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Author : David Graeber
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I am appending this piece, ostensibly about the Christopher Nolan film The Dark Knight Rises— the long version of a piece published under the title “Super Position” in The New Inquiry in 2012 —as it expands on themes of sovereignty and popular culture broached in the third essay in this book. In that essay, I noted that there were three historically independent elements that I believed came together in our notion of “the state,” which I described as sovereignty, bureaucracy, and (heroic) politics. My thoughts on sovereignty, however, were only minimally developed, so I thought it might interest the reader to see some further reflections on the subject, written in the same broad, discursive vein.
On Saturday, October 1, 2011, the NYPD arrested seven hundred Occupy Wall Street activists as they were attempting to march across the Brooklyn Bridge. Mayor Bloomberg justified it on the grounds that protesters were blocking traffic. Five weeks later, that same Mayor Bloomberg closed down the nearby Queensboro Bridge to traffic for two solid days to allow for shooting of Christopher Nolan’s last installment of his Batman Trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises.
Many remarked upon the irony.
A few weeks ago, I went to see the film with some friends from Occupy—most of whom had themselves been arrested on the bridge back in October. We all knew the movie was basically one long piece of anti-Occupy propaganda. That didn’t bother us. We went to the theater hoping to have fun with that fact, in much the spirit of someone who was not a racist, or a Nazi, and would go to watch a screening of Birth of a Nation or Triumph of the Will. We expected the movie to be hostile, even offensive. But none of us expected it to be bad.
I’d like to reflect here, for a moment, on what made the film so awful. Because, oddly, it’s important. I think the understanding of a lot of things—about movies, violence, police, the very nature of state power—can be furthered simply by trying to unravel what, exactly, made The Dark Knight so bad.
One issue I think we should get straight from the outset. The film really is a piece of anti- Occupy propaganda. Some still deny it. Christopher Nolan, the director, went on record to insist the script was written before the movement even started, and has claimed the famous scenes of the occupation of New York (“Gotham”) were really inspired by Dickens’s account of the French Revolution, not by OWS itself. This strikes me as disingenuous. Everyone knows Hollywood scripts are rewritten continually over the course of production, often to the point where they end up looking nothing like the original text; also, that when it comes to messaging, even details like where a scene is shot (“I know, let’s have the cops face off with Bane’s followers right in front of the New York Stock Exchange!”) or a minor change of wording (“let’s change ‘take control of’ to ‘occupy’ ”) can make all the difference.
Then there’s the fact that the villains actually do occupy Wall Street, and attack the Stock Exchange.
What I’d like to argue is that it’s precisely this desire for relevance, the fact that the filmmakers had the courage to take on the great issues of the day, which ruins the movie. It’s especially sad, because the first two movies of the trilogy—Batman Begins and The Dark Knight—had moments of genuine eloquence. By making them, Nolan demonstrated that he does have interesting things to say about human psychology, and particularly, about the relation of creativity and violence (it’s hard to imagine a successful action film director wouldn’t). The Dark Knight Rises is even more ambitious. It dares to speak on a scale and grandeur appropriate to the times. But as a result, it stutters into incoherence.
Moments like this are potentially enlightening, for one thing, because they provide a kind of window, a way to think about what superhero movies, and superheroes in general, are really all about. That in turn helps us answer another question: What is the reason for the sudden explosion of such movies to begin with—one so dramatic that it sometimes seems comic book-based movies are replacing sci-fi as the main form of Hollywood special effects blockbuster almost as rapidly as the cop movie replaced the Western as the dominant action genre in the seventies?
Why, in the process, are familiar superheroes suddenly being given complex interiority: family backgrounds, emotional ambivalence, moral crises, anxiety, self-doubt? Or why (equally true but less remarked-on), does the very fact of their receiving a soul seem to force them to also choose some kind of explicit political orientation? One could argue that this happened first not with a comic-book character, but with James Bond, who in his traditional incarnation, as preternatural foil of evil masterminds, was always a kind of cinematic version of the same thing. Casino Royale gave Bond psychological depth. And by the very next movie, Bond was saving indigenous communities in Bolivia from evil transnational water privatizers.
