked to curtail? I mention this because going into The Dark Knight Rises, I was determined not to make this sort of mistake. The previous volume in Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy, The Dark Knight, was an excellent film--thrilling, sharply plotted, one of the best superhero films of the last decade. It also ended on a risible note, with Batman choosing to take responsibility for the crimes of crimefighter turned psychotic murderer Harvey Dent, on the belief that the people of Gotham couldn't handle the truth of Harvey's fall from grace, and that without his shining example to guide them they would fall into barbarism and criminality. It would have been easy to ignore this troubling conclusion in favor of the excellent film that preceded it. To do as fandom is too prone to doing, and say "yes, this story is problematic, but it's also such a good story!" But this would be to ignore the strain of fascist authoritarianism, of Great Man fetishism, that has run through all of Nolan's Batman films. In the trilogy's concluding volume--in which, after being relegated to observer status in The Dark Knight, Batman would once again take center stage--it seemed reasonable to assume that these problematic themes would be intensified rather than toned down.I was prepared, in other words, for The Dark Knight Rises to be an excellent story with a contemptible message. But what Nolan, along with brother and collaborator Jonathan, has delivered is so much more disappointing. The Dark Knight Rises is a flabby, talky film, prone to pounding in its points with a hammer, then repeating them several times to catch up the slow audience members. It has a silly plot whose twists, with one notable exception, are telegraphed well ahead of time, and which hangs together only because the film as a whole is too dreary to arouse the kind of scrutiny that would lay bare its many plot holes. Most of these flaws can, indeed, be traced back to the Nolans' determination to reinforce their Randian vision of Batman as the only person who can restore Gotham to its glory. Most noticeably, the film bogs down in its final third because the Nolans whisk Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) away from the beleaguered city for months so that he can gain enlightenment and return to Gotham even more heroic than he left it--a process that is achieved by having various Magical Foreign People spew repetitive cod-philosophy at him while he has a training montage. But the Nolans also undercut this theme, in ways that, far from granting it the complexity it so desperately needs, only serve to neuter it. In the end, the Nolans seem to lack the courage of their convictions.
In the early scenes of The Dark Knight Rises, there's almost a sense that the Nolans are about to back off from the high-handedness of The Dark Knight's ending. In the eight years since that night, the sainted and hollow memory of Harvey Dent has been used to clean Gotham's streets, but only by stripping away the civil rights of those deemed criminal, and the architect of this process, Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman), is sick with himself over the lie that he's promulgated. What soon becomes clear, however, is that rather than feeling shame at having lied to the people of Gotham, or at having sold them the fantasy of a savior, what irks Gordon is the fact that he's sold them the wrong savior, and that Batman remains maligned and despised. As if to drive home the theme of unappreciated heroism, we learn in the film's opening scene that the mayor is planning to fire Gordon. "He's a hero," Gordon's gladhanding, politically-savvy second in command protests. "A war hero. This is peacetime," he's told. Bruce Wayne, meanwhile, is a shut-in, his body ruined by his crimefighting escapades, his mind still reeling from the loss of his lover Rachel. He's the subject of sneering rumor and speculation, not least from the board of his company, whose fortune he's squandered on a clean fusion project that he later shut down with no results. He did this, we soon learn, to keep the technology out of the hands of those who could turn the reactor into a bomb. This echoes the subplot in The Dark Knight in which Bruce builds a machine that can spy on anyone in Gotham, then destroys it after one use because no one should have such unlimited power, and nor is it the only instance of such thinking in The Dark Knight Rises--by the end of the film, the revelation that Bruce has bought yet another company, or concealed yet another technological development, to keep it out of the wrong hands, feels almost like a running joke. The film, of course, means it entirely in earnest, and accepts that Bruce not only has the right but the authority to decide which technologies are safe enough for the general public to use.
Far from toning down The Dark Knight's message, then, The Dark Knight Rises takes it to even further extremes. This isn't simply Batman having the moral authority to act as judge and jury on Gotham's criminals. This is Batman--and Bruce Wayne--as John Galt, the mysterious, reclusive, omni-competent, super-rich industrialist who is the only hope for the future. The Dark Knight Rises extends Batman's authority past crime, into technological progress, and even into social welfare--when Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Officer Blake, a Batman believer who is one of the first to uncover signs of the film's villain, starts his investigation by following up the murder of a homeless teen, he learns that the boy was kicked out of his group home because the cash-strapped Wayne Foundation has stopped funding it. In other words, it's not just the police that needs to be augmented by a caped crusader, but every level of government that must be replaced by private enterprise and private philanthropy. And when that private benefactor is mocked, derided, hobbled in his efforts to keep his community safe and even hunted down for those efforts--why, then he will retreat from his obligations, and the result will be disaster.
That disaster comes, fittingly enough, in the form of a people's revolution--or rather, this being that sort of movie, in the form of a revolution that claims to be on the people's behalf but is really a force of evil. Bane (Tom Hardy, wasted under a mask that conceals most of his face and in a role that demands little of him but an imposing physique), the last surviving member of the League of Shadows, the villains of Batman Begins, arrives in Gotham seeking revenge. He steals Bruce Wayne's fortune, defeats and disables Batman, and converts that dangerous fusion reactor from a few paragraphs ago into a nuclear bomb. This he uses to hold the entire city hostage, an act that he describes as the liberation of Gotham's citizens--from a corrupt government, from Commissioner Gordon's lies about Harvey Dent, and from the oppression of the moneyed classes--but which is really a preamble to the bomb's inevitable explosion. What follows is equal parts Communist and French revolutions, with Gotham's rich and powerful rousted from their homes and marched into show trials as enemies of the people--in a court which is presided over by Batman Begins's deranged (and, when last seen, committed) villain, Jonathan Crane (Cillian Murphy), who looms over the accused from atop a pile of desks.
Now might be a good time to stop and boggle at the fact that the Nolans' Batman films are renowned for their realism. The image of Crane perched on those desks is a reassuringly Alice in Wonderland-ish touch, a hint that we're meant to take the city's sudden descent into Jacobinism with a grain of salt. Alas, it's but a brief reprieve from the po-faced seriousness with which The Dark Knight Rises otherwise serves up this plot. The Dark Knight managed to make comic book characters and plots seem organic to the real world because it injected a single irrational player--the Joker--into a system whose other participants, cops and criminals alike, were rational, and therefore had no idea how to approach a force whose choices and motivations they couldn't fathom. The Dark Knight Rises fills Gotham with these irrational players--not just Bane but an army of henchmen who seem to have no recognizably human reactions or emotions, and will gladly die at Bane's command--and has them do ridiculous, cartoonish things--Bane traps Gotham's entire police force in the city's sewers, and then instead of killing them he keeps them prisoner for months, at the end of which they march out, uniforms barely mussed, ready to fight Bane's forces--all while pretending that this is a meaningful political statement.
A silly premise might have been forgivable if the film had developed its implications in interesting ways, but, much like The Legend of Korra last month, The Dark Knight Rises uses its villain as a means of avoiding those implications. Both stories are ostensibly about the cities they are set in and the battle for their soul, and yet those cities--their culture, their norms, and most of all their people--are curiously absent. Like Korra's Amon, Bane claims to be acting on behalf of the city's underclass, and establishes a policy of violent persecution against the upper classes. And as we were in Korra, we are kept entirely in the dark on the question of how the people of Gotham feel about this. Do they support Bane? Do they oppose him? Do they think he has the right idea but the wrong methods? Are they, as seems most likely, divided between these options according to their social status in the pre-occupation world? The Dark Knight Rises ignores all these questions. The people responsible for Gotham's suffering are only Bane and his followers (whose ranks are not, as far as we can tell, swelled by Gotham's have-nots), and the people responsible for stopping him are only the few policemen who managed to evade Bane's trap, the authority figures whom he has deposed--no civilians join the resistance. Anyone who does not fall into either of these groups is completely ignored.
Gotham spends months under Bane's rule--months that you'd expect to have a profound impact on the social, psychological, and cultural life of the city--but upon his defeat all we see are its citizens stepping out of their homes (as if they'd spent all that time indoors), ready to resume their lives as if the very fabric of their society hadn't been ripped to shreds. What's interesting is that the Nolans had an opportunity here to reinforce their authoritarian message and show why Batman is necessary--because when stripped of both their white knight, the lie of Harvey Dent, and their dark knight, the citizens of Gotham turn to Bane, a false savior. The film could have shown us Gothamites turning on one another, informing on their neighbors and signing up to do Bane's bidding--the nightmare scenario that justified Batman's choice to take responsibility for Harvey Dent's crimes. Instead, the Nolans prefer to serve up a fantasy of docile, patient goodness, of a populace content to wait for Batman to save it without doing anything--good or evil--on its own behalf.
