Reactionary Visions -- Review of "The Dark Knight Rises"

I have been apprised of the subtext in last year’s The Dark Knight Rises. This is the final movie in the Batman trilogy directed by Christopher Nolan, and its premiere was widely anticipated. As we well know, Nolan is a critically-acclaimed director who revived a flagging franchise, and infused it with a darker edge, concentrating more on the psychic dimensions of the drama in play, but also combining it with vigorous action sequences. The subtext, referencing as it does the Occupy Wall Street protests and other current social movements, was a new element, one that made the movie more compelling because, as a dark fantasy, it seemed to respond to processes at play in our country. That it read as politically conservative response should not strike one as a surprise, given the underlying thematic nucleus of the story that is predicated on the idea of vigilante justice.

The Batman character was not a particular favorite of mine when I was a young man. Perhaps because of the camp factor that came with the popular 60s series, it seemed to lack a true ominous quality, one that it would have been natural to associate with this character. At the time, I remember being infatuated by superhero comics, and I enjoyed the drama that was portrayed in the lives of figures such as Spiderman or the Fantastic Four. They were fallible characters, ones who struggled with their daily lives, with Peter Parker in particular struggling economically, badgered and bullied by the irascible publisher James Jameson. The Fantastic Four, on the other hand, was a family always about to fall apart, with a subtext of sexual desire that was at once palpable but never truly given expression.

The first Batman movie seemed to me at the time to represent a vindication of the Batman character. Timothy Burton gave it a dark edge, and while there were many naysayers in the beginning, Michael Keaton captured the tortured quality of Bruce Wayne, the wealthy billionaire traumatized by the murder so many years ago of his parents. He was defined by this loss, by this rage that could not be satisfied, by this idea that he was alone, and was compelled to do whatever it took to recuperate a sense of justice that seemed outside of his reach. Is this how all victims of horrible crimes feel? Is there no recuperating what has been lost?

 

Of course, by then, the Frank Miller graphic novel, the Return of the Dark Knight, had also permeated popular consciousness. Frank Miller uses broad brushstrokes to elaborate his pageant, one in which it is first necessary to pass judgment on all the failings of contemporary society. The work was very crude, the news media seemed to revel in this spectacle of a society in decline, and the ordinary people were either too timorous to resist, or seemed, at worst, apathetic and thoroughly disengaged. It was a dark view of society, but painted, once again, in broad brushstrokes, where gladiators fought in the rain at night to settle the fate of society, and where no one escaped moral judgment.  The film franchise seemed to share in this dark vision, at least for a time, but then became too formulaic, too settled in a certain campy quality that made it seem, ultimately, to assume the contours of an empty costume epic. The nadir, perhaps, was the Batman and Robin movie.

Well, along came Christopher Nolan to revive the character, rebooting it and paving the way for other franchises to undergo a similar process of re-imagining. It hasn’t always been successful, one might add, if we may take the example of the Superman movie that has not performed according to plan after its release in the spring of 2013. Other franchises continue on their way, nonetheless, because so much of Hollywood is predicated on the formulaic, on the supposedly “sure” thing, and not on taking artistic risks or investing in movies that deal with complex psychological motives, with true human drama, with passions that are enflamed and harbored, with witty and dynamic interplay between characters, and with style and experimentation. The formula is king, especially when it comes to blockbuster movies.

I didn’t see the last Christopher Nolan film when it was released in the theaters last year, mainly because of the tragic events that accompanied its debut in a movie theater in Colorado. As we recall, an individual by the name of James Holmes, a graduate student who had been struggling of late, was seemingly inspired by the Joker character (played unforgettably by Heath Ledger in the previous film), and who on July 20, 2012, took several guns into a movie theater, killing 12 and injuring 58 people. It was a terrible event, and seemed to invest the film with a certain dark energy that certainly repelled me, and made me feel sorry for those who had invested so much of their time anticipating this movie. Which is not to say that I only want to see happy fables, but in this case, the film seemed almost to confirm my intuition that this character, from the very beginning, illustrated that there are dark and destructive energies that are harbored by all of us, and that we are all morally suspect. We can all be similarly dehumanized.