Spiderman, too, broke left, just as Batman broke right. In a way this makes sense. Superheroes are a product of their historical origins. Superman is a Depression-era displaced Iowa farm boy; Batman, the billionaire playboy, is a scion of the militaryindustrial complex that was created, just as he was, at the beginning of World War II; Peter Parker, a product of the sixties, is a smartass working-class kid from Queens who got something weird shot into his veins. But again, in the latest movie, the subtext became surprisingly explicit (“you’re not a vigilante,” says the police commander, “you’re an anarchist!”): particularly in the climax, where Spiderman, wounded by a police bullet, is rescued by an outbreak of working-class solidarity as dozens of crane operators across Manhattan defy city orders and mobilize to help him. Nolan’s movie was the most politically ambitious, but it also falls the most obviously flat. Is this because the superhero genre does not lend itself to a right-wing message?
Certainly, this is not the conclusion cultural critics have tended to come to in the past.
What, then, can we say about the politics of the superhero genre? It seems reasonable to start by looking at the comic books, since this is where everything else (the TV shows, cartoon series, blockbuster movies) ultimately came from. Comic-book superheroes were originally a mid-century phenomenon and like all mid-century pop culture phenomena, they are essentially Freudian. That is to say, insofar as a work of popular fiction had anything to say about human nature, or human motivations, a certain pop Freudianism is what one would expect. Sometimes this even becomes explicit, as in Forbidden Planet, with its “monsters from the Id.” Usually, it’s just subtext.
Umberto Eco once remarked that comic book stories already operate a little bit like dreams; the same basic plot is repeated, obsessive-compulsively, over and over; nothing changes, even as the backdrop for the stories shifts from Great Depression to World War II to postwar prosperity, the heroes—whether Superman, Wonder Woman, the Green Hornet, or Dr. Strange—seem to remain in an eternal present, never aging, always fundamentally the same. The basic plot takes the following form: a bad guy—maybe a crime boss, more often a powerful supervillain—embarks on a project of world conquest, destruction, theft, extortion, or revenge. The hero is alerted to the danger and figures out what’s happening. After trials and dilemmas, at the last possible minute, the hero foils the villain’s plans. The world is returned to normal until the next episode when the exact same thing happens once again.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what’s going on here. The heroes are purely reactionary. By this I mean “reactionary” in the literal sense: they simply react to things; they have no projects of their own. (Or to be more precise, as heroes they have no projects of their own. As Clark Kent, Superman may be constantly trying, and failing, to get into Lois Lane’s pants. As Superman, he is purely reactive.) In fact, superheroes seem almost utterly lacking in imagination. Bruce Wayne, with all the money in the world, can’t seem to think of anything to do with it other than to design even more high-tech weaponry and indulge in the occasional act of charity. In the same way it never seems to occur to Superman that he could easily end world hunger or carve free magic cities out of mountains. Almost never do superheroes make, create, or build anything. The villains, in contrast, are relentlessly creative. They are full of plans and projects and ideas. Clearly, we are supposed to first, without consciously realizing it, identify with the villains. After all, they’re having all the fun. Then of course we feel guilty for it, reidentify with the hero, and have even more fun watching the Superego pummel the errant Id back into submission.
Of course, the moment you start arguing that there’s any message in a comic book, you are likely to hear the usual objections: “But these are just cheap forms of entertainment! They’re no more trying to teach us anything about human nature, politics, or society than, say, a Ferris wheel.” And of course, to a certain degree, this is true. Pop culture does not exist in order to convince anyone of anything. It exists for the sake of pleasure. Still, if you pay close attention, one will also observe that most pop culture projects do also tend to make that very pleasure into a kind of argument.
