First off, let me direct you to this Batman thread from the old No Left Turns site. Second, I saw The Dark Knight Rises and here are my thoughts below:
There has been some discussion about whether The Dark Knight Rises is critique of Occupy Wall Street. The most obvious villain (though as it turns out not the main villain) Bane stages a violent revolution against the government of Gotham in the name of radical equality, imposes military law with his army of ideological fanatics, begins mass expropriation of private property and holds show trials against enemies of the regime in which the judge is the psychopathic Jonathan Crane (the Scarecrow.) I think it is fair to say that Christopher Nolan is no fan of North Korea’s government.
But I don’t really buy it as a critique of Occupy Wall Street. For one thing, Occupy Wall Street came too late in the movie’s writing and filming to be much of an influence one way or another. Ross Douthat interprets the film as arguing that “a compromised order can still be worth defending, and that darker things than corruption and inequality will follow from putting that order to the torch.” I think there is something to that, but The Dark Knight Rises is also about the foundings and deformations of democratic polities and the risks a political culture takes when it lies to itself about its past and its present. Let’s start at the beginning of the Nolan Batman trilogy.
In Batman Begins, Gotham is basically a failed state. The city’s civic institutions are partly an extension of organized crime and partly just another parasite. Those decent figures within government either keep their heads down or await their own murder. The first film is basically an exploration of the challenges of establishing the reign of personal justice in a situation where the rule of law is temporarily impossible. Batman uses his own power (along with strategic alliances with officer Jim Gordon and assistant D.A. Rachel Dawes) to establish a modicum of public safety, but Gotham still lacks a legitimate and functional government.
The second movie in the trilogy deals with the problem of transitioning from the rule of personal justice to the rule of law under conditions of pervasive and existential threat from the Joker’s campaign of terrorism. When The Dark Knight came out, there was some commentary that the film was an allegory of the problems of setting up a functional Iraqi government in the midst of a radical terrorist campaign. I don’t think that is how it works in Nolan’s movies. Iraq might (or might not) have inspired the central conflict in The Dark Knight, but that doesn’t make Bruce Wayne George W. Bush or the Bin Laden the Joker. The problem at the heart of The Dark Knight (like the problem of Batman Begins which was what to do with a decadent and collapsed polis) is ancient and human.
The Dark Knight found a solution to the problem of finding popular legitimacy for the transition from the rule of personal justice to the rule of law, but the solution was ironic and unstable. Bruce Wayne understands that the rule of personal justice can’t last. Gotham’s symbol of justice must stop being Batman and start being District Attorney Harvey Dent. As Bruce Wayne says at a fundraiser “I believe in Harvey Dent.” The problem is that Harvey Dent cracks under the pressure and tragedy of the Joker’s terrorism campaign and becomes a murderer himself. So the central irony is that the rule of law is preferable to the rule of personal justice, but the man of personal justice turns out to be a better man than the man of the law. It was decided that this complicated truth was too much for the people of Gotham to bear. So the lie was concocted that Batman killed Dent. Dent became a martyr and Batman (willingly) became a reviled fugitive. The popular legitimacy of the rule of law was founded on a lie.
The Dark Knight Rises is partly a story of how that lie comes apart. The popular appeal of Bane and his army has more in common with the New Left terrorist groups of the 1960s and 1970s than with Occupy Wall Street. The New Left terrorist groups weren’t asking for a somewhat more egalitarian distribution of wealth and less student loan debt. Those terrorist groups viewed American society as poisoned to the root and all of American history as a lie masking radical oppression. Slogans like “we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal” and “give me liberty or give me death” only existed to obscure slavery, imperialism, and exploitation. They wanted to tear everything down.
Nolan doesn’t share the terrorist desire to tear everything down. Nolan clearly loathes the rhetorical tropes of left-wing terrorism and the governing strategies of left-wing totalitarianism (and this has earned him enemies he should be proud to have.) But that’s not really the most important thing. Some large fraction of Gotham’s public is ready to hear Bane’s message because Gotham’s polity hasn’t come to terms with the reality of its past and present. An exaggerated sense of the polity’s virtue ends up being a fatal weakness. When Bane reveals that the founding was based on a lie, it is shattering to public morale. One can see here a metaphor for America’s coming to terms with the enormity of white supremacy in the 1960s and how the suddenness of this accounting gave plausibility to the indictments of left-wing radicals, but it is more than that a metaphor for a particular time and place. By the end of the movie, Gotham refounds itself on the basis of something very close to the truth about its past and present. Nolan suggests that it is safer for a democratic society to honestly face its (inevitably) ambivalent past and present, and that doing so doesn’t open the door to nihilism, but instead makes it easier to defend what is good in the civic order.
July 24th, 2012 | 8:50 pm
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July 24th, 2012 | 10:16 pm
I haven’t yet seen the movie, but this is a good summary of the themes of order/disorder–rule of law/personal rule–as they are depicted throughout the trilogy (as far as I can see from the first two).
