Tag Archives: Batman

Time-Traveling Supervillain Gatsby the Great

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Jimmie Gatz, AKA Jay Gatsby, debuted in dual-identity crime fiction long before the prototypal Bruce Wayne slipped on his Bat tights.  F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby rolled off the press in 1925, Detective Comics No. 27 in 1939. When Bob Kane and his writers (probably Bill Finger, possibly Gardner Fox) tacked on an origin story six issues later, they set the alleyway murder of Bruce’s parents “Some fifteen years ago.” I’m not suggesting Gatz (it’s slang for “gun”) was that homicidal thug (one of Mr. Wolfshiem’s other associates would be a better guess), but the Gatsby and Wayne funerals would have been simultaneous. Which might explain why nobody attended Gatsby’s. Though I suppose friends of the extravagantly respected Waynes would have snubbed a West Egger regardless. Thomas and Martha Wayne were tight with the Buchanan crowd.

“Jay Gatsby” is a disguise, one as elaborate as the mild-mannered reporter a certain Kryptonian invented for himself. Jimmie Gatz was born on the alien planet of smallville Minnesota. To the snobbish Nick Carraway, he might as well have crawled out of New York’s lower East Side or the swamps of Louisiana. He is a rough-neck trying to pass as an Oxford man. And, unlike Bruce and Kal-El, he’s not one of the good guys.

Jay is a party-crasher to a long tradition of gentleman thieves popular in the first decades of the century. For an origin point, see E. W. Hornung’s 1898 “A. J. Raffles,” a man of seeming wealth and leisure who secretly burgles his fellow aristocrats. Hornung was a brother-in-law of Arthur Conan Doyle, and his character is an inverted Sherlock Holmes. By 1925, the character type’s anti-heroism had mutated to Robin Hood do-goodery, the mission Kane and Finger burgled for Batman. Graham Montague Jeffries published Blackshirt the same year, another tale of a thieving yet well-intentioned well-born—this time inspired by Mussolini’s Fascists. Hitler published Mein Kampf in 1925 too, a treatise Tom Buchanan and many of his fellow East Eggers sent up the best seller list.

As far as supervillainous schemes go, the Gatz Plan for World Domination is small-fry, mostly bootlegging and stock scamming. Unless you count his secret identity itself. “Jay Gatsby” is an agent of social chaos greater than Christopher Nolan’s Joker. To Tom Buchanan, the mere existence of the new money millionaire signifies the collapse of Aryan Civilization. Soon blacks and whites will be marrying. He’s the bridge beyond which anything can happen.

But what ultimately wins Nick over to Gatsby’s belated side is his other Plan for World Domination, the wooing of Daisy Buchanan. In addition to re-inventing himself, Jay invents a time-machine more complex than Dr. Doom’s or Kang the Conqueror’s. He wants to reboot the world and repair the moment he lost Daisy. And like any Quixotic supervillain, he can’t see the futility of his own plan. Of course he’s going to fail. That’s the point.

I miss teaching The Great Gatsby. Before I re-invented myself as a college professor, Fitzgerald was a perennial high point on my high school syllabus—same as most high school syllabi. I don’t need a time machine to visualize the filmstrips from the 1974 adaptation I had to watch when I was sixteen. It’s a god awful film, the surprisingly incompetent script penned by Francis Ford Coppola. So imagine my delight when I heard Baz Luhrmann was taking a fresh shot. His Romeo and Juliet was a delightfully frenetic mess, Moulin Rouge yet more so, and so who better to capture the excesses of the decadent 20s?

True to form, Baz delivers a circus wagon of a movie. I was planning to enjoy it, but despite the incongruous hip-hop beats, it was almost as yawningly dull as last time Gatsby the Great popped into our timeline. I admit much of the problem is me. I know the book embarrassingly well, and the Luhrmann script, like the Coppola script, is a collage of favorite lines. I know, you’d think that would be a good thing—Fitzgerald’s own words!—but it means neither doggishly devoted screenplay ever commits to its own storytelling.

Worse, Luhrmann loves voiceovers. Which isn’t necessarily an absolute evil in screenwriting. But instead of visual juxtapositions or contradictions, we get lazy repetitions. Tobey Maguire narrates what we’re already seeing. He tells us that his neighbor is standing on the dock reaching for the green light. And, yep, sure enough, there’s Leonardo DiCaprio doing exactly that. It’s the definition of excess, but not the fun kind (like replacing Klipspringer’s baby grand with a church-sized organ—why not!). Early comics suffered similar redundancy. Look at the Bill Finger panel declaring Batman’s first appearance in Detective Comics 27: “As the two men leer over their conquest, they do not notice a third menacing figure behind them… It is the ‘BAT-MAN!’” And, yep, that’s exactly what Bob Kane drew in the panel under it. Comics outgrew the flaw decades ago, making poor Tobey all the more annoying now.

But maybe Baz is fulfilling a larger theme here. Gatsby has to fail. It’s what makes him Great. Ultimately, he and Bruce aren’t very different. Yes, Batman directs his megalomania for good—but just barely. His never-ending war on criminals is about vengeance and self-punishment. He’s ceaselessly borne back into his parents’ alleyway, endlessly replaying a botched past he will never get right. Gatsby’s jilting at the hands of Daisy is no different. It’s a fate he’ll never escape either.

“Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!”

I can’t wait till the next time Hollywood reboots him.

 

Children of Chaos

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Detective Comics 66. Two-Face's origin

 
Bob Kane first drew the villain Two-Face in 1942 (Detective Comics #66). But it wasn’t till 2008 that the Nolan brothers got his origin right. My favorite scene from The Dark Knight is Heath Ledger’s Joker convincing Aaron Eckhart’s brutally disfigured Harvey Dent to embrace the dark side. How’s he do it?

With the flip of a coin.