Horror films provide a particularly unsubtle example of how this works. The plot of a horror movie is, typically, some kind of story of transgression and punishment—in the slasher film, perhaps the purest, most stripped-down, least subtle example of the genre, you always see the same movement in the plot. As Carol Clover long ago noted in her magisterial Men, Women, and Chainsaws, the audience is first tacitly encouraged to identify with the monster (the camera literally takes the monster’s point of view) as he hacks away at the “bad girls,” and only later, shifting to looking through the eyes of the androgynous heroine who will eventually destroy him. The plot is always a simple story of transgression and punishment: the bad girls sin, they have sex, they fail to report a hit-and-run accident, maybe they’re just obnoxious, stupid teenagers; as a result, they are eviscerated. Then the virginal good girl eviscerates the culprit. It’s all very Christian and moralistic. The sins may be minor and the punishment utterly disproportionate, but the ultimate message is: “Of course they really deserve it; we all do; whatever our civilized exterior, we are all fundamentally corrupt and evil. The proof? Well, look at yourself. You’re not evil? If you’re not evil, then why are you getting off on watching this sadistic crap?”
This is what I mean when I say the pleasure is a form of argument.
Next to this, a superhero comic book might seem pretty innocuous. And in many ways it is. If all a comic is doing is telling a bunch of adolescent boys that everyone has a certain desire for chaos and mayhem, but that ultimately such desires need to be controlled, the political implications would not seem to be particularly dire. Especially because the message still does carry a healthy dose of ambivalence, just as it does with all those contemporary action-movie heroes who seem to spend so much of their time smashing up suburban shopping malls and suchlike. Most of us would like to smash a bank or shopping mall at least once in our lives. And as Bakunin put it, “the urge for destruction is also a creative urge.”
Still, I think there is reason to believe that at least in the case of most comic-book superheroes, the mayhem does have very conservative political implications. To understand why though I will have to enter into a brief digression on the question of constituent power.
Costumed superheroes ultimately battle criminals in the name of the law—even if they themselves often operate outside a strictly legal framework. But in the modern state, the very status of law is a problem. This is because of a basic logical paradox: no system can generate itself. Any power capable of creating a system of laws cannot itself be bound by them. So law has to come from someplace else. In the Middle Ages the solution was simple: the legal order was created by God, a being who, as the Old Testament makes abundantly clear, is not bound by laws or even any recognizable system of morality (again, this only stands to reason: if you created morality, you can’t, by definition, be bound by it). Or if not by God directly, then by the divinely ordained power of kings. The English, American, and French revolutionaries changed all that when they created the notion of popular sovereignty—declaring that the power once held by kings is now held by an entity that they called “the people.” This created an immediate logical problem, because “the people” are by definition a group of individuals united by the fact that they are, in fact, bound by a certain set of laws. So in what sense can they have created those laws? When this question was first posed in the wake of the British, American, and French revolutions, the answer seemed obvious: through those revolutions themselves. But this created a further problem. Revolutions are acts of law-breaking. It is completely illegal to rise up in arms, overthrow a government, and create a new political order. In fact, nothing could possibly be more illegal. Cromwell, Jefferson, or Danton were all clearly guilty of treason, according to the laws under which they grew up, just as much as they would have been had they tried to do the same thing again under the new regimes they created, say, twenty years later.
So laws emerge from illegal activity. This creates a fundamental incoherence in the very idea of modern government, which assumes that the state has a monopoly of the legitimate use of violence (only the police, or prison guards, or duly authorized private security, have the legal right to beat you up). It’s legitimate for the police to use violence because they are enforcing the law; the law is legitimate because it’s rooted in the constitution; the constitution is legitimate because it comes from the people; the people created the constitution by acts of illegal violence. The obvious question, then: How does one tell the difference between “the people” and a mere rampaging mob?
There is no obvious answer.
