The Dark Knight versus Occupy Gotham
Jul. 21st, 2012 08:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bcholmesMy friend, sabotabby, perfectly captures my apprehension about The Dark Knight Rises. But spoilers out the wazoo, so you’ve been warned.
Mirrored from Under the Beret.
bcholmesbcholmesMy friend, sabotabby, perfectly captures my apprehension about The Dark Knight Rises. But spoilers out the wazoo, so you’ve been warned.
Mirrored from Under the Beret.
regna
(no subject)
Date: 2012-07-22 04:25 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-07-22 09:12 am (UTC)SPOILERS AHOY!
The story was very engaging. It tugged my heart strings. I was invested. I was glad that Bruce was able to escape into a life where he could be himself and Selina could escape her criminal past. I enjoyed the movie. But I wasn't really rooting for anyone. I don't think the text supports a reading of Bane as the embodiment of the spirit of Occupy or of any radical change in politics. He's just as ruthless and vicious as the worst capitalist. People are disposable to him. And his goal is not a genuine change in power structure. He doesn't actually believe what he's saying. He's a willing ally or perhaps even a tool of someone with a very different agenda. He's on board with Talia al Ghul's plan to destroy Gotham and all the millions of people in it, rich and poor alike. He uses the *rhetoric* of class liberation to exploit the prisoners, using them as foot soldiers under his own well-trained and terrifying lieutenants whose background the movie explicitly says we don't know, and to establish his own police state enforced with the threat of nuclear annihilation.
What distresses me about Bane's arc in this movie is that it suggests that the legitimate politico-economic protest we have seen in the last couple of years is hollow at its core and that, if this movement achieves its goals, that police state with the lives of so many people disrupted if not destroyed through the violent redistribution of wealth and the corrupt system exemplified by the kangaroo court over which Scarecrow presides, offering only sentencing but no due process, is the natural result. In short, it is typical US Red Scare horseshit, that people who talk about any change in the socioeconomic order really want to turn the US into the USSR.
That is, of course, unless they are redeemed, like Selina Kyle, by wanting to bone the local billionaire superhero and are almost literally seduced into "doing the right thing" and discovering that "there's more to you than that." Argh.
Also, it totally pisses me off that in all the Nolan Batman movies, the police are presented as an unalloyed force for good. Even though Gotham is clearly Fake New York City, racism is never mentioned or dealt with, despite that city's well-documented, ugly history of racially motivated police violence. And in The Dark Knight, the corrupt cop with the most screen time is, for fuck's sake, a woman of color! I talked about this with my partner and his brother, both big nerdy fans of the comics, and they talked about how Renee Montoya, the character in the comics to whom the movie character is a nod, is actually a badass lesbian and a huge force for good, and Nolan has said in interviews that he didn't want to sully that, so he didn't name the character for her or link them in any way. Well, except for the part where she's the only woman of color with any dialogue, so give me an effing break, Nolan. Feh.
Whew! Sorry if I rambled. Apparently I need to go grouse about this in my own journal!