Friday, July 27, 2012
The third film in the Batman series is a direct polemical
assault on the French Revolution and its political heirs, which includes Occupy
Wall Street and perhaps Barack Obama. I would say that it is the exact opposite
of so many revolutionary-wannabe films from Fight Club to V for Vendetta (which
has provided the tell-tale Guy Fawkes masks to the Occupy movement), except
that in order to be opposite, they must in some sense be comparable and DKR is
far superior to the others artistically, commercially and philosophically. The
crazed theater shooter, if he turns out to be as much of an attempted
revolutionary hero of the poor, the depressed, and the downtrodden as his
predecessor at Virginia Tech, will prove to be a better match for the villain
in the third film than for the one in the second film.
While superficial analysis has tried to make hay out of
the name of the villain, Bane, which is a homonym for Bain, the private equity
firm founded by Mitt Romney, the truth is that Bane the villain is
philosophically much closer to Bam the President than to Bain the firm. Spoilers from here on…Bane is a man who
speaks for the ‘oppressed’ (his word) masses against the upper classes. He is
Gotham’s revolutionary ‘reckoning’ who urges the people to ‘storm’ (again his
words) Blackgate prison and release the prisoners within. That’s the moment in
the film at which I became sure that the French Revolution theme was
intentional. Bane, like Robespierre, the real life villain of the French
Revolution, uses the freed prisoners as the vanguard of the revolution and as
citizen brigades to roust the affluent from their homes and expropriate their property,
dragging them before citizen tribunals before which their guilt is already
determined based on their class. They are then executed, judged by the lawless
element of the city which had until the revolution been festering on the edge
of society.
This film shows no ideological sympathy for the Occupy
Movement. Bane, the terrible villain of
the film, literally occupies Wall Street, taking control of the trading floor
of the stock exchange. Police are hesitant to deal with the problem partly
based on class warfare complaints that it’s not their money at risk, but the
money of the wealthy Wall Street guys. But a trader explains that it is indeed
the cops’ money too: that it’s everybody’s money that is part of the financial
system, including cops’ pensions.
Bane was created by Chuck Dixon and Graham Nowlan, two
“life long conservatives”, which is pretty unusual in the world of comic book
creatives. He is, as his name implies, a curse, in this case the curse of class
warfare. Interestingly, Dixon complained about Rush Limbaugh’s misfire in trying
to link the villain with Bain capital as part of some liberal media conspiracy.
How did things get so bad for Gotham? Partly it was a
lack of profit. Bruce Wayne had become a recluse in his mansion, shrugging off
the responsibility of running his company, and as his inner circle points out,
where there are no profits there is no philanthropy. The Wayne Foundation
ceased supporting the private religious program for at-risk motherless and
fatherless youth who had aged out of the traditional government foster care
system. The at-risk children became risky adults and became a feeder system for
the army which Bane was gathering in the sewers beneath the city, literally
chipping away at the foundations of the old order.
But it was not just a shortage of financial capital that
ruined Gotham: moral capital was deficient too.
Gotham’s social order was based on a lie: that Batman was evil and that
the crusading District Attorney Harvey Dent died as a righteous martyr. As I
pointed out in my review of the other two films in the series, the Platonic
(and Machiavellian) useful lie is a major theme of the trilogy, and as I
expected the lie would be found to be an inadequate foundation for long-term
civil order. Alfred Pennyweather, the moral voice of the story, argues that
it’s time to stop suppressing the truth, that truth must in the end have its
day and be allowed to speak, whatever the consequences. Commissioner Gordon,
the promulgator of the lie, is wracked with guilt and indecision about the lie
and longs to correct it. Eventually,
Bane uses the lie against the city, depriving it of legitimacy.
The film is not without some emotional, if not moral,
sympathy for the foolish young idealists of OWS. Selina Kyle, AKA Catwoman, is a
morally confused young woman who wages class warfare through jewel thievery.
She takes from those who, in her estimation, have too much. She delights in the
fact that “There’s a storm coming,” and that Gotham’s rich are living too well,
and on borrowed time. But when the storm comes, she sees the evil of it. A
young protégé reminds Selina that this is exactly what she has been calling
for, but now that it’s here, Selina sees that it is far worse than what it
replaced. This is Nolan’s way of saying “Hey, idiot in the Che t-shirt, smarten
up. If deep down you are the decent person you claim to be, you’ll hate the
revolution you’ve been wishing for.”
About halfway through the film, I turned to my wife and
said “It’s Dickens.” By which I meant the movie is a modern retelling of A Tale
of Two Cities, albeit much lousier with hovercrafts and nuclear bombs. Bane is
Robespierre, Miranda (played by French actress Marion Cotillard) is Madame
Defarge. Batman is Sydney Carton. Now every time I write something like this,
some joker (pun not intended) writes to me and says that I’m reading too much
into it, and sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and it’s just a movie. I think
I dislike those comments even more than the purely oppositional ones because
they wallow in their own laziness and ignorance.
Toward the end of the film, Gordon offers a eulogy in the
form of a long quote which begins “It is a far, far better thing that I do,
than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have
ever known.” That’s the speech which Sydney Carton, the former ne’er do well
playboy-turned-sacrificial-hero, gives before offering his life in exchange to
save another. I told this to my son, Christopher, and he pointed out that the
co-writer of the screenplay, Jonathan Nolan, told his brother (and the film’s
director) Christopher to read A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens before
making the film.
The debate between left and right in the modern world has
largely been a debate for and against the French revolution. Russell Kirk, the
intellectual father of American conservatism, attributes the intellectual
founding of the philosophy to the British statesman and philosopher Edmund
Burke, author of the Reflections on the Revolution in France, the most
important anti-revolutionary book ever written. The right argues for tradition;
the left for revolution. In fact, the idea of ‘left’ and ‘right’ come from
revolutionary era France. Those who sided with the old order sat on the right
side of the French general assembly. Those who wished to overthrow it sat on
the left side. In the Gospels, those who are destined for Hell are told to go
to Christ’s left, while those destined for Heaven are set at his right. Let us
be rid, then, of any delusions about a synthesis of leftist politics with
orthodox Christianity.
In some ways the film is a throw-back to the original
Batman, not the comic book one, but the one on whom the whole masked hero genre
was based, the Scarlett Pimpernel, the nobleman cum masked
counter-revolutionary hero who went about saving victims of ‘the people’s
justice’ from the guillotine. Now conservatives have a new hero, and this time
he has a much cooler name than “Pimpernel.”
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