Javier Bardem made similar use of a quarter the year before in the Coens’ No Country for Old Men. Live or die? Ask JFK and the eagle.

Rewind two more years, to Woody Allen’s 2005 Match Point, and Jonathan Rhys Meyers spells it out: “People are afraid to face how great a part of life is dependent on luck. It’s scary to think so much is out of one’s control.”

Meyers’ character (he later gets away with murdering an inconvenient lover) fascinated Roger Ebert because, like all of the characters in the film, he’s rotten: “This is a thriller not about good versus evil, but about various species of evil engaged in a struggle for survival of the fittest — or, as the movie makes clear, the luckiest.”

Bardem’s Anton Chigurh is a hitman, so at least he’s supposed to kill people. But that’s not what makes him so damn scary. The movie’s nihilism is contained in those coin flips. When Chigurh tells a gas attendant to “Call it,” the man says he didn’t put nothing up to bet. “Yes, you did,” Chigurh answers. “You’ve been putting it up your whole life you just didn’t know it.”

Myers’ tennis pro plays the same game: “There are moments in a match when the ball hits the top of the net, and for a split second, it can either go forward or fall back. With a little luck, it goes forward, and you win. Or maybe it doesn’t, and you lose.” Near the film’s end, when he tosses an incriminating piece of evidence (his dead lover’s ring) toward the river, it takes the same fate-determining bounce. He wins.

When the gas attendant wins his toss, Chigurh congratulates him and tells him not to put the lucky quarter in his pocket where “it’ll get mixed in with the others and become just a coin. Which it is.” Chigurh’s last victim already know this and so refuses to play: “The coin don’t have no say. It’s just you.”

“Well,” says Chigurh, “I got here the same way the coin did.”

Coin-Toss

The Nolans’ Joker embodies the same anarchic philosophy: “I’m not a schemer. I try to show the schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are.” And in the true spirit of  anarchy, he points the gun at himself. “I’m an agent of chaos,” he explains to Harvey Dent as he leans his forehead into the barrel. “Oh and you know the thing about chaos, it’s fair.”

The Joker survives his coin toss too, but not Dent. He’s Two-Face now. He worships Chigurh’s god.

My wife and I were recently catching up on the last season of the British cop show Luther. It opens with Idris Elba (we liked him as a gangster in The Wire too) sitting on a couch, playing Russian roulette. He learned the game from a homicidal army vet, not the Joker, but his character is relinquishing his will to the same higher Non-Will as the others. Except Luther is a (mostly) good guy. So by the season’s end he’s traded in the gun (he rarely carries one anyway) for an ice cream cone with his newly adopted teen daughter. What got him there?

Not a coin toss.

It wasn’t a roll of the dice either. That’s the device of chance preferred by the season’s ugliest villains, a pair of identical twins (two people, one face) playing a real-world game of D&D. They earn experience points by killing people. You can do it anywhere, a gas station, subway, a lane of stopped traffic. Just open your backpack, spread out your bat, hammer, and squirt gun of acid, and roll the dice.

I bought our twelve-year-old his first D&D game this Christmas. (He learned about the game last year from a particularly hilarious episode of our family’s favorite sitcom, Community.) So while Luther’s evil twins were rolling their dice, our son was upstairs rolling his. I can now differentiate between the thump and skid of dice on floorboards and the smack and skitter of dice in a D&D box lid.

I asked him once, if instead of killing the various trolls and orcs and armored whatnots he has to battle, could he just knock them out, tie them up, and leave them for the authorities to incarcerate?

He said, “What authorities?”

Right. There’s no government in D&D. It’s literal anarchy. Even at the metaphysical level. There are plenty of supernatural beings, but no Supreme One. Gods but no God. Even the Judeo-Christian Lord is only the sum of the numbers in the Dungeon Master’s hand. And the DM isn’t God either. He (yes, in this case, DMs are almost as uniformly male as Catholic priests) must obey the Dice like everyone else.

Roll them to determine the whims of heredity, what skills and proclivities you’re born with, which you’re not. The Dice control every important moment of your life, every struggle, the literal blows of chance. Sure, my son admits to ignoring the occasional bad roll, but he said it gets boring if you do that too much. Real life is random.

So why is randomness overwhelming portrayed as “evil” in pop culture?

The Brave and the Bold 130

First time I saw Two-Face as a kid (October 1976, The Brave and the Bold #130), he bewildered me. Instead of just killing Batman and Green Arrow, he and the Joker flip a coin? (Allowing the Atom to secretly climb on and alter its fall.) At some point in the story, Two-Face betrays the Joker—and not because Heath Ledger killed his fiancé. It’s just what his quarter tells him to do. So why, my ten-year-old self wondered, is the guy considered a supervillain?

When those D&D twins bend down with a 20-sided die, only the ugliest options are in play. Shouldn’t your backpack have more than murder weapons? Where’s the wad of twenties for homeless people’s cups? Why does Chigurh only flip a coin when he’s thinking about plugging someone in the head? A true worshipper of chance would be Mother Theresa half the time.

So it’s not randomness that makes hitmen, supervillains, D&D players, and tennis pros scary. It’s the deification of randomness. The abdication of responsibility. A true nihilist (like Alan Moore’s Comedian) embraces the absence of God and so the permissibility of everything. But that’s an abyss too deep for the Two-Faces of the world. They can’t fill that God-sized gap with themselves. They can’t hack that much free will. So instead of randomness, they invent Randomness and pretend they’re just following order. Pretend that’s not really your finger on the trigger.

You can take comfort in the illusion that the bullet in Russian roulette chooses you. But an ice cream cone, that’s something you have to go out and get. It’s a scheme. You have to choose to want it despite the uncontrollable probabilities of your getting or not getting it. If life’s a crap shoot, the only question is how you cope with that fact.

