'The Dark Knight' is No Capitalist... 

By Gavin Mueller 

July 23, 2012

http://jacobinmag.com/blog/2012/07/the-dark-knight-is-no-capitalist/

... he's something much worse. Using the French
Revolution for inspiration, the Nolans have restaged
the bourgeois revolution, but in reverse. They want you
to stand with the monarchists.

By now, you already know: the new Batman movie is
fascist propaganda, a clear swipe against the Occupy
movement, and the occasion for the worst rampage in
U.S. history, by a guy referring to himself as the
Joker. Historic stuff is happening, so much so that
Hollywood opted not to report its weekend numbers out
of sensitivity (and, maybe, because Batman 7: Dark
Knight 2 isn't going to beat The Avengers).

But Batman a fascist? Come on, this isn't news. This is
American entertainment!

Folks have been doing the superheroes-are-fascist
routine for over 50 years now, so there's very little
novel in dropping the f-bomb on Batman now. Which isn't
to say the critics are wrong: after all, the last Dark
Knight movie was totally reactionary, though I don't
seem to remember quite so many complaints about it.

There's that whole rich guy handing out helpings of
extrajudicial brutality thing, which is the entire
Batman schtick. Then there's the Brothers Nolan heaping
some extra fascist ideology on top, wrapping up The
Dark Knight with authority figures effacing the crimes
of the elite in a deliberate effort to craft symbols
that will get the public to support their War on Crime.

And then there's the actual plot, that dusty old thing
that ties together two hours of dudes grimacing and
punching each other. In Dark Knight, we saw Bruce Wayne
cleverly wrest away control of his corporation from its
pesky shareholders, turning Wayne Enterprises into a
privately held company to better conduct experimental
weapons research.

We can't have valuable tank money wasted on useless
ventures, no! And nothing gladdens the American soul
like a family company allowed to do business the way
they see fit, away from those pesky disclosure rules
and fiduciary responsibilities -- in fact, I remember
the theater audience cheering.

Look, you don't have to be an entertainment junkie, or
a critic, to come up with examples of white men, often
cops and soldiers, "forced" to go rogue to fight the
(usually brown-skinned) evils that threaten family and
fatherland. Pretty much every trailer before Dark
Knight Rises had some variation on the theme, even the
comedy Neighborhood Watch (apparently, Trayvon Martin's
killing by hero-wannabe George Zimmerman pushed the
release date back a couple months - oh sensitive
Hollywood!). Halliburton wet dream Iron Man 2 was
shockingly glib about "privatizing peace," and
everybody noticed, but I guess Robert Downey Junior is
too charming for the f-word. Frank Miller, the curdled
soul behind contemporary Reichskultur like 300 and Sin
City (and The Dark Knight), is all but open about his
fascism, and recently told Occupy to join the military
and get whipped into shape fighting our "ruthless
enemies." Lately I've been watching Walter White kill
depraved Latino drug dealers so he can keep his brood
nice and petit bourgeoisie.

Guys, these are your basic fascist plotlines, and if
you want to tell me that 90% of Hollywood plots work
this way, do the math yourself. It's not an accident
that these revenge fantasies pour out of the country
that's the world's biggest, most violent bully.

Apparently this time the critical consensus has caught
up, declaring Batman a Goebbelsian fable squarely
targeting the protests of the 99% before the film had
been released to the public. If that's true, then The
Dark Knight Rises is a pretty crap installment of the
U.S. entertainment industry's parade of macho reaction.
Class war tropes abound, but they're thin and
unconvincing, never given the credence you'd expect now
that income inequality is dinner table conversation.

Director Christopher Nolan, a guy who deemed absolute
monarchy "relatable," wouldn't know real underclass
resentment if it pulled him up by his underwear, the
way his chums at his British private school used to. So
let me clear things up - The Dark Knight has nothing to
do with Occupy, and no one who sees it will make that
connection, unless they gleaned everything they know
about Occupy from newscopter footage. Bane's "army of
the 99%" is a disciplined private militia - no mention
of anarchists, as the Guardian would have you believe -
who happily volunteer for neck breakings out of blind
loyalty.

