by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was The Dark
Night Rises, third and last in
writer-director Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy and to my mind by far the
best of the three, rivaling the 1943 Columbia serial and the first Tim Burton Batman from 1989 as the best Batman films ever made. I’m
not sure why I liked this one so much
better than its two predecessors — like them, it’s grim and almost unrelievedly
dark, both physically (most of it is played in shadows and half-light,
appropriate for a film whose central character is a man who took the bat as his
alter ego) and thematically. It’s
grimly ironic that the movie’s history was permanently impacted — and its
commercial success probably damaged; it was a huge hit but not the enormous
blockbuster Warner Bros. was clearly hoping for — by the Aurora, Colorado mass
shooting that took place during a first-day-of-release midnight screening (and
was allegedly committed by a man who identified himself with the Joker, villain
of three previous Batman films, so much that he dyed his hair red to match the
appearance of the Joker in the Batman comics — so the Batman mythos was evidently part of his homicidal madness, as the Beatles had been of
Manson’s; he didn’t pick The Dark Night Rises just because it was obviously going to be the
top-grossing film of the year and thereby supply him with an abundance of
targets in the audience), which made it almost unbearably ironic that Charles
and I were watching it in the aftermath of another mass shooting in Newtown,
Connecticut. In a way it’s appropriate because The Dark Night Rises is not only one of the darkest films ever made but
one of the most openly radical — probably the second most Left-leaning
mass-audience blockbuster the capitalist movie industry made in 2012 (next to The
Hunger Games), even though the ultimate
message is a reassertion of representative democracy and the authority of the
police (just as in the two sequelae to The Hunger Games — the Suzanne Collins novels Catching Fire and Mockingjay, which haven’t been filmed yet — the original
book’s socialist message is transformed into an anarchist one; the hopes raised
by the revolution are dashed as the new bosses turn out, in Pete Townshend’s
immortal line, to be the same as the old ones, leading to a Voltairean ending
in which the heroine literally tends her garden). Rush Limbaugh was rightly ridiculed when he said
that the movie was an obvious attack on Mitt Romney because the principal
villain is named Bane and Romney’s company was called Bain Capital (he either
didn’t notice or didn’t care about the difference in the spelling), but if he
actually watched the movie he’d have found quite a lot to hate about it.
It
takes place eight years after The Dark Knight, during which the late Harvey Dent — killed at the
end of The Dark Knight after
his previously upright character was turned into the villain Two-Face — has
been held up as a symbol of law and order, and the city government of Gotham
has passed something called the Dent Act, which appears to be a law for the
preventive detention of people with criminal tendencies whether or not they’ve
actually done anything. Police commissioner Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman) defends
the Dent Act against the efforts of civil libertarians to repeal it on the
ground that it’s worked — Gotham’s crime rate has nosedived since the utter
corruption and climate of fear vividly depicted in the previous movie — and
there’s still a criminal element that needs to be kept under tight control. The
rhetoric behind the Dent Act can’t help but remind one of the USA PATRIOT Act
and the similar proclamations by the Bush administration and its defenders that
it was aimed at “terrorists” and that they were a new breed of enemy against
whom we couldn’t afford such niceties as due process of the law. The film gets
even more radical as we see the jockeying for power among members of the 1
percent; while Bruce Wayne has become a recluse, holing up in one wing of Wayne
Manor, and the stories circulating about him make him sound like a cross
between Howard Hughes and Michael Jackson, other ultra-rich people are
circulating around his company like vultures, and one of them, Daggett (Ben
Mendelsohn), hires master criminal Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway — making this the
second Batman film in a row to feature a
member of the Brokeback Mountain cast), a.k.a. Catwoman, to steal Bruce Wayne’s fingerprints so he can
make fake trades on the stock market in Wayne’s name that will impoverish him
and leave his company ripe for the picking. (This does rather sound like Bain Capital’s investment
strategy.) He’s also hired Bane (Tom Hardy), whose name and appearance seem to
have come from the infamous case in San Francisco in which a particularly
vicious dog, named Bane and part of a breed called Presa Canario, bred for
fighting, clawed a woman in a San Francisco apartment where the dog was being
kept by the attorney girlfriend of a white supremacist criminal who was running
a market for such dogs from behind bars.
Bane wears a doglike mask and speaks
in a barely discernible growl (as, for some reason, does Batman whenever he
appears — which is surprisingly little in a film about him; Christian Bale,
becoming the first actor to play Batman in three theatrical films, has far more
screen time in the character’s Bruce Wayne identity than he gets in the
Batsuit), and he’s the sort of thug hired by the 1 percent (or the 0.001
percent in this film) because they think they can control him — only to find
that his sheer physical strength and the dedication of the men in his fighting
force mean he can overturn the established order and make himself dictator any
time he wants. Selina Kyle crashes a super-rich party and starts spouting
dialogue that makes her sound like an organizer for Occupy Gotham. Bane targets
the Gotham Stock Exchange for one of his terrorist attacks. The film has been
criticized on the Left for making the Occupy movement look ridiculously easily
manipulated by Bane, who manages to organize mobs into a revolutionary fervor
(I suspect director Nolan — who also co-wrote the film’s story with David S.
