Noah Brand reveals his startled reaction to Batman’s latest foray into outright authoritarianism.
A note for clarity: I’m going to be using the words fascism and fascist a lot in this review. Since, as Orwell warned us, those terms have come to be used as synonyms for “stuff I don’t like”, I should pin down the sense in which I use them here. Fascism is a political ideology fixated on authoritarianism, militaristic imagery and action, and the use of authoritarian force against internal and external Others who are defined as threats to the continued existence of society. Fixations on nationalism and national or racial purity and unity are also common. Fascism is a phenomenon of the political right, and has always been fanatically anti-communist, communism being what happens when the political left gets equally douchey.
That said, there has always been an intrinsically fascist subtext to all superhero mythology. These stories, which I have grown up on and still love, are predicated on creating a situation of such exaggerated threat that fascist solutions, i.e. strongmen acting outside due process to restore order by violent force, become not only plausible but desirable. To put it another way, citizens of Metropolis might be uncomfortable with having a nearly-omnipotent alien living in their city, answerable to no authority but himself, but when a week can’t go by without a giant robot trying to level the city, you’ll accept the alien as preferable to the robots.
However, this is usually just subtext, and many superhero stories go out of their way to specifically eschew this reading. The Batman films of Christopher Nolan, however, embrace it, and never more explicitly than in the newest, The Dark Knight Rises.
SPOILER ALERT: Everything from here on in will ruin the last two Batman movies for you. On multiple levels.
Many people have read the previous Batman film, The Dark Knight, as an endorsement of the authoritarian, anti-civil-liberties policies of the Bush administration. (Policies that, dismayingly, the Obama administration has not reversed.) I wasn’t persuaded of this thesis until someone pointed out that one of the centerpieces of the film, one of Nolan’s superb action setpieces, is literally about the extraordinary rendition of a foreign national from his own country so he can be brought under American control for interrogation, and it didn’t have to be. That scene could have played just the same way in any skyscraper controlled by Bad Guys; the choice to make it legitimately sovereign foreign soil was deliberate, and creepy.
Even after that, I didn’t want to subscribe to a fascist reading of Nolanverse Batman, until I saw the new movie last night. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good movie in most respects. Severely weird structural problems, but each scene and line is skillfully and gracefully written in and of itself, and the cinematography is lovely. They’ve even fixed the unfollowable fight scenes of the previous two; the two major fights between Batman and Bane are gorgeous. This is probably the best overtly pro-fascist film I’ve seen since Leni Riefenstahl’s heyday. But whoa nelly, is it fascist.
The film opens eight years after the previous movie, eight years in which Batman has retired because there is no longer any serious crime in Gotham. After the events of The Dark Knight, the “Harvey Dent Act” was passed, which apparently authorized the police to lock up a thousand organized crime figures with no chance of parole… the details are deliberately vague (could the police not arrest people before?) but the expression is clear: Harvey Dent’s supposed martyrdom allowed passage of a law removing any restrictions on police authority, thus granting Gotham a crime-free golden age. Lest we miss the militarist undertones, characters go out of their way to specify that Commissioner Gordon is going to be forced out of his job because he was the right man for the “war”, but now it’s “peacetime.”
This entire time, Batman has been retired, and Bruce Wayne has become a recluse in Wayne Manor. In other words, mere ordinary fascist techniques have proven sufficient to handle the threat, and Batman’s super-fascism has not been necessary.
Now, however, a new threat has arisen, one mere normal fascism can’t handle. From some unspecified Other People part of the world comes Bane, a super-terrorist who has a number of clever and well-written connections to the mythos established in Batman Begins. He comes equipped with an army of “mercenaries” who turn out not to be mercenaries, in that they keep fighting after nobody is paying them, i.e. about halfway through the movie. This is a threat too great for the weaklings running the Gotham City Police Department, especially with strongman James Gordon in the hospital. The ultimate strongman, the Batman, must return to restore order.
