Tag Archives: Dark Knight Rises

Sandy Hook and the Superheroic War on Crime

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A few nights after the Sandy Hook shooting, a father heard a strange noise coming from his son’s bedroom. The little boy—he’d seen his teacher and classmates gunned down days before—was pounding on his floor. “I know where the bad guy is,” he said. “I’m beating him up.”

It sounds like a superhero origin story. When Bob Kane drew Batman’s, he posed little Bruce in his bedroom too. “I swear by the spirits of my parents,” said the little boy, “to avenge their deaths by spending the rest of my life warring on all criminals.”

The father of the Sandy Hook survivor said his son was pointing at the floor because the bad guy was in Hell, the same place Bruce’s prayer of vengeance was headed. The child (his name is all over the net, but I’d rather not use it) wants to be a detective when he grows up. He wants to save other children. Meanwhile he’s wearing his old Batman costume to bed.

“People don’t hurt Batman,” his father explained. It’s his way to feel “in control.”

Aurora superheroes

Other shooting survivors take similar comfort in superheroes. An Aurora comic shop owner commissioned a drawing of Green Lantern protecting their local Cineplex 16 to help a twelve-year-old survivor after the shooting there. Three women left the Dark Knight Rises premiere alive because their dates died shielding them from bullets. “He always wanted to be a superhero,” said a family member of one of the victims, “he’s wanting to save someone or do something greater.” One was an honors student “who loved superheroes” and “wrote exceptionally about” Batman and “themes of good versus evil” in his English class.

Unfortunately, the shooter was a fan too. Police found a Batman poster hanging in his home and learned that he’d dyed his hair read to look like the Joker. Jeff Kass, author of Columbine: A True Crime Story, theorized the killer “saw himself as some sort of a twisted superhero avenging perceived wrongs.” Hours after the shooting, Kass guessed the suspect “was trying to extract some sort of revenge. Possibly angry at some perceived wrong. This would be similar to the Columbine shooters, and similar to other shootings in the South and West of the United States where people feel compelled to take the law into their own hands.”

I won’t pretend to know the Sandy Hook shooter’s motives, but police suspected he was influenced by a Norwegian, anti-Muslim terrorist who killed 77 people in 2011. That gunman considered himself a kind of superhero too, the self-declared “commander” of his own, one-man “Knights Templar” acting out of “goodness, not evil.” The American Conservative likened him to a “movie supervillain” played by “an unfunny Garrison Keillor.” He titled his manifesto 2083, the year his speculative history of the future ends. The Sandy Hook shooter preferred video games. He may have just wanted a hit a higher death count.

It’s easy to see these killers as supervillains, a kind of Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. It’s even comforting in a way. Wearing a Batman costume, drawing Green Lantern above a mass murder site, calling a person who died protecting someone else a “superhero,” even writing English essays about good and evil, they’re all ways to feel “in control.”

The world is unsafe, but we feel safer when can see events in terms of familiar formulas. And right now, superhero stories are a cultural favorite. Perhaps because they are so violent. I’m not going to suggest that mass murder is the result of mass marketing costumed vigilantes. The relationship between culture and behavior is way beyond my abilities of analysis. But I think we can agree that the relationship is both circular and vicious.

A little boy witnesses murders and devotes his adult life to vengeance.  Why is that formula comforting? Isn’t it a deepening of the tragedy?

In The Myth of the American Superhero, John Sheldon Lawrence and Robert Jewett read the Unabomber and the Oklahoma bomber as homegrown terrorists twisting the American monomyth of redemptive violence to anti-government ends. But McVeigh and Kaczinski believed they were acting out of “goodness, not evil.” And they thought violence was the best way of achieving it. It’s part of the American way. The country was born in revolution. Its borders grew through a century of expansionist wars. It remained unified only through civil war. And its second century was shaped by a sequence of foreign wars. Our national heroes, caped and otherwise, champion all that violence.

Is a non-violent superhero even possible? Bruce Willis never throws a punch in M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable. The Scarlet Pimpernel dispatches his arch-nemesis with a snuff box of pepper. But Willis’s enemy is a serial killer, and though Willis quietly strangles him, there’s the promise of more to come. And while the Pimpernel’s enemy is likely to face the guillotine for his failure, the guillotine itself motivates the Pimpernel’s on-going mission. The violence has to continued. It’s part of the formula.

But does it have to be?