Goyer and its script with his brother Jonathan Nolan, who wrote the original
story for Christopher’s breakthrough movie Memento — studied Eisenstein’s Russian Revolution film October when working out how to stage these scenes), but
the critics missed an important cue: when Bane’s forces are approaching Gotham
to start their reign of terror, he announces, “We come as liberators, not
conquerors” — the famous line the Bush administration told the Iraqis just
before they attacked in 2003. I would read Bane’s movement as far closer to the
Tea Party than Occupy — a fascistic cult leader of strength and power manipulates
people into thinking the fascist leaders are genuine populists and acting in a
way that only destroys their own interests — and (perhaps because the Nolans
are British by birth and therefore the sport doesn’t have the emotional tie to
them it does to Americans) they even do a marvelous plot twist ridiculing
Americans’ cult of football: the climax of Bane’s first attack on Gotham (the
setting off of explosives concealed in concrete Bane’s construction company has
laid underground under the guise of rebuilding Gotham’s subway system) occurs
during a big football game and leaves the audience unscathed but opens a big
crater where the playing field was previously.
There’s a grimly ironic shot in
which one of the players, having grabbed the ball on the opening kickoff, has
to run for the end zone not to score a touchdown but literally for his life as the field disappears into the
earth just behind him (reminiscent of the scenes in the movie 2012 where characters similarly had to flee just ahead
of the collapsing earth), and the Nolans and Guyer thrown in one more radical
twist: during the final attack, as police captain John Robin Blake (James Gordon-Levitt,
who virtually steals the film from the principals) organizes an evacuation as a
nuclear super-bomb Bane has stolen from Wayne Enterprises is about to explode
and destroy the city (though there’s a hint in the dialogue that it’s actually
a neutron bomb, designed to kill Gotham’s population but leave its buildings
and property intact) — and a police squad in the neighboring state threatens to
shoot Blake and his evacuees, and dynamites the bridge to keep them on Gotham’s
side — an obvious reference to the city
government of white-majority Algiers, Louisiana, who deployed their police
force on the bridge across the Mississippi from New Orleans to Algiers to keep
Black New Orleanians from evacuating during Katrina. The Dark Knight Rises has its flaws, including the horrible-sounding
voices of both Batman and Bane (it’s supposed to make them ferocious but only
makes them sound like they’re trying to talk and gargle at the same time), some
pretty transparent plot twists (including a major reversal at the end involving
Bruce Wayne’s seeming love interest, fellow 1-percenter Miranda Fox, played by
Marion Cotillard — Nolan had to reschedule the film to shoot all her scenes
last, because she was pregnant when she signed for the role and he had to wait
until she had her baby) and a weird ending in which Batman seems to sacrifice
his life to fly the super-bomb out of Gotham in his weird half-car, half-plane
“The Bat” but then turns up at an outdoor café leading the life of an aimless
expat, while Captain Blake embraces his middle name (the first time we’ve heard
it in the film) and seems to be setting up a non-Nolan sequel. (The reason
Robin didn’t appear as a character in the Nolan Batman cycle was that Christian Bale refused to play the
Caped Crusader if he did.)
I’d still like to see the makers of these films do one lighter in tone, if not
all the way over to the campy extremes of the 1960’s TV shows and the one film
based on them at least with some sense that a superhero adventure is supposed to be fun (I’d love to see
a scene with Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson in Wayne Manor reading an article
denouncing them as “a wish-fulfillment fantasy of two homosexuals living
together” and getting livid about it — the line comes from an actual book, Seduction
of the Innocent, published in 1954, in
which psychologist Dr. Frederick Wertham actually said that about the Batman
and Robin relationship), but The Dark Knight Rises is a quite impressive film (and the end sequence
of Michael Caine as the Wayne butler Alfred Pennypacker mourning Bruce’s
supposed death and reflecting that he outlasted both Wayne and his parents is
unexpectedly moving and tragic), helped by the fact that no one in it is as
horrendously miscast as Heath Ledger was as the Joker in The Dark Knight. (Yes, he won an Academy Award for it, but that
was partly because he’d died and therefore the Academy voters knew they’d never
have another chance to give him one, and partly a “consolation Oscar” because
he hadn’t won for Brokeback
Mountain.) I had mixed reactions to
the first two Nolan Batman movies and utterly loathed Inception (mainly because he used its plot about
manufactured dreams as an excuse to take his movie anywhere and do anything
whether it made sense or not — though in retrospect Inception reveals the same cynicism towards the 1 percent
and their unscrupulous treatment not only of the 99 percent but of each other
as well that’s at the heart of The Dark Knight Rises), but The Dark Knight Rises is a surprisingly effective movie and a
well-crafted and thoroughly moving take on the Batman mythos. And to think that when I wrote about The Dark
Knight I said I had no idea how
they’d be able to make a credible sequel to it!