Bane’s agenda is that of the Occupy movement as seen by people who don’t know anything about the Occupy movement. (Google “Dark Knight Rises” + “Occupy Wall Street” and prepare to sigh deeply.) He overcomes the current strongman of Gotham City and imprisons its police, thereby successfully taking over the city. This only makes any sense at all if we assume that government is solely comprised of a strongman and his enforcement apparatus, which… well, that’s a little fascist, isn’t it? The enforcement apparatus removed, the economic status quo is reversed, with rich people being turned out of their homes so the poor can take their stuff.
This is a key point: Bane keeps talking about The People, but the people of Gotham City do not appear in this film.
The People are entirely absent. Everyone we see dragging rich folks out of their homes, everyone we see freeing the men imprisoned under the Harvey Dent Act, everyone we see fighting the police in the big authority-vs.-rebellion showdown at the end, they’re all Bane’s staff members. The only character with a speaking part who expresses any support for Bane’s agenda and isn’t a known supervillain or paid-up member of the League of Shadows is Selina Kyle’s girlfriend Holly. It’s one of her three lines. Nobody got a SAG card playing a Gotham citizen in this movie; their only role was to cheer Batman in crowd scenes.
This is important: if the people of Gotham are present, then when the enforcement mechanism of the current power structure is removed, the people immediately rise up and overthrow the system. This would imply that Gotham citizens are so oppressed that only brutal enforcement keeps them from naturally rising against this oppression, which makes Bane the good guy. However, the people are not present; only Bane’s thugs rise against the rich. The people are so absent from this movie that, in every single vehicle scene, there are no civilian vehicles on the road. Everything on the road in every scene belongs to either Batman, the cops, or Bane, resulting in some rather odd-looking chase scenes down completely unused urban streets.
This point is inadvertently underscored toward the end, when Commissioner Gordon realizes Batman’s secret identity, a moment that should be powerful and instead is comical, because he is, at that point, literally the only significant character who didn’t already know Batman’s real name. He ends up coming off as the last kid to get the joke.
Bane’s “power to the nonexistent people” schtick is designed to echo vague impressions of Soviet communism, with its empty stores, kangaroo courts, and a lingering shot of a breadline, something American audiences have been conditioned to believe was solely a Soviet phenomenon. A similarly lingering shot of a tattered and torn American flag under Bane’s regime is there for people too slow to pick up on the other symbols.
In the end, of course, the police and the Batman triumph and order is restored by force, thus freeing the nonexistent people of Gotham to enjoy their existing system where the police can lock you up without parole at will.
All this would not be too bad, except for the little matter of cultural context.
Americans live in a society right now where fascism is trendy. We are more militarized, by money spent, than the entire rest of the world put together, and one of the men running for president has promised to increase that spending. We have more people imprisoned per capita, than any society in human history, including China, apartheid-era South Africa, and the Soviet Union. These are facts. They reflect a status quo in which fascist solutions for society’s ills are considered good ones by a portion of the populace, and it is to that demographic, the American political right, that The Dark Knight Rises is explicitly pitched. The entire film is peppered with conceptual catchphrases, like “peacetime”, “appeasement strategy”, “those who have too much”, and so on, designed to appeal to the worldview of people who think Fox News does journalism. A deliberate caricature of the imagined opposition is created, and then duly punched into submission in accordance with superheroic genre convention.
Some will argue, and have argued, that the film is more even-handed than it is, that it presents a moral dilemma between fascism and anarchy that Batman must resolve via a middle ground. It doesn’t. There is no anarchy, merely a choice of two dictatorships, and Batman doesn’t resolve it, he comes down very squarely on the pro-fascist side. Commissioner Gordon is presented as having doubts about the Harvey Dent Act, but he never speaks out against it, his words against it are stolen by bad guy Bane, and he is put in his place by new good guy John Blake, who dismisses his attempt to remain morally good as useless.