This "true believer" nonsense simply doesn't resonate
with Occupy at all, where debates over simple
procedural matters took hours to resolve, and Bane's
authoritarian command violates the Occupy's own prime
directive of leaderlessness. There's only the
sketchiest indication that Bane has any appeal to the
Gotham citizenry at all, unlike the Joker in Tim
Burton's Batman.

If The Dark Knight Rises was supposed to be an attack
on Occupy, it's a failure, and even if it's settling
for vague anti-populism, it sucks at that too.

There is a fundamental carelessness - or perhaps more
accurately, cowardice - running through the whole film,
where every character's motivations are thin and
unconvincing or simply nonexistent. Sure, the Joker
didn't have any motivation, but I've been bored by
evil-for-evil's-sake villains since I started fifth
grade. Let's start with Bane himself, who I initially
liked. He informs people of their imminent demise with
this matter-of-fact Sean-Connery lilt that makes
untimely death seem like not such a big deal.

I was looking forward to seeing his character develop,
for the film to explore his weird populism, or at the
very least his destructive pleasures the way Dark
Knight indulged us with the Joker. Instead he ends up
being your bargain basement villain, making silly
pronouncements and receiving lots of head trauma. The
Nolans couldn't think of anything to do with him after
he breaks Batman's back throws him into an Uzbek prison
pit (there's a reason this movie is almost three hours
long and still feels rushed). He ends up getting
unceremoniously capped by some Bat-Gadget, nary a
farewell one-liner to his name.

This is not a movie full of good one-liners. Commando,
that's an action movie with some one-liners. In Dark
Knight Rises, one of the characters literally utters,
"His only crime was that he loved me." Someone wrote
that.

The writing's not all bad, and most of the decent lines
go to Anne Hathaway's appealing Catwoman, who also has
the most coherent class war angle. The Nolan boys
attempt to give her character a dash of
hipster-bohemian anticapitalism with a social climbing
streak, but her poise and taste for the finer things
doesn't exactly add up to a rough childhood, let alone
Billyburg bee-keeping. Rather, it better approximates
the privileged upbringing and pricey liberal arts
education of Hathaway herself. Still, she's a welcome
presence in a film full of nondescript white dudes with
that same Mad-Men-retro slicked hair thing that GQ
cannot stop pimping. That's right, Joseph Gordon
Levitt, I called you nondescript, which is better than
me saying you are not at all credible as a grizzled
cop.

But you don't need me to tell you this movie is clunky,
if not a total clunker, just like you don't need me to
tell you that it's fascist. You'll probably see it for
yourself, if you haven't already. So let's get to my
most controversial point: Batman/Bruce Wayne is not a
capitalist. Sorry.

This Batman-as-financier stuff is a trick played by
casting the actor whose greatest role was a
psychopathic i-banker. Yes, Wayne is rich, but that's
not the same as being a capitalist. The guy running the
bodega down the street is more of a capitalist than
Bruce Wayne. Wayne has no interest in profit, in
accumulation, in investing his wealth to produce more
wealth. If you don't see M-C-M' you don't have
capitalism. Now, the character of Bruce Wayne has
always been imbued with noblesse oblige, but let's not
get that confused with what a capitalist does. Wayne
funds orphanages and renewable energy in distinction to
the actual capitalist, Daggett, who is trying to
pillage Wayne Enterprises, Bain-Capital-style. Daggett
is pointedly dissed at a party full of rich people
because he's only interested in money. Those silly
noveau-riche, so gauche, am I right?

So this is a class struggle all right, but it's not
between Bane's pseudo-proles and Gotham's elite with
their cop army. That's a sideshow. The struggle is
within the ruling class itself, between the capitalist
Daggett and the aristocratic Wayne. Wayne is far more
feudalism than finance: heir to a manor complete with
fawning manservant, unconcerned with business or
money-making, bound by duty and honor even if it makes
him a recluse.

Meanwhile, Daggett represents the rapaciousness and
self-destructiveness of unfettered acquisition,
stooping to working with terrorists to edge out Wayne's
position on the board of directors. And so we're
presented with a choice, which like with so much
ideology is a false one: be ruled by the chaotic profit
motive who holds out empty promises of liberation, or
by an unaccountable violent lord who nevertheless
promises to look out for our best interests. Using the
French Revolution for inspiration, the Nolans have
restaged the question of bourgeois revolution, but in
reverse. They want you to stand with the monarchists.

