The underlying message of Batman has always been conservative - a billionaire protecting property owners from criminals. In the Dark Knight Rises, the message becomes clearer as Bruce Wayne takes on an anarchist psychopath Bain and his Occupy army trying to take over Gotham. Director Chris Nolan creates a blockbuster about the nightmares of the 0.1% to be enjoyed by the 99.9%. Hollywood as ever turning capitalist ideology into mass entertainment. I have not yet seen the movie but I'm familiar enough with the genre and the series to know where it will take us. However Howard Stern has now come out and said the fact that the villain is called Bain is no coincidence - it's the same name as Mitt Romney's asset stripping outfit Bain Capital. He claims Nolan deliberately did this. The thought crossed my mind too - it's a very neat coincidence. Perhaps I am being unfair to the franchise....
The last Dark Knight movie was a fantastic entertainment, with the Joker as a kind of demented Osama Bin Laden. There is enough soul searching in the franchise to satisfy intelligent fans without in anyway breaking with the central mythology of the uber-rich, like New York Mayor Bloomberg, offering their services to the public. It's a great American tradition - even including asset strippers like Romney. Unlike the crime-tamed New York of recent years, Gotham is always on the edge of entropy at the hands of madmen. It just needs a solid dose of zero tolerance.
As the Guardian writes:
The last Dark Knight movie was a fantastic entertainment, with the Joker as a kind of demented Osama Bin Laden. There is enough soul searching in the franchise to satisfy intelligent fans without in anyway breaking with the central mythology of the uber-rich, like New York Mayor Bloomberg, offering their services to the public. It's a great American tradition - even including asset strippers like Romney. Unlike the crime-tamed New York of recent years, Gotham is always on the edge of entropy at the hands of madmen. It just needs a solid dose of zero tolerance.
As the Guardian writes:
Batman's butler-crush and bells and whistles feudalism is swallowable – it's a cartoon, right! Likewise the free pass that Wayne's Rowntree-ish gestures, disapproval of criminals and general tortured grizzling seems to allow him. But The Dark Knight Rises is a quite audaciously capitalist vision, radically conservative, radically vigilante, that advances a serious, stirring proposal that the wish-fulfilment of the wealthy is to be championed if they say they want to do good. Mitt Romney will be thrilled. What's strange is that quite so many of the rest of us seem to want to buy into it.
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