Your claim that Dark Knight Rises is not about OWS is probably right, but your fine distinctions between New Left terrorism, North Korea and OWS is not made in your typical right wing analysis of OWS. Usually these things are conflated. In such analysis, heated rhetoric regarding student loan debt on the one hand, and the outright reorganization of all aspects of economic, social and political life are usually conflated. Is the movie making the fine distinctions you make, or is it actually a right wing take on current mass politics?
Or, more likely, does none of this matter?
So I plan to see the movie later this week, and I will shut my speculation up at this point. But thanks for giving me food for thought.
July 25th, 2012 | 7:37 pm
John, I’d make a distinction between the Weather Underground, the Symbionese Liberation Army and North Korea’s government on the one hand and Occupy movement on the other. I knew several (youngish) people who participated in Occupy protests and they were all perfectly fine small-d democrats. That doesn’t mean that the Occupy movement doesn’t contain some truly rotten elements. One of the links above is to a new left-wing magazine that affiliates with the Occupy movement. The writer is upset that The Dark Knight Rises doesn’t romanticize left-wing terrorism and left-wing totalitarianism. It so upsets the writer that he describes the movie as fascism and monarchism and whatever else he thinks will terrify a meeting of the 1950s French Communist Party. These are the kinds of enemies we should all hope to earn for ourselves.
FWIW, I don’t think that the Dark Knight Rises is primarily a critique of anti-democratic left-wing politics (though it is that.) I think it is more a critique of the flaws in a polity (especially a refusal to live in truth) that can provide a popular basis for left-wing anti-democratic politics.
July 25th, 2012 | 10:58 pm
One of the interesting things to me about the new Batman is the status of the Police department. If we can say anything about Christopher Nolan’s movie, I would say that it is pro- rule of law and pro-police.
The people of Gotham never do show up with pitchforks to do battle with Bane (ala the Mexican townspeople in “The Magnificent Seven”), it was the Police who battled the bad guys. Batman maintained his moral integrity in not exercizing a liscense to kill by disabling a couple of tanks with his chopper and letting the police infantry do the shooting. A key part of the plot was winning over the new police commissioner to join the resistance.
The “noble lie” or hypocracy involving the use of Harvey Dent’s name to sponsor a police bill doesn’t strike me as that important; they could have just named it something else and had the same content in the bill. I personally think that is a plot weakness that Nolan didn’t develop very well. The only person we see who questions himself when the noble lie is revealed is a young cop. Which again makes me say, I think this movie was most focused on the Police
July 26th, 2012 | 2:05 pm
CJ, “The only person we see who questions himself when the noble lie is revealed is a young cop.” Bane’s speech where he reveals the lie is interspersed with scenes of social revolution where the participants aren’t Bane’s fanatics but some nontrivial element of Gotham’s population (though not necessarily a majority.) It enflames some fraction of the population to join Bane’s cause and (implicitly) demoralizes those who might have been willing to resist, while giving plausibility to Bane’s revolutionary rhetoric. It also causes Gordon and Blake to alter their plans. Their original plan was for Gordon to go in front of cameras and call on the population to resist Bane’s occupation (sorry, couldn’t resist) of the city. The plan was for a mass uprising to discredit Bane’s claim to be acting in the name of the People – even though the likely initial result would be Gordon’s murder. The revelation that Gordon had been at the center of the lie apparently made such a “political” confrontation impossible in the short-term since Gordon’s credibility was shot. This discredited the old regime and gave the new regime some measure of public support (with dissenters to be hunted down by Bane’s forces of course.)
I think the “noble lie” is important in the sense that the trilogy started with civic institutions that everyone knew were a joke. There was a deficit of trust in public institutions. The Harvey Dent name was a symbol that those who are entrusted with pubic power could be something other than corrupt and/or impotent. It was a shortcut to popular legitimacy for the rule of law. It doesn’t last. One of themes of the movie is articulated by Alfred who says it is time to stop trying to “outsmart the truth.”
You’re right about the importance of the police in the movie and the evolution of the Gotham police over the course of the three films. In the first, they are basically broken. In the second they are more functional (and acquire outstanding leadership), but still partly compromised by internal corruption. In the third they win popular legitimacy by fighting and defeating Bane’s army in the streets. The transition to the rule of law is summed up with “There’s only one police in this town.”
It is a little more ambivalent than all that. Batman is still the guy who saves the lives of the people in the city. Truth doesn’t entirely win out. Bruce Wayne fakes his death to start his own life and let the city’s institutions rebuild themselves on the basis of (most of) the truth and the rule of law.
July 28th, 2012 | 7:10 am
I have just seen the movie last night and I confess to spending the experience making sotto voce comments to my daughter like, “Where are all the people in Gotham City?” and, “Who’s been cleaning up the garbage off the streets?” and “If portions of the city were blown up, how is the rest of the city functioning, getting water and electricity? Who’s cleaning it up?” and “If this were really America, the governor would be involved and would have called out the National Guard. The president would have to do something or the rest of the country would be in an uproar.” Seriously, we need to suspend so much of reality so that Batman, Bane & company could have their private bits of drama. Cities are never just in the hands of a few people, which is why so much goes right daily and so much more would go wrong if something like this happened.