I do know one writer who flips Randomness to make us see it not as a force of evil but of good. Or, more accurately, of helpful change. Glen Dahlgren’s A Child of Chaos spins a D&D-inspired world where the lazy gods of Charity, Evil, War, etc. have gotten a bit too complacent. What the universe needs is the smack and skid of a die. Literally. That’s the magic instrument of Chaos, how the promised one will restore some much needed disorder, unlock all that magic the privileged class keeps hogging. No more homicidal lunatics. Chaos is our hero.

Unfortunately you don’t get to read Dahlgren’s novel yet. My copy is a Word file in my laptop. The manuscript (like my own third novel) is still mid-spin in the seemingly random universe of the publishing industry. I’m rooting for the unmarred JFK side of the coin. But there are no guarantees. Right now my agent is battling the forces of Evil and trying to land my manuscript in a New York house. It’s a chaotic process (stalled by the randomness of a hurricane and jaw surgery so far), but the dice keep bouncing.

Glen and I aren’t complaining. Like Chigurh’s last victim, we understand the rules of the game: “I knowed you was crazy when I saw you sitting there. I knowed exactly what was in store for me.”

God bless chaos.

dice

The Devil You Thought You Knew, The Devil You Wish You Didn’t

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Hating comics is a strage business for me. I’m not against it – I’m not a Team Comics guy, worried about hurting Brian Bendis’ feelings. I’m a big Comics of the Weak fan, and I’m writing for the Hooded Utilitarian. I’m down with hate. But I find it unexpectedly difficult to hate comics.

Most comics, even some corporate ones, are the product of one or two idiosyncratic minds putting pen directly to paper. Even if I don’t particularly care for them, they tend to fascinate me as art objects. And the truly focus-grouped editorially-driven corporate comics? I’m frankly not invested enough in most of them to care if they’re all that bad. A bad comic of that sort is far more likely to inspire mere apathy. It takes something more than poor quality to drive me to hate.

To hate a work of art, I have to feel trapped or confronted by it in some way. Popularity will do it, sometimes. I almost wrote this essay about 100 Bullets, and then almost again about The Walking Dead. Neither of those books are the worst things I’ve ever read, but I also don’t find much to value in them, and their various levels of critical and commercial success serve to turn my general distinterest into a sneer of disgust. (You might think that sounds petty, and at one point I would have agreed with you. But I’m more inclined these days to see the general public reaction to a work as a legitimate part of that work’s existence, and worth reacting to in its own right. Plus, frankly, it’s just sickening to hear constant praise of work you consider undeserving.)

But most comics aren’t really that popular or that talked about. And unlike a movie, for which you sit passively in a dark room for a predetermined amount of time with nothing to focus on but Bradley Cooper’s “punch me” face, reading a comic at all requires active participation. If I’m not enjoying a comic, my energy for that participation just slides away, and I toss the book aside. I’m not trapped in it.

I can’t even fall back on old, reliable superhero nerd rage. Up until embarrassingly recently, I could become greatly offended by terrible superhero comics that violated my vague platonic ideal of what a superhero comic should be. A few years ago, I might have found it in me to write this entire essay on Identity Crisis, or a Mark Millar comic. But now, I try, but it fizzles. Superhero comics were never the most relevant things to begin with, and for me they’ve now spiralled off into utter inconsequence.  (Superhero movies, on the other hand, are a constant presence in the cultural conversation, as well as being formally dominating experiences, and I have little to no problem hating THOSE. I hate that new Batman movie and I haven’t even seen it yet.)

So to write about a comic that I truly hate, I have to pick one that affected me on a personal level. I’ve picked a comic that, although it isn’t particularly important, let me down tremendously, and that I came to hate through sheer disappointment. That comic is Matt Wagner’s Batman/Grendel II.

I wonder for how many people Matt Wagner’s name still resonates. Briefly glancing over a chronology of his work, most of his output over the last decade-and-a-half seems to be scattered projects from DC or Dynamite, mostly writing franchised characters like Zorro or Madame Xanadu; some short work writing his own characters, some work drawing Batman. But nothing much to suggest that, for a time in the late eighties and early nineties, Wagner was one of the most consistently interesting and experimental of mainstream-minded American cartoonists. His was a mixture of complex but balanced geometric page layouts, high fashion and art deco-influenced design, a deliciously cartoonish line embellished with painterly colors, all mixed with a strong, semi-modernist writing style.

His earliest major work, Mage, a traditional fantasy quest recast to then-current ’80s urban America and strained through a cheeseclotch of comic book iconography, was the kind of thrilling learn-on-the-job opus that only a young cartoonist can deliver – from page to page and chapter to chapter you can see Wagner gaining confidence and competence in equal measure, his skill rapidly catching up to his ambition. In the middle of Mage, Wagner began his other major early work, Grendel: Devil by the Deed, a re-make of his first comics series, a crude but vibrant entry into the ’80s black-and-white boom called Grendel, about a young, wealthy sociopath named Hunter Rose who becomes the world’s greatest criminal mastermind out of want for a challenge. Foregoing the previous work’s lightly-manga-influenced adventure comics style, and having substantially improved as a draughstman, Wagner re-told (and expanded) the entire Grendel story in a series of tableaus and captions, the panels of the comics page divided up to somewhat resemble the composition of a stained-glass window. It was an experiment that earned high praise from then-fresh superstar Alan Moore in his introduction to the collected edition, and arriving as it did simultaneously with the virtuoso final issues of Mage, together they announced Wagner as most definitely someone to watch.