Here's where the renewable energy plot comes in. Wayne
invested heavily in fusion power, which was apparently
successful. However, he shuttered the project at great
personal cost because he was worried about it being
weaponized. This is why we can't have nice things,
world! Your betters have constructed cheap, clean,
renewable energy, but it could be turned into a weapon
by evil people (Russians of course, those reliable
tragic mullatoes of global cinema - so white and so
good at science, yet so ethnically other that things
always go badly). So Wayne mothballs it "to keep it out
of the wrong hands." He alone determines the fate of
the realm - in the name of the people, of course - as
he hobbles around his mansion.

This is the essential gutlessness of the Nolans'
enterprise. They can write a knotty plot, and can even
bring some visual style, but they have no feel for what
most people actually feel and enjoy and find
"relatable." I'm impressed by their films, like I'm
impressed by Michaelangelo's Last Judgment even though
it doesn't inspire me to fear the torments of Hell.
Even when I like a Nolan film, I don't love it, don't
identify with it, and rarely get swept up in it unless
the soundtrack forces me (for fascism, I'd like a bit
more Wagnerian bombast in the score instead of Hans
Zimmer's strings tugging me by my sleeve from scene to
scene). And I think that's because the Nolans have
absolutely no common touch, no feel for what energizes
anyone who isn't white and with summer home.

Oh, they try, but they largely waste a good football
stadium set-piece while tipping their manicured hands
by having a British choirboy sing the national anthem.

When it comes down to it, the Nolans are enthralled by
the elite of the elite, and simply cannot stoop to
dissent from them on any level. The Nolans won't let us
revel in the carnivalesque eviction of the rich from
their condos, or let us enjoy shooting up the stock
market before hurrying to the next scene, or even give
us a riotous show trial to chuckle through.

Read your Jameson, boys: you're allowed to let us
indulge in our fantasies of communist utopia as long as
you sew things up ideologically by the end. But we are
never allowed to indulge; instead, the audience of the
indebted and oppressed are invited to shake our heads
sadly at the spectacle of redistribution of property.
Dickens may have been a lip-quivering liberal in the
face of social revolution, but he at least portrayed
the poor with sympathy, depicting the destitute of
London and Paris hanged, limbs lopped off for the
slightest offenses. The Nolans only have sympathy for
the ruling class aristocrats, and that's what they
insist on from their audiences. So they'll let
Bloomberg's private army play the scrappy guerilla
force: the cops are the underdogs when it comes to
taking back the streets, and the Nolans want you to
root for them.

I don't watch a lot of movies these days, mostly
because I find them as juvenile and regressive as this
one. But I'll be honest: sometimes I can "look past"
shitty politics and enjoy films on a formal level,
though it's not as easy as it used to be. I halfway
hoped I could do that for Dark Knight Rising. But the
problem is that the shitty politics, and the Nolans'
slavering supplication to them, sap the film of its
pleasures. The Nolans never honestly consider the
antagonism between rich and poor. Instead, what could
make for some really fertile drama is just another
wasted set piece for some CGI pyrotechnics. Have some
characters mouth some half-remembered platitudes from
an E.J. Dionne op-ed, call it topical. This
tone-deafness to class struggle renders the entire
occupation of Gotham nonsensical when it could have
been the most interesting part of the film.

This stems from the Nolans' lack of any concept of
popular power. There is no evidence that "the people"
back this coup, no evidence of popular support, not
even a scene where a newscaster summarizes it for us.
There is barely any evidence of "the people" at all -
it's all cops and mercenaries battling it out. So
instead of a real insurrection, the takeover of Gotham
functions via Baroque conspiracies among elites
struggling for status and power. By going medieval,
this allows the Nolans to tie DKR into the previous two
Batman flicks while crafting so much room for a sequel
that you could fit a fleet of Batplanes into it.

They've sacrificed a whole lot of the script to the
shareholders on this one, which isn't really what I
expect from them. But maybe it's one reason they have
so much affection for a world where elites can exercise
their powers any way they wish. Capitalism is hard on
art, and these guys want to suggest feudalism might be
a better option.

___________________________________________

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