Since Bane is planning to blow up Gotham, his claims of populism are easily dismissed--can be taken, in fact, as an attack against the very notion of popular, anti-capitalist protest. Even more disappointing, however, is the fact that The Dark Knight Rises squanders the opportunity to address the class struggle in a more nuanced way, through the character of Catwoman. For a lot of Batman fans, Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker in The Dark Knight had to clear an impossible hurdle in the form of Jack Nicholson's turn as the character in Tim Burton's Batman. For me, the iconic Batman villain performance is Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman, and I was very nervous to see what the Nolans and Anne Hathaway would make of the character--not least because, let's face it, Christopher and Jonathan Nolan have a woman problem. It's not as pronounced as Aaron Sorkin's or Steven Moffat's--the Nolans' women are generally competent, rarely hysterical or weepy, and have interests other than landing a husband--but it has nevertheless marred most of their films, in which women are either love interests (often dead ones), or minor plot tokens with little in the way of personality or motivations. So it was something of a surprise to discover that Hathaway's Selina Kyle, though she doesn't hold a candle to the scary intensity of Pfeiffer's performance, is one of the Nolans' best female characters (and my favorite part of the film), followed close behind by Marion Cotillard's Miranda Tate, the visionary who contracts with Bruce to build the fusion reactor. Both women have their own agenda and aspirations which are given their own space in the narrative, not just as they reflect on the hero's journey or his feelings--the first time this has been true of a woman in a Nolan film since Carrie-Ann Moss's character in Memento. Hathaway's Selina, in particular, has her own arc of growth over the course of the film, and she is also the one who gets to defeat Bane (though only after it's revealed that he is actually the film's secondary villain). At the film's end, she is the only character in the cast whose further adventures I'd like to learn about.
All that said, the cost of this compelling character arc is that Catwoman's rough edges are filed off, and with them her politics. Perhaps wisely given their track record with female characters, the Nolans choose to veer away from the angry feminist slant that Burton gave Catwoman, and instead make her a class warrior. A jewel thief, she justifies her crimes simply by the fact that she steals from those who have so much, and tells Bruce Wayne that "you're all going to wonder how you ever thought you could live so large and leave so little for the rest of us." Unlike Bane, Selina says things like this in earnest, and also unlike him, she is for the most part a sympathetic character, whose moments of villainy are usually the result of straitened circumstances rather than malice, and whose bitterness over having been dealt a bad hand that has forced her to make increasingly bad choices shines through her disaffected mask and lends moral authority to her views. Through her, then, the film could have given us another perspective on the class struggle that Bane sparks, one that could have suggested that he is playing on a legitimate grievance. Instead, the film uses the earnestness of Selina's convictions to dismantle them. When she sees the violence that has accompanied Bane's revolution, the suffering of the rich whom she had previously reviled, Selina repents of her desire for revolution, and by the end of the film she is fighting by Batman's side to defeat Bane. The message here is clear--capitalism, however predatory, is still better than the alternative--and it's Selina's own believability as an enemy of capitalism that helps to sell it. What's more, the fact that she's positioned as a love interest for Bruce Wayne--the very representative of everything she despises--helps to undercut Selina's convictions, which are overpowered by her affections for Bruce. One can't help but compare this turnaround to Pfeiffer's last scene in Batman Returns, in which she tells Batman "I would love to live with you in your castle ... I just couldn't live with myself." That Catwoman had the strength to give up what she wanted for the sake of her beliefs; the Nolans' Catwoman doesn't.
Of course, by the time this turnaround happens, Batman himself has backed away from the authoritarianism, the Randian dogma, that permeated the first half of the film. The crux of Bruce's long sojourn away from the city (which is the reason that Bane's occupation of Gotham lasts so long despite the fact that the film can't convincingly portray the effects of such an ordeal, and indeed glosses over most of that period as far as Gotham is concerned) is that he is courting death. This echoes Albert's repeated admonitions in the film's first half, and indeed the tone of the entire film is slanted to both warn us and lead us to expect Batman's death. In case we weren't clear on just what kind of death he's heading towards, the film has Selina offer to leave Gotham with Bruce, because "you don't owe these people any more. You've given them everything." "Not everything. Not yet," is his reply. And if that were not enough, the film's surprise villain stabs Batman in the side. That's right. After three films, including one of most critically lauded superhero film in years, and a mass of critical and fannish buzz building up to a consensus on the uniqueness and depth of the Nolans' vision for Batman, their final statement on the character is: Batman as Jesus. The same tired, unoriginal, hokey theme that has shown up in just about every superhero film in the last decade. (Adding insult to injury is the fact that Batman's self-sacrifice is nothing of the sort; though he tells the other characters that he is embarking on a suicide mission, he knows that he has a chance of survival and has merely chosen to fake his death. The film, in its fetishizing of this "death," completely ignores this inconvenient wrinkle.)
At the end of The Dark Knight Rises, Blake, who has spent the film as Batman's de facto apprentice, laments to Gordon that no one will know who truly saved Gotham. This is such a whiny thing to say that it's unbelievable--who cares who saved the city or whether they're acknowledged? Surely what's important is that the city was saved, and surely that's all a true hero would care about? But Gordon himself seems to be of Blake's mind--the last thing he says to Batman before sending him off to what he thinks is his death is that Gotham deserves to know who saved it. The conclusion that both Gordon and Blake reach is that Gotham knows who its hero is--it's Batman, whether or not the city knows that Bruce Wayne was the man behind the mask. And indeed, Gotham unveils a statue of Batman in one of the film's final scenes, even as Blake, who has resigned from the police force (because, he says, he now feels that the system is preventing him from doing good), discovers the Batcave and becomes the new Batman. But this is only to reinforce the mealy-mouthed conclusion to which the Nolans' have brought their vision of Batman the Great Man. The truly authoritarian, Frank Miller-style Batman doesn't care about the public's accolades--nor, indeed, their condemnation. He acts because he believes his strength and competence give him the authority to act and the ability to know which act is right, regardless of what the public or government think of him or try to do to him. A work like Miller's The Dark Knight Returns forces its readers to face up to the inherent fascism of such a worldview, and challenges them to either fall in line or get out of the way. The Nolans, on the other hand, want to have their cake and eat it too. Their Batman, Blake's Batman, and even Bruce Wayne's Batman are all Batmen in desperate need of approval. They want a moral authority that transcends government and the will of the people, but they also want the government and the people to like and appreciate them.
As objectionable as I find the Great Man fetishism of the Nolans' Batman films, I might have still respected it had they, like Miller, taken it to its logical conclusion, but instead the Nolans' Batman trilogy concludes not with an examination of Batman's right to act, but with a reinforcement of the notion that it is tragic that his actions are not properly appreciated. In this scheme, the persecution that Batman suffers isn't just the cost of doing business, but a necessary component of his apotheosis. Like Jesus on the cross, he has to be mocked and tormented by a small-minded mob before he turns around and magnanimously saves them all. What The Dark Knight Rises amounts to is a great, self-pitying cry of You'll see, one day I'll be dead and then you'll be sorry. I'm mainly sorry that I didn't stop with the previous film.
Each of Christopher Nolan's Batman films opens with a quiet, singular image forming the unmistakeable bat symbol. They're cinematic palate cleansers before the business of Batman begins in earnest. In Batman Begins, it is a sky full of bats; in The Dark Knight, it is a wall of flames; but the opening image of The Dark Knight Rises is notable for two reasons: the bat symbol appearing from cracking ice is muddy, only there if you look for it, and it is overlaid with the film's opening lines of dialogue. If you wanted to, you could say that the first ten seconds of The Dark Knight Rises spell out all the problems that lay ahead: here is a film both rushed and obscured.SPOILER WARNING: The following contains massive spoilers for The Dark Knight Rises.
The Dark Knight Rises is so packed with a Jenga-like tower of plot that it can barely spare you a moment to breathe. Any quietness that might have existed in this film seems to have been sacrificed to the cutting room floor in service of trying to condense a year-and-change in the life and death of Batman into fewer than three hours. While The Dark Knight Rises sets out with measured paces, as soon as Selina Kyle jumps out the window of Wayne Manor, we have left the realm of film and entered the domain of montage, and it's one that picks up speed and intensity and sheds story, character and entire months of movie time at a rate that only gets faster as it goes.
Time is the biggest gray area in The Dark Knight Rises. It hopscotches in both screen time and movie time so much that it feels like it should come with a temporal libretto to help audiences follow along. Taking place eight years after The Dark Knight, the opening set piece of Bane and his crew taking down a CIA plane in mid-air takes place six months before we even get to Gotham. From there we leap days and months in single cuts. Jim Gordon tucks his reconsidered Harvey Dent truth bomb into a jacket pocket, and it's still there several days later when he gets captured by Bane in the sewers. Minutes after Bane is mentioned to Bruce Wayne, Alfred is there rattling off Wikipedia entries about the villain and the entire League of Shadows. Bruce Wayne goes from a broken back to push-ups in 80 days. Cops spend months underground and come out as clean-shaven and robust as when they went in. The best indicators of when something is happening are snow on the ground and a long-winded countdown of the atomic bomb that inexplicably takes five months to reach detonation. It's a clock that jumps from five months to 23 days to 24 hours in rapid succession, because the plot is all-consuming.
Plot doesn't just consume time in The Dark Knight Rises, it pigs out on clarity as well. Big, important things happen so quickly and so often that it's easy to forget that much of it doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense. The daylight Wall Street raid turns into a pitch-black nighttime chase in just under ten minutes -- not ten minutes of screen time, but actual movie time, as pointed out by the mobile computer counting down the bars to completing the fraudulent trade that wipes out the last of Bruce Wayne's finances (another ridiculous plot point). Bane's crew pumps the Russian scientist's blood into their carry-on corpse to help fake his death, a death Bruce Wayne is too shut-in to even notice happened. John Blake spills the Batman beans all over Wayne Manor because he recognized the look of "dead parents" in Bruce's eyes and no one bothers to even try denying it, yet supercop Jim Gordon has to be flat-out told who Batman is.