Again, in case the red meat for the right wing is too subtle for some, the film explicitly casts “sustainable energy” as a doomsday weapon. Nolan clearly didn’t want us to miss his point, so I feel it would be bad manners to pretend I did.
Fascism may not always be palatable or pleasant, the film tells us, but it is necessary and it works. At no point in the movie do fascist solutions fail, except in cases where they are not fascist enough. The strongmen who Do What Must Be Done, the classic excuse of the fascist, are always right. When the Gotham police are led into a trap, it is under the command of Gordon’s successor, who is shown to be a cowardly quisling who only redeems himself by putting on a uniform and shooting scruffy people.
In short, The Dark Knight Rises posits a conflict between the form of fascism some Americans currently favor, and a strawman version of their imagined opponents, and places the center of moral good firmly on the pro-fascist side. This isn’t even subtext, it’s just text in context. I’m sorry if this ruins the movie for anyone.
Oh, and Catwoman is in the film as well, but since she’s not called Catwoman and the plot wouldn’t be even slightly different if she were absent, I have omitted her in a failed attempt at brevity. Which is a shame, since she’s the best thing about the movie.
You have no idea how much this has cheered me up. I’ve felt like the little kid in ” The Emperor’s New Clothes” since seeing it.
Of course Nolan’s Batman films are fascist. They’re despicable. The real question is why human beings, and teens, so readily lap up fascism, or why human beings seem innately fond of the fascist.
I find it funny how liberal progressives (actually read regressives) throw around the left and right terms. One of the liberal demigods, Woodrow Wilson, thought fascism was great. Conservatives believe in our country as constituted. We righted our original wrongs but are always conscious of too much government. Don’t confuse conservatives with Republicans. We believe the Constitution limits government. The Republican party is just demonrat lite. B. Hussein Obama is more of a fascist than any president since Wilson and FDR.
Matt,
If you believe Obama, Wilson, and FDR are fascists, I believe you MIGHT just not know the meaning of the word… May I suggest a dictionary? But then again, if you believe Republicans aren’t conservatives, then may have bigger problems, specifically in recognizing reality, haha.
Wow! I JUST finished watching the last half of that movie and the same thing crossed my mind, In fact I found this site by typing “Batman film Pro fascist”
I spoke too soon. Weather The Dark Knight Rises is facist may depend less on my opinion then on what it inspires. Back in the mid 1990’s I attended a party that in attendence had a few men who were members of the White Power movement. On the TV was a collection of clips edited together as a kind of recruitment tool. The frist clip I saw was the Jeraldo Rivera Show episode with Nazi’s as guests and where violence broke out. Another clip was a group of young white, blond haired, blue eyed young men singing a song called… Read more »
Excellent review, couldn’t have put it to words better myself.
When I was in high school I was shown “The Birth of a Nation.” Afterwards the teachers and students had a long discussion about it. In college I watched “Triumph of the Will” followed by a similar discussion. The Dark Knight rises is not, in my opinion, a Pro-Facist film. After The Dark Knight Christopher Nolan began work on the Inception which hit theaters in July of 2010. It was in late October of that year when the official title “The Dark Knight Rises was announced. I find it unlikely that “The Dark Knight Rises” references the Occupy movement directly.… Read more »
Hmm, food for thought. I didn’t get that reaction from the last two Batman movies, but I DID see clearly fascistic themes in the recent _Green Lantern_ movie. I think it’s a much better example. All that simultaneous raising of fists, chanting together, being part of a powerful, elite class of people who have the mandate to do whatever they want to, and all of it powered by “the will.” The movie is literally about the “Triumph of the Will.” Not to mention the subsuming of the rugged individual behind the collective will of the powerful group that runs the… Read more »
“Fixations on nationalism and national or racial purity and unity are also common.”
I would really be interested to hear how you envisage a non-nationalist fascism would work. It’s never happened, and while I concede that it could theoretically be possible, I certainly can’t picture it.
“Americans live in a society right now where fascism is trendy. ”
Please, if only.