Wagner’s career post-arrival followed what now seems like something of a familiar path for eye-catching independent artists working in a mainstream idiom. He only occasionally drew his own characters again in comics form, instead making the likely economically expedient (as well as, admittedly, often aesthetically interesting) choice of writing a long run of Grendel stories for other artists to interpret, and plying his drawing skills on various franchise characters (including a Terminator comic that was actually fairly excellent, if memory serves) and many, many cover art jobs. Through the ’90s he did draw several short Grendel stories (the character of Grendel long-since transformed into a sort of freefloating symbol of the evils of mankind, with many different characters through time and space taking on the persona of the devil), and delivered a long-awaited sequel to his Mage series. The latter, though, is best discussed through the prism of the twin projects that are my true, belated subject today: 1993’s Batman/Grendel and 1996’s Batman/Grendel II, or rather, the aesthetic distance between these two works, both written and drawn by Wagner himself.

 

The Aesthetic Distance.  (Left, Batman/Grendel.  Right, Batman/Grendel II.) 

 

Batman/Grendel is far from the best comic ever made, but it does happen to be one of my personal favorites. Wagner, operating at his most formally innovative — with page layouts to die for, and the most elegant linework of his career (not to mention beautiful coloring by Joe Matt) — delivers a comic that on the surface purports to be about an epic battle between two wealthy playboys who enjoy violence on rooftops while wearing masks, Wagner’s own perverted inverse of Bruce Wayne versus the genuine article. The heart of the comic is actually, however, the story of two women, Hillary Ferrington and Rachel King.

The narrative consistently paints both Grendel and Batman as obsessive, destructive, meticulous, and both more than a little inhuman, both callous to the emotional realities of human life, the only difference being that one is callous out of sadism and the other out of expediency. And in the vein of the best of Will Eisner’s work on The Spirit, their entire superheroic clash of wills is constructed largely as backdrop to the story of Hillie and Rachel’s friendship, their tortured pasts, and their struggles against an increasingly hostile world filled with terrors such as wealthy playboys who enjoy violence on rooftops while wearing masks.

 

Wagner still fulfills the genre demands of a Batman story – there’s plenty of Batman puzzling things out at a computer, or thinking terse caption thoughts about how the weights in his cape are perfectly suited for urban combat – but he structures the big emotional beats of the story all around Hillie and Rachel. It’s a comic that uses the superhero setting to tell a human story, and unlike 99 percent of the stories that try that trick, it unembarrasingly succeeds.

Again, it’s still a Batman comic, still an inter-company superhero crossover, and still indebted to genre and melodrama in ways that could be argued to work to its detriment as a piece of art for the ages. It isn’t the best comic ever made. But I think that its formal mastery, compelling story, and welcome attention to gender politics and genre critique make it something kind of special. I love it a lot.

Batman/Grendel II, released three years later, takes a huge shit on everything that made Batman/Grendel even a little bit special.


The sequel finds Wagner in a different mode of storytelling. Gone are the tightly constructed and narratively functional layouts. In their place are splash pages crowded with unmoored smaller panels that often lead your eye in the wrong direction, to no good aesthetic effect. The most functional visual device is a re-hash of Frank Miller’s already decade-old television narration from The Dark Knight Returns. Gone, too, is the elegant linework. In 1996, Wagner had begun to loosen up his art, freeing himself from his devotion to the angles and fashions of 1980s illustration. The result is art that may very well have been more fun and personally fulfilling for Wagner to draw, but which looks clumsy and ugly on the page when compared to his previous style.

Most importantly, gone is any thematic or narrative resemblance to what made Batman/Grendel a minor miracle. This is not a story about any kind of human experience. This is a story about Batman fighting a cyborg from the future. Overwrought captions describe in agonizing detail how each of them feel about every moment of the story, endless verbiage that unironically calls Batman “The Dark Knight” and Grendel “The Devil” as it painstakingly narrates their utterly pointless and generally uninteresting fight to a stalemate that Wagner pompously postures as enigmatic and ambiguous in a desperate attempt for any kind of meaningful resonance.

Batman/Grendel II‘s thorough betrayal of everything Batman/Grendel did right can be summed up by its very first page, in which Hillary Ferrington, the narrative and emotional heart of the former work, makes a cameo appearance that is used for exactly three purposes: (1) to display via her close-shaved head and multiple piercings that Wagner has ditched the elegant art deco stylings of old, (2) to lay exposition regarding the book’s fatuous internal free speech debate, and (3) to talk about how awesome Batman is. That Wagner is seemingly fine with disrespecting one of his best characters in this way speaks to the loss of something in him. And it is a loss that can be seen in his work through to the present.

After Batman/Grendel II, Wagner delivered his aforementioned Mage sequel, which displayed a similarly loose pencil and disinterest in the formal rigors of his previous work. It also, like Batman/Grendel II, displayed a much less nuanced sense of irony in regards to its straight-ahead mythic-adventure story. Where once Wagner used fantasy tropes to explore human situations, now the tropes themselves had become the focus. The same can be said of his post-’96 corporate superhero work (which makes up the bulk of his post-’96 work, in toto), at least that which I’ve read. Even the latter-day Grendel stories that he still occasionally writes for other artists are laden down with all the self-importance and forced darkness of a goth teen. Where once he used genre trappings as a delivery system for something bigger, he seems dedicated now to wallowing in those trappings for their own sake.

There’s a large degree of unfairness to what I’m saying. A perfectly valid view of all of this would be that I’ve merely gotten older, and my tastes have changed, while Wagner too has matured, and his art has shifted gears, just in a different direction. In some ways, his looser artwork may speak to Wagner achieving a more direct and free form of expression on the page. That I’m frustrated at the lack of particular thematic or formal tics in his current work is perhaps as much to do with my own nostalgia as any artistic lack on Wagner’s part. And like I said up top, Batman/Grendel II isn’t the worst comic in the world. If what you want is Batman fighting a murderous cyborg from the future, it might even be a pretty good one. But I can’t tell. I’m too sad at the loss of a cartooning voice I cherished, and too angry at the imposter that strolled in and tried to take his place. It’s an irrational feeling, but then again, so is hate.
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Click here for the Anniversary Index of Hate.