Look at it; theoretically weeks go by with none of the ravages of time in a chaotic human environment being evident. The problems of maintaining infrastructure when portions of the city have blown up would have strained the democratic impulses of people and occupiers of the city within a week. Logistics, anyone? Who was feeding a massive city? It’s just as well the population seemed to evaporate. What did they do with the bodies if they hadn’t?
Nor did anything about time make any sense in other ways. How did anyone have time to get from one place to another and how did they do it, or overcome broken bodies and return to spectacular health, or, especially at the end with clocks ticking seconds away, take time for fond farewells and have profound conversations? The last two minutes of the nuclear device lasted longer than the final few minutes of a football game.
Then, the police did nothing but sit in a sewer for weeks? I’ll take that, but how, in the final fight, did they all simply brawl? The bad guys had guns before. Why were they simply grappling with the police and not shooting them down as they came on? Perhaps the bad guys had given up their guns to maintain civil order? No, they had guns all though the movie and had shown an impressive self-control for movie bad guys, only shooting good guys. It all seemed very confused.
Ignoring all that, as we are trained to do with comic book stories, it’s an exciting movie and a cautionary tale aimed at the ignorant and simplistic to make them think about power and government and who or what they will give themselves to. To me the question was, would you rather have a tyrant than the schlubs who are so easy to overthrow that they must exercise deceptions even to do good.
July 28th, 2012 | 6:09 pm
Kate, right. Nolan especially likes fights in which fists predominate over guns in ways that don’t add up. The charge of the blue brigade at the end should have been a massacre, Batman or no Batman. It is something of a take-it-or-leave it convention.
The question of how the utilities and public services continue to function is right. Presumably those who do the jobs might well be forced to do them (to the extent possible.) The city still should have looked more like a filthy Occupy camp by the end of Bane’s five month…occupation.
The federal government is shown delivering supplies to the city (which is controlled by the revolutionaries of course.) The relationship between Gotham and the higher levels of government is interesting. Across the trilogy, Gotham wants to use Gotham to tell a series of stories about political legitimacy. That means Gotham, in practice, is treated more like a city-state than a municipality within a nation. I don’t think you ever see the governor within the trilogy and you only see the President (at least I think it is the President) so he can announce that the federal government can’t intervene. That is less of a problem in the first two movies as Gotham is an exaggerated version of an American city gone to hell. It is bigger problem in the third movie because the occupation and nuclear hostage-taking of an American city by a terrorist group would obviously demand a decisive federal action in a way that public corruption, an inefficient police force, and a high crime rate wouldn’t necessarily. The result was a plot device where the state and federal government are in a position to provide food and medicine (and explain why the city doesn’t descend into starvation within a week), while being impotent to intervene. That leaves it to Gotham to save and refound itself.
I’m going to borrow some of Peter Lawler’s locutions here, but I think the movie is less against left-revolution (though it is that), than it is pro the complicated ambivalent truth about the past of any particular human societies and pro the truth of what we can’t help but know about our present.
July 28th, 2012 | 7:40 pm
I forgot the scene with the president, but recall thinking how minimal the delivery of supplies seemed to be for a city of millions. How many private companies cart supplies into a city like New York every day? And how did Bane’s minions distribute those supplies? Did everyone live on federal largesse for the month or so of the occupation? Were they made to pay? This reminds me of conversations with the young who are sympathetic with OWS. When I ask about the practical problems of governance, what kind of system they are proposing, they get angry at the questions. I think such practical things go to the heart of how we function in modern society. But I’ll agree with your last paragraph, as it is simple enough, in truth.
July 28th, 2012 | 9:31 pm
“Did everyone live on federal largesse for the month or so of the occupation?” Presumably (though it was five months) and the distributional questions would be interesting considering Gotham is described as bigger than NYC (at about 12 million) and I don’t know how Bane maintains political support as no (reasonably imaginable) amount of imported supplies would maintain pre-revolution living standards over a period of five months as normal commerce would, of necessity, be disrupted. The movie contains multiple hints that Bane’s economic order is unsustainable (in the ruined house where there is the exchange “This used to be someone’s home.” followed by “Now it is eveyone’s home.” or something to that effect, and the orphan boy is visibly worse off under Bane than he was before.) I suppose the combination of distribution of supplies plus the redistribution of high status goods (and status itself) might gain the new regime support from some elements of the populace. Yeah, I don’t buy it either. I’m not going to make the economics make sense because they don’t. Gotham also has different axes of conflict than actual American society. Across the trilogy, crime is much more centralized and hierarchical and race seems to form no kind of social cleavage whatsoever. The economics of Gotham’s depression and partial recovery in BATMAN BEGINS didn’t really make a lot of sense either. I don’t really worry about it because I don’t see that those details matter much for this story (though they would matter In actual governance.) It is a setting (it could – tech stuff aside – just as easily be a Greek polis thousands of years ago) for a series of age old political problem while asking the audience to take much of the setting as given. Why is Selena Kyle so bitter at the economic order? How did much of Gotham’s wealthy get their money? How come there doesn’t seem to be any kind of federal or state welfare state in evidence? How did Gotham’s institutions rot? It doesn’t seem to be a similar process to the decay of NYC in the Lindsay years.
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