The response by mainstream, respectable opinion is to try to push the problem as far away as possible. The usual line is: the age of revolutions is over (except perhaps in benighted spots like Gabon, or maybe Syria); we can now change the constitution, or legal standards, by legal means. This of course means that the basic structures will never change. We can witness the results in the United States, which continues to maintain an architecture of state, with its electoral college and two party-system, that—while quite progressive in 1789—now makes us appear, in the eyes of the rest of the world, the political equivalent of the Amish, still driving around with horses and buggies. It also means we base the legitimacy of the whole system on the consent of the people despite the fact that the only people who were ever really consulted on the matter lived over two hundred years ago. In America, at least, “the people” are all long since dead.
We’ve gone then from a situation where the power to create a legal order derives from God, to one where it derives from armed revolution, to one where it is rooted in sheer tradition—“these are the customs of our ancestors, who are we to doubt their wisdom?” (And of course a not insignificant number of American politicians make clear they’d really like to give it back to God again.)
This, as I say, is how these matters are considered by the mainstream. For the radical Left, and the authoritarian Right, the problem of constituent power is very much alive, but each takes a diametrically opposite approach to the fundamental question of violence. The Left, chastened by the disasters of the twentieth century, has largely moved away from its older celebration of revolutionary violence, preferring nonviolent forms of resistance. Those who act in the name of something higher than the law can do so precisely because they don’t act like a rampaging mob. For the Right, on the other hand—and this has been true since the rise of fascism in the twenties—the very idea that there is something special about revolutionary violence, anything that makes it different from mere criminal violence, is so much self-righteous twaddle. Violence is violence. But that doesn’t mean a rampaging mob can’t be “the people” because violence is the real source of law and political order anyway. Any successful deployment of violence is, in its own way, a form of constituent power. This is why, as Walter Benjamin noted, we cannot help but admire the “great criminal”: because, as so many movie posters over the years have put it, “he makes his own law.” After all, any criminal organization does, inevitably, begin developing its own—often quite elaborate— set of internal rules and regulations. They have to, as a way of controlling what would otherwise be completely random violence. But from the right-wing perspective, that’s all that law ever is. It is a means of controlling the very violence that brings it into being, and through which it is ultimately enforced.
This makes it easier to understand the often otherwise surprising affinity between criminals, criminal gangs, right-wing political movements, and the armed representatives of the state. Ultimately, they all speak the same language. They create their own rules on the basis of force. As a result, such people typically share the same broad political sensibilities. Mussolini might have wiped out the mafia, but Italian Mafiosi still idolize Mussolini. In Athens, nowadays, there’s active collaboration between the crime bosses in poor immigrant neighborhoods, fascist gangs, and the police. In fact, in this case it was clearly a political strategy: faced with the prospect of popular uprisings against a right-wing government, the police first withdrew protection from neighborhoods near the immigrant gangs, then started giving tacit support to the fascists (the result was the rapid rise of an overtly Nazi party. Roughly half of Greek police were reported to have voted for the Nazis in the last election). But this is just how far-right politics work. For them, it is in that space where different violent forces operating outside of the legal order (or in the case of the police, sometimes just barely inside it) inter-act where new forms of power, hence order, can emerge.
So what does all this have to do with costumed superheroes? Well, everything. Because this is exactly the space that superheroes, and super-villains, also inhabit. An inherently fascist space, inhabited only by gangsters, would-be dictators, police, and thugs, with endlessly blurring lines between them. Sometimes the cops are legalistic, sometimes corrupt. Sometimes the police themselves slip into vigilantism. Sometimes they persecute the superhero, at others they look the other way, or help. Villains and heroes occasionally team up. The lines of force are always shifting. If anything new were to emerge, it could only be through such shifting forces. There’s nothing else, since in the DC and Marvel universes, God, or The People, simply doesn’t exist.
