A little bit ago, Peter Little wrote an essay for this site in which he argued that Dark Knight Rises was the fever dream of a ruling class in crisis:
Although Bruce Wayne has developed a revolutionary source of, “sustainable,” nuclear energy, he has hidden it from the outside world for distrust of the existing social structure’s ability to manage it. It is this very technology which Bane steals and transforms into the nuclear device which threatens Gotham’s annilhation. The ruling class’ implicit understanding of the limits and failures of their dreams of a technocratic solution to the crises of ecology, economy, and culture, are vivid, however, in the moments when Bane’s insurgency takes control of Batman’s arsenal of weapons and toys, employing them against the former ruling order in Gotham City.
The ruling classes’ terror is vividly painted; the possibilities of liberation are more confused.
I finally saw the Dark Knight Rises myself, and I don’t think I agree with this. Specifically, DKR doesn’t feel like a terrified film to me. And certainly, I think saying that the ruling classes’ terror is vividly painted is giving way too much credit to Christopher Nolan, whose imaginative powers, at least in his Batman work, are almost uniformly pedestrian. We never get to “mildly striking,” much less “vivid.”
Peter does a good job limning the ideological positions and tensions of the film, about which I think he’s broadly correct. Nolan is riffing on the financial collapse and the Occupy movement (as I think he’s said in interviews.) Bruce Wayne’s position as beneficent billionaire and technocratic expert is questioned, and the dangers of populist revolt are raised.
But they’re raised only in the most perfunctory manner, and then dismissed via half-assed genre conventions that are, at best, marginally competent. Just as one example, consider the police.
The real terror for a ruling class is always that its own security forces will join the opposition — that the order will be given to shoot the perpetrators of the mass uprising, and instead the police will give them guns. The police are, after all, basically workers in shitty blue collar jobs; they’re definitively not part of the 1%. They’re even (horrors!) unionized. If the ruling class is running scared, one of the things they should be running scared of is the possibility that the police will betray them.
But this is never even hinted as a possibility in DKR. Oh, sure, the police are dumb, ambitious, occasionally venal, at times cowardly, and, at times, too meticulous in the execution of their orders. But they never consider joining their fellow citizens in an assault on the Gotham elite. For that matter, Bane never considers the possibility that the police might betray their masters; on the contrary, he locks the officers up underground, and hunts them down when he can. For Nolan, for Bane, and for the police themselves, the police are always going to be on the side of order. That doesn’t strike me as the vision of a terrorized ruling class. It strikes me as the vision of a ruling class so comfortable that worst case scenarios haven’t even occurred to it.
Of course, part of the reason that the police can’t join the mob is that there isn’t actually a mob. Maybe I blinked and missed it, but as far as I could tell, all the on-screen violence in the film is perpetrated by Bane and his cronies. There are some show trials which I guess are ambiguous…but even those come off pretty much as directed by Bane, and the judge is not some pissed off derelict, but the Scarecrow, a supervillain. Bane does make some speeches in which he urges the people of Gotham to attack their betters, and we see some trashed apartment which seems like it may have been looted by citizens rather than Bane’s thugs (though again it’s unclear.)
But what we never see is actual members of the Gotham 99 percent rioting on their own behalf. The police, in their final showdown, are fighting Bane’s men, it looks like — the battle is against folks armed with machine guns who know how to use them, not against a random crowd with knives and clubs. Of course, there’s some suggestion that Bane’s recruits are from the Gotham underclass…but the underclass is filled with criminals and losers anyway, you know? A ruling class which thinks its foes are the lumpen is not a ruling class that is looking down the barrel of despair. It’s only when you can imagine that even imperial retainers like that lawyer Robespierre are out to get you that you can really start to talk about terror.
Nolan is exploiting the rhetoric of class war because it’s timely and gives his film a patina of contemporary meaningfulness. But I see no indication that he actually cares about the issues he raises, or that they have troubled his sleep for even a moment. The emotional center of his film is not the fear of rebellion against the ruling class. It’s the truly preposterous sequence in which Bruce Wayne climbs out of a foreign gaol pit while his fellow prisoners cheer him on. The 1% will be saved by their love of extreme sports. That’s a profoundly stupid vision…but its stupidity seems born of snug obliviousness, not desperation.
If Christopher Nolan has one rock-bottom belief, it’s that everyone — Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Catwoman, random incarcerated Arabic-speaking ethnics — loves billionaire playboys and wants to see them self-actualize. And, hey, if tickets sold are any indication, Nolan’s absolutely right…which means that the 1% have little if anything to worry about.
I agree the movie doesn’t actually care about the issues of our time, it’s just trying to be topical.
“The emotional center of his film is not the fear of rebellion against the ruling class. It’s the truly preposterous sequence in which Bruce Wayne climbs out of a foreign gaol pit while his fellow prisoners cheer him on.”
