Men of Stahlhartes Gehäuse: Or, The Dark Knight Rises on Followership

I liked the film a good deal more than you–dramatically, I thought all the confusion was confined to the first hour or so of the movie, with its real aims and themes pretty much clear, and clearly and thrillingly delivered, from Batman’s first encounter with Bane on through the end–but your identification of Nolan’s basic take on the Batman mythos as an aristocratic one is, I think, dead on. And while that rightly, as you note, complicates any attempt to make political sense of what the story is purportedly about, I would additionally argue that that kind of anti-political aristocracy has been central to a correct understanding of the Batman mythos from the beginning. So I would credit Nolan for having got that much right about Batman from the very start.

I don’t really think Nolan brothers had much to do with this aristocratic viewpoint. Mass media movies are very prone (to the point I think it’s policy) to promote this sense of public participation, where they see larger than life figures be symbols of some kind of great theory and combat each other, while the normal people are passive actors unto victimhood. I think this effect is much clearer with Alan Moore’s works converted into movies. The comic books are pretty careful to preserve a sense of the personal, and I consider the change of the end of Watchmen to be tragic–the comic book is angry that average people don’t get a chance to be better than what they are, when Ozymandia carries out his destruction in order to terrify self-destructive tendencies to obedience. That cartoonish narrative of conspiracies that mark the end of Watchmen, the movie–it’s hard to see how that isn’t about reinforcing the narrative that other people will make the decisions for you, Joe Blow, and it’s hard for me to see how this isn’t a piece of propaganda art. V for Vendetta has similar kinds of narrative changes. And most of these big action movies (say, MiB for example, despite being rather humane)directed at the broad public hew to this pattern. It’s not so different from Chinese movies, I suppose in my darker thinking, just better acted and slightly more plausible plots, than anything like Hero, or any of those other State Spectaculars!

I liked it, but trying to shoehorn so many plots into the third film results in narrative contortions to get everyone in the right place for the final showdown – the fascinating Selina Kyle becomes a cameo, Miranda Tate is robbed of her deserved big romance with Bruce before (literally) sticking the knife in and twisting it for the big reveal, and the less said about the unwise five months fast-forward so that Bruce’s back can be broken then heal the better (the US let a major city alone in Bane’s hands for such a long time? The cops emerge from the sewers in such pristine shape?).

@ shah8

Watchmen is unwatchable (no pun intended) for me after enduring it once. I knew something was wrong in the film when the Night Owl and the Silk Spectre were portrayed as sadistic murderers (after they were attacked by the muggers that they then beat up and killed).

It’s no surprise that the corporate types who control the rights have now commissioned ‘prequel’ comics, and not from Alan Moore.

Ditto 6. Plus, democracy isnt easy. It depends on institutions. Bane severs those. A few people riot; most lay low.

People seem to confuse the movie having something to say with Bane saying something.

But yes, CT has noticed that tales of supermen aren’t particularly democratic.

I agree that the aristocratic theme is undercut–or made creepier, which may be the same thing–by the way each character is neatly assigned psychoanalytic motivations for what they do. But it’s also undercut because they’re not actually the elites (except maybe for Scarecrow). They’re people without any defined place in society that they can live with (Bruce Wayne doesn’t want to step into his father’s shoes–his relationship with the board is pretty cliched, but is done in a way that’s also annoyingly reminiscent of Vanilla Sky). They’re just nerds with emotional problems (or artists who are deluded into out their fantasies in the real world).

There’s no reason anyone in Gotham would want to be involved in politics. The fact that they aren’t involved isn’t even an issue in the films. They just don’t want to be terrorized. Only the villains (like Scarecrow) try to get them to do something beyond going to work in the morning and coming home at night (and in the Scarecrow’s case it’s by giving them emotional problems). It’s creepy, but complaining that non-elites in Gotham don’t have political agency seems beside the point.

(I may actually get to see this in a first-run theater–the second-to-last movie I saw in a theater was actually The Dark Knight–yes, I need to find a babysitter–but I haven’t seen it yet.)

