When
The Dark Knight Rises came out, we were inevitably subjected to the flurry of reviews that surround the release of any blockbuster. While largely positive, there were a significant amount of negative reviews that criticized a variety of aspects of the movie. Screenplay, editing, soundtrack, acting—these are all fair and justified topics for criticism for any movie. Regardless of your personal feeling towards these aspects of the movie, I think that most (and here, we’re ignoring the “death threats on RottenTomatoes” crowd) of us feel that it’s a matter of opinion and everyone is entitled to their own opinions (even though it’s fun to debate with those who have different opinions). However, there was one common complaint that I saw that kept popping up in review after review and it infuriated me:
The Dark Knight Rises is a conservative’s wet dream
The Dark Knight Rises has a strong anti-Occupy message
The Dark Knight Rises doesn’t promote conservatism, it promotes something even worse—monarchism
And so it went. Review after review after review.
I consider myself well on the left when it comes to political issues, but I had enough objectivity to notice that every single time I saw this phrase, or some variation of it, in a review it was coming from a left-leaning commentator who tended to favor movies that were socially activist in some way. Which is fine. Everyone has their own tastes. But if you’re going to judge a movie based on its merit as a didactic social commentary, at least make an effort to understand the movie you’re critiquing. The major mistake that all these reviewers make is that
The Dark Knight Rises is NOT an allegory. You can’t just substitute in George Bush for Batman, and you can’t just pretend Gotham City is NYC. Yes, when Gotham was created it was modeled after New York, but it takes on a life of its own in this trilogy, and I think that that is something that has been completely ignored by a large portion of the audience. Reviews profit off of comparing movies to the real world and drawing parallels where there should be none because a literary analysis of a fictional movie as a fictional movie won’t draw anywhere near as much of an audience as using a fictional movie to augment a political ideology—and when it comes down to it, drawing an audience is the only thing that seems to matter anymore.
I wanted to trace out the narrative arc of Gotham City and show why Batman is essential in the city’s rebirth, but because of all the mindless political drivel in reviews, I wanted to guard against any risk of people reading this review allegorically. The Dark Knight trilogy doesn’t attempt to make any moral statement about the world we live in—it seeks to
explore some of the same problems we face, offering some solutions, but raising other problems in their wake.
So let’s start at the very beginning. Batman Begins.
We find ourselves in a city riddled with crime and fear. Gangs have taken over, powered by their infiltration of governmental organizations that were built to protect the people. It’s not anarchy—established structures do exist, and power has been granted to those structures through a democratic system. But over time, the structures have become so corrupt that Gotham virtually belongs to the gangs—with the few ‘good’ cops, like Jim Gordon, picking and choosing their fights, but ultimately making little headway against the ruined system. Two competing perspectives come up in response to corruption—Rachel Dawes’, who believes that the corruption needs to be weeded out, but the protective systems need to be kept intact, and Bruce Wayne’s, who believes that gang corruption must be stamped out at any costs necessary, even if it means weakening social institutions like the police force. Through the movie, the varying perspectives compete, but Batman eventually wins out, catalyzing social change. But at the end of the movie, we see the hints of a problem coming about. Batman has catalyzed social change, but he has done it so quickly that there was no reappropriation of power. He simply removed power from those who had held it and misused it. This doesn’t seem like much of a problem at first because, hey, at least the bad guys aren’t in charge anymore, but the final scenes hint at two major implications of Batman’s actions. First, is the obvious—Batman has used theatrics as a weapon and it is a strategy that his enemies and admirers are beginning to copy (Joker card), themes that come to fruition in
The Dark Knight. The second is a lot more subtle, and would have slipped by me unnoticed if it weren’t for the events of
TDK—Batman has, in essence, created a power vacuum. He has taken power away from the crime lords, but the police still don’t have power, the district attorney doesn’t have power; no one does. At the end of the movie, we get the sense that everyone is at the bottom fighting for power now, and the police have a fighting chance, which gives us resolution and hope.
But the second movie tears that resolution apart. We expect to see Gotham rise from the ashes like a phoenix, with positive structures rising to replace the negatives one that Batman has helped destroy. But instead, we see a madman, the Joker, take advantage of the power vacuum to make a meteoric rise to the top. The Joker could not have come to power if it were not for the lack of institutionalized power in Gotham. Yes, he was smart and savvy, but ultimately, it was his ability to manipulate desperate people—people who were willing to give up some power in order to return to their old positions—that allowed him to step on both the police force and organized crime. And instead of consolidating his newfound power, he decided to use it to spread anarchy. Gotham moved from a city with structure—although corrupt structure—to a city where chaos ran rampant. At the end of the movie, Batman is faced with a difficult choice. I’ve heard many people ask why the crimes of Harvey Dent weren’t blamed on Joker, but given that the Joker was being caught by the SWAT team when Batman confronts Two-Face, the police had set up a perimeter around the two of them, and Harvey Dent died from blunt force trauma (I think they can determine that in autopsies), evidence would point away from the Joker being directly responsible for Dent’s death. So we all know what happens next—Batman decides to take the blame for Dent’s crimes, and there is a montage showing us how lies and deceit have been used to solve the problems that had risen throughout the movie. The ending is extremely cathartic and reinforces our image of Batman as a tragic hero, yet it is still problematic. We could conceivably see these lies used to ‘fix’ Gotham permanently, but of course they will not.
