Why I Didn’t Like “The Dark Knight Rises”
Looking back on 2012, The Dark Knight Rises was probably my least favorite film. The visuals were OK, I guess, but Christian Bale somehow managed to make the Batman both wooden and whiny. All that was just disappointing; what made the movie positively unlikeable was its politics:
There’s a storm coming, Mr. Wayne. You and your friends better batten down the hatches, because when it hits, you’re all gonna wonder how you ever thought you could live so large and leave so little for the rest of us.
— Selina Kyle
And what did Hollywood tell us would actually happen if someone was uppity enough to challenge the 1%? Why, chaos, of course: drunken, violent, chaos. The truth—the fact that when disaster strikes, people spontaneously come together to help each other—isn’t as dramatic, or as politically useful, but more importantly, that’s the choice those with power want us to believe we have to make: the status quo, or anarchy.
The fact is, most super-heroes are fundamentally cowards: they’re happy to fight evil when it’s clearly, obviously evil, but when it dresses itself up as order, they lose their nerve. (Snap quiz: how many super-heroes have ever gone after the people who kept saying “Smoking doesn’t cause cancer” 20 years after their own research showed them it did?) Orwell wrote about this kind of failure of nerve eighty years ago:
[Dickens'] radicalism is of the vaguest kind, and yet one always knows that it is there. That is the difference between being a moralist and a politician. He has no constructive suggestions, not even a clear grasp of the nature of the society he is attacking, only an emotional perception that something is wrong, all he can finally say is, “Behave decently”…
— George Orwell
Here’s the story I’d like to tell instead. I’d like to tell people about a world where Kal-El was raised by the Joads, rather than by the Kents. I’d like to tell people about a world where Bruce Wayne faced up to the fact that the biggest crimes are committed in quiet murmurs, and went after the psychopaths in nice suits rather than the ones in funny costumes. Most of all, I’d like that to be our world.
Best wishes to you all for 2013—may you end the year proud of how you used it.
I must confess, I have a much better time reading Dickens than Orwell.
I accept that drama works best under unrealistic constraints. When one only has 2+ hours to tell a story, the tangible villain is a useful foil, even if it’s a crummy portrayal of social dynamics.
Yes, but it’s *fiction*. Bruce Wayne fights the people in funny costumes because he exists in a world with superheroes and supervillains. Criticising such a movie for not reflecting the real world seems odd to me – it *isn’t* the real world, and doesn’t pretend to be.
I dislike the superheroes’ relentless push to preserve the status quo, too. Superman in particular irks me for this reason. I assume it has to do with their origin as children literature–we’ve grown up, but the heroes in tights keep fighting the villains in tights.
Simon and Marshall, I would normally agree with you, 100%. The problem is Nolan’s Brit-Gothic Batman trilogy tries very hard to be a world very much like ours, only more technologically advanced. This is why you do not see villains and heroes in tights per se, and they attempt to root everything in “ground truth”. Therefore, complaints about the world feeling false or fake are completely valid.
What disappointed me about DKR was that Nolan took ideas: good ideas that resonate strongly, and went nowhere with them. There was nothing about Nolan’s Bane that required any of his populist cover. They were just thrown in there to make Bane seem “clever” or “charismatic”. The final twist didn’t have much meat and cheapened three characters. Even Batman’s big struggle and escape didn’t mean much. I mean, are Batman and Bane supposed to be two sides of the same coin?
The previous movie elevated Batman into myth and legend, at least within Nolan’s vision. Others may think it’s overrated, but I think it deserved almost all of its praise, for more than just Heath Ledger’s performance. We knew, without a doubt, what Batman is, why he is necessary in a very strange but familiar world, and what that meant.
In Rises, Batman is a scared, broken, desperate person in a world he helped create. The sad man saves the day, looks cool, and goes home because he doesn’t care anymore. Finally, he maybe dumps it on someone else?
To be fair, I loved seeing some fine performances from some GREAT actors (Caine, Freeman, and Oldman). Anne Hathaway’s Catwoman was a delightfully amoral breath of fresh air. Nolan can still put cool words in actors’ mouths and cool things to look at on the screen; I can’t bring myself to CARE, but I enjoyed looking at them. It wasn’t a BAD movie, just… disappointing.
Ah well, Nolan is still rich, and has money to use on personal projects, now.
@Jorge – because that’s what superheroes do. As characters, they’re not built to fight against greedy bankers, and fat-cat businessmen – their powers are forceful, intended to fight threats on the same scale as the heroes. Suppose Superman were to go up against Rupert Murdoch – what would you expect him to actually do? And would it be something that would actually make a movie that people would watch?
@Simon: I would expect Superman to solve our planet’s energy and hunger problems, but I realize that may not end well for him: http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2305
@Simon But stories shape how we see the world. For example, the stories Americans tell themselves about rugged individualists settling the West and standing on Main Street at high noon with a six-shooter on their hip have a lot to do with their current gun problem…
@Simon The greatest adventure story in American history is, hands down, the Underground Railroad. The greatest in living memory is the civil rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s. I know Superman wasn’t around for the first, but he was very noticeably silent during the second. How about a reboot where he decides that segregation is wrong, and that he ought to do something about it? How about a modern story line where every single off-the-record conversation anyone’s ever had with Rupert M. about their campaign is made public? After all, he does have super-hearing…
@Greg Wilson
Yes, but could you make a decent movie out of that? A proper Superman movie, that is, not just two-hours of him sitting a courtroom, relating what he’s heard to the Leveson Inquiry? And what would Superman actually do about segregation, apart from beating up on the KKK (for which he’s somewhat overkill)? He’d actually be more effective in his Clark Kent persona, as an influencer of public opinions…
If you haven’t read it, check out Watchmen for a much more “realistic” take on superheroes, their effect on the world, and the fact that they stand up for the status quo. One of my all-time favourite books.