I’d actually like a superhero story that ends the way “The Stars, My Destination” does: the protagonist empowers everybody in sight and then pisses off, never to be seen again. For example, Batman open sources his “League of Shadows” juju and helps other people defend themselves, then hangs up his cape and pisses off to the Riviera.

Anderson, there are many movies about people living in a time when the institutions of democracy are severed. But by and large they do not wait for rescue, but make every attempt to reestablish democracy. Or have we forgotten every world war II movie ever made? The resistance in Batman confines itself to passively waiting for the police to emerge and Batman to return.

Anderson, there are many movies about people living in a time when the institutions of democracy are severed. But by and large they do not wait for rescue, but make every attempt to reestablish democracy.

Those aren’t superhero movies. Duh.

If you wanted Nolan to make a movie where Batman becomes irrelevant as the People in Arms rise up to re-establish democracy and civil institutions, well, that might be an interesting movie. But that’s an anti-superhero movie.

Watson: off the top of my head, I can think of precisely no WWII movies that didn’t feature a Heroic Elite rescuing the Suffering Masses from an Evil Elite. It’s the trope of absolutely everything related to that war, from Nazi propaganda through to Inglorious Bastards.

While I’m no fan of Nolan’s Batman, this particular criticism is rather silly, since it applies equally to most of western dramatic output from the ancient Greeks onwards. It’s very hard to construct a drama in which “the people” are the primary agent.

I kind of sort of see the point of the second sentence, I think. But given the incredible breadth of the first, I’m going to go ahead and recommend John Carpenter (Escape from New York and They Live are obvious examples) and Paul Verhoeven (Starship Troopers obviously, but also Robocop) as makers of genre films with a decidedly anti-aristocratic bent. And they aren’t the only two, of course. The point is that there’s nothing remotely inevitable about popular genre entertainment—let alone “western dramatic output since the Greeks”—that need make it an apologist or cheerleader for aristocratic tendencies.

If you wanted Nolan to make a movie where Batman becomes irrelevant as the People in Arms rise up to re-establish democracy and civil institutions, well, that might be an interesting movie.

I’m trying to figure to how you would show this happening in a movie (or any form of narrative) without reducing “The People” to a few representative characters. “The People” are an undifferentiated mass. In order to apply a coherent narrative to them, you have to single out representative characters. The limits of budget and the medium dictate that for a 2-2.5 hr movie, you’re only going to be able to give half a dozen POV characters any meaningful coverage.

Hay, you know what might be interesting? If these representative characters were also psychological archetypes. And maybe they could wear masks and costumes to underscore the symbolism…

David,

OH MY YES. Especially since they foreground the passage of time. The thing they’re downloading advances a couple percentage points in the five-ish minutes they take to between deciding to leave the bank and hop on their motorcycles in broad daylight, and then they’re zipping down the highway in inky blackness and only a few percentage points have gone by.

js,

It is as night and day as the continuity error David picks out. There are a couple fist fights between Bane and The Batman whose average shot length must be at least five times the average shot length of the most coherent fight in the previous movies.

As to the theory of politics stuff, there are a couple narrative choices that hurt the story and are consistent with Henry’s take. We are given literally no depiction of how the average person deals with the siege. The closest we get is Selina Kyle’s blonde “roommate” enjoying the spectacle of taking all the rich people’s shit and beating them up, and that’s obviously not intended to be a stand-in for the person in the street. This hurts the story because I for one am interested in the reactions of hundreds of thousands of people on an individual and group level to being held captive with the threat of nuclear annihilation, and was wondering why we weren’t being shown that.

That might not have been as big a problem as it turned out to be. Movies can’t show everything, after all. But we do get the very specific reaction of the police chief or second in command or whoever, Mr. Matthew Modine himself (Nolan found a way to fit a Joker into the movie after all), who gets a quiet personal moment of refusing to fight and wanting to huddle up with his family in his modest house on a street that had several newspapers in it being blown around by the wind.

So: th’ fuck? Is this supposed to stand in for the reactions of hundreds of thousands of people? It doesn’t work as character development because this character has less screentime than Miranda Tate and changes just as drastically. And the only way it works on a plot level is to generate tension about who is going to lead the police in their frontal assault against Bane’s Army at the end, which is just another example of what Henry’s talking about.