In the third act to The Dark Knight Trilogy, we find ourselves 8 years ahead of the events in
The Dark Knight. The lies from the second movie have become institutionalized and Harvey Dent has become a martyr. Batman has ‘succeeded’ in his original goal. He destroyed the structure of society in the first movie so that legitimate organizations could reform it, and here, we see that he has succeeded in doing that. The cops have power, organized crime has been virtually stamped out, and things seem to be looking better than ever. For the wealthy at least. Because although crime has been drastically reduced, it seems as if the wealth disparity that we saw in the first movie is as intact as ever. Insert a revolutionary, Bane, and the built up anger towards the wealthy is given a way to express itself. The power structures that existed should have been able to handle the threat, but when Bane reveals that the peace was based on a lie as written in a speech by Jim Gordon (in my opinion, the reveal wasn’t as powerful as it could have been), the consent of the governed quickly slips away and, combined with the fact that the majority of the police force is trapped underground, the city is back to a quasi-anarchy. There are a few important things that I want to mention here. With the reveal of Harvey Dent’s crimes comes the redemption of Batman. Unless I’m recalling incorrectly, Gordon’s speech explicitly mentions how Batman saved Gordon’s child, thereby restoring his name. The social structure that was built on lies has been destroyed by Bane, but that give Gotham a chance to redeem itself and build a society that isn’t built on a foundation of lies. Secondly, the threat of the bomb is the only thing that allows the city to stay in a state of perpetual social upheaval. The revolution is artificial—yes, it capitalizes on the tension between different social classes, but the agency is Bane’s (and Talia’s), not the people’s, and he’s manipulating them like puppets on a string. Thirdly, the plot that Bane concocts hearkens back to Ra’s al Ghul’s original plan to destroy Gotham—not the one using the focused microwave device to poison the city with fear, but even before that. If you recall, at the end of
Batman Begins, Ra’s says that this was not the first time the League of Shadows had come to Gotham. When Bruce’s parents were alive, the League of Shadows tried to destroy Gotham by using economics, but Bruce’s parent’s deaths galvanized the city unto saving itself, “and the city has limped on ever since”. It looks like Bane has realized Ra’s failed plan—he has succeeded in creating the revolution that would run Gotham into the ground.
So the situation Gotham is in halfway through the third movie is a dire one, but there are a few positives—the lies on which Gotham thrived have been exposed and the removal of the bomb will, to some extent, remove the impotency of the governmental institutions that are supposed to protect the people. Now we move on to the action-packed final act of the trilogy. First, Batman frees the cops, restoring the structural institutions of Gotham. Second, Batman defeats both major villains, removing the figureheads of the artificial revolution. Third, he removes the bomb, removing the impetus for the revolution. And fourth, he ‘kills’ Batman, providing the city a figure around which to rebuild their political ideology. Gotham feels like it’s finally been saved.
The ending with John Blake is a bit tough to decipher because I don’t know what Blake’s relationship to the Batman iconography will be moving on into the future. With the unveiling of the Batman statue in City Hall, I got the sense that the Batman’s legacy was finally being, literally and metaphorically, cemented into Gotham City’s social structure. The return of a ‘new’ Batman would prevent the martyrdom of the ‘old’ Batman, unless it was made distinctly clear that the two were different people. But regardless, the ending was extremely satisfying thematically in all aspects but this (and even this part was a great cinematic moment, especially when Blake goes into the cave and the bats swarm him).
The power of the trilogy comes from Bruce Wayne’s relationship with the city—a city that he had every reason to turn away from. Gotham is a central character in The Dark Knight trilogy, and the changes it goes through throughout the trilogy affect Bruce Wayne just as much, if not more, than his interactions with any other character. The city lived and breathed, responding to the actions of Batman and forcing him to consider the implications of his actions beyond just himself and the people he cared about. These weren’t just your typical superhero sequels where the character takes on new villains in the exact same setting as before. They forced Bruce Wayne to constantly change his Batman persona to figure out how to help save a city that was in a constant state of flux-and in the end, he does manage to save it. Christopher Nolan decided to make a trilogy that was as much about the spirit of Gotham as it was about Batman and I think that he, like Batman, succeeded.