Bruce Wayne goes from an eight-year heartbreak over Rachel Dawes that causes him to kick Alfred to the curb to sleeping with Miranda Tate simply because they got caught in the rain. A broken back is fixed with a rope and swift punch to the spine, administered by two prison Yodas whose services Bane inexplicably pays for. Never mind the villain's shock when Batman actually returns from the desert prison with the GIANT ESCAPE ROUTE he threw him into. Talia al Ghul hates her dad for his disloyalty to Bane -- until Batman kills him, at which point the idea of destroying a major American city suddenly seems like a really awesome idea. Bane orchestrates the disintegration of Gotham because... well, I don't even have a joke answer for that, his plan just doesn't make sense in the larger scope of the film. The list goes on and on and on.
Admittedly, suspension of disbelief is a helpful concept in superhero movies, because at some point you have to shut your brain off to the fact that things like this just don't happen. Except the Nolanverse has strived to swaddle these films in the notion of reality. Things don't just happen. Batman's arsenal comes with an engineering pedigree, villains are flesh and blood nightmares, Batman is vulnerable to such minor concerns as knives and dogs, and officials follow procedure and code. What makes The Dark Knight Rises such a disappointment is that it is riddled with chasms of logic and just plain dumb moments that seem to beat back against this real world starkness of the previous films, answering with a shrug of, "Well, it's about a dude who dresses up as a bat to fight crime, what do you want from us?"
So we get a Gotham devoid of people, populated only by cops and robbers and MacGuffins. Characters ramble expositional monologues at one another to explain things that there's no time to spell out, from CleanSlate.app to abandoned fusion reactors gathering dust under the streets. You're not meant to understand them, you're only meant to accept them. The sewers fill with thugs from central casting reporting to a convoluted hierarchy of villainy that seeks to be evil for evil's sake or make more money. But don't get caught up in the Occupy metaphors that are vaguely hinted at, because there's no ethos or commentary to be found. The 99% don't exist in this movie, they're only used as collateral damage or as extras dragging the rich from their homes, cheering on the condemnations in the Scarecrow's courtroom. Unlike in The Dark Knight, their affections and moral dilemmas are unimportant. The Dark Knight Rises' only agenda is to get to the ending, to wrap everything up in a cliched bow.
What does it all come to? A generic ticking time bomb, a grunted sacrifice by Batman (for a city that, if Bane's plan did anything, was revealed as being really not worth saving), children in peril, a hothead detective speaking truth to an administration of bureaucrats, a flooding chamber to jerk our chains of hope, a force of nature wiped out with a big gun, a would-be mass-murderer defeated by crappy driving, and a tacked-on happy ending with a love story that was as hard to figure out as any of the other giant question marks of the film. What we're left with, in the end, is a feeling of exhaustion on the part of the brothers Nolan as screenwriters and Christopher Nolan as the savior of the Batman film franchise. It's a hasty goodbye that dances near the slippery slope of farce that Nolan once strove so hard to drag Batman away from.
Occasionally a pretty film to look at, the greatest shot of The Dark Knight Rises happens about ten minutes in, and then aesthetics get the bum's rush. While it's a bit of a running joke at this point, The Dark Knight Rises often treads through the land of indecipherable. If the visual mechanics are serviceable, the audio end is as hobbled as Bruce Wayne. So many lines are spoken through masks, slurred from hospital beds, whispered and heavily accented, all while struggling to be heard over Hans Zimmer's screaming score that eventually you have to admit defeat and hope you catch enough of the dialogue to make sense of anything at all. Having seen it twice now, in two different theaters, I can only conclude that this is how the film is meant to sound.
Upon a first viewing, The Dark Knight Rises is an enjoyable movie. I don't believe it commits the cardinal sin of being boring, and much of the film is carried along by solid performances from the cast, especially Hathaway's Catwoman, who almost single-handedly steals the show. Levitt's turn as Blake is enjoyable, and it has to be as he carries much of the film on his back. Hardy's Bane is as good a villain you could hope for to follow up Heath Ledger's unfollowable Joker, the kind of jaunty terrorist that works against the oppressively serious crusader. Nolan can still pull off an amazing opening scene and his followthrough on the concept of a Batman film where the titular character is largely absent is admirable, even if it isn't wholly successful. But seeing it a second time, no longer watching to see how the story unfolds but to revel in the finer details, all the film's issues step forward in stark relief and the brisk jog of that first viewing gives way to a grueling march uphill.
Nolan's Batman films have never been absolute masterpieces. The previous two had their own special flaws, the severity of which people will long continue to argue over the same way they will over the ones in The Dark Knight Rises, but those flaws were easier to overlook because the overarching stories gave you something to cling to when the waters got rough. The Dark Knight Rises suffers so mightily because it substitutes twists for character arcs, convenience for hard choices and flashbacks for discernible themes. Gone are meditations on fear, family, the cost of justice, order vs. anarchy, or the thin line between good and evil. What remains is just an action movie with people punching and shooting each other until one side falls down, all muddled sound and unexplainable fury signifying not much at all.
Warning: The following contains major spoilers for The Dark Knight Rises. Proceed at your own risk!It probably won't surprise anyone to learn that I liked The Dark Knight Rises quite a bit. I was, after all, part of the team here at ComicsAlliance that wrote somewhere in the neighborhood of 60,000 words about how much I loved Nolan's last Batman film, and I walked out of this one feeling satisfied with both the direction and the execution of the final chapter of his trilogy. It's solid, enjoyable, and interprets themes that are a core part of the Batman mythology in a way that we've never seen before on film. That said, I do think that it's probably the most flawed of Nolan's three Batman movies.
My writing partner, Chad Bowers, told me that one of his biggest problems with Rises was that he didn't feel like it worked as a sequel to The Dark Knight, and in a lot of ways, he's right. Despite the emphasis on Harvey Dent, Rises feels like more of a throwback instead to Batman Begins, both overtly with the way that the plot ties tightly into the first movie and Cillian Murphy's surprising (to me) return as the Scarecrow, and also with the weird quirks that crop up in characterization.
The most notable for me was at the end, when Catwoman rolls up and rescues Batman from Bane by shooting him with a gun. It's the same kind of climax that I had a problem with in Geoff Johns and Gary Frank's recent Batman: Earth One (which I don't think is a coincidence), and while Nolan does it with considerably more skill, the act leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Batman himself doesn't kill or use guns, but in Nolan's version, that's presented as a weakness. Having that be the way that a villain like Bane is defeated doesn't ring true at all -- especially given how enjoyable Bane and his ludicrous Broadway Musical bad guy voice are for the rest of the film.
In fact, Batman's entire second fight with Bane is more than a little lacking, especially given how perfect the defeat of the Joker is in the last film. That was such an incredible moral victory, not just the triumph of one man over another, but of a city refusing to turn against each other, inspired by Batman to stand together against someone who preyed on their fears. Here, Bane is defeated because Batman magically gets better at punching between scenes for no apparent reason. The redemption of Gotham City, and of Batman himself, comes later; the villains are pretty incidental to it by that point.
Also, while he's a solid character throughout the film and the subject of one of the most emotional moments when he accidentally kills someone, that big reveal with John Blake at the end may well be the biggest groaner in super-hero movie history. I rolled my eyes so hard that I think I pulled a muscle.
But despite those flaws (and a few others), I still thought The Dark Knight Rises was great. A lot of that has to do with the character work on the part of both Nolan and the cast, particularly Bane and Catwoman. Anne Hathaway is legitimately amazing every time she's onscreen, but Hardy's Bane was a huge surprise. In a lot of ways, he's a direct attempt at recapturing what Heath Ledger did with the Joker, from the the voice and over-the-top swagger to the fact that he's got a complex, ever-spiraling plan that culminates in a massive lie meant to trap Batman. Even the core mechanic of his plan, the idea of an ordinary Gotham Citizen who's secretly a "triggerman" with the power of life and death over his neighbors, is a direct thematic callback to the moral dilemma that the Joker sets up for Gotham as the culmination of his plan. But to the credit of the film and actors, it never really feels like a retread as much as it's a further exploration of those themes.
As someone who tends to read a lot into things -- particularly the moral victory at the end of The Dark Knight -- I was genuinely thrilled at how much Nolan decided to just literalize the ideas at the core of his story. For good or ill, there's very little subtlety to anything that's going on here, from Catwoman's desire for something that's literally called "the Clean Slate" to Christian Bale and Michael Caine saying their opinions of each other's actions out loud in a scene that would've been awful if it had been attempted by lesser actors.
The entire second half of the film follows a logic that has absolutely nothing to do with reality, and everything to do with symbolism. From a realistic perspective, it makes no sense that every policeman in Gotham City would be sent underground to be buried alive for three months, but it works in context as a representation of law and order being overthrown and suppressed by Bane and his fanatical army of devotees. The same goes for the scene where Batman gets his spine broken and then pretty much just walks it off, does a few push-ups and decides that he doesn't have a limp anymore. No joke, I thought that part was great, but it's also something that's easy to laugh at for how much it completely does away with the concept of believability.
To be fair, though, the comic that sequence is based on involves Bruce Wayne recovering because his girlfriend has psychic healing powers that cause her to mentally regress to a five-year-old after she patches him up. Compared to that, recovering from paralysis by getting punched in the back and then doing a few crunches is downright sensible.