The most charitable reading of these choices is that Kyle’s buddy and Modine are the two general flavors that the reactions of regular folk come in, and that their representation of the populace as a whole fell flat because it wasn’t executed very well. But the reading that’s more plausible, because it’s been built up not only in the rest of the movie but the rest of the trilogy, is that the reactions of regular folks aren’t included because they just don’t matter and the movies aren’t interested in them. Kyle’s buddy highlights Kyle’s own personal growth, and Modine’s plot points and whiplash-inducing character development are included because they show another example of how leaders respond in stressful environments, even though they take all of five minutes and are superfluous to the plot (why was that final assault by the cops necessary, again? What did it accomplish?).

Whether explicitly or implicitly, the same ideas tend to underlie all band-of-heroes epics (so certainly all major comic book superheroes). The ultimate fate of the entire world is at the mercy of the whims and fancies of a tiny number of randomly-chosen but irreplaceable ‘Chosen Ones’. Everyone else is just there for adulation, manipulation, or cannon fodder. It’s why my tolerance for such stories is directly proportional to their frivolity – seriously pushing such paternal elitism as an ideal to strive for is despicable.

I suppose they work well as palliative escape fantasies for the disempowered and marginalised, however. Especially with the heroes tending to be plucked out of obscurity, the desired effect is not “wouldn’t it be great if I was among the thus-administered masses” (because no – it would not be great), “wouldn’t it be great if I similarly was made the hero”. It’s the modern take on the peasant guy/girl marrying the princess/prince in fairy tales.

Insofar as this aristocratic ethos permeates every superhero movie ever made (even if most of them are less concerned than Nolan’s Batman trilogy with being Significant And Meaningful), then that simply widens the problem: why is it that the culture of late capitalism yearns to return to an idealised Middle Ages? Because it’s not just the superhero movies: Harry Potter follows an identical path of struggles for power among the magical elite, with the mass of the population relegated to passive herd status. Somehow I fear that the film version of Jonathan Stroud’s Bartimaeus Trilogy, depicting the revolt of the masses against their magical overlords, is unlikely to make it onto the screen any time soon.

Yes, but actually it sounds interesting in a way, being so explicit about its political theory, thereby being different that way. Usually the political theory is there, in clear view, but nevertheless implicit, which probably makes the message stronger, often a message that submission to hierarchy is the way to achieve brotherhood. I recall critique of Star Wars as antidemocratic, can’t get much more antidemocratic than that. For something more like democracy, there was Star Trek. That is prehistoric now. We’re become disappointed and cynical. Our democratic forms are ever more revealing both designed and evolved plutocracy. Is democracy actually possible? Has there ever been anything better than a lottery for it? Corrupt political machines, or big politicians like FDR bending the rules may have been the best exemplars we’ve had of something more like democracy. When it’s more about big principles, and not big people, it falls down.

One of the reasons DC will never go there with Captain America is that he’s a Marvel character.

“In time, you will help them accomplish wonders…”

We’ll certainly get a chance to see these theories put to the test next summer when Watchmen’s Snyder and Batman’s Ryan give the ultimate Nietzschean comic book figure another shot. (http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/wb/manofsteel/)

I’ve always thought the politics of the Batman and Superman ethos fit more into a Seven Samurai/Man Who Shot Liberty Valance theme- the stories might be organized around aristocrats, but they’re not for the the aristocrats- they stage the people’s desires and fears, their inadequacies, confront them with those desires and fears, and leave them asking what to do about it.

The civic status of the contradictions- therein lies the question.

Batman is at his best when morally ambiguous.

I would have said it the other way around: he is morally ambiguous at best. And to achieve even moral ambiguity he has to exist in a failed state, otherwise he’s screwing up a functioning state and doing more harm than good.

Even when the state has failed, though, Batman makes no attempt to change that fact (unlike V, who is also morally ambiguous at best, but is at least trying to change the big picture rather than emptying the sea teaspoon by teaspoon).