To the Bat Tunes, Robin!

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This first appeared on Madeloud.
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The old sixties Batman TV show with Adam West and Burt Ward is best known for the Batmobile, Bat Shark Repellent, and Bat Overacting. However, the show also featured a number of high profile musical guest stars. Here then, are some of the greatest Bat-cats ever to swing through stately Wayne Manor and environs.

Liberace
“The Devil’s Fingers/The Dead Ringers”
Episodes 49 and 50
October 19 & 20, 1966

Liberace was too perfect a choice to be contained in a single Batman villain guest spot, so he did two at once, portraying both piano maestro Chandell and Chandell’s evil twin brother Harry. The plot starts off strong as Chandell declares, “Listen for a moment; I’ll toy idly with the keys, and set the mood.” He then launches into a highland air, instantly summoning a trio of criminal Scottish lassies toting inhumanly piercing bagpipes. From there the plot only get sillier, featuring attempted murder by piano-roll puncher, the lassies transformed into Burmese dancing girls, and Bruce Wayne deducing the whole evil scheme when he realizes that Chandell made a mistake in a C-minor chord (“Holy impossibility, Batman!” as Dick Grayson says.) Oh, and we get to watch that ladies’ man Chandell seduce Aunt Harriet. And he utters the immortal line “I’ll cast off my criminal skin like a molting butterfly!”

While it’s fun to watch Liberace play himself as Chandell; watching him adopt a tough-guy, cigar-chomping persona as Harry is brain-meltingly preposterous, and somehow even gayer than gay — it’s like he’s wearing butch drag. Not to be outdone in flamboyance, Bruce Wayne spends a certain amount of the episode literally camping, and then he and Dick fake their deaths by incinerating themselves in a flaming closet.

Chad and Jeremy
“The Cat’s Meow/The Bat’s Kow Tow”
Episodes 63 and 64
December 14 & 15, 1966

Gentle moderately popular sixties British folk duo Chad & Jeremy appear here as insanely popular, dangerously wild sixties British folk duo Chad & Jeremy. However, in a daring plot twist, the dangerously wild sixties British folk duo Chad & Jeremy reveal to Bruce Wayne’s Aunt Harriet that they are in fact gentle and civilized, sipping tea and declaring, “Really we hope to go back to school as soon as we can to complete our education… Just think of it: every record our fans buy brings me closer to becoming a brain surgeon!”

Alas, their fans are not so cultured, and they screech, holler, and throw up their hands when their idol’s voices are purloined by Catwoman (an incandescently yummy Julie Newmar.) Catwoman’s dastardly plan is to hold the voices for ransom, demanding twenty-two million dollars from Britain since “Chad and Jeremy pay so much income tax to their native land,” and that if they stopped the entire economic structure of the world would collapse.

In other highlights, Chad & Jeremy provide jovially irreverent interviews like the Beatles and seek out hair salons. They also perform a few verses of the sunnily inoffensive “Distant Shore,” and almost all of the peppily inoffensive “Teenage Failure.” “Aren’t they great, Alfred?” the enraptured Dick Grayson asks. “Well, they do sway, don’t they?” replies the stoical Butler.

Also in this episode…Batman and Robin climb down the side of a building past the window of Hawaiian singing legend Don Ho.

Leslie Gore
“That Darn Catwoman/Scat Darn Catwoman”
Episodes 74 and 75
January 19 & 20, 1967

Leslie Gore was not only a teen pop sensation; she was also the niece of Howie Horwitz, the producer of Batman. On the strength of that connection, she got to wear a skintight pink outfit, pink cat ears, a pink bowtie and (improbably) big pink mittens as Catwoman’s evil protégé Pussycat. Pussycat comes on to Robin so strongly that the Boy Wonder’s voice jumps an octave, a scene all the more amusing since we now know that Gore was far more likely to have had eyes for Julie Newmar than for Burt Ward. Perhaps, though, Pussycat was under the influence of cataphrenia, a drug which reverses all a person’s moral and ethical standards, as Catwoman helpfully explains.

In any case, though Pussycat has turned to a life of crime and frequent flirtatious moments with Catwoman (and a couple with an ethically-inverted Robin), she still sometimes wishes she could pursue her dream to be a rock and roll singer. And, in fact she performs a wow-that’s-obviously-lip-synced version of the hit, “California Nights” for Catwoman’s henchmen in front of a giant green cathead with a glowing purple mouth.

Ethel Merman
“The Sport of Penguins/A Horse of Another Color”
Episodes 98 and 99
October 5 & 12, 1967

Teamed up with the Penguin (Burgess Meredith), the famously stentorian Ethel Merman elocutes her way through the role of Senora Lola Lasagne, a.k.a. common crook Lula Schultz. Merman doesn’t actually sing, though she does seem ready to burst into bombastic warble when she declaims “I am Senora Lola Lasagne!”

Eartha Kitt
“Catwoman’s Dressed to Kill”
Episode 108
December 14, 1967

“Funny Feline Felonies/The Joke’s on Catwoman”
Episodes 110 and 111
December 28 & January 4, 1967

Singer and actress Eartha Kitt stepped into Catwoman’s whiskers for the third Batseason, appearing in one stand-alone episode and a two-parter with co-villain the Joker. Where Julie Newmar played Catwoman as luxuriantly playful, Kitt was downright feral — when she widened her eyes and hissed, you really believed she wanted to pounce on and devour some flying rodents. She also threw herself into the vocal tics more enthusiastically than her cat predecessors, embracing lines like, “Rrrrr, I glow with the thought of that garment,” and rolling her rrrrs through words such as “Spaarrrrrk plug,” “perrrrsuaive,” “perrrrrturbring,” “perrrrrfidious,” and of course, “perrrrrhaps.” Despite such verbal shenanigans, Kitt never actually sings, though she does recite some doggerel verse (prompting the Joker to comment “Oh your voice has a nice lilt, Catwoman!”), as well as lapsing into a foreign tongue for a moment in homage to her big exotica hits (“That’s the first time I ever heard a cat purr in French!” enthuses the Joker.)