That's an interesting aspect of the film, too: The Dark Knight Rises wears its influences on its sleeves. It lifts directly from The Dark Knight Returns (I'm not going to lie, I was pretty excited to see the old cop and the young cop chasing Batman), Year One, Knightfall and No Man's Land, and there are smaller influences from plenty of other stories as well. But in mashing all of those up, it came away with something those stories could never have: an ending. Or at least, a kind of ending.
Nolan has a luxury that the creators working in the Batman comics don't. He's not bound by having to have Batman show up five times next month in a self-perpetuating comic book story machine, so he can show us how his version of Batman ends, and that ending is a victory. In Begins, Batman sets out to become a symbol that's more than a man, and in The Dark Knight, we see how powerful that symbol can be. By the end of Rises, that symbol has truly grown to encompass more than one man ever could, to the point where the man at the core of it is no longer necessary. It's a complete and total victory: Gotham City is no longer a place that needs Batman to survive. The climate that led to his parents' murder -- revealed in Begins to have been a social construct created by the League of Shadows -- has been changed into something better. The extraordinary grip that crime held on the city has been broken, and with it, the need for Batman. He finally gets the happy life that he deserves, but he's also secure in the knowledge that if the need for Batman arises, there will always be someone there to help that won't have to resort to running around in hockey pads. Again, it's the symbolism of Batman as the hero without powers, the hero that "could be you" (if you happened to be born a billionaire with a photographic memory and a genetic disposition towards athletics) made literal. It's an interesting idea, and for Nolan's version of Batman, it works.
Coming to The Dark Knight Rises as a fan of the comics, or even of other mass media interpretations like Batman: The Animated Series, it's a weird movie. It's less about Bruce Wayne than it is about the idea of Batman and what that means, and as someone who's devoted a lot of time and energy to that idea, I found it to be very appealing. Taken as a trilogy, the movies themselves move further towards the symbolic and representational, from the fairly straightforward action movie of Begins to the morality play of The Dark Knight to the genuinely mythical storytelling of Rises. I'm not quite sure it works as well as it could've, but in telling that story in that way, it fulfills the first movie's promise of Batman becoming more than just a person. He becomes an idea, a symbol of hope, and it's that idea that wins out as the focus of the movie.
And if nothing else, it's certainly the second-best Batman movie with an extended sequence based around the premise that some days, you just can't get rid of a bomb.
… he’s something much worse. Using the French Revolution for inspiration, the Nolans have restaged the bourgeois revolution, but in reverse. They want you to stand with the monarchists.
By now, you already know: the new Batman movie is fascist propaganda, a clear swipe against the Occupy movement, and the occasion for the worst rampage in U.S. history, by a guy referring to himself as the Joker. Historic stuff is happening, so much so that Hollywood opted not to report its weekend numbers out of sensitivity (and, maybe, because Batman 7: Dark Knight 2 isn’t going to beat The Avengers).
But Batman a fascist? Come on, this isn’t news. This is American entertainment!
Folks have been doing the superheroes-are-fascist routine for over 50 years now, so there’s very little novel in dropping the f-bomb on Batman now. Which isn’t to say the critics are wrong: after all, the last Dark Knight movie was totally reactionary, though I don’t seem to remember quite so many complaints about it.
There’s that whole rich guy handing out helpings of extrajudicial brutality thing, which is the entire Batman schtick. Then there’s the Brothers Nolan heaping some extra fascist ideology on top, wrapping up The Dark Knight with authority figures effacing the crimes of the elite in a deliberate effort to craft symbols that will get the public to support their War on Crime.
And then there’s the actual plot, that dusty old thing that ties together two hours of dudes grimacing and punching each other. In Dark Knight, we saw Bruce Wayne cleverly wrest away control of his corporation from its pesky shareholders, turning Wayne Enterprises into a privately held company to better conduct experimental weapons research.
We can’t have valuable tank money wasted on useless ventures, no! And nothing gladdens the American soul like a family company allowed to do business the way they see fit, away from those pesky disclosure rules and fiduciary responsibilities — in fact, I remember the theater audience cheering.
Look, you don’t have to be an entertainment junkie, or a critic, to come up with examples of white men, often cops and soldiers, “forced” to go rogue to fight the (usually brown-skinned) evils that threaten family and fatherland. Pretty much every trailer before Dark Knight Rises had some variation on the theme, even the comedy Neighborhood Watch (apparently, Trayvon Martin’s killing by hero-wannabe George Zimmerman pushed the release date back a couple months – oh sensitive Hollywood!). Halliburton wet dream Iron Man 2 was shockingly glib about “privatizing peace,” and everybody noticed, but I guess Robert Downey Junior is too charming for the f-word. Frank Miller, the curdled soul behind contemporary Reichskultur like 300 and Sin City (and The Dark Knight), is all but open about his fascism, and recently told Occupy to join the military and get whipped into shape fighting our “ruthless enemies.” Lately I’ve been watching Walter White kill depraved Latino drug dealers so he can keep his brood nice and petty bourgeoisie.
Guys, these are your basic fascist plotlines, and if you want to tell me that 90% of Hollywood plots work this way, do the math yourself. It’s not an accident that these revenge fantasies pour out of the country that’s the world’s biggest, most violent bully.
Apparently this time the critical consensus has caught up, declaring Batman a Goebbelsian fable squarely targeting the protests of the 99% before the film had been released to the public. If that’s true, then The Dark Knight Rises is a pretty crap installment of the U.S. entertainment industry’s parade of macho reaction. Class war tropes abound, but they’re thin and unconvincing, never given the credence you’d expect now that income inequality is dinner table conversation.
Director Christopher Nolan, a guy who deemed absolute monarchy “relatable,” wouldn’t know real underclass resentment if it pulled him up by his underwear, the way his chums at his British private school used to. So let me clear things up – The Dark Knight has nothing to do with Occupy, and no one who sees it will make that connection, unless they gleaned everything they know about Occupy from newscopter footage. Bane’s “army of the 99%” is a disciplined private militia – no mention of anarchists, as the Guardian would have you believe – who happily volunteer for neck breakings out of blind loyalty.
This “true believer” nonsense simply doesn’t resonate with Occupy at all, where debates over simple procedural matters took hours to resolve, and Bane’s authoritarian command violates the Occupy’s own prime directive of leaderlessness. There’s only the sketchiest indication that Bane has any appeal to the Gotham citizenry at all, unlike the Joker in Tim Burton’s Batman.
If The Dark Knight Rises was supposed to be an attack on Occupy, it’s a failure, and even if it’s settling for vague anti-populism, it sucks at that too.
There is a fundamental carelessness – or perhaps more accurately, cowardice – running through the whole film, where every character’s motivations are thin and unconvincing or simply nonexistent. Sure, the Joker didn’t have any motivation, but I’ve been bored by evil-for-evil’s-sake villains since I started fifth grade. Let’s start with Bane himself, who I initially liked. He informs people of their imminent demise with this matter-of-fact Sean-Connery lilt that makes untimely death seem like not such a big deal.
I was looking forward to seeing his character develop, for the film to explore his weird populism, or at the very least his destructive pleasures the way Dark Knight indulged us with the Joker. Instead he ends up being your bargain basement villain, making silly pronouncements and receiving lots of head trauma. The Nolans couldn’t think of anything to do with him after he breaks Batman’s back throws him into an Uzbek prison pit (there’s a reason this movie is almost three hours long and still feels rushed). He ends up getting unceremoniously capped by some Bat-Gadget, nary a farewell one-liner to his name.
This is not a movie full of good one-liners. Commando, that’s an action movie with some one-liners. In Dark Knight Rises, one of the characters literally utters, “His only crime was that he loved me.” Someone wrote that.
The writing’s not all bad, and most of the decent lines go to Anne Hathaway’s appealing Catwoman, who also has the most coherent class war angle. The Nolan boys attempt to give her character a dash of hipster-bohemian anticapitalism with a social climbing streak, but her poise and taste for the finer things doesn’t exactly add up to a rough childhood, let alone Billyburg bee-keeping. Rather, it better approximates the privileged upbringing and pricey liberal arts education of Hathaway herself. Still, she’s a welcome presence in a film full of nondescript white dudes with that same Mad-Men-retro slicked hair thing that GQ cannot stop pimping. That’s right, Joseph Gordon Levitt, I called you nondescript, which is better than me saying you are not at all credible as a grizzled cop.
But you don’t need me to tell you this movie is clunky, if not a total clunker, just like you don’t need me to tell you that it’s fascist. You’ll probably see it for yourself, if you haven’t already. So let’s get to my most controversial point: Batman/Bruce Wayne is not a capitalist. Sorry.
This Batman-as-financier stuff is a trick played by casting the actor whose greatest role was a psychopathic i-banker. Yes, Wayne is rich, but that’s not the same as being a capitalist. The guy running the bodega down the street is more of a capitalist than Bruce Wayne. Wayne has no interest in profit, in accumulation, in investing his wealth to produce more wealth. If you don’t see M-C-M’ you don’t have capitalism. Now, the character of Bruce Wayne has always been imbued with noblesse oblige, but let’s not get that confused with what a capitalist does. Wayne funds orphanages and renewable energy in distinction to the actual capitalist, Daggett, who is trying to pillage Wayne Enterprises, Bain-Capital-style. Daggett is pointedly dissed at a party full of rich people because he’s only interested in money. Those silly noveau-riche, so gauche, am I right?
