The Dark Knight Rises and Forestalls Revolution

It’s hard not to miss the theme of class warfare in The Dark Knight Rises, the third of Christopher Nolan’s masterful trilogy bringing Batman back to the silver screen, but what does the movie really say about it? When I watched the film again recently on DVD, there was more there and it was more nuanced than I remembered.

On a first viewing, the movie seemed to merely have a thin subtext along the lines of Occupy Wall Street: Isn’t it unfair how some have so much while others have so little?

 

When the villain Bane raids the Gotham Stock Exchange, a stock broker outside is distraught, claiming, “It’s not our money, it’s everybody’s,” a skeptical police officer nearby says, “Really? Mine’s in my mattress.” This and several dialogue exchanges highlight the difference between those who make their money on Wall Street and those who labor for wages.

Later, Bane locks most of Gotham’s police officers underneath the city, turning the city over to the common people. The result is instant revolution, with the masses dragging the rich from their homes and expropriating their wealth.

The point’s been made, but I can’t help but mention one of my favorite scenes in the movie. Bruce Wayne attends a ball, where he dances and verbally spars with Selina Kyle (Catwoman), one of Gotham’s marginalized living in a rundown apartment in a seedy neighborhood. With touching sincerity and anger, Anne Hathaway delivers a number of lines on economic injustice, among them the following:

“You think all this can last? There’s a storm coming, Mr. Wayne. You and your friends better batten down the hatches, ’cause when it hits, you’re all gonna wonder how you ever thought you could live so large and leave so little for the rest of us.”

Slovenian philosopher and self-professed “some kind of a communist” Slavoj Zizek (video), however, has expressed disappointment with the film for its anti-revolutionary tenor. The film quite firmly states that if the people are given control of themselves, the result is violence and chaos:

There is this side to the film, and it has clearly drawn inspiration from some of the bloodier incidents of the French Revolution, even making them more sinister. At least the storming of the Bastille was an expression of outrage against the Crown’s practice of taking political prisoners, whereas the prisoners Bane frees from Blackgate Penitentiary appear to be mostly violent offenders. And the movie turns the Committee of Public Safety, which presided over the Reign of Terror, into mere sentencing hearings ruled by a bona fide lunatic, the Scarecrow, who only hands down one of two sentences: death or exile by death.

The Dark Knight Rises doesn’t seem to have much faith in revolution.

But something tells me that’s because Nolan is not trying to side with either the bourgeoisie or the proletariat over and against the other. To return to the man with his savings in his mattress at home, the stockbroker has an immediate rebuttal to this that I don’t take as a defense of status quo capitalism with all its failings so much as a statement highlighting the realities of today’s economy:

 

“If you don’t put those guys down, that stuffing in your mattress might be worth a whole hell of a lot less.”

Nolan’s Batman films are about many kinds of people--rich and poor, law officer and civilian, white collar and blue collar--working together each in their own way for better communities against forces that seek to bring out the worst in us. Consider the scene in the previous film, The Dark Knight, when the Joker plays a ferry full of regular citizens against a ferry full of prison inmates. Each group has the choice of blowing up the other and thereby saving their own lives, but they don’t do it.

The world of Batman is rich in villains, perhaps because the unsavory in human nature is so easy to come by, but Nolan’s films are at least equally populated with heroes, and these heroes go beyond Batman and Jim Gordon to district attorneys, entrepreneurs, police officers, charity directors and the common man, whatever his place in society.

In a sense, anyone can be Batman--we are all Batman, potentially--and each is responsible for doing the Right for the greater good:

“A hero can be anyone, even a man doing something as simple and reassuring as putting a coat around a young boy’s shoulders to let him know the world hadn’t ended.” (Batman himself)

Zizek is not satisfied with this vision of society, and I’m not sure I am, but it has its benefits, and in the absence of a revolution, it provides a ghost of a chance for a somewhat better world in which to live.