A Tale of Two Reviews

Take that, you 99%-ers, you mob-waiting-to-happen, you incipient villains!  Let this be a warning to you not to listen to any charismatic rhetoric about your rights as citizens!

Because sure enough, the dreadful working class hordes dressed in sinister motley casual-wear—hoodies and the sorta thing—are manipulated by Bane to take back their city. So the first thing they do is buckle down to releasing all the violent psychopathological criminals in the prison—that’s the first thing protesters always do, it’s Step One in the Social Justice Playbook. Then they go around looting violently and attacking women in fur coats.

Later on, the brainwashed mob follows Bane through the streets to a confrontation with the cops, where the Nolan boys continue to get all topical on our asses. The brave men in blue, the vulnerable uniformed “thin blue line” of police, armed only with pathetic small handguns against tanks and assault rifles, and badly outnumbered, march right into the terrifying mob of savage sans-culottes, I mean protesters, who mow them down.

Ripped from today’s headlines, see, only reversed: now it’s the police who get mauled and the protesters who do the mauling.

The Dark Knight Rises vs. The 99% [The Exiled]

Director Christopher Nolan, a guy who deemed absolute monarchy “relatable,” wouldn’t know real underclass resentment if it pulled him up by his underwear, the way his chums at his British private school used to. So let me clear things up – The Dark Knight has nothing to do with Occupy, and no one who sees it will make that connection, unless they gleaned everything they know about Occupy from newscopter footage. Bane’s “army of the 99%” is a disciplined private militia – no mention of anarchists, as the Guardian would have you believe – who happily volunteer for neck breakings out of blind loyalty.

This “true believer” nonsense simply doesn’t resonate with Occupy at all, where debates over simple procedural matters took hours to resolve, and Bane’s authoritarian command violates the Occupy’s own prime directive of leaderlessness. There’s only the sketchiest indication that Bane has any appeal to the Gotham citizenry at all, unlike the Joker in Tim Burton’s Batman.

If The Dark Knight Rises was supposed to be an attack on Occupy, it’s a failure, and even if it’s settling for vague anti-populism, it sucks at that too.

There is a fundamental carelessness – or perhaps more accurately, cowardice – running through the whole film, where every character’s motivations are thin and unconvincing or simply nonexistent.

‘The Dark Knight’ is No Capitalist… [Jacobin Mag]

Jul. 23 2012
#batman #the dark night rises #fascism #christopher nolan
8 notes

Notes

  1. escranesque said: Not to be overwhemlingly cynical, but I do wonder how much of the audience for TDKR would look beyond a “newscopter” interpretation of Occupy
  2. thenoobyorker posted this