So this is a class struggle all right, but it’s not between Bane’s pseudo-proles and Gotham’s elite with their cop army. That’s a sideshow. The struggle is within the ruling class itself, between the capitalist Daggett and the aristocratic Wayne. Wayne is far more feudalism than finance: heir to a manor complete with fawning manservant, unconcerned with business or money-making, bound by duty and honor even if it makes him a recluse.
Meanwhile, Daggett represents the rapaciousness and self-destructiveness of unfettered acquisition, stooping to working with terrorists to edge out Wayne’s position on the board of directors. And so we’re presented with a choice, which like with so much ideology is a false one: be ruled by the chaotic profit motive who holds out empty promises of liberation, or by an unaccountable violent lord who nevertheless promises to look out for our best interests. Using the French Revolution for inspiration, the Nolans have restaged the question of bourgeois revolution, but in reverse. They want you to stand with the monarchists.
Here’s where the renewable energy plot comes in. Wayne invested heavily in fusion power, which was apparently successful. However, he shuttered the project at great personal cost because he was worried about it being weaponized. This is why we can’t have nice things, world! Your betters have constructed cheap, clean, renewable energy, but it could be turned into a weapon by evil people (Russians of course, those reliable tragic mullatoes of global cinema – so white and so good at science, yet so ethnically other that things always go badly). So Wayne mothballs it “to keep it out of the wrong hands.” He alone determines the fate of the realm – in the name of the people, of course – as he hobbles around his mansion.
This is the essential gutlessness of the Nolans’ enterprise. They can write a knotty plot, and can even bring some visual style, but they have no feel for what most people actually feel and enjoy and find “relatable.” I’m impressed by their films, like I’m impressed by Michaelangelo’s Last Judgment even though it doesn’t inspire me to fear the torments of Hell. Even when I like a Nolan film, I don’t love it, don’t identify with it, and rarely get swept up in it unless the soundtrack forces me (for fascism, I’d like a bit more Wagnerian bombast in the score instead of Hans Zimmer’s strings tugging me by my sleeve from scene to scene). And I think that’s because the Nolans have absolutely no common touch, no feel for what energizes anyone who isn’t white and with summer home.
Oh, they try, but they largely waste a good football stadium set-piece while tipping their manicured hands by having a British choirboy sing the national anthem.
When it comes down to it, the Nolans are enthralled by the elite of the elite, and simply cannot stoop to dissent from them on any level. The Nolans won’t let us revel in the carnivalesque eviction of the rich from their condos, or let us enjoy shooting up the stock market before hurrying to the next scene, or even give us a riotous show trial to chuckle through.
Read your Jameson, boys: you’re allowed to let us indulge in our fantasies of communist utopia as long as you sew things up ideologically by the end. But we are never allowed to indulge; instead, the audience of the indebted and oppressed are invited to shake our heads sadly at the spectacle of redistribution of property. Dickens may have been a lip-quivering liberal in the face of social revolution, but he at least portrayed the poor with sympathy, depicting the destitute of London and Paris hanged, limbs lopped off for the slightest offenses. The Nolans only have sympathy for the ruling class aristocrats, and that’s what they insist on from their audiences. So they’ll let Bloomberg’s private army play the scrappy guerilla force: the cops are the underdogs when it comes to taking back the streets, and the Nolans want you to root for them.
I don’t watch a lot of movies these days, mostly because I find them as juvenile and regressive as this one. But I’ll be honest: sometimes I can “look past” shitty politics and enjoy films on a formal level, though it’s not as easy as it used to be. I halfway hoped I could do that for Dark Knight Rises. But the problem is that the shitty politics, and the Nolans’ slavering supplication to them, sap the film of its pleasures. The Nolans never honestly consider the antagonism between rich and poor. Instead, what could make for some really fertile drama is just another wasted set piece for some CGI pyrotechnics. Have some characters mouth some half-remembered platitudes from an E.J. Dionne op-ed, call it topical. This tone-deafness to class struggle renders the entire occupation of Gotham nonsensical when it could have been the most interesting part of the film.
This stems from the Nolans’ lack of any concept of popular power. There is no evidence that “the people” back this coup, no evidence of popular support, not even a scene where a newscaster summarizes it for us. There is barely any evidence of “the people” at all – it’s all cops and mercenaries battling it out. So instead of a real insurrection, the takeover of Gotham functions via Baroque conspiracies among elites struggling for status and power. By going medieval, this allows the Nolans to tie DKR into the previous two Batman flicks while crafting so much room for a sequel that you could fit a fleet of Batplanes into it.
They’ve sacrificed a whole lot of the script to the shareholders on this one, which isn’t really what I expect from them. But maybe it’s one reason they have so much affection for a world where elites can exercise their powers any way they wish. Capitalism is hard on art, and these guys want to suggest feudalism might be a better option.
Recent years have seen the acceleration of the rate of the reboot. A full sixteen years separates Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins from Burton’s Batman, but there are only ten years between Raimi’s Spider-Man and the recent The Amazing Spider-Man. When it comes to the sequels the gap also shrinks, eight years separate the unwatchable Batman and Robin from the reboot, but only five separates the latest spider-man sequel from the reboot. The fact that these sequels were failures, aesthetically if not commercially, is significant. They end the franchise, exhaust the product line, justifying the reboot in the eyes of the investors, if not the audience. They produce a frustration and exhaustion that is integral for the desire to begin again. Of course the quickest turnaround is the time between Ang Lee’s Hulk and The Incredible Hulk, add the new iteration of the Hulk in The Avengers and you have a production of new models at a rate that even exceeds the iphone. Of course the endless reboots of comic book heroes could be seen as another example of form matching content. Readers of comic books are accustomed to multiple iterations of the same character coexisting, of Ultimate and Amazing Spider-man, as well different interpretations all identified with different proper names, Ditko’s Spider-man, Miller’s Daredevil, etc.
The twist here is that the remakes are driven as much by corporate ownership as individual creativity. Sony Pictures owns the rights to make movies about Spider-Man, but, if the various rumors online are to be believed, it will lose those rights if it ceases to make films based on the character. The same is true for Twentieth Century Fox’s ownership of the X-men. It used to be the case that comic book fans of all ages could distinguish between DC and Marvel, debating the relative superiority of each brand’s characters, but the contemporary comic book film offers a much more complicated lesson in intellectual property, as different characters are owned by different studios. The question is no longer could the Hulk beat Wolverine, but what sort of multi-studio licensing deal could get them to appear in the same movie.
It is perhaps fitting then that if The Amazing Spider-Man has any thematic subplot, anything to warrant its existence beyond fulfilling the fine print in a contract, it has to do with the corporation. The new Spider-Man is not only a corporate product through and through, bitten by a spider at Oscorp, using Oscorp designed webbing in his shooters, and ordering his costume online, but is one whose entire origin is tied up with question of ownership of intellectual property. The film adds the backstory of Peter Parker’s parents, specifically his father who discovered the formula to make gene splicing possible, the sort that creates spidermen and lizards in lab coats, and disappeared before it could fall in the wrong hands. The inclusion of this backstory does not just give Peter a backlog of angst, but sets a plot in motion that has everything to do with intellectual property as the sought after property is eventually returned to its rightful corporate owner, a return which also paves the way for sequels.
The inheritance of property, and its return, is tied up with a search for a father figure. Peter’s search for a father takes him to several surrogates. First to Doctor Connors, employee of Oscorp, research associate of Peter’s father, and, eventually, the Lizard. Peter’s next surrogate father is Captain Stacy, father of Gwen Stacy. It is a trajectory that moves from corporate science to the militarized police force. Uncle Ben, Peter’s original father surrogate is somewhat elided in this search for father, relegated to a supporting role. He represents the working class background that Peter is trying to escape, an escape that is aided by his transformation. This spider-man is less a friendly neighborhood variety than an upwardly mobile wall-crawler, using his powers to bypass doormen and date outside of his economic bracket. In one particularly cruel scene, Peter Parker steals the Oscorp ID of a young intern, an intern with a Hispanic name, in order to meet Dr. Connors. I suppose that this is supposed to be proof of his intelligence and punk nature, but it just seems cruel. A cruelty that is underscored as the scene of the young man being dragged away by Oscorp security is played for laughs. This is the problem with this version of Peter Parker/Spider-man, he makes jokes, as Spider-man is expected to, but these jokes are more at the expense of weaker opponents, Flash Johnson and a hapless car thief, than the Lizard, making them seem more cruel than funny. Perhaps this change in Peter Parker/Spider-man reflects the fact that it is hard to believe the story of a downtrodden nerd turned hero in this day and age. The most contemporary scene of Peter Parker is not the skateboarding scene or the shot of him using bing to search for his father, but a scene in the film's conclusion, when Flash Johnson is seen wearing a Spider-man T-shirt to school. This is the ultimate lesson of this Spider-man: copyright is true power.
The real limitation of this reboot has to do with its omission of J. Jonah Jameson and the Daily Bugle. This is not just because J.K. Simmons was one of the best things about Raimi's films, but because the Daily Bugle's propaganda war against Spider-man gave the story a populist bent. Spider-man was a people's hero, hated by the newspapers and cops but loved by the people. His very existence testifies to a popular knowledge not reflected in the media and authority.
