Originally published by Truthout
Nietzsche's declaration that "God is dead" is
quoted nearly as often as it is misunderstood. Nietzsche did not simply intend
to express that there is no God. Rather, he meant that the notion of God had
ceased to play its value-generating role as an organizing principle,
maintaining order and social harmony. Since God is what gives the world
structure for the plebian masses, the death of God opens a space in which
meaning can be reshaped and ideals redefined. For Nietzsche, God would have to
be replaced by an ubermensch, a higher sort of human being who would
"revalue all values," assuming the role of imposing meaning and
purpose for the weaker class of followers.
Christopher Nolan's "The Dark Knight Rises" takes
place at a rather similar moment. In the film, the system and those who lead it
("the 1%" of Occupy's imagery) have failed: we are shown images of
economic decline, unemployment and hardship. This fall corresponds with the
disappearance of Batman, the patriarchal guardian of order in Gotham City. This
absence of "God" brings imbalance in the form of a mass uprising led
by arch-villain Bane, which threatens dominant values and relationships. It is
not often that superhero villains explain their goals in terms of social
justice and democracy, yet that is precisely what Bane does - but he seeks to
redefine these terms in a manner contrary to that of the existing
establishment. The clash between Batman and Bane is, on one level, a clash of
values between value-creating ubermenschen, two contradictory notions of social
order and harmony. In the film, concepts like democracy justice, and equality
are deformed and manipulated by the "bad guy" as a means of leading
the masses astray, into what is ultimately a murderous plan to destroy the
entire city. Then, in true Bonapartiste fashion, Batman the ubermensch joins
the cops in reimposing the rule of the social elite, restoring law and order.
As with God in Nietzsche's age of scientific discovery, and
in Gotham in "The Dark Knight Rises," for us today the system has
lost its self-evidence, the automatic legitimacy that usually renders its role
in underwriting social order invisible. But in this moment of liminality, no
ubermensch, but the Occupy movement, has risen to challenge fundamental ideas
and structures, striving to re-articulate the very principles on which the
prevailing ideology claims a monopoly. This struggle has contributed to the
crisis of ruling-class power, and has accordingly been met by a level of state
violence that has shocked the nation and contributed to a growing awareness of
the tenuous, limited nature of our democracy. In this context, "The Dark
Knight Rises" has been interpreted by several critics as a shameless,
reactionary attack on the efforts of Occupiers to endure police beatings and
brave the winter cold to propel us toward a more just and democratic future.
This is worth paying attention to, because it is not just fictional characters
Batman battles, but real-life ideas that are of great importance to our future.
Justice, Class and Power
The tremendous inequality in Gotham city is obvious from the
very beginning. While Bruce Wayne drives around in a sports car with a
six-digit price tag and attends glamorous balls, a black child on a playground
talks to a cop about the precariousness of his family's economic situation.
"How long do you think all this can last?" Selina Kyle, a jewel thief
cum social justice crusader whispers to Bruce Wayne amidst an extravagant
charity gala. "There's a storm coming ... when it hits, you're all going
to wonder how you ever thought you could live so large and leave so little for
the rest of us." Against this background comes Bane's
pseudo-anti-capitalist uprising, which includes the dramatic seizure of
Gotham's Stock Exchange, in which bankers and traders are attacked.
"There's nothing here for you to steal," one of them protests during
the trade floor hijacking. "Oh yeah? Then what are you people doing
here?" Bane replies. It turns out that stealing or damaging the financial
sector is not the true purpose of the attack, but it's still hard not to
chuckle in agreement.
Relying on a pseudo-Jacobin discourse of class struggle and
popular justice, Bane promises "the good people of Gotham" that the
wealthy will soon be forced to surrender their riches to improve the lives of
everyone. How, then, is the audience to know whom to see as the "good
guy"? After all, most people would have a difficult time identifying with
Gotham's billionaire class. The answer is simple: rhetoric aside, Bane and his
supposedly "revolutionary" cohort do not actually seek the social
transformation they claim, but rather are intent upon destroying the entire
city and killing everyone in it by turning a fusion reactor developed by Bruce
Wayne (for the purpose of saving the world with "green technology")
into a powerful atomic bomb. Thus Bane's movement is more a pathologically
homicidal attack on the people of Gotham - from which they need to be protected
by existing state institutions - than a struggle to emancipate them. In the
presence of a nuclear bomb that threatens to kill everyone, the interests of
the majority are suddenly brought into total alignment with those of Gotham's
1% - and the organs of state that sustain them - whom they may otherwise have
desired to usurp.