Insofar as there is a potential for constituent power then, it can only come from purveyors of violence. And indeed, the supervillains and evil masterminds, when they are not merely dreaming of committing the perfect crime or indulging in random acts of terror, are always scheming of imposing a New World Order of some kind or another. Surely, if Red Skull, Kang the Conqueror, or Doctor Doom ever did succeed in taking over the planet, a host of new laws would be created very quickly. They wouldn’t be very nice laws. Their creator would doubtless not himself feel bound by them. But one gets the feeling that otherwise, they would be quite strictly enforced.
Superheroes resist this logic. They do not wish to conquer the world—if only because they are not monomaniacal or insane. As a result, they remain parasitical off the villains in the same way that police remain parasitical off criminals: without them, they would have no reason to exist. They remain defenders of a legal and political order which itself seems to have come out of nowhere, and which, however faulty or degraded, must be defended, because the only alternative is so much worse.
They aren’t fascists. They are just ordinary, decent, super-powerful people who inhabit a world in which fascism is the only political possibility.
Why, might we ask, would a form of entertainment premised on such a peculiar notion of politics emerge in early- to mid-twentieth-century America, at just around the time that actual fascism was on the rise in Europe? Was it some kind of fantasy American equivalent?
Not exactly. It’s more that both fascism and superheroes were products of a similar historical predicament: What is the foundation of social order when one has exorcized the very idea of revolution? And above all, what happens to the political imagination?
One might begin here by considering who are the core audience for superhero comics. Mainly, adolescent or preadolescent white boys. That is, individuals who are at a point in their lives where they are likely to be both maximally imaginative and at least a little bit rebellious; but who are also being groomed to eventually take on positions of authority and power in the world, to be fathers, sheriffs, small-business owners, middle managers, engineers. And what do they learn from these endless repeated dramas? Well, first off, that imagination and rebellion lead to violence; second, that, like imagination and rebellion, violence is a lot of fun; third, that, ultimately, violence must be directed back against any overflow of imagination and rebellion lest everything go askew. These things must be contained! This is why insofar as superheroes are allowed to be imaginative in any way, it could only be extended to the design of their clothes, their cars, maybe their homes, their various accessories.
It’s in this sense that the logic of the superhero plot is profoundly, deeply conservative. Ultimately, the division between left- and right-wing sensibilities turns on one’s attitude towards the imagination. For the Left, imagination, creativity, by extension production, the power to bring new things and new social arrangements into being, is always to be celebrated. It is the source of all real value in the world. For the Right, it is dangerous; ultimately, evil. The urge to create is also a destructive urge. This kind of sensibility was rife in the popular Freudianism of the day: where the Id was the motor of the psyche, but also amoral; if really unleashed, it would lead to an orgy of destruction. This is also what separates conservatives from fascists. Both agree that the imagination unleashed can only lead to violence and destruction. Conservatives wish to defend us against that possibility. Fascists wish to unleash it anyway. They aspire to be, as Hitler imagined himself, great artists painting with the minds, blood, and sinews of humanity.
This means that it’s not just the mayhem that becomes the reader’s guilty pleasure, but the very fact of having a fantasy life at all. And while it might seem odd to think any artistic genre is ultimately a warning about the dangers of the human imagination, it would certain explain why, in the staid forties and fifties, everyone did seem to feel there was something vaguely naughty about reading them. It also explains how in the sixties it could all suddenly seem so harmless, allowing the advent of silly, campy TV superheroes like the Adam West Batman series, or Saturday morning Spiderman cartoons. If the message was that rebellious imagination was okay as long as it was kept out of politics and simply confined to consumer choices (clothes, cars, accessories again), this had become a message that even executive producers could easily get behind.
We can conclude: the classic comic book is ostensibly political (about madmen trying to take over the world), really psychological and personal (about overcoming the dangers of rebellious adolescence), but ultimately, political after all.[171]
If this is so, then new superhero movies are precisely the reverse. They are ostensibly psychological and personal, really political, but ultimately, psychological and personal after all.