No, this critique hasn’t ruined the Batman movies for me; quite without any rancour, all I see when I read this is someone trapped in his own idealism. Left-wing feminist thinking can be as much a cult as any other ideology; if I have one overall reaction to your piece, it’s that you need to deprogram yourself a few notches. The world’s more complex than your philosophy allows. My take on the Batman movies is this. All stories are part of the human attempt to create mythology, to make sense of the world around them in a way that is,… Read more »
Wee…I’m slow. Finally watched. Funnily, I had opposite impressions of the third movie. In some ways, it almost seemed like an apology for the some aspects of the second, which did have some apologism for certain policies that were in the public debate at the time (although I’m not sure Batman nabbing Lau counts; it’s certainly not extraordinary rendition; simply taking a criminal from another state to the US is ordinary rendition). I took the utter lack of the people participation in Bane’s takeover as intentional on the part of the filmmakers. In one breath, Bane is claiming to be… Read more »
Also:
While it’s true that Foley is in command of the Gotham PD when they’re lured into Bane’s trap, since Gordon is on his hospital bed at the time, the order to send to police into the sewers comes originally from Gordon.
Batman is stabbed in the back by Talia al’Ghul while beating Bane, trying to force him into revealing the identity of the trigger man for the bomb (trigger person?). Torture, and in broader symbolic terms the entire set of new national security policies, distracting him from the real threat. Another common criticism of the new national security apparatus.
I just saw this fascist trash and yes, it was fascist. The whole point of the movie is to make you suspicious of anyone who seeks to free you from this crooked system we are currently living in. Bane frees the people using the threat that he will set off a nuclear bomb if anyone tries to recapture Gotham for the elites. That part is more or less o.k., but the real propaganda lies in the the fact that Bane knows the bomb is going to go off anyway. So the message is anyone who tries to save you has… Read more »
The script was finished a few months to a year before Occupy began.
But again, I would say that it more closely resembles a standard military occupation, which is often presented as a liberation. When the US “liberated” Iraq, they were greeted with enthusiasm at first but as time wore on the Iraqis chafed under the occupation.
I am now glad I haven’t seen the new Batman movie. At least in the other movies, the fascism was toned down enough that you could actually enjoy the movie–this sounds like it’s so front and center as to actually detract from the plot and awesome superhero fight scenes.
Which is sad, because I always liked Batman as a kid.
Thank you Noah- I sat through the movie confused…..
I’m a fat white man in a suit & Bain seemed to be making some good points….
On another level- where was the gore? Millions of dollars of CG effects, 100s of cops and Mercs beaten & killed and no blood.
No wonder Holmes thought it was a video game.
I always took Nolan’s Batman trilogy (especially these last two) as an exploration of exactly the type of man (or entity) needed to fight sort of extra-human threats using extra-human power. The reason we could trust Batman to wield such authoritarian power is that, well, he’s The Batman. He has the guts to build a machine that can spy on every person in Gotham, use it to capture just one, then burn it to the ground. He has the guts to build a new type of reactor that could make him rich(er) beyond imagination, and never turn it on because… Read more »
After seeing “The Dark Knight Rises,” I’m more convinced than ever that “Watchmen” handled all these big ideas better and more wittily.
just saw it today and it was great. obviously your mad it attacks your hypocritical downright bogus ideology and has batman fighting on the side of good. Bane represents lenin and other commie dictators who love criminals and usefull idiots that will follow him to his death and instate a socialist system that will kill them all in the end. He uses their greed and envy as a tactical weapon to remove any institution he doesn’t want and ties up all lose ends. He holds show trials that are hosted by a batshit insane judge who just wants to eliminate… Read more »
“Batman merely wanted to protect the money he earned”
Earned…? By being born into the right family? And then ignoring the company the money comes from anyway while he trains for seven years, and then coming back and ignoring it again and running it into the ground? I don’t think that counts as “earned”.