Incidentally, Orson Welles called Kitt, “the most exciting woman in the world.” You might think he was exaggerating…until you see her in that skintight black Catwoman suit.

The Dark Knight Self-Actualizes

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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.
 

Bat History

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Dark Knight Rises is an odd movie. It’s a mish-mash of Dickens, adventure stories, geek nostalgia, Hollywood bombast, and a smattering of “ripped from the headlines” topicality. The movie manages to be a fairly enjoyable diversion, but as other reviewers have noted, it’s a mess from both a narrative and ideological perspective. But its messiness isn’t entirely the fault of the filmmakers. The latest film is part of a decades-long process where a children’s adventure story was modified to appeal to an older audience, specifically an audience that remained attached to the childish elements of the story. Live-action Batman films (and TV) are required to satisfy both a nostalgic attachment to childish adventure stories while insisting that such entertainment is not childish.

In ancient times (i.e., before I was born) live-action Batman was a simple concept. No one would accuse the original Batman series (1966-68) of being too complicated. It was children’s television at its most basic: bright colors, catchy music, unvarnished plots, and violence that never went beyond a punch to the jaw. The series had no pretensions of being either great art or politically relevant, which is not to say that it was bad. In fact, Batman was and is consistently entertaining. The over-the-top performances of the villains, the deadpan earnestness of Adam West, and the 60’s camp were successfully mixed with the more ridiculous premises from the comics. But while the series became a cult classic, it had its share of detractors. Its unabashed silliness was less appreciated by the aging community of comic fanboys who wanted their Batman stories to cater to their adult tastes.

Comic book Batman entered a “grim and gritty” phase during the 1980s, and this was reflected in Tim Burton’s Batman (1989). Significantly darker and more violent than the TV series, the movie was clearly targeted at an older fanbase. It was also the first attempt to turn Batman into a Hollywood blockbuster, along the lines of Jaws or Star Wars. Blockbuster status meant lavish production values, fancy special effects (which haven’t aged well), marketing deals with fast food chains, and an A-list cast, including Michael Keaton, Kim Basinger, and Jack Nicholson. But the childish elements of the character remained: the Batmobile, the Batcave, and all those “wonderful toys.” Another director might have produced an incoherent disaster, but Burton cobbled together a reasonably entertaining, if shallow, film that satisfied both the fanboys and mainstream audiences.

The secret to Burton’s success was due to his idiosyncratic vision of Gotham City, a heaping dose of film noir with a touch of BDSM and goth sub-culture. Batman and its sequel, Batman Returns, could be described as noir-lite, lacking most of the typical noir preoccupations but relying on dark, brooding imagery to enhance a plot that relied on mood more than substantive content. The goth and BDSM influences factors more heavily in Returns, particularly during the famous origin sequence of Catwoman. Among the many superhero film franchises, the Batman films by Burton stand out as having a distinctive look.

Burton’s idiosyncrasies allowed the various pieces of the Bat franchise to co-exist, albeit uneasily: the fanboys got their “dark” story, mainstream audiences got an action film that didn’t look like all the other action films they had already seen, and the more juvenile elements appeared slightly less ridiculous if they were bathed in shadow. But in aiming for an adult audience, Burton could never fully embrace the most childish parts of the Batman franchise. Most obviously, Robin is nowhere to be seen (to say nothing of Batgirl, Bat-Mite, or Bat Shark Repellent).

The Bat-franchise went through a number of changes with Batman Forever (1995). Officially a sequel to Batman Returns, Forever could more accurately be described as a soft reboot, given that the film had a new lead actor (Val Kilmer) and a new director, Joel Schumacher. And Schumacher’s movies had a different visual style and a greater affinity for the childish content in Batman comics. This Batman film would have a Robin (Chris O’Donnell). Gadgets and other wonderful toys would be on full display, and Schumacher even worked in a joke with the “Holy ___!” exclamations made famous by the original Robin, Burt Ward. And the dark Gotham of the Burton films was replaced by a much more vibrant and cartoony city.

But many of these features were overshadowed by the presence of Jim Carrey (as the Riddler), who was at the height of his fame when Batman Forever was released. The next film lacked Carrey and his massive ego, allowing Schumacher to shape the Batman franchise to his own preferences.

Batman and Robin (1997) is widely regarded as the worst of the Batman films, and perhaps the worst superhero movie ever made. While my inner contrarian would love to defend the film, in truth it was fairly awful. Bad acting, worse writing, and not a single moment of genuine excitement. But for many fans, the movie’s greatest sin was that it was campy. It had Batman and Robin fighting on ice skates. It had godawful puns delivered by Arnold Schwarzenegger (as Mr. Freeze). And there were nipples on the bat-suit.

Schumacher’s great mistake was in assuming that Batman was a campy character for kids (and maybe adults who enjoy children’s entertainment). It’s an honest mistake, because Batman really is a campy character for kids (and kids are still interested in Batman, as demonstrated by more than one successful animated series). But something big happened over the course of the 80’s and 90’s – fandom got older and became mainstream. And over the past two decade superheroes went from being a niche product sold to young children and antisocial geeks to being a significant chunk of Hollywood’s revenue. People who had never picked up a comic were getting excited about the latest Batman, X-Men, and Spider-man films. But the mainstreaming of superheroes meant the contradictory preoccupations of fandom – a reverence for source material with an insistence that such material be updated for an older audience – also became mainstream.