A colleague in my English department, Leah Green, spent her summer in a Buddhist monastery in France.  She recently pulled me into her office to tell me about a comic book she saw there, The Secret of the 5 Powers.  She didn’t bring back a copy (backpacking Buddhist travel very light), but she emailed me the link:

thesecretofthe5powerssou2

“3 Superheroes of Peace and nonviolence use their powers to change the course of world history.” The members of these non-avenging Avengers include: “Alfred Hassler, an American anti-war superhero, Vietnamese peace activist Sister Chan Khong and Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh.” Instead of supervillains, they fight violence itself and its “seemingly unstoppable escalation.” The creators hope the comic will “challenge the traditional notion of ‘the hero’ and what constitutes heroic action.” They even hope to redefine the “traditional dramatic structure” of superhero comics, showing “there is no good or bad, no white or black. There is only compassion and suffering.”

According to a related documentary, not only is Martin Luther King, Jr. a “Superhero,” but he was transformed into one by a comic book: “In 1958, Alfred Hassler had an idea to work with Martin Luther King, Jr. to produce a comic book – a comic book to be distributed in the South to young and old, African Americans and white Americans, to tell the story of the struggle for civil rights in Montgomery.”

Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story

Of course the one-off Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story wasn’t the first comic book about a non-violent hero. DC introduced “Johnny Everyman” into World’s Finest Comics near the end of World War II.  The non-costumed Everyman travels the world teaching racial and ethnic tolerance while “devoted to further understanding between peoples.”

World's Finest Johnny Everyman

Unfortunately you’ve probably never heard of Johnny Everyman. He vanished from the pages of World’s Finest in less than three years. You probably haven’t heard of Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story or The Secret of the 5 Powers either. Comics about peaceful superheroes aren’t exactly popular. The genre demands violence. It demands righteous punishment. The superhero formula, the very idea of good versus evil, maintains the problem it pretends to fix. It may be comforting to imagine that for every Joker there’s a counter-balancing Batman, but the reverse would be true too. For every Batman there’s a Joker. The equation maintains unlimited violence. The sense of control is an illusion.

Meanwhile, when my daughter returned to her high school this fall, the lobby included security doors. They’re a new state requirement, a direct fall-out of Sandy Hook. Hanging up pictures of superheroes would be less effective at keeping out gunmen, but probably not by much. The NRA would arm all the teachers, but, as my daughter’s principal told our PTA, “the top focus for security remains administration visibility and relationships.” That’s a boring premise for a comic book, but it might literally save my daughter’s life.

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.

More Superheroes, More Ideology

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Note by Noah: Eric posted a brief review of Dark Knight and other recent superhero films in comments. It seemed a shame to let his thoughts languish at the bottom of an old threat, so I’m highlighting them here.
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I liked DKR way more than the previous two Nolan Batman movies. It does seem pretty conservative in some ways…though…as it turns out…the “Bad Guys” are not really 99%’ers at all and are just manipulating political unrest and class division to take revenge. In some ways this is a copout (just another madman/madwoman bent on revenge or world domination), but in other ways it mitigates the conservatism of the film (which initially seems to take the side of the rich/status quo vs. the “crazy” poor and downtrodden). In some ways, one could read the film to suggest that it’s the mistreatment of the poor and mishandling of the economy that “primes” that (large) section of society to be manipulated by “evil.” That is, there is some suggestion that if we had a more egalitarian society, revolution/anarchy wouldn’t be necessary (or on the verge of happening). (Just as criticizing the results of the French Revolution in the short term doesn’t necessarily mean one is in favor of the ancien regime). For all those reasons, it’s an interesting film, that (to me, anyway) made more sense plot-wise than Batman Begins or Dark Knight…and had enough fun mindless superheroing and explosions to make it enjoyable. Anne Hathaway was also surprisingly good as Catwoman.

I also liked the new Spider-Man movie quite a bit. That one had almost no ambitions that I could see… I liked the return to Gwen Stacy, though, since I read about her in Ben’s book. Both DKR and ASM were better than Avengers, to my mind (which really made almost no logical sense…never mind the ideology).
 
Also…the fact that Bruce Wayne loses all of his money is meant to make him a more ambiguous figure (not clearly on the side of the rich). Instead he ends up in the same place as Bane—stripped of everything…at the bottom of a well…etc. I don’t think this really works to make Batman a “working-class hero” (it’s something to be, I here)… but that’s clearly the intent…and it adds an extra layer to any kind of ideological reading. To some degree, I agree that “it’s a mess”—but at least it’s an interesting mess…which is more than can be said for something like Avengers…which is both a mess…and completely mindless.