But if the cheap device of the nuclear bomb isn't enough to
illustrate the evil of Bane and his followers, their uprising itself is
depicted as dangerous and frightening: dramatic scenes of unruly crowds filling
the streets, destroying property and committing acts of violence against the
wealthy serve as the backdrop for Bane's grandiose rhetoric. It's never made
clear whether any of this supposedly popular revolt is carried out by Gotham's
civilian population as opposed to hired goons: in the battle between
ubermenschen, the people themselves have no agency whatsoever. They are merely
Nietzschean "herding animals," doomed to mindlessly follow one idol
or the other: good or evil, Batman or Bane. This is the precise inverse of the
situation in the French Revolution, whose imagery Nolan so freely employs.
Rather, that revolution was propelled by spontaneous mass insurrection bursting
through one representative-institutional arrangement after another.
The film is at pains to show that Bane's vision of justice -
in conflict with that of the state and Gotham's elite - is false, a siren song
in hard times. While persuasive, such re-articulation is incredibly dangerous -
in this case serving as a façade for nihilistic slaughter. When the rich and
powerful are forced to appear in show trials before a revolutionary tribunal, a
corrupted Commissioner Gordon bemoans the lack of due process because there
were no witnesses to testify or evidence against him. The conservative lens is
obvious: Justice cannot be administered by the people (or those claiming to
represent them) as it results in chaos and death; only the system, with its
established procedures of due process, can legitimately mete out justice. But
we should remember that our current president insists on the right to maintain
a secret list of individuals to be targeted for death without charge or trial -
including American citizens - designated solely by him.
Harvey Dent, the
Ubermensch and the Violence of Capital
The ultimate message is that we should trust those in power,
who can handle things maturely. Rather than a ruling class drunk with greed
amidst an out-of-control bonanza on Wall Street that eventually wrecked the
economy and destroyed countless lives, the wealthy as represented by Bruce
Wayne and the majority of the Wayne Enterprises board are depicted as a
responsible group who spend much of their time engaging in charity or otherwise
trying to improve the condition of humanity.
The very nuclear weapon that Bane attempts to use to destroy
the city is a converted fusion reactor designed and built by Wayne - a
philanthropic billionaire in the mold of Bill Gates - to save the world from
global warming by providing a green alternative energy source. But after he
discovered it was possible to build a bomb out of the reactor, Wayne
responsibly decided to shut it down and conceal it from the world, losing his
investment and practically bankrupting his company. In the name of
transparency, Miranda Tate reveals its existence to the board of directors
after taking over Wayne Enterprises, but Bane shows up at the meeting and the
reactor falls into his hands (it is later revealed that the two were in league
all along). Wayne, who was just trying to spare the world from global warming,
would have acted responsibly in secrecy, but once his secrets were revealed,
evil was able to take advantage of the information, and strike.
In this vein, the film also takes what appears to be a
not-so-oblique shot at WikiLeaks. At a public rally, Bane reads the private
meditations of Commissioner Gordon, intended only to be made public at some
never-specified, endlessly deferred "right time." Gordon has been
concealing the fact that the beloved Harvey Dent, the district attorney who
gained a reputation for cleaning up the streets and defeating organized crime,
committed murder. In a further sacrifice, Batman allowed himself to be blamed
for Dent's killings and death, in order to preserve the illusion of the DA's
immaculate image and secure the passage of the Dent Act that expanded the
powers of law enforcement to pursue dangerous criminals. Now, years later,
Dent's broad smile and blonde hair are omnipresent on posters throughout
Gotham, the symbol of the happiness and social harmony which the public is
supposed to believe constitute the status quo. In the name of "the
truth," Bane defiles the omnipresent, two-dimensional image of Dent,
holding a poster of his face before the crowd and declaring his corruption. We
are shown frightening images of prisoners, many of them Hispanic or
African-American, being broken out of jail.