The change was driven by a number of factors. Comic nerds may be a minority, but they are disproportionately likely to have disposable income and are fiercely loyal to certain intellectual properties, two things which make them an attractive market to the Hollywood suits who own those IPs. Also, the older distinctions between “children’s entertainment” and “adult entertainment” were declining, the result of the creation of the PG-13 rating in 1986. Previously, the MPAA ratings systems drew a stark contrast between films appropriate for children (G and PG) and films restricted to adults (R) because of sex or violence. But the PG-13 rating effectively created new genre of action movie – with just enough violence and sexual content to please adult males but not so violent or sexual that parents wouldn’t allow their kids (or at least their teens) to see them. And the “grim n’ gritty” superheroes preferred by older fanboys fit perfectly into this new rating. Tim Burton seemed to understand the new approach, so he toned down the goofier aspects of Batman. Schumacher highlighted that goofiness, and the fans never forgave him.

Which leads me back to the recent trilogy of Batman films directed by Christopher Nolan: Batman Begins (2005), The Dark Knight (2008), and Dark Knight Rises (2012). Superficially, Nolan’s films are similar to Burton’s. The three movies  are dark, both visually and figuratively. They were surprisingly violent, even by the standards of PG-13 movies. And many of the more juvenile elements of the Batman comics were either excised or downplayed. For example, Robin is largely absent from the trilogy (except for a brief reference at the very end of Dark Knight Rises). But the Nolan films went even further in the pursuit of seriousness. Batman was grounded in a realistic world, so his vehicles and gadgets became less fanciful and were explained away as next-gen technology (memory cloth!), persuasive to audiences as long as they don’t stop to think about it. And the outlandish versions of Gotham created by Burton and Schumacher were replaced with spliced footage from real cities such as Chicago and Pittsburgh. Nolan was also determined that his movies touch upon important current events. In other words, he wanted his films to be topical. In The Dark Knight, Batman uses an illegal surveillance system to track down the Joker, referencing the growing “surveillance state” in the U.S. and the obvious risks to civil liberties. Dark Knight Rises includes an homage to “A Tale of Two Cities,” and it’s not hard to see a link to the Occupy movement and growing inequality in the U.S.

Nolan went further than Burton in promoting Batman as a character that adults could appreciate, but at the end of the day he couldn’t ignore the childish roots. The character of Batman is still a boy’s adventure story, and the elements which make the Batman stories juvenile are the same elements that actually make them fun. So Batman still drove a rocket car, used cool (if less ostentatious) gadgets, and fought supervillains. And in the third film, Batman was flying around in a vehicle that was obviously pure fantasy, brawling with Bane, flirting with Catwoman, and prepping a would-be Robin. Altogether, Dark Knight Rises was actually rather “comic booky.” For all their pretensions at maturity, realism, and topicality, the Nolan films are still about a guy who dresses like a bat and fights supervillains.

So Batman can’t escape his goofy comic book origins. The various stabs at maturity will generally be in conflict with the juvenile appeal of superhero stories, namely the fistfights, the toys, and the empowerment fantasies. It is also extremely difficult to address political issues with any degree of nuance or intelligence, because boy’s adventure stories are not known for either of those qualities. But Batman will not be going back to the days of Adam West and the batusi. Given the huge success of the Nolan films (and the bitter hatred directed at the last Schumacher film) it’s clear that mainstream audiences have embraced the preferences of fanboys. Batman is going to be dark, violent, and pseudo-mature for the foreseeable future.

The Dark Knight Rises: Nightmares of a Ruling Class in Crisis

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As for his appearance in The Dark Knight Rises, Bane is a force for evil and the destruction of the status quo,” Dixon said. “He’s far more akin to an Occupy Wall Street type if you’re looking to cast him politically. And if there ever was a Bruce Wayne running for the White House it would have to be Romney.”
–Bane creator, Chuck Dixon

Echoes of the Arab Spring, European and Asian strike waves, the Occupy phenomenon and a host of new popular upsurges haunt the psyches of a global ruling class attempting to navigate the ever unfolding crises which continue to spiral outward. It is in this light that the newly released Dark Knight Rises, third in the Dark Knight series, is a stunning, if terrifying reflection of the deepest anxieties of a ruling class with few options, fewer ideas, and no shortage of increasingly threatening social contradictions menacing its psyche.

The plot itself is predictable-but with notable twists. The film’s villain Bane, long incarcerated in a prison pit he describes as,”hell,” has nurtured a revenge desire against Gotham City. His rage, however, is not only driven by personal experience-he has adopted an ideological conception of Gotham as representative of the causes of a myriad of injustices embodied by his life of incarceration and brutality. The mission of Bane’s large insurgent force? Destroy Gotham with a nuclear weapon.

Early on in the film, a small crew of armed men, led by the anti-hero Bane, bursts onto the Nasdaq trading floor, randomly firing weapons, and taking the entirety of the trading floor hostage. While they attempt to tap into the trading circuits on the floor itself, Bane stands over a trembling trader. The trader, in a vain attempt to dissuade Bane and his crew, tells him,”There’s no money to steal here!” to which Bane hisses,”Then what are you people doing here?”

Noteworthy also is the recurrence of Bane’s populist themes during the pursuit of his goal. Recruiting from orphaned and homeless youth, Bane has trained a small army in the sewers of Gotham City. Midway through the film, Bane lures thousands of police officers into the sewers, detonating explosives and trapping them underneath, unleashing his insurgency on the city.

Soon after, we see Bane at the steps of a prison in the heart of the city, the site where, we are told, the forces of organized crime have been held on lengthy sentences under the,”Dent Act.” To establish the Dent Act, Gotham’s incorruptible Police Commissioner Gordon knowingly allowed Batman to be framed and publicly scapegoated. In a nod towards former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s,”tough on crime,” policies, the Dent Act is heralded as bringing an era of unprecedented social peace and stability in Gotham City, and thus justifying the dishonesty behind Batman’s downfall. The foundational myth of Gotham’s “peace” is not just a lie, we come to see, but a total inversion of the truth.