How is a genre that is a mix of fantasy and crime noir not supposed to be about elite action? X-men, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars are all about a small number of people. Sci-fi runs the other direction (Blade Runner, Aliens, etc)–the best people seem to do is to survive a bizarre and alien world.

What is insidious about these aristocratic tropes though is the illusion of representativeness. This is what magnifies the drama: Batman, Frodo, and Luke are carrying the torch for the forces of light. A similar thing happens with sports (Casey at Bat being a great example), where commentators act as though the players are feeling the combined anxieties of the fan base as they walk to the plate/free throw line/penalty kick area. The illusion is that an aristocratic system can be democratic, if only the people realize it.

@Keith Edwards, aexpc:
The problem is when you combine the internal psychological imagery with a story about politics (as Nolan’s Batman movies have been–Burton’s were not, as much), I don’t see how you can have a clear political message. You raise a lot of questions about how they relate to each other.

Harry Potter is deeply cynical about leaders. Dumbledore is ineffective, the Ministry of Magic government capture in action, and ultimately everyone does what they have to do without much guidance from above. (Especially Dumbledore’s Army).

As for BTVS, Slayers are nice but not necessary. (spoiler alert) Giles, Xander, Anya, Willow, and even Dawn kill vampires single-handedly at points. I’m a bit surprised no one thinks to blow up the Bronze during the daytime, exposing all the undead within it to light, but ultimately the resistance in the Wishverse saves a large number of people. Also, Sunnydale high school graduation? While Buffy might be needed to blow up the school, her classmates go hand to hand with vampires. As for the people keeping us safe from the horrors of the undead: like all governments, mostly human.

the takeover of Gotham functions via Baroque conspiracies among elites struggling for status and power.

Haven’t seen the movie, but isn’t this just a description of civilization? Elites struggling for power over some particular configuration of the masses? If it’s not a universal description of civilization, it seems to me to be a pretty adequate description of contemporary experience, at least as far as a commercial superhero movie can represent it to the masses. In other words, sure, it’s a creepy aristocratic politics, but it’s also the kind of politics we live with.

Bianca Steele @43:

My point was that Nolan’s Batman movies aren’t meant to have a clear political message. The characters are too big and abstract to fit into tidy little political categories.

Bane is not a Ron Paul supporter. He’s a psychopath who would shoot Paul in the face on national television, then give a speech about how true liberty only comes after you smash your idols. But of course, he’s a monster from the Id, so he doesn’t mean that in any sort of ideological sense. He’s just trying to perpetuate the sort of chaos in which a monster like that can thrive.

Bruce Wayne, as the first child of Gotham (and our orphaned hero) feels compelled to use his wealth and privilege to fight these monsters from the Id by becoming one himself. In this world, the political is a secondary or even tertiary concern over the ramifications of this dark psychodrama.

Keith:
That’s what I thought you meant, but I wasn’t sure. I agree. Bane might represent what, in his own psyche, Bruce Wayne most worries will take him over and cause him to lose control. Or what he fears most about the people of Gotham, as he imagines them. None of these is a political statement. Unless Bruce Wayne is meant to be representative in some way (of people in the real world). I don’t know whether the filmmakers meant him to be, or whether they’re depicting the psychology of one idiosyncratic figure.

OTOH, plausibly Bane might represent what the “real” leader of the movementof Rand Paul followers looks like, in the author’s mind. I don’t see what’s gained by merging this political statement with a psychoanalytic statement (as you suggested earlier could be done, I don’t know whether Nolan did just that). I mean, I see what’s gained in terms of visceral audience response, but it makes the film less political.

Hmmm… a couple thoughts

Short Version: I find it hard to believe that a “theory of politics” is being dramatized when all the key dramatis personae are not only afflicted with TEH CRAZY, but also the Nolan brothers wouldn’t have it any other way, being utterly obsessed themselves with dramatis personae suffering from utter obsession.