While I don’t disagree about the earning thng, he did not “ignore t and run it into the ground.” in Dark Knight he reveals that he is observing everything about the company. It does start to decline after he has become a recluse.
Fascism bears absolutely no relation to socialism. As well, liberalism doesnt have anything to do with racism.
monkey,
would you say that the “Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter Partei” (National Socialist German Workers’ Party) was not fascist?
No, I would say that they weren’t really socialist.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_socialist
This isn’t a No True Scotsman argument, BTW. Hitler didn’t even want the word “socialist” in the part name, and in any case his positions – anti-organized labour, pro-business – were antifthetical to actual socialism.
Don’t take my word for it, though:
:”Socialism is a fraud, a comedy, a phantom, a blackmail. ”
“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.”
-Benito Mussolini
Here is the problem, your position on what “actual socialism” is, contradicts the common usage of the word socialism. For example the policy of the socialist eastern European countries were, according to you, antifthetical to actual socialism. Examples: 1.Hitler was against independent organised labour, so were the socialist eastern European states (see the history of the “Solidarity” in Poland). 2.Hitler’s pro business position was not pro free market, but pro big business just like the economic policy of any socialist eastern European country. 3.Both National Socialism and Socialism (in eastern Europe) were anti individualistic and anti pluralistic. 4.Both had a… Read more »
Wikipedia lists 20 different variations on socialism. The eastern European variety is but one, and while it had many totalitarian aspects, it did not begin that way. Nazism, OTOH, had domination as its first goal.
Italian fascism made no bones about the fact that it was opposed to socialism. Fascism is about the control of power lying with a elite. Socialism, at least on theory, concentrates power in the people. Even if it falls short of that goal, it is in no way related to fascism.
Of course they were fascist, but they weren’t really socialists.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_socialist_party
This isn’t a No True Scotsman argument, BTW. The article states that Hitler (who didn’t come up with the name) actually hated the term socialist. in any case, their policies were against unions and worker’s rights – the core of socialism.
As for Italy, Mussolini apparently called fascism “corporatism,” in that the corporation was merged with the government. In Spain, the civil war was between fascists and communists.
Corporatism has nothing, or very little to do with joint stock companies. The fascists believed that the “Corpus” or body of society as a whole was more important than the individuals who composed it. The fascists were every bit as communitarian as the socialists. That’s why the whole argument of “fascism vs. socialism” is such a waste of time: for the individual. they work out the same in practice.
The NSDAP was not socialist in anything but name. In fact, a significant number of party members was killed in 1934 because they actually took the “socialist” part serious.
My head hurts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=35TbGjt-weA
Frankly, I’m more disturbed by Iron Man. A billionaire who flouts the law with his might but stays mostly within his city (and regards it as a grim duty) versus a billionaire who flouts international law and denies his technology to all governments because he know better (and is portrayed as a cuddly rebel)? No contest. I actually counted quite a few ordinary people. The priest who ran the orphanage, the fellow prisoners in the “Lazarus Pit” (I was thrilled to see Tom Conti), Lucius Fox, and Alfred. But there are a few things that I noticed on the second… Read more »
I think you nailed a good one right here. I will elaborate further but right now I have something in the oven and I don’t want to forget to give you rep.
While I love this website and its message, I can help but feel a few key ideas weren’t considered when making this article. I was, like the author, skeptical at first, but open minded and willing to listen. Unlike the author, I am not convinced. The author makes a good case, but I find the following large holes in the logic. The article makes intelligent, thoughtful, academic analysis, but it oversteps the bounds of practicality. Obviously, art can make political statements, but if we look too hard, we can find a phallus in a cigar that was meant to be… Read more »
Have you actually read the Batman comics? Communism, nationalism and authoritarianism are not actually a very common theme, and especially not “intrinsic”.
“When you see a Hollywood director making a huge spectacle, think ticket sales, not politics.”