The humanization of superheroes didn’t start in the movies. It actually began in the eighties and nineties, within the comic book genre itself, with Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and Alan Moore’s Watchmen—a subgenre of what might be called superhero noir. At that time, superhero movies were still working through the legacy of the sixties camp tradition, as in Christopher Reeve’s Superman series, or Michael Keaton’s Batman. Eventually, though, the noir subgenre, probably always somewhat cinematic in its inspiration, came to Hollywood as well. One might say it reached its cinematic peak in Batman Begins, the first of the Nolan trilogy. In that movie, Nolan essentially asks, “What if someone like Batman actually did exist? How would that happen? What would it actually take to make an otherwise respectable member of society decide to dress up as a bat and prowl the streets in search of criminals?”
Unsurprisingly, psychedelic drugs turn out to play an important role here. So do severe mental health issues and bizarre religious cults.
It is curious that commentators on the movie never seem to pick up on the fact that Bruce Wayne, in the Nolan films, is borderline psychotic. As himself he is almost completely dysfunctional, incapable of forming friendships or romantic attachments, uninterested in work unless it somehow reinforces his morbid obsessions. The hero is so obviously crazy, and the movie so obviously about his battle with his own craziness, that it’s not a problem that the villains are just a series of egoappendages: Ra’s al Ghul (the bad father), the Crime boss (the successful businessman), the Scarecrow (who drives the businessman insane.) There’s nothing particularly appealing about any of them. But it doesn’t matter—they’re all just shards and tessera of the hero’s shattered mind. As a result, we don’t have to identify with the villain and then recoil in self-loathing; we can just enjoy watching Bruce do that for us.
There’s also no obvious a political message.
Or so it seems. But when you create a movie out of characters so dense with myth and history, no director is entirely in control of his material. The filmmaker’s role is largely to assemble them. In the movie, the primary villain is Ra’s al Ghul, who first initiates Batman into the League of Shadows in a monastery in Bhutan, and only then reveals his plan to destroy Gotham to rid the world of its corruption. In the original comics, we learn that Ra’s al Ghul (a character introduced, tellingly, in 1971) is in fact a Primitivist and ecoterrorist, determined to restore the balance of nature by reducing the earth’s human population by roughly 99 percent. The main way Nolan changed the story is to make Batman begin as Ra’s al Ghul’s disciple. But in contemporary terms that, too, makes a sort of sense. After all, what is the media stereotype that immediately comes to mind—at least since the direct actions against the World Trade Organization in Seattle—when one thinks of a trust-fund kid who, moved by some unfathomable sense of injustice, dons black clothing and a mask, and takes to the streets to create violence and mayhem, though always in a way calculated never to actually kill anyone? Let alone one who does so inspired by the teachings of a radical guru who believes we need to return to the Stone Age? Nolan made his hero a Black Bloc disciple of John Zerzan who breaks with his former mentor when he realizes what restoring Eden will actually entail.
In fact, none of the villains in any of the three movies wants to rule the world. They don’t wish to have power over others, or to create new rules of any sort. Even their henchmen are temporary expedients—they always ultimately plan to kill them. Nolan’s villains are always anarchists. But they’re also always very peculiar anarchists, of a sort that seem to exist only in the filmmaker’s imagination: anarchists who believe that human nature is fundamentally evil and corrupt. The Joker, the real hero of the second movie, makes all of this explicit: he’s basically the Id become philosopher. The Joker is nameless, he has no origin other than whatever he, on any particular occasion, whimsically invents; it’s not even clear what his powers are or where they came from. Yet he’s inexorably powerful. The Joker is a pure force of self-creation, a poem written by himself; and his only purpose in life appears to be an obsessive need to prove to others first, that everything is and can only be poetry—and second, that poetry is evil.
So here we are back to the central theme of the early superhero universes: a prolonged reflection on the dangers of the human imagination; how the reader’s own desire to immerse oneself in a world driven by artistic imperatives is living proof of why the imagination must always be carefully contained.