Long Version:
I believe there’s a theme running through all the Nolan brothers’ films, not just their Batman films, that means any attempted critique of their Batman films as fundamentally pro-aristocratic/pro-fascist/pro-Great-Men-of-Will-seeking-to-establish-salutary-legends-to-impel-the-average-joe-or-jane-to-fufill-their-proper-role will be missing quite a bit of the brothers’ intent. Namely (in my humble opinion at least), the Nolan brothers seem to venerate obsession—particularly the type that’s uncontrolled, destructive to oneself and one’s loved ones, and plain ol’ all-consuming—as the most interesting subject for cinema. When I look at the main characters of not just their Batman films, but Memento, The Prestige, and Inception as well, I see the complete opposite of Persons of Great Will self-realizing and remaking the world into something of their choosing but pitiable persons who are extreme clinical neurotics suffering from an utter abridgement of volition.

Hmmm… I fear my thoughts are outstripping my ability to put them in prose [which is pretty much the story of my life, e.g., I’m procrastinating on writing my PhD thesis as I write this comment. :( ] Soooo… in closing, maybe suffice it to say that what I’m getting at is just an extreme version of Henry’s original point that

The action of the Batman films is driven nearly entirely by the personal hang-ups of a few powerful individuals.

and Bianca’s point back at Comment #11

I agree that the aristocratic theme is undercut—or made creepier, which may be the same thing—by the way each character is neatly assigned psychoanalytic motivations for what they do.

Do other superhero series go out of their way to highlight how pathetic, disgusting, and contemptible it is for the masses to attempt to claim some agency for themselves?

Maybe less so the third movie, but The Dark Knight hardly said anything else. Near the beginning Batman steps in and foils some vigilantes’ attempt to interrupt criminals; he leaves them both, but it’s the vigilantes he mocks. Near the end two sample populations from the masses demonstrate how pathetic, disgusting, and contemptible they are by choosing to blow up the other boat. In each case some rogue individual has to step in and trick or coerce the populace into forfeiting their agency. Then to drive the point home Batman says to the Joker, “What were you trying to prove? That deep down, everyone’s as ugly as you?” (Which, of course, they are; Batman just wasn’t there on the boat to see it.) Joker responds, “Can’t rely on anyone these days.” Which is the perfect characterization of the Gotham populace in Nolan’s world. They’re fickle and stupid and amoral and stuff.

I guess the only time we see the masses in the third movie is the police force, which is dense enough to get captured underground. Their release is completely inconsequential, and we’re treated to this extended tracking shot of thousands of police officers charging at… among other things, a missile-launching tank. And it’s completely pointless. It doesn’t matter if they’re blown to bits or if they somehow subdue the tank. Either the bomb asplodes and everyone dies, or the bomb is neutralized and the military steps in to promptly squash the terrorists. So what purpose exactly are they serving, other than acting the fools? You’d think a Batman who knows the capabilities and vulnerabilities of the vehicle uniquely well would fare better against a rocket-equipped armored tank than a thousand lackey officers wearing matching hats and billy clubs, but apparently fistfighting with Bane takes priority. And then no more scenes of the “war,” because, whatever.

As good as this analysis is, it still falls a little short of the standard set by Joe Queenan in 2007:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2007/sep/04/features.juddapatowfilm

“The whole shadow of Man is only as big as his hat.”

It’s hard to construct a politics or philosophy that lasts as long as the paper it’s written on.

without some master-figure, however capricious, who can grant or deny them recognition isn’t actually about monarchy

You seem to have in mind a Sun King model of monarchy, but that’s only one phase of the cycle. At other times there is the Game of Thrones or Hundred-Years’ War phase, wherein competing absolutists duke it out for the right to confer legitimacy, going beyond the country-club maneuverings of the Upper Ten Thousand which ultimately center around conservatism: more of what we’ve got. It seems to me Jacobin has a point.

Love your idea for a sequel…. it so could work.

@Ragweed, John B.: There’s also 1942’s Keeper of the Flame, in which a great national hero, recently deceased, turns out to have been a secret fascist. I remember its being Spencer Tracy’s character who tells Katharine Hepburn’s (I’m paraphrasing loosely here) “He was their [the people’s] enemy and they deserve to know it,” but the plot summary on Amazon says it was Hepburn telling Tracy. In any case, part of the point of the movie was that the people deserved to know.