Heh, it’s clearly supposed to be some sort of Orpheus rising from the underworld sort of thing. And the title of the film seems to be invoking some sort of Jesus “He is Risen” thing.
Superhero writers have been milking this sort of thing since at least the 1978 Richard Donner Superman film. (Or maybe that’s mostly just a DC comics thing?) Is the 1978 Superman film the origin of the “Our Superheroes are our Jesus” meme, or does it go back earlier than that?
Well, the police probably won’t join the sans culottes as long as the state continues to grant them a few union perks and a decent pension plan. And the ruling class would never take those things away. I mean, you’d have to be a complete idiot to try and de-unionize police departments … oh wait.
The 1% will be saved by their love of extreme sports. That’s a profoundly stupid vision…but its stupidity seems born of snug obliviousness, not desperation.
Heh. I read that more as like, in the midst of chaos, it’s about your individual journey. Depends on whether you empathize with Bruce Wayne/Batman, I suppose. All the people who root for him are people who do empathize: Catwoman because she’s also trapped as a person she doesn’t want to be, Robin because he’s also an orphan, Gordan because he also loves Gotham City, and the prisoners because they’re also trapped in the pit. It’s not that they love the billionaire, necessarily, so much as that they can see parts of themselves in him. And I think the scene where Batman climbs out of the pit can be moving for the same reason, if you’ve ever felt like you’ve fucked everything up and it’s all going to shit and you’re trapped at the bottom of a pit etc.
But the movie can’t really be about the external reality of the populist revolt, either, for the reason that it’s too concerned with personal struggles to really be concerned with the collective struggle.
“The real terror for a ruling class is always that its own security forces will join the opposition — that the order will be given to shoot the perpetrators of the mass uprising, and instead the police will give them guns. ”
While I think that’s a practical terror for actual ruling classes, I’d argue that it’s not a part of the resonant, iconic terror of the peasant revolt, which in a story about heroic symbols seems more relevant. Certainly in this country, the general conservative narrative of fear is that the underclasses will break into your home to steal your television, so you had better vote to be tough on crime. The incorruptibility of the police would seem to serve the same narrative function as the incorruptibility of Batman himself – as a fable of an unerringly moral violent force that will keep us all safe from evil qua evil and jealous poor people.
That said, in terms of Nolan’s intentions, I think you’re right that “Nolan is exploiting the rhetoric of class war because it’s timely and gives his film a patina of contemporary meaningfulness.” But I don’t think his apolitical intentions necessarily remove the political meaning from what’s actually in the film.
That is, by choosing to deal in class warfare imagery in a story that by default of being a Batman story must end with the status quo upheld and a billionaire victorious, Nolan made an extremely right-wing film whether or not he realized that he was.
“story must end with the status quo upheld and a billionaire victorious”
Didn’t Batman lose all of his money at the end of the movie?
Pallas, it’s somewhat unclear. On the one hand, he says the narrative says he lost his money…on the other hand, we see him at the end gallivanting about Europe, apparently, so he must have had some money socked away somewhere.
Jason, I think it is a right wing film…but I don’t know that it’s a extremely right wing film, just because Nolan is too stupid/uninterested/untalented to really create an emotionally resonant fascist fever dream. It’s a half-assed right wing film, I’d argue.
“everyone — Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Catwoman, random incarcerated Arabic-speaking ethnics — loves billionaire playboys and wants to see them self-actualize. ”
I love this. Isn’t it weird that we’re all existing as part of Mitt Romney’s dream but he still wants us to vote for him? It sort of feels like he’s testing us.
David Bordwell described the typical Hollywood approach to politics as “strategically ambiguous”, a point he recently made again with explicit reference to the Batman movies. That’s a nice phrase, I thought.
The “Clybourne Park Is Lying To You” article here ( https://hoodedutilitarian.com/2012/08/clybourne-park-is-lying-to-you/ ) pretty deftly analyzes a similar approach.
To follow that actually unthreatening “feel that something dangerous is happening,” create the illusion that Significant, Timely Issues are being addressed, approach — while actually reinforcing the status quo — is rewarded; by audiences, critics.
The important thing is not to turn the audiences or mainstream critical establishment off by yielding any revelations, actually cast harsh lights upon nasty truths heretofore carefully ignored by the “liberal media”…
———————-
subdee says:
…the movie can’t really be about the external reality of the populist revolt, either, for the reason that it’s too concerned with personal struggles to really be concerned with the collective struggle.
————————
And we are carefully kept thinking our ourselves as atomized individuals (at most joined by the spouse and kids) rather than parts of exploited groups. Check out “STUNNING: Comparing U.S. & World Covers for TIME Magazine”: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/11/25/1039957/-STUNNING-Comparing-U-S-World-Covers-for-TIME-Magazine . Showing that while covers aimed at foreign markets regularly cover the revolution in Egypt, international issues, the American ones for the same week encourage navel-gazing; focus on “me, myself, and I”…