The result is a thrilling movie, with a villain both likable—he’s just so obviously having fun with it—and genuinely frightening. Batman Begins was merely full of people talking about fear. The Dark Knight actually produced some. But even that movie began to fall flat the moment it touches on popular politics. The People make one lame attempt to intervene in the beginning of when copycat Batmen appear all over the city, inspired by the Dark Knight’s example. Of course they all die horribly and that’s the end of that. From then on, they’re put back in their place, as Audience, who like the mob in the Roman amphitheater exist only to judge the protagonists’ performance: thumbs-up for Batman, thumbs-down for Batman, thumbs-up for the crusading DA … The end, when Bruce and Commissioner Gordon settle on the plan to scapegoat Batman and create a false myth around the martyrdom of Harvey Dent, is nothing short of a confession that politics is identical to the art of fiction. The Joker was right. To a degree. As always, redemption lies only in the fact that the violence, the deception, can be turned back upon itself.
They would have done well leave it that.
The problem with this vision of politics is that it simply isn’t true. Politics is not just the art of manipulating images, backed up by violence. It’s not really a duel between impresarios before an audience that will believe most anything if presented artfully enough. No doubt it must seem that way to extraordinarily wealthy Hollywood film directors. But between the shooting of the first and second movies, history intervened quite decisively to point out just how wrong this vision is. The economy collapsed. Not because of the manipulations of some secret society of warrior monks, but because a bunch of financial managers who, living in Nolan’s bubble world, shared his assumptions about the endlessness of popular manipulability, turned out to be wrong. There was a mass popular response. It did not take the form of a frenetic search for messianic saviors, mixed with outbreaks of nihilist violence;172 increasingly, it took the form of a series of real popular movements, even revolutionary movements, toppling regimes in the Middle East and occupying squares everywhere from Cleveland to Karachi, trying to create new forms of democracy.
Constituent power had reappeared, and in an imaginative, radical, and remarkably nonviolent form. This is precisely the kind of situation a superhero universe cannot address. In Nolan’s world, something like Occupy could only have been the product of some tiny group of ingenious manipulators (you know, people like me) who are really pursuing some secret agenda.
Nolan really should have left such topics alone, but apparently, he couldn’t help himself. The result is almost completely incoherent. It is, basically, yet another psychological drama masquerading as a political one. The plot is convoluted and barely worth recounting. Bruce Wayne, dysfunctional again without his alter ego, has turned into a recluse. A rival businessman hires Catwoman to steal his fingerprints so he can use them to steal all his money; but really the businessman is being manipulated by a gas-mask-wearing supervillain mercenary named Bane. Bane is stronger than Batman but he’s basically a miserable sort of person, pining with unrequited love for Ra’s al Ghul’s daughter Talia, crippled by mistreatment in his youth in a dungeon-like prison where he was cast unjustly, his face invisible behind a mask he must wear continually so as not to collapse in agonizing pain. Insofar as the audience identifies with a villain like that, it can only be out of sympathy. No one in her right mind would want to be Bane. But presumably that’s the point: a warning against the dangers of undue sympathy for the unfortunate. Because Bane is also a charismatic revolutionary, who, after disposing of Batman, reveals the myth of Harvey Dent to be a lie, frees the denizens of Gotham’s prisons, and releases its ever- impressionable populace to sack and burn the mansions of the 1 percent, and to drag their denizens before revolutionary tribunals. (The Scarecrow, amusingly, reappears as Robespierre.) But really he’s ultimately intending to kill them all with a nuclear bomb converted from some kind of green energy project. Why? Who knows? Maybe he too is some kind of Primitivist ecoterrorist like Ra’s al Ghul. (He does seem to have inherited the headship of the same organization.) Maybe he’s trying to impress Talia by finishing her father’s work. Or maybe he’s just evil and there’s no need for further explanation.