After finally seeing the film on video, it wasn’t this dark moral subtext that most disturbed me. It was the politically explicit text, in which, once again, we have outsized characters who personalize this inner struggle that we all have. Bruce Wayne has retired after the events of the previous film, ones that saw the murder of a heroic figure turned evil, Harvey Dent, and his girlfriend, Mary Jane.  Rather than excise the memory of his childhood trauma, he has been forced to relive it once again, in the bitter murder of two characters who, as I suppose he would have been forced to recognize, stood in for his mother and father who, once again, he couldn’t save. But what we have in this movie is an explicit allusion to the conflicts that divide our own society, especially in the wake of the meltdown of our financial institutions in 2008. We have a society waging a bitter war, but with itself, one divided into haves and have-nots, ready for a revolution.

There is no moral distinction between the two sides. It is all about giving free reign to their predatory instincts, for greed and manipulation and corruption on the part of Wall Street and the institutional actors who buy into this system, but also, on the thirst for vengeance on the part of those who feel powerless. We have a society that is also smeared with very broad brushstrokes, with amoral characters who seem to have little sense of moral restraint, and who are complicit in their dehumanization. By humanization, of course, I am referring to the capacity for feeling empathy, for understanding the suffering of others, for being capable of exercising restraint. In this case, Bane (another ruthless cartoon villain who serves as the spokesperson for the underclass) seems to be driven by an insatiable lust for power that belies his seeming defense of the underclass and their grievances against the system.

But what disturbs me about the film is that there seems to be little faith in the idea of institutional justice. As with the formative Batman mythos, we have individuals who are brutalized by acts of injustice, and who are somehow justified in their need to pursue a balance (i.e. accountability) by their own solitary action, without the capacity for moral oversight. Justice would seem to be an individual goal, rather than a social goal, one to be guaranteed only by the action of enlightened individuals. Who watches over the Batman? Who will restrain the vigilante and guard against excess, in this situation that seems to be characterized by excess all around?

When Bane takes over Gotham City, he does so with the threat of setting of a devastating nuclear explosion. In the ensuing drama, we are supposedly treated to a vision of what might happen if the marginal sectors of society, the downtrodden poor, those who have lost their jobs and been downsized, those who affirm that there is a class war and are excoriated by the hosts of conservative talk radio programs, might achieve if they obtained power. The vision is not positive. We are treated once again to a demoralizing recapitulation of the French revolution, to the reign of terror, to second-rate Robespierres doling out inhuman justice, to human appetite unleashed in a paroxysm of greed and lust that is every bit the equivalent to that seen in the tycoons of Wall Street. It is a cartoonish vision, and it is deeply reactionary, in my point of view.

That is why I saw this film as deeply disappointing from an ideological standpoint. The action sequences are thrilling, as they always have been in this Nolan reboot of the Batman franchise, and the sense of mystery and suspense has been engaging, even if, as always in these thrillers, the finale always seems to revolve around a race for time, with the final seconds always ticking away. (I could do without this formula. For once, could the conflict be resolves with an hour to spare, or fifteen minutes, and not with the clock on explosive timers counting down the last few seconds? I know these are meant to get our adrenaline pumping, but all I can think as I watch them is that I have seen this too many times before, and I am tired of these frenetic endings.) Bruce Wayne is played with admirable intensity once again by Bale, although the Catwoman never does quite convince me that she is anything other than a pretty actress.

It is dreary, though, to think about the ideological underpinnings of this film, and to see the tribunals of people’s justice sentencing defendants to cruel deaths, as if the French Terror or the Stalinist purges were the only models for people’s justice. It is a deeply reactionary vision, to say that there is no alternative to the depredations of Wall Street tycoons and to the machinations of self-centered tycoons, to moralists who would seek to impose their own strict fundamentalism on society. It seems to be that in these films, even collective action is suspect, and human society as well as the individual are equally morally corrupt. A depressing vision, and one that rings false, for in the end, it is a debilitating vision that leaves us all passive, waiting for Batman.

 

 

Eternal Observer -- ORomero (c) 2013
Copyrights ORomero 2013