Though the public believes he was killed by Batman,
following the murder, Dent is transformed into "Two Face": though his
blonde hair and broad smile persist on one half of his face, the other has been
horrifically burned and disfigured. This duality is central to the film: in the
public world of appearances, Bruce Wayne is a businessman and respected
socialite; in the private world of shadows, he is Batman, a masked caped
crusader who engages in violent struggle in the darkness. Concealed behind
every smiling photograph of Harvey Dent is a hidden world of violence necessary
to sustain the myth of the peaceful, orderly status quo. Likewise, though
Batman and Bane are clearly the good guy and the bad guy, respectively,
Batman's very status as the ultimate Ubermensch is signaled by a
non-dialectical moment in his relation to Bane. Whereas Bane needs his mask to
survive, Batman/Bruce Wayne is free to move in and out of the "shadow
world" that lies behind the tranquil exterior marked by Dent's placid
smile. "So, you think the darkness is your ally?" Bane asks,
reminding Batman that while Batman inhabits both worlds, entering each at his
will, Bane "was born in darkness" from which he is unable to escape.
Batman/Wayne must master both worlds in order to gain supremacy in either -
preserving Dent's immaculate image requires forceful exertion in the dark
underworld, behind the mask.
Like Batman's self-sacrifice for the sake of appearances,
the principal struggle of the film is to keep the mask on, to preserve The Lie
and keep up appearances of social harmony. As responsible, enlightened leaders
understand, preserving order (and keeping nihilistic evildoers such as Bane
from infecting the masses with their poisonous doctrines) requires the
deception of the public, concealing manifestations of social collapse behind
two-dimensional, placid illusions of social harmony and the system's smooth
functioning. As with the disclosure of Wayne's fusion reactor, Bane's reading
of Gordon's secret personal letter serves only to tear off masks that are best
left on, undermining public faith in the established order, which functions in
the best interests of all.
"Structures
Become Shackles": Reform and Necessary Evil
When explaining his decision to deceive the public to a
shocked and demoralized subordinate, Commissioner Gordon explains that
"structures become shackles," forcing the corruption of good
individuals who are trapped by faltering institutions. The fall of Gordon, an ordinary
police commissioner trying to do good, mirrors the fall of the system as a
whole; likewise, his rejuvenation marks the restoration of the system and the
suppression of Bane's revolt. The implication is clear: the system has failed,
requiring a strong individual - an ubermensch - capable of acting violently
outside of formal institutional structures to restore balance.
As it turns out, this is also Bane's ideology. The irony
here is that it is Bane's attempt to destroy the system that made possible its
revitalization. As Bane tells Batman at one point in the movie, "I may be
evil, but I am a necessary evil." It was Bane's struggle which brought
Batman to the rescue, to shake the accumulated corruption and decadence out of
the system and restore its smooth, orderly functioning. Bruce Wayne had to
fall, become one of the people, and then rebuild himself in order to bring this
salvation and, ultimately, stabilize the status quo.
This is the paradox which Occupy faces: in struggling for
social change, it is attempting to avoid becoming the system's necessary evil,
resulting merely in some paltry reductions in student loan interest rates or a
few Keynesian programs to increase aggregate demand that could restore a
precarious order to a fundamentally unjust capitalism. As Marx understood,
struggles such as Occupy's are essential if the system is to run smoothly -
otherwise, it would collapse in on itself by the force of its contradictions.
The cure, therefore, becomes itself part of the disease. Escape from this
paradox is not easy, but falling into the trap is not inevitable, as "The
Dark Knight Rises" might have you believe.
As George Orwell was fond of remarking, "All art is
propaganda." Indeed, "The Dark Knight Rises" contains so many
reactionary themes, it is virtually impossible to deconstruct them all in one
brief critique. Advancing the struggle to redefine the rotten values that have
produced such misery and hardship for so many requires that we dispute the
purported "innocence" of such ideology-laden spectacles in our
relentless attack on the supports that legitimize the status quo. We cannot
rely on an ubermensch to save us, nor count on a system based fundamentally on
injustice and inequality to miraculously transform itself. Rather, we must tear
off the mask, take matters into our own hands, and struggle together to create
a better world no matter what justifications the 1% concocts to preserve its
power and privilege. With the implosion of capitalism in the West, the
evisceration of democracy and intensifying ecological catastrophe, there is
little choice but to begin right now if there is to be any future worth living
in.