Conversely, why does Bane wish to lead the people in a social revolution, if he’s just going to nuke them all in a few weeks anyway? Again, it’s anybody’s guess. He says that before you destroy someone, first you must give them hope. So is the message that utopian dreams can only lead to nihilistic violence? Presumably something like that, but it’s singularly unconvincing, since the plan to kill everyone came first. The revolution was a decorative afterthought.
In fact, what happens to the city can only possibly make sense as a material echo of what’s always been most important: what’s happening in Bruce Wayne’s tortured brain. After Batman is crippled by Bane halfway through the movie, he is placed in the same fetid dungeon where Bane himself was once imprisoned. The prison sits at the bottom of a well, so sunlight is always taunting its inhabitants—but the well is impossible to climb. Bane ensures Bruce is nursed back to health just so he can try and fail to scale it, and thus know that it’s his failure that allowed his beloved Gotham to be destroyed. Only then will Bane be merciful enough to kill him. This is contrived, but psychologically, at least, you can say it makes some kind of sense. Translated onto the level of a city, it makes no sense at all: why would anyone want to give a population hope and then unexpectedly vaporize them? The first is cruel. The second is just random. And not only that, the filmmakers compound the metaphor by having Bane play the same trick on the Gotham police department, who—in a plot contrivance so idiotic it violates even the standards of plausibility expected from a comic book—are almost all lured beneath the city and then trapped there by well-placed bombs, except then for some reason allowed to receive food and water, presumably so they too can be tortured by hope.
Other things happen, but they’re all similar projections. This time Catwoman gets to play the role usually assigned to the audience, first identifying with Bane’s revolutionary project, then, for no clearly articulated reason, changing her mind and blowing him away. Batman and the Gotham police both rise from their respective dungeons and join forces to battle the evil Occupiers outside the Stock Exchange. In the end, Batman fakes his own death disposing of the bomb and Bruce ends up with Catwoman in Florence. A new phony martyr legend is born and the people of Gotham are pacified. In case of further trouble, we are assured there is also a potential heir to Batman, a disillusioned police officer named Robin. Everyone breathes a sigh of relief because the movie is finally over.
Is there supposed to be a message we can all take home from this? If there was, it would seem to be something along the lines of this: “True, the system is corrupt, but it’s all we have, and anyway, figures of authority can be trusted if they have first been chastened and endured terrible suffering.” (Normal police let children die on bridges. Police who’ve been buried alive for a few weeks can employ violence legitimately.) “True, there is injustice and its victims deserve our sympathy, but keep it within reasonable limits. Charity is much better than addressing structural problems. That way lies madness.” Because in Nolan’s universe, any attempt to address structural problems, even through nonviolent civil disobedience, really is a form of violence; because that’s all it could possibly be. Imaginative politics are inherently violent, and therefore, there’s nothing inappropriate if police respond by smashing apparently peaceful protesters’ heads repeatedly against the concrete.
As a response to Occupy, this is nothing short of pathetic. When The Dark Knight came out in 2008, there was much discussion over whether the whole thing was really a vast metaphor for the war on terror: how far is it okay for the good guys (that’s us) to go adapting the bad guy’s methods?
Probably the filmmakers were indeed thinking of such issues, and still managed to produce a good movie. But then, the war on terror actually was a battle of secret networks and manipulative spectacles. It began with a bomb and ended with an assassination. One can almost think of it as an attempt, on both sides, to actually enact a comic book version of the universe. Once real constituent power appeared on the scene, that universe shriveled into incoherence—even came to seem ridiculous. Revolutions were sweeping the Middle East, and the United States were still spending hundreds of billions of dollars fighting a ragtag bunch of seminary students in Afghanistan.
Unfortunately for Nolan, for all his manipulative powers, the same thing happened to his world when even the hint of real popular power arrived in New York.
From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.
Chronology :
January 07, 2021 : Appendix -- Added.
January 17, 2022 : Appendix -- Updated.
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