The ultimate point of reference for these various “reboots” is of course Nolan’s Batman series. It is the successful business model that all others copy. Nolan’s films have received a great deal of credit for being relevant, for capturing the spirit of their respective times. However, in all fairness it should be pointed out that relevance came cheaply after 9/11, a few remarks about the politics fear, the excess of state power, a debate about torture, or surveillance and everyone would claim that you captured the zeitgeist. Nolan's films had all of this, fear, surveillance, torture, and secrets making them films of their moment Thus it is perhaps no surprise that Nolan’s latest film, The Dark Knight Rises was even interpreted in advance of its release. These interpretations began with rumors that Nolan was going to shoot scenes at Occupy Wall Street, rumors that were given some credibility by the early trailers, which made references to wealth, and had Catwoman remark that Wayne left “so little for the rest of us.” This advance speculation took a turn for the strange and paranoid with Rush Limbaugh’s accusation that a villain named Bane could not be a coincidence in a year that Bain Capital was such a crucial campaign issue. (Why does the right wing always do cultural critique in the conspiratorial mode?) Of course all of this was silenced with the tragic massacre in Aurora, Colorado, which changed the discussion from the specifics of this film to the generic questions of violence in film.
It shouldn't be surprising that in this case the initial speculations were closer to the mark than Limbaugh. The Dark Knight Rises is a film about class struggle, but one that sides with the wealthy and forces of order. However, it is more accurate to say that the film tries to divide this struggle in two by separating the good and bad wealthy, the good and bad downtrodden. This gesture where there are good and bad of every class a gesture which mires social structures in the infinite variety of morals and character, is perhaps the ideological gesture par excellence.
This instrument of this division of Bane, who is presented as either the people's liberator or the most unconvincing demagoge ever. Bane's plan involves separating Gotham from the rest of the world, blowing its bridges and holding the entire city hostage with an atomic weapon. The newly liberated (or conquered) Gotham is then subject to the revenge of the repressed, prisoners are freed and the rich are subject to show trials before their exile/execution as they cross the frozen rivers separating Gotham from the rest of the world. However, it is not entirely clear if Bane is truly a revolutionary or simply manipulating Gotham to orchestrate its self-destruction. In the film this question hinges on whether or not he has turned over control of the atomic weapon to a random citizen, a gesture that would symbolize the "withering away" of the supervillan. There is an ambiguous suggestion of the connection between popular rule and tyranny.
Part of this ambiguity has to do with the film's inability to imagine the people. What do the ordinary people of Gotham think of Bane, who blows up their football team one minute and then offers them a chance to "do what they please" the next, appearing alternately as terror and liberator. The film does not even ask this question let alone answer it. The people of Gotham are shown to vacillate widely, demonizing Batman one minute, idolizing him the next, turning against order and then clamoring for it. It is perhaps this absolute distrust of the people, of any popular will or intelligence, more so than the love of billionaire vigilantes, that makes the film fascist. The people need to be lied to, this is the theme that is constant throughout all three movies.
The film is visually and thematically clear on the status of the police. Part of Bane's plan involves trapping the entire Gotham police force under the city, visually realizing the idea of a city without police. This is presented as a right wing nightmare rather than an anarchist fantasy. The police are eventually liberated, returning to a surface ruled by criminals and terrorists. This gives rise to the film's strangest scene. A group of police marching in unison to restore the city are confronted by a group of Bane's gang, a gang of mercenaries and freed prisoners, and told to disperse. The police refuse and attack the well armed gang and their tanks. Oddly they do this without guns, swinging their clubs. This is the perfect illustration of counter-revolution: the image and logic of revolution put in the service of its reversal. In order to restore authority, to make it look desirable and cool, it must take on the image and affect of rebellion. The film turns wealth, authority, and deception into acts of rebellion and subversion.
The question is often raised as to how long this superhero trend in movies will continue, how many reboots and sequels will we be subject to? Will we eventually mark time in reboots, differentiating the eras of Burton's Batman and Nolan's Batman, Raimi's Spider-Man and whatever comes next. This question is usually asked cynically, and it is generally assumed that the only logic driving it is one of profits. Maybe it is time to ask another question, one about ideology rather than economics. Given that all superhero films are defined by an absent people, by a hero we can idolize but never become, we can ask how long will we be captivated by these images of our own collective impotence? Perhaps the superhero film will come to end when we can imagine other ideas of the people, other ideas of collectivity, than passive and terrified masses.
For over a decade now, Christopher Nolan, whose “The Dark Knight Rises” opens this Friday, has been awing and taunting us with his restless blockbusters. Nolan has directed “Inception,” “The Dark Knight,” “The Prestige,” “Batman Begins,” “Insomnia,” and the independent “Memento,” which established his reputation in the summer of 2000. That film delighted everyone from university faculty to teen-agers with customized bongs. Since “Memento,” however, Nolan, though more critically praised than many directors and more commercially successful than most (“The Dark Knight” is the twelfth-highest grossing film of all time, and its sequel promises to crack the top ten), has been dismissed by many cineastes as slick and quasi-intellectual.
I think this is because they misunderstand what his films are doing. Nolan’s entertainments, the best ones, anyway, are games. I don’t mean that they resemble puzzles or tricks (though they do that, too), I mean that they are most satisfying when understood as games, not as novelistic narratives. They are contests with rules and phases, gambits and defenses, many losers and the occasional victor, usually a Pyrrhus type.
Take “Inception.” Many thrilled to this story about corporate spies who invade dreams, but smart critics tended to find it, like Slate’s Dana Stevens, “mind-blowing but not heart-moving.” On the whole, men like it more than women. I was confused by this until one female friend cut me off as I tried to explain my adoration for “Inception,” with, “Ugh, see, you have to explain it. It was all exposition.” And she’s right—the movie suffers from male-answer syndrome. When “Inception” isn’t explaining the rules of inception, the trick of implanting ideas in minds that’s at the center of its plot, it’s explaining the rules of “Inception.”
This friend, a novelist, is unmoved by quantifiable outcomes, strategy, unromantic conflict—by rule, the stuff of games. She has grown accustomed to considering those things to be opposed to feeling and invention, the stuff of good storytelling, of life. Yet, the philosopher Bernard Suits wrote, “To play a game is to engage in activity directed towards bringing about a specific state of affairs, using only means permitted by rules, where the rules prohibit more efficient in favor of less efficient means, and where such rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity.” Doesn’t that definition apply to life, too, and to the best stories? We’re stuck with certain constraints, and we must accept them to keep playing. When we fail, we labor to better understand the constraints, to figure out creative ways to live within them. Or, as Samuel Beckett had it: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
Nolan may take a dimmer view of human nature than Beckett. His characters fail at failing better. In “Memento,” Leonard (Guy Pearce) suffers from anterograde amnesia, a disorder that prevents him from forming new memories, which he acquired after his wife was killed and he took a blow to the head. He has spent every day since trying to find the perpetrator. Or so he tells himself. As Leonard’s backstory coalesces, we find, first, that he is being gamed by everyone else in the movie, and, eventually, that he is gaming everyone, including himself. He has intentionally forgotten that his wife didn’t die but, rather, left him (the film even suggests that Leonard’s wife was killed by Leonard himself), so that he can keep investigating the mystery of her murder over and over again.
Leonard has made his life “a puzzle you could never solve,” a detective says. “A dead wife to pine for, a sense of purpose to your life, a romantic quest.” A loser in the game of life, Leonard has arranged things in his own mind so that he can keep playing but never exactly win. “So you lie to yourself to be happy,” the detective says. “There’s nothing wrong with that. We all do it.” There is one thing wrong with it, actually—Leonard must keep killing to relive his fantasy.
In “The Prestige,” Nolan puts in an extra quarter and upgrades from one player who deceives himself in order to stay happy to two who deceive each other so that they can remain miserable. Set in the apparently cutthroat world of turn-of-the-century London magic shows, the story pits the jocular Robert Angier against the inscrutable Alfred Borden. Their gamesmanship is a series of increasingly astounding illusions that take over their real lives, though, like most all of Nolan’s creations, they have no lives outside their illusions. “That’s who he is. That’s what it takes!” Angier cries in anguished admiration of Borden. “He lives his act!”
By the end of “The Prestige,” another wife is dead, a child twice orphaned, mistresses and false diaries have been exchanged, Nicola Tesla has been revivified (by, who else, David Bowie) and has invented cloning, and Angier and Borden have played each other to death and beyond in order to perfect the greatest magic trick of all, the Disappearing Man. All of this for our grubby amusement. “Now you’re looking for the secret, but you won’t find it, because, of course, you’re not really looking,” Michael Caine hisses at us in voice-over. “You don’t really want to work it out. You want to be fooled.” Nolan is perpetrating his own trick upon the audience. But we don’t mind, because he also reveals the machinery behind the Disappearing Man. But yes, we do mind, because that bit of honesty makes the trick a disappointment, which ultimately makes “The Prestige” a disappointment. So Nolan is right. We do want to be fooled, but he has too much respect for us to do it.