Seriously? You should have more respect for Nolan than to assume that. Also, he’s a Hollywood director. He has more than enough money to never work again, so it can’t be said that he “makes movies for a living”. He does it because he wants to/has to. He’s an artist.
I agree that Nolan is an artist. I have enjoyed many of his movies, and I really loved the latest Batman movie (Which I probably should have stated to give people a better idea of where I was coming from). I very much enjoyed the spectacle; I think he was trying to give fans something awesome to watch, and that he succeeded. My comment about ticket sales was a statement about Hollywood in general, simply telling the author he should probably look to tickets sales before politics when looking for motivation in Hollywood film. With a great director, art goes… Read more »
Fascism continues to be dumb down.
“Fascism is a phenomenon of the political right”.
Are you sure about that? What’s the definition of ‘political right’? Can you define ‘fascism’ without reference to Communism, or define ‘political right’ without reference to ‘political left’? Modernism and egalitarianism were also big components of Fascism, but you seem to have left them out.
Is ‘Fascist’ really a useful term? Or is your use of it just a more sophisticated synonym for ‘stuff I don’t like’?
I agree with you. That is what the author is using Fascism for. “I don’t like it due to my Freedom and Liberalism. And anything bad in my eyes is evil therefore Fascist because it is authoritarian and anything authoritarian with a police state=Fascism. Even Bane’s ‘communism’ was truly authoritarian in nature and therefore Fascist.'” I think that is the new post-modern definition of Fascism: “Stuff I don’t like.” Made me laugh. P.S. Although I have to disagree with you about Egalitarianism being a big component of Fascism. Egalitarianism is not a component of Fascism. But another topic for another… Read more »
<a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090303160442/http://www.reformthelp.org/marketing/positioning/models.php"There's a pretty solid sense in which fascism was centrist, instead of far left or far right.
Bleech, link busted. 🙁
http://web.archive.org/web/20090303160442/http://www.reformthelp.org/marketing/positioning/models.php
“The Rise and Fall of Western Civilization” By Emmanuel Goldstein has the definitions you’re looking for. The author’s definitions are the standard accepted ones in academia, except they don’t usually teach them with the loaded descriptions (i.e. douchey) in the classroom. Basically, fascism is an extrapolation of right wing values and communism is an extrapolation of left wing values, but how both systems have been practiced on national levels in the past is basically similar – they have more in common with each other than they do with more centrist systems (centrist globally – the USA is classified as pretty… Read more »
(Sorry about the open ended link – the last para is my position, not Douthat’s.)
Ross Douthat of The New York Times has this to say, following on the heels of the blood feast in Colorado: THE villains in Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy are distinctive, even by the standards of summer-movie bad guys, in that they seek nothing but destruction … they cannot be bargained with or reasoned with, and all they want from us is death. [O]ur contemporary iconography of evil is increasingly dominated by figures who seem to have stepped out of Nolan’s take on the DC Comics universe: world-burners, meticulous madmen, terrorists without a cause. Perhaps men of authoritarian sentiment have finally… Read more »
This movie was Batman going up against a prototypical James Bond villain wearing Hannibal Lecter’s mask with Darth Vader’s voice. It opened up like a spy movie and closed up like Star Wars. I half expected Bane to say, “Bruce, I am your father…” There were the obvious Islamist Terrorist themes, including the Blackwater Hangings over the bridge. A few times I almost expected Catwoman to say, “Who is John Galt?” This movie basically tried to throw everything at the audience to see what would stick. It’s hard to say. I even caught a little Passion Of The Christ in… Read more »
What I will say struck me as odd is that towards the very end of the movie, it’s revealed that Bane actually became who he is while trying to save a young girl from being brutally gang raped. Well… that was… awkward? And 10 seconds later Catwoman takes care of that can of worms with one of the Batcycle’s cannons.
Also, if they wanted to blow up Gotham, why not just blow it up? Why establish some weird ‘anarchist’ society for a few months, giving the good guys time to build up resistance?