Standing on the steps of the prison, Bane appeals to the citizens of the city. Encouraging them to rise up against those who have robbed them, oppressed them, and imprisoned them, his men blow open the doors of the prison and he urges Gotham’s citizens to set the prisoners free. We next see hundreds of armed prisoners, still in their orange jumpsuits, surging through the open doors of the prison into the streets of the city.

As official order is derailed, and at Bane’s urging, we see the poor and impoverished ransacking luxury hotels, pulling the wealthy from their homes and cars. We see police officers and the wealthy dragged before barbaric people’s tribunals where guilt is already determined-the only ruling to be made is whether the sentenced to death by execution or sentenced to exile (a trial by ordeal) across a partially frozen bay surrounding the now isolated island of a city.

Bane and his actions represent the deep seated anxieties of a ruling class in crisis. Unable to resolve the global economic crisis themselves, they nonetheless reject popular movements -the attacks on Wall Street, the striving from the excluded, imprisoned, and forgotten for power. All of these are seen not as possible forces for freedom and the resolution of the crisis, but instead as demagogic, Machiavellian, and terroristic threats only capable of producing destruction and barbarism. Bane is not a product of the actions of masses-by the film’s authors, the initiatives of the masses are a manipulated, controllable product of the actions of Bane’s armed vanguard.

Although Bane espouses notions of democratic urges against wealth, decadence, and the oppression this crumbling system doles out, he is clearly painted as sadistic, brutal, and opportunistic. He has no genuine interest in human freedom. In the end, he himself is only a pawn of an entirely misanthropic leadership whose sole goal-even if it means their own destruction-is the destruction of everything Gotham is-including the very masses Bane pretends to appeal to and whose power he momentarily unleashes. In the trembling subconscious narratives of official society, the possibilities of the unleashing of that social force are reduced solely to acts of barbarism against their former oppressors, but are incapable of offering a vision towards freedom.

The police, by and large, play a contradictory role throughout the film. We are introduced to Police Commissioner Gordon as he prepares to acknowledge his prior role in allowing the film’s hero, Batman, to have wrongly been defamed in order that he may pass his”Dent Act.” Throughout the film, the police as a force are easily led into traps and rendered useless. They attack civillian populations they are charged to assist, and are utterly unable to resolve the social contradictions which Bane manipulates to tear Gotham apart. Even in their redemption — leading a,”return to order,” rebellion against Bane and his mobilization of the marginalized, — they are only useful as auxilliaries. Even then, they are so inept that as the film closes and order is returned. the city’s one honest officer, Batman’s unacknowledged,”Robin,” throws his badge into the river in disgust.

Who is Batman in this context? The dream of a technocratic solution to a problem of social contradictions. Bruce Wayne, though orphaned, is a child of privilege. A billionare, who in his forties is still waited on hand and foot by his caretaker butler, Bruce Wayne’s finances are bouyed by his ownership and investment in military technologies developments. Alongside his superhero role, Bruce Wayne funds philanthropic and,”sustainable energy,” projects in vain attempts to mitigate his own unresolved anger (and his rage shines as a stand-in for the repressed social conflicts his very wealth is rooted in.) Bane, his nemesis, draws his recruits from the same orphanages that the failing Wayne Foundation ceases to fund as its finances become imperiled. Throughout the film we find Bruce Wayne, a man whose body has been so traumatized from his vigilante acts of years past that he must walk with a cane, is redeemed physically, returned to superhuman prowess by technological adaptions to his human form. When he is incarcerated and almost killed by Bane, he escapes and makes his way back to Gotham just in time to participate in the,”law and order,” rebellion led by Gotham’s resurgent police force. In the midst of it, he seeks out the head of his technological development firm-knowing Batman alone is useless without his expensive military toys.

The flipside? 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. For example, though the filmmaker appears unable to understand her potential as representing a liberating social force, Anne Hathaway’s Catwoman takes the stage as a working class hero. As a gifted street fighter and cat burglar, she finds herself unknowingly in a bargain with Bane’s agents. Her goal is a piece of software which can erase the electronic history of a person permanently — their credit, their debts, their arrests, all electronic record of their ever existing — giving them a blank slate.

In exchange for the promise of this program (and she assumes, a new freedom), she pulls a heist on Bruce Wayne himself. Obtaining employment in the Wayne property as a servant, she breaks into Bruce Wayne’s private grounds. Beyond her assigned recognizance role on Wayne himself, she takes a valuable pearl necklace for her own keeping. When caught, she justifies herself to Wayne by saying she only takes from those who have more than they could ever use for themselves. She then leaves Wayne with a warning that his class will soon face their own reckoning.

Throughout the film, we see two mutually existing conflicting conceptions of the world. At times, Catwoman engages in acts of solidarity with poor and oppressed people; at other times, she acts solely in her own self interest. She even sells out Bruce Wayne despite her developing sympathies for him. It’s only at the moment of total social upheaval that she casts off all self interest, using her considerable talents and skills, risking her own life when she could easily guarantee her own safety, to assist the civilian population of Gotham City in escaping the nuclear threat about to engulf them.

Between the lines of Dark Knight Returns grim, dystopian reflection of a bankrupt official society we also see nods towards its own failures and brutalities. Hints of Katrina can be seen as police open fire on civilians attempting to cross bridges to flee Bane’s bomb, we hear Commisioner Gordon refer to Gotham as a,”failed state,” and see agents of the U.S. Security apparatus acknowledging Bane as a less than ideal but negotiable,”warlord,” over Gotham.

In The Dark Knight Rises, philanthropy, technology, and institutions all fail to mitigate intolerable social crises. In this context, Batman represents the sad clamoring of the ruling class for a hero that even they don’t truly believe in.