“The Dark Knight” finds Gotham in the midst of the transition described by the sociologist Roger Callois, a founder of the field known as ludology, the study of games. In his 1958 book, “Man, Play and Games,” he proposed that societies develop along with the development of play. When a society is young, just as when people are young, its constituents learn to interact by imitating and scaring one another. As they mature, they leave off the shenanigans and develop a preference for contests of merit and chance, which provide the “pure equality denied (us) in real life.” Gotham is maturing, and Bruce Wayne is, too. After a year of ripping the masks off primitive villains, he meets Harvey Dent, the deft and fortune-favored new district attorney, and decides it’s time to retire.
The audience, of course, doesn’t want him to. We don’t want maturation. We want the atavistic game. We want death. And so, too, does Wayne. He’s become addicted to the mask, to killing. He believes that he is Batman. So from the huddle there must emerge an even more ghoulish and more pure killer to break the impasse—the Joker. While all of the virtuous and bent characters play one another, the Joker is out to “show the schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are.” As he says, “The only sensible way to live in this world is without rules.”
For all its urban grime, Nolan’s clearest inspiration is chivalric death matches, like the ones depicted in Arthurian literature. Batman and the Joker tear up Gotham practicing ars moriendi, the art of dying, as knights called it. The Joker wins every round save the last, because his only endgame is his own death.
I would argue that a new kind of movie came into being with Ledger’s Joker. Let’s call it the algorithmic action picture. Viewing “The Dark Knight,” and its follow-up, “Inception,” you feel as though you haven’t pressed “play” on a movie, but rather “start” on a game console, or that you’ve instructed a computer program to run and are watching its functions. These movies are so frenetically informative and their rules take up so much bandwidth that the screen seems to contain not mise-en-scène but “gameplay,” that interactive dance between player and video game.
Nolan, who is old enough (almost forty-two) to have avoided video games, has acknowledged that they influence him, and once you start looking, examples pop up everywhere. His characters find hacks, or “cheats” (e.g. Batman’s cell-phone panopticon in “The Dark Knight”), that short-circuit the narrative and confer short-lived omnipotence. They come up with “mods,” modifications to bypass some obstacle or create some new effect. In “Inception,” the team of corporate dream-spies led by Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) builds an elaborate dream sequence to invade the mind of an energy-empire heir only to have to rely on secret air ducts. If video-gaming could be said to have an unconscious, it is the “kill screen,” the level that the game designer never anticipated the player would get to, where the code breaks down. Nolan’s movies are full of kill screens, most ingeniously the “limbo” in “Inception,” a kind of pre-death purgatory of the soul where a dreamer can wander for an eternity.
But while all of Nolan’s movies owe a debt to the speed and info glut of video games, “Inception” is on another plane: it so unmodulated in its integration, such an efficiently overheating circuit, that it can be understood as a comment about video games and what they’re doing to our ideas of storytelling. I’ve seen the movie five times now, and each time I’ve played it differently. I don’t just mean that I’ve noticed new bits; I mean that I’ve moved through it differently, have interacted with its rules more and less petulantly, and have derived varying amounts of satisfaction from it depending on my willingness to engage. The film is so dense with its own game that if you get through it and appreciate it, it’s as though Nolan is saying to you, “You’ve won. You get it. Join me up here on the director’s chair.”
And there’s one last twist—for all its gunplay in tailored suits and all its bravura action, “Inception” is the most humane of Nolan’s games. I can’t not weep for Cobb, the only real person Nolan has ever created. Like Leonard in “Memento,” Cobb’s life is defined by the memory of his dead wife, the projection from his unconscious that keeps threatening to hack the code and end the movie. But, unlike Leonard, he’s made no game of her. He lives with his memory of her, with his grief, day in and day out. Just like the rest of us. Yet somehow he finds a way to keep playing.
Photograph by Chris Pizzello/AP.
The Dark Knight Rises may be the silliest and most overwrought of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, but it closes the series out on a satisfying high note. Although not as viscerally effective as The Dark Knight and quite a bit pulpier than Batman Begins, Nolan puts the whole of his craft on display in Rises.
This Dark Knight cohesively binds the other two entries to itself, forming one complete story. If the last go-round had the sensibilities of an edgy graphic novel, this one is a big, bombastic Saturday morning cartoon transformed into socially conscious pop art. The visuals deserve the benefit of the big screen, much of the acting is impeccable even if it’s in service of outsized dialogue, and Nolan has improved his own style when it comes to crafting exhilarating action. It’s a messy, ambitious, hyperactive epic and it’s as interesting for its flaws as its achievements. I dare say, the franchise is cheerier this time around, even if the story stakes are graver.
Of course, that melancholy that settled slowly over the last act of The Dark Knight permeates the opening chapters of Rises. After a decidedly James Bond-esque prologue involving new villain Bane, an absconded Russian scientist, and a hijacked aircraft, Nolan settles us into Gotham City eight years after the night Harvey Dent died. Taking a page or two from Frank Miller’s esteemed The Dark Knight Returns, this first hour is the most intriguing section of the movie.
Bruce Wayne is a broken, regretful recluse, hiding out as his empire is ruined over the shelving of a clean-burning energy source and the city continues to blame Batman for Dent’s death. Crime-wise, things couldn’t be sweeter for Gotham. The carefully planned lie that Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman) and Batman perpetrated has spared the city knowledge of Dent’s alter ego Two Face or to the depths that their righteous crusader had fallen. The Dent Act has seen the end to organized crime in Gotham, and now the greatest threat is a police force grown ambivalent and soft around the middle thanks to extended peacetime.
It is an enticing climate in which to bring a little chaos, and Nolan does that with a patient and deliberate hand, introducing the gestating rot and poison of the Wayne/Gordon deception and the impact it has had on them. A pair of new characters challenge the two men and bring the past racing back. For Bruce, it’s a fetching cat burglar named Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway) who has carved out a niche stealing from wealthy men and running roughshod over authorities ill equipped to handle her. Gordon’s interruptor is a young officer by the name of Jon Blake (Joseph Gordon Levitt), once an orphan and beneficiary of the Wayne Foundation’s charity, now a forthright inquisitor about Batman’s whereabouts and his real involvement with Dent. In addition, there are a few other new faces and the welcome return of Morgan Freeman as Lucius Fox, head of Wayne Enterprises and developer of Batman’s wickedly lovely toys. Marion Cotillard’s Miranda Tate is a wealthy philanthropist who wants to get in on Wayne’s prospective clean burning fuel and maybe into his bed as well.
As Bruce’s faithful butler Alfred struggles to break him out of his spiritual malaise and direct him to a life away from Gotham, Kyle drops hints of an approaching storm headed for the city. A storm called Bane, a mercenary rising out of the legends of the old world, born in the depths of a prison well and linked to the League of Shadows. He and Wayne shared a mentor, the late Ras Al Ghul (Liam Neeson)who himself took a shot at wiping out Gotham in Batman Begins. Bane’s plans for Gotham—and the Batman in particular—are far more sinister and grand, unraveling the city’s social order and its assumed era of peace. The sneaking undertones of Charles Dickens and the original Bob Kane creation begin a cautious duet in these early sections, and reach a screaming crescendo in the film’s unadulterated final third.
To speak more of the plot would do a disservice to those who haven’t seen it. At a basic level, it can be said that Nolan has undoubtedly raised the stakes for Batman and Bruce Wayne and created in Gotham and its residents a a microcosm so lovingly detailed that it can stand on its own without the caped crusader. This allows him to sequester Bruce for a time and really delve into the warring facets of the man, reminding again that the trilogy has always been about this character first and foremost. Christian Bale turns in his best performance of the three films, exploring Wayne’s ambition and frustration. He is introduced to us with his body bent and tested, watching his vision of a secure Gotham become a reality while his own personal dreams and happiness lay in ashes. Bruce comes alive again slowly, and this process—including the grueling passages where he must walk the original path of his enemy—is made real and poignant by the sincerity that Bale brings. He’s more than a rugged constipated growl this time around.
The scale and scope have increased at the same time the film pushes for a character study of Batman. Oldman and Levitt carry much of the second act as they race around in the shadow of Bane’s epic plot and try to find a way to save the city. They play well off of each other, and Oldman proves again why he’s such an underrated gem of the series; Jim Gordon is the public face of justice Batman could never be, and it has held just as dear a cost for he and his as it has for Wayne. The burden of a well-intended but ultimately corrupt lie weighs heavy on Gordon, and Oldman wears it openly and nakedly on his face. It’s a great performance, and Levitt matches it with a man that echoes and reminds Gordon of his early days as a greenhorn detective who was less desperate, less corruptible.
Caine and Freeman bring a warmth and tenderness to their roles, much needed this time around, and I found Caine’s scenes as Alfred the very backbone of this movie. I would have traded up some of Bane’s copious screen time for more Alfred Pennyworth and his strained relationship with the man he’s lovingly watched over all these years. Every film so far, Nolan has managed to scrounge up at least one or two vanished actors who we haven’t seen in awhile. Begins had a nice Rutger Hauer turn, and Dark Knight gave us Eric Roberts and Anthony Michael Hall. Rises tops those with Matthew Modine, playing a sagging police captain who has adjusted too well to the lack of criminal activity in Gotham. He’s gone too cocky, too complacent, but like Gordon he’s a good man who will have his iron sharpened and his mettle tested before all is said and done. I’ve not mentioned Bane, but there’s not much to say. Hardy is physically imposing, and the production team have done the best they could with that sinister face mask without turning him into Phantom of the Opera. Hardy’s sympathetic eyes and berserker posturing make him a tantalizing contradiction, but he never would have been my top pick for a villain. He’s not quite charismatic enough, not as mysterious or splendidly weird. Everything about him screams lackey or minion, a fact even Nolan ultimately acknowledges. Still, following up Heath’s Joker, Hardy had his work cut out for him and he gives the character a better turn than he probably deserved.
