Thoughts from the Usher Podium: The Dark Knight Trilogy Analysis Part 3

Serious fans of the Dark Knight Trilogy will stringently and exhaustively argue that The Dark Knight Rises is not only the worst of the three but a big step down comparable to Raiders of the Lost Ark and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. On the surface they do indeed have a lot to justify their ire. The Dark Knight Rises suffers from problems of form and length, features story elements that don't mix very well and, the largest supposed problem, plot holes, lots of plot holes. I will not spend an entire blogpost refuting every complaint as I find many well founded but by dismissing the last movie in the trilogy I feel that fans are dismissing the emotional character arc of Bruce Wayne. They also betray the underlying message behind the films. The final evolution in the story that drives the subtext home. More so than any of the three Christopher Nolan movies, The Dark Knight Rises encapsulates conservative political and economic dogma and does so while keeping with Judeo-Christian themes.

The last leg of the trilogy begins years after Batman encountered the Joker. Batman had all but disappeared from the limelight, taking an extended break from crime fighting. It's just as well, the city blames him for the death of Harvey Dent; their white knight. The only people who know the truth behind Dent's demise are Bruce Wayne, Commissioner Gordon and his kin. Dent's death rallied the city to pass the Dent Act which granted the police the power to all but eradicate organized crime in Gotham.

What powers are they specifically given remains unclear. Later in the movie Blake lets the audience in on only one detail on the Act; criminals are denied chance of parole. Other than that the details remain scant. What is clear is there are obvious and immediate benefits to the Dent Act and Gotham's adoption of a tough on crime stance. According to Commissioner Gordon, crime is at an all-time low in the City, 1,000 violent criminals were arrested as a direct result of the Act as well as "essential cogs in the organized crime machine."

If they made a 4th one, it would have been shot in Miami!

Director Christopher Nolan further illustrates the benefits of Gotham's tough on crime stance by choosing to represent the exteriors of Gotham with Pittsburgh instead of Chicago or Detroit. Pittsburgh, like Chicago and Detroit has a long and proud history of rust-belt industry and a city-scape full of industrial period buildings which keeps with the overall aesthetics of the trilogy. More importantly Pittsburgh is a city enjoying a vibrant comeback from the days of Carnegie and Ford. Pittsburgh; the Steel City, is considered among America's safest big cities and one of the most livable. Conversely back in 2008 when The Dark Knight was being filmed in Chicago, it was considered the murder capital of America. As for Detroit, the less we say about it the better.

Despite relative calm, evil lurks underneath the surface of Gotham. Bane a terrorist said to be too extreme even for the League of Shadows has emerged from his hiding place. He brings to Gotham a crew of dedicated fanatics who's aim is to hold Gotham hostage with a bomb created from Wayne Enterprise's new fusion reactor. Like the Joker, Bane is a terrorist through and through and comes seemingly out of nowhere. Sure we get little nuggets of information but that information is ultimately used as a narrative tool to set up a final twist. Unlike the Joker, Bane isn't an anarchist. His actions amount to much more than a cruel nihilist joke on society. His principle actions are one of a revolutionary blurring the line between violence and justified violence; terrorist and freedom fighter.

In many ways Bane represents the ugly side of liberalism/socialism as painted by traditional Judeo-Christian and conservative beliefs. He makes eloquent speeches about changing the established order built by the City's elite, going so far as to place the rich in show trails where death is a certainty. "We take Gotham from the corrupt! The rich! The oppressors of generations who have kept you downwith myths of opportunity," He says. He justifies his violence with every broken jaw and dislocated spine by speaking of justice and moral absolutes. He consistently talks about the downtrodden, the disenfranchised etc. and the gullible eat it up as a revolution. In the eyes of a conservative American, Bane is the real nightmare in its ultimate form; "Liberty through fear," oh the irony.

Dent died for our sins! Praise Zoltan!

In earlier essays there was discussion about the "Cult of Order"; order through fear, order through idealism, order through sacrifice. Batman represents order through fear, Harvey Dent represents order through idealism and his death becomes order through sacrifice. Bane takes the religious connotations of the Cult of Order and turns it on its head. He reveals Dent as a false prophet through the speech he stole from Commissioner Gordon. Like a modern-day Voltaire he proclaims "God is dead," and the man Gotham lionized as a savior is in-fact a fake.

This looks eerily similar...

Behind Bane's Robespierre-like persona and intimidating speeches to the public, he and Miranda are just as selfish as Batman. Miranda seems to want to destroy the City out of a mixture of pride and revenge. She wants to finish what her father Ra's al Ghul started and stick it to the Batman who killed him. Bane wants to destroy Gotham because, as it's revealed at the end, he's a protector to Miranda. Did he truly believe all what he was saying? Doubtful since the bomb was supposed to go off regardless of Gotham's lower-class latching on to his dogma. That is the ultimate hypocrisy of Bane. He creates the image of a radical who wraps himself in socialist rhetoric but really wants to destroy Gotham and by extension America.

When Bane is talking to the disenfranchised mobs with high-minded speeches, the main characters who should be most receptive to his message are arguably Selina Kyle and John Blake (and maybe a recently impoverished Bruce Wayne). John Blake was raised an orphan boy in an impoverished side of town who rose from his circumstances to become a police officer. Regardless of wearing his uniform blues, he has an appreciation for vigilante justice and Batman, going so far as to deducing who Batman is and continuing to keep it secret. He admonishes Gordon when Dent's true character is revealed; he doesn't even question whether Bane is telling the truth or not. I would argue if not for his association with law enforcement he'd probably be roaming the streets with the rest of the mobs seeking out his own sense of justice and liberty.

Selina does not have the luxury of proximity to authority like Blake does. Therefore she's receptive to Bane's plans. When Selina confronts Bruce at Miranda's charity party she warns him "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." Yet she doesn't buy in to Bane's rhetoric 100% largely due to her fear of him. When she has a front row seat to Batman's back-breaking her fear becomes more realized and that informs her judgment when Bane starts talking like Occupy Wall Street.

By the third act Selina probably goes through he most dramatic change a character in the Batman universe has ever had. She goes from a self-interested anti-hero and accomplice to Bane to a woman who comes back to help Batman without promise of reward. She conflicts morally with the majority of the characters in the film with maybe the exception of Alfred. That would likely explain Bruce's attraction to her. That and when Selina first meets Bruce she's wearing his mother's necklace.

Dark Knight Rises ends with Batman's supposed noble sacrifice. A sacrifice I felt needed to be made to redeem the Batman character. Then that sacrifice was undermined by Bruce and Selina sitting comfortably in a cafe in Florence. While its an ending I don't agree with, I suppose it does feed into its political subtext rather nicely. order can be administered in many ways including intimidation, fear, government overreaching, the eroding of privacy rights, the sacrifice of an idealist martyr, religiosity, the obfuscation of the truth and on, and on. But what ultimately matters is that order, as a function of a civilized society, is the most important thing in the furtherance of that society. The trilogy as a whole makes a cogent argument and as I posited before; the Dark Knight Trilogy, has a politically authoritarian bent and is chalked full of religious and conservative themes. You only need look for them.