Maybe Nolan’s real inspiration was Vilfredo Pareto. Elites with class 1 residues getting replaced by elites with class 2 residues, except they were lucky enough to have Batman, class 2 residue paradigm, on their side.

@Bill, the sheer number of political speeches mean any attempt to cast the film as apolitical is going to take a bit more evidence than what you’ve got. More to the point, the political stuff is entirely superfluous – the movie’s plot would be unchanged if Bane simply announced himself dictator, and Kyle’s dissimilitude with the possibility of populist revolt runs counter to the rest of her character arc- the only plausible reason for putting it in is as a deliberate message: populist revolts are dangerous, cooked up by shifty oriental schemers to cast down the righteous and put themselves in power.

As political commentary goes it’s on the level of one of those political cartoons with some morally clear but irrelevant image, captioned so that the villains are your political opponents and the victims yourself (as per: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1226#comic). Juvenile and harmless but, because of that, pretty obvious – in a movie where the dialogue consists entirely of people spouting exposition and their motivations at each other, why else do Catwoman and Bane make repeated monologues and the poor and downtrodden, when they already have perfectly good motives for everything they do. No plausible reason but to associate those making similar speeches with criminals and, in the case of Kyle, to have her realise the error of her revolutionary ways – though this little character arc merely muddles her much more typical “amoral thief grows a conscience” arc.

Incidentally it’s worth pointing out that the film’s writer, David Goyer, is currently working on a videogame about the OWS movement falling for a charismatic terrorist who dupes them into letting him take over the US. So the authoritarian political elements identified here are probably not accidental.

@Scott you’re kind of coping out by dismissing the X-men like that, it clearly indicates you can have a superhero story about broad movements. Regardless of whether the movies had admirable politics, they provide a blueprint for stories that do, that are not based on individual psychoses but on masses of superpowered individuals.
And though it’s been a while, I seem to remember the comics had the X-men expanding their rooster to include the marginalised and uncanny generally – clones and aliens and so on – rather than defining their team membership on racial grounds. Plus there was a constant proliferation of mutants front of judea-style ideological splits, which fits in the idea that the stories don’t have to be about isolated individuals.

I’m not sure I’d agree films without an aristocracy of representative character that subsitute for the mass are impossible, but they would be Eisenstein style montages that mostly lacked dialogue.

Anyway, in the TDKR I was sort of playing spot the rightist ideology. Others here will know these better than me, so I’m open to correction:

1. The lie about Harvey Dent – this seemed evocative of what’s often attributed to Leo Straus (unfairly or not, I don’t know) – exoteric myth for the masses, esoteric truth for those in the know. This is predicated on the masses being potentially powerfully capable (otherwise why bother to mystify?) but also fated to be incapable to know right and so to ever do good.

2. Gordon’s complaint about the ‘Shackles of Structures’ – this is sort of Carl Schmitt, isn’t it? Although they often appear as a couplet, the idea here is that Law and Order are antinomic (really, moral law versus order – subtracting the moral aspect from law is the reduction of law to ordering). Gordan and Batman chose order at the end of TDK.

I think 1 & 2 are partly interesting because they were Batman’s attempt to do politics in response to the Joker’s destabilisation, a move beyond the anti-political conspiracism of Begins. TKDR makes clear it’s ultimately a failure, with Blake explicity rebuking Gordon for it. But the solution isn’t a different politics that’s truthful to the masses: it’s a real, heroically presented conspiracy in the form of Gordon’s counter-revolution rebellion, which is a policeman’s putsch with no mass participation, a new anti-politics. From artistocrats conspiring to securocrats conspiring. From heroic to routinised reaction: Batman lays down the law, installs the police then leaves the stage.

3. Again, out my depth here, but wasn’t the whole fear death, jump without the rope bit a kind of lite Heidegger?

I thought it all sort of raised the question: was climbing out of the pit a metaphor for Wayne’s entire story, so essentially being Batman was dicing with death until he learned to live authentically, and his reign in Gotham was really just a means for working on his existential problems (so the running ‘extreme sports’ gag was actually the truth?).