I understand that it's tough to discuss The Dark Knight Rises without discussing the tragedy in Aurora, CO; that said, I'm not going to go into that in this post, because trying to detach myself from something like this long enough to try to analyze it any scholarly fashion isn't really something I'm emotionally capable of, particularly after reading about Jessica Ghawi; that said, I did want to talk about the movie itself, even though I think to some extent it will always be associated with the shootings (much like its predecessor was inextricably linked to Heath Ledger's death even before it came out).
Before the Aurora incident, it seemed like the movie's politics were going to be a flashpoint; Christopher Nolan considered filming footage of Occupy Wall Street at one point before deciding against it, and Rush Limbaugh infamously took a break from calling women who use birth control prostitutes to claim that the movie's villain, created in 1993, was named Bane as an attack on Mitt Romney. And when The Dark Knight was released four years ago, there was a lot of speculation that that film was meant as an apologia for Bush-era War on Terror policies (I'm of the belief that those connections are intentional, but not as a promotion of them, simply confronting us with the fact that if someone like Batman was real, those would probably be the kind of tactics he used.) It's somewhat surprising, then, that the movie itself doesn't really have any clearly-defined politics, so much as vague political undertones that drive an apolitical story. Bane's plan, in which he engineers an uprising using economic inequality and the fallout from the revelation of how Harvey Dent really died, and exploits that to create something approximating the Reign of Terror in France (Gary Oldman's Jim Gordon actually reads from A Tale of Two Cities late in the film), seems vaguely like reactionary warnings about things like the Occupy movement, but there's far more to it than that.
Nolan's Bane, you see, is effective at what he does because he's great at getting people to see them how they want him to see him. When he begins putting his plan into place, he's allied himself with a corporate weasel (the criminally underrated Australian actor Ben Mendellsohn), who doesn't seem to think of him as anything more than muscle. When Bane inevitably turns the tables, Mendellsohn impotently rages that he's "in charge". "Do you feel in charge?" Bane asks, looming over him, in one of the most effectively chilling moments in the film. So it goes with Bane's army, and the civilians he inspires: he gets people to believe they want the same thing, and then uses it as a way to get what he really wants. He's not an actual true believer among either the 1% or the 99%; he simply manipulates everybody. (Appropriately enough, his first act onscreen is killing Petyr Baelish.) Once Bane has actually put his plan into place, establishing martial law, cutting Gotham off from the rest of the country and burying its police in the sewers, the class conflict aspect becomes immaterial; in fact, after the uprising, we never see any further civilian participation in Bane's plan.
It's not as though the film is unsympathetic to the have-nots; in one quietly brutal scene, Joseph Gordon-Levitt's rookie detective, asking questions at a boys' home, learns that most of the residents simply age out and end up in the streets, and that the home is short on resources because it's run by profits from the business that a now-reclusive Bruce Wayne has been neglecting. (This, incidentally, is, I think, one of the major weaknesses of Nolan's Batman films; we're repeatedly told secondhand about how the economic downturn has ravaged Gotham's citizenry, but we really have no human window into those effects. The closest we've got is Anne Hathaway's Selina Kyle, and can we really call a master thief emblematic of the commoners?)
Really, the film's overarching themes are far more universally applicable than anything political; this is largely a film about chickens coming home to roost, and the undeniably populist idea that people should be trusted with even the ugliest of truths. Even though he doesn't genuinely care one way or the other, Bane is perfectly right that Gotham's new status quo is based on a lie (the film depicts Gordon-Levitt's sympathetic character as outraged about it himself), and mending the damage caused by it not only requires acknowledgment of the truth (and also a big-ass tank-plane), but leads to further acknowledgment of the truth (Batman finally being considered a hero). It's a movie that takes a lot of the questions we thought The Dark Knight was posing and then answering for us and removes that certainty, which is appropriate for a franchise (or at least, an incarnation of one) that has been, in large part, about turning our ideas of what a Batman movie, and a superhero movie, should be on their heads. Of the three, I'd still say The Dark Knight is the strongest, but this is a helluva way to end Nolan and Bale's tenures.
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