How about the ladies? Cotillard’s Miranda has a lovely and soft kind of presence that calms and tames some of the early turmoil, and I was encouraged to see Nolan willing to let her take part in some of the more harrowing action in the last third, not usual work for the side-character love interest in a Batman film. Hathaway’s Catwoman (never referenced by that name) is of course much more the action figure type, a lithe thief that looks great in leather and embodies a self-serving ethos that makes her as guilty as the Gotham fat-cats feeding off the city’s misfortune, even if she romantically sees herself as part of the 99 percent. Although she’s not the sleek and unmistably feline presence that Michelle Pfeiffer was, I quite liked Hathaway in the role and believe that her trembling morality, wavering between responsibility and selfishness, requires greater emphasis and may have resulted in a stronger, more focused film.
Focus is something The Dark Knight Rises could have used much more of. I have talked only of the characters, limited the gargantuan plot, and said nothing of some of the off-the-wall and splendidly huge action scenes that fill almost all of the last 45 minutes, and still I’ve barely given suggested shape to the film. The reality is that this stew is just too full, too rich, a potpourri of flavors that goes down well but leaves your taste buds tingling in shock. For one thing, Nolan has never gone this blatantly campy and pulpy before, in anything he’s done. Those who felt Batman could use more jolts of a serialized, devil-may-care adventure will leave this one satisfied. Anyone who had hoped this would delve more into the psychological underbelly of the madness of Batman, not so much. Nolan gently (at first) reminds that this is a comic-book character, not by rendering his choices moot and inconsequential, but by building events and actions to a peak so dramatically high that it can only remind of opera. Sometimes, it even has a little soap in it.
On the technical side of things, The Dark Knight Rises is more accomplished and impressive than its two predecessors, but it never hit me as hard dramatically and it doesn’t flow as well narratively. There’s extra fat here by about 30 minutes and some of the investment is lessened because the quiet character moments are limited to a handful of scenes. When he goes big in that finale, evoking the better instincts of Michael Bay and Ridley Scott, and referencing cinema classics like Fritz Lang’s dual masterpieces Metropolis and M, Nolan’s direction ignites with the passion found in breathlessly good comic book stories. Lang’s astonishing silent-era imagery and blatant but effective class-struggle melodrama are paid homage to in Bane’s restructured Gotham, with apocapytic kangaroo courts presided over by maniacs, and a standoff between cops and criminals which is so unapolegtically symbolic it feels ripped from an ancient funnybook strip. Unfortunately, this hair-raising miasma can’t help but also lose just a bit of its emotional impact because the emphasis keeps shifting.
The plot holes are probably more abundant here than in TDK or BB, but the overall atmosphere of Rises reminds of a fairy tale, and the logic gaps feel more like the delicious twists of a surreal dream than the attention-diverting gaffs of a sloppy filmmaker. In many ways, I see it as the spiritual compaion to Burton’s equally overstuffed Batman Returns. It’s not a traditional Batman movie, but it sure is a fascinating one. If there’s anything particularly diverting during the running time, it’s that inevitable question than even the most disinterested will be asking on their way in. Is this final curtain for Nolan’s caped crusader? Not as a film series—we know that—but as a character. Essentially, does Batman die? It turns out Nolan makes that question worth the 160 minute wait leading up to it. This is a strong and extremely entertaining end to the best superhero film series we have gotten to-date.
Rating:
The Dark Knight Rises (2012)
Posted by Mike C on July 20, 2012
Director: Christopher Nolan
This review contains serious spoilers, don’t read if you haven’t seen the film or don’t want it to be spoiled
After seeing posters for The Dark Knight Rises all over town, I had been anticipating a film that contains serious commentary on social change and revolutionary struggle. One possibility that I had considered was that this was a marketing ploy to capitalize on the past year of protest and revolution to get folks to see the film, yet after seeing it Thursday morning: it certainly does take the subject seriously. The only problem of course is that The Dark Knight Rises is what could be described as an anti-revolutionary, anti-populist, conservative film. That may sound a bit off-putting, but if we analyze the film as a political intervention, or rather a film that seriously deals with politics, then a political analysis and response is appropriate.
So what are the politics of The Dark Knight Rises and why are they problematic from a left wing perspective? To answer this we should look at the major conflict in the film: Bane’s attempt to control, and ultimately destroy Gotham City. The film starts off with Batman/Bruce Wane ruined and depressed by the experiences of the previous film. What returns him to his suit is Bane’s arrival in Gotham, a villain who was trained by the same organization that Wane was, who has come to Gotham to “finish the job” of destroying it (which was the conflict of the first film). Bane likens his method of destroying Gotham to that of escaping the prison that he experienced: letting people see the light and giving them false hope before accepting total despair. In other words, Bane’s motivations for wrecking havoc on the city are to first manipulate the people of the city into thinking that they are being empowered, while at the same time secretly plotting to destroy them all (this particular motivation is partially explained in the first film: that the city has “become too corrupt at every level”). He is a classic “mastermind” in this sense, as he works both with the rich and the “common criminals” to fulfill his goals and raising populist consciousness, each being a pawn in his game. A series of events in the film lead to Bane essentially seizing power in Gotham and declaring that he is ruling on behalf of the people.
While this may sound like something that would excite the Left, his ascendance is based on the threat of unleashing a nuclear device that would destroy the city if anyone leaves or the if outside world interferes with their plans. Bane thus forces the people to be “free,” and instead of being a “man of the people” he is secretly a manipulator of the people which mirrors the dominant Western narratives of revolutions of the past (for example we are taught that folks like Lenin and Castro helped lead genuine revolutions but were really secretly motivated by their lust for power). One problem with this of course is that it is a portrayal of a populist anti-rich group that is motivated by “evil” or malevolence, and thus much of the audience will certainly be reminded of recent events in New York City (which is essentially what Gotham is) like Occupy Wall Street and their populist anti-elite messaging here. The association is similar to what other major media releases like the video game Call of Duty are doing in their attempts to paint populist movements as evil terrorists, as David Sirota pointed out in a recent Salon article that compared politics of the film to the game.
A more significant problem with the film is not just the motivations of the villains as they are used in the plot device, but rather how that plot itself plays out. The villains are not only populists who resemble Occupy Wall Street, but in the film they actually seize power and thus challenge the State, or in other words: they carry out a revolution in the heart of capitalism. Now of course this doesn’t quite play out in the same way it would if Sergei Eisenstein had written the film, but the seizing of power and the question of the state play a central role for the film: for example there is a scene where the recently freed police force goes up against the new army of Bane’s Gotham. One of the police officers even says something along the lines of “there can only be one police force,” this line alone could help launch us into an in depth analysis about the monopoly of violence, the State, and how these questions are ideologically present in cultural products like Batman. This seizure of state power isn’t depicted as a mass uprising, but is rather part of Bane and his organization’s devious plans. Thugs and criminals are the new State in Bane’s Gotham which even includes an absurd kangaroo court with the delusional Scarecrow character presiding over the show trials, unfairly sentencing people to death. So the revolution of The Dark Knight Rises is a far cry from Battleship Potemkin and is instead more of a cautionary tale against allowing such disturbances of the social structure to occur.
So in the context of this plot device, Batman’s character plays a fundamentally conservative role. His status as a wealthy capitalist who secretly protects all the people of Gotham translates into his being the guardian of the very structure that allows folks like himself to have such wealth. It may be a stretch to call him a “counter-revolutionary” in the context of The Dark Knight Rises, considering the revolution itself is portrayed from a right wing perspective. But it isn’t just the portrayal of the motives and the revolution itself that makes the film politically problematic for the left. The secret motive of the revolutionaries to destroy Gotham with a nuclear weapon is related to what the philosopher Slavoj Zizek has said about major catastrophes in Hollywood films:”So the paradox is, that it’s much easier to imagine the end of all life on earth than a much more modest radical change in capitalism” (from the documentary Zizek!). This film highlights this claim about ideology and culture perfectly: even the seizure of power by the people against the rich can really only be understood as the end of the world or as a disaster for all humanity rather than a mere rearranging of social relations. Batman is thus the hero of Gotham who saved it from being rearranged, which would have lead to total destruction for all, or in other words, the very attempt at rearranging those social relations was a threat to all of humanity (or at least the whole city in this case) that only someone like Batman could prevent. This ideological content of the film cannot just be seen as “being read into it” but rather is what the film revolves around.
There are many more things that could be said about the film form both a political and cinematic perspective. But those of us who identify to some extent with social movements like Occupy Wall Street should be taken aback when we see the year’s most anticipated Hollywood film try to equate messages of populism to either being easily manipulated or secretly motivated by “evil destructive ends.” The fact that the film even deals with themes of revolution and social change is an interesting development itself, but framing is important and this film engages in a seriously problematic framing of the popular movements to challenge inequality.
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This entry was posted on July 20, 2012 at 8:00 AM and is filed under UK, USA. Tagged: Bane Revolutinary, Batman Conservative, Christopher Nolan, Politics of Batman, Politics of The Dark Knight Rises, The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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