From the repression of unruly citizens to the celebration of
the “good capitalist”, The Dark Knight Rises reflects our age of anxiety.
By Slavoj Žižek [1] Published 23 August 2012
From the repression of unruly citizens to the celebration of
the “good capitalist”, The Dark Knight Rises reflects our age of anxiety.
Fear city: the director Christopher Nolan's latest Batman
film consciously explores modern anxieties about "economic fairness".
Image: Warner Brothers Extended Artwork
The Dark Knight Rises shows that Hollywood blockbusters
are precise indicators of the ideological predicaments of our societies. Here
is the storyline. Eight years after the events of The Dark Knight, the
previous instalment of Christopher Nolan’s Batman series, law and order prevail
in Gotham City. Under the extraordinary powers granted by the Dent Act,
Commissioner Gordon has nearly eradicated violent and organised crime. He
nonetheless feels guilty about the cover-up of the crimes of Harvey Dent and
plans to confess to the conspiracy at a public event – but he decides that the
city is not ready to hear the truth.
No longer active as Batman, Bruce Wayne lives isolated in
his manor. His company is crumbling after he invested in a clean-energy project
designed to harness fusion power but then shut it down, on learning that the
core could be modified to become a nuclear weapon. The beautiful Miranda Tate,
a member of the Wayne Enterprises executive board, encourages Wayne to rejoin
society and continue his philanthropic good works.
Here enters the first villain of the film. Bane, a terrorist
leader who was a member of the League of Shadows, gets hold of a copy of the
commissioner’s speech. After Bane’s financial machinations bring Wayne’s
company close to bankruptcy, Wayne entrusts control of his enterprise to
Miranda and also has a brief love affair with her. Learning that Bane has also
got hold of his fusion core, Wayne returns as Batman and confronts Bane.
Crippling Batman in close combat, Bane detains him in a prison from which escape
is almost impossible. While the imprisoned Wayne recovers from his injuries and
retrains himself to be Batman, Bane succeeds in turning Gotham City into an
isolated city state. He first lures most of Gotham’s police force underground
and traps them there; then he sets off explosions that destroy most of the
bridges connecting Gotham to the mainland and announces that any attempt to
leave the city will result in the detonation of Wayne’s fusion core, which has
been converted into a bomb.
Now we reach the crucial moment of the film: Bane’s takeover
is accompanied by a vast politico-ideological offensive. He publicly exposes
the cover-up of Dent’s death and releases the prisoners locked up under the
Dent Act. Condemning the rich and powerful, he promises to restore the power of
the people, calling on citizens, “Take your city back.” Bane reveals himself,
as the critic Tyler O’Neil has put it, to be “the ultimate Wall Street
Occupier, calling on the 99 per cent to band together and overthrow societal
elites”. What follows is the film’s idea of people power – summary show trials
and executions of the rich, the streets surrendered to crime and villainy.
A couple of months later, while Gotham City continues to
suffer under popular terror, Wayne escapes from prison, returns as Batman and
enlists his friends to help liberate the city and disable the fusion bomb
before it explodes. Batman confronts and subdues Bane but Miranda intervenes
and stabs Batman. She reveals herself to be Talia al-Ghul, daughter of Ra’s al-Ghul,
the former leader of the League of Shadows (the villains in Batman Begins).
After announcing her plan to complete her father’s work in destroying Gotham
City, Talia escapes.
In the ensuing mayhem, Commissioner Gordon cuts off the
bomb’s remote detonation function, while a benevolent cat burglar named Selina
Kyle kills Bane, freeing Batman to chase Talia. He tries to force her to take
the bomb to the fusion chamber where it can be stabilised, but she floods the
chamber. Talia dies, confident that the bomb cannot be stopped, when her truck
is knocked off the road and crashes. Using a special helicopter, Batman hauls
the bomb beyond the city limits, where it detonates over the ocean and presumably
kills him. Batman is now celebrated as a hero whose sacrifice saved Gotham
City. Wayne is believed to have died in the riots. While his estate is being
divided up, his butler, Alfred, sees Wayne and Selina together alive in a café
in Florence. Blake, a young and honest policeman who knew about Batman’s identity,
inherits the Batcave. The first clue to the ideological underpinnings of this
ending is provided by Alfred, who, at Wayne’s apparent burial, reads the last
lines from Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities: “It is a far, far better thing that
I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I
have ever known.” Some reviewers took this as an indication that, in O’Neil’s
words, the film “rises to the noblest level of western art . . . The film
appeals to the centre of America’s tradition – the ideal of noble sacrifice for
the common people . . . An ultimate Christ-figure, Batman sacrifices himself to
save others.”
Seen from this perspective, the storyline is a short step
back from Dickens to Christ at Calvary. But isn’t the idea of Batman’s
sacrifice as a repetition of Christ’s death not compromised by the film’s last
scene (Wayne with Selina in the café)? Is the religious counterpart of this
ending not, instead, the well-known blasphemous idea that Christ survived his
crucifixion and lived a long, peaceful life in India or, as some sources have
it, Tibet? The only way to redeem this final scene would be to read it as a
daydream or hallucination of Alfred’s.
A further Dickensian feature of the film is a depoliticised
complaint about the gap between rich and poor. Early in the film, Selina
whispers to Wayne as they are dancing at an exclusive, upper-class gala: “A
storm is coming, Mr Wayne. You and your friends better batten down the hatches.
Because when it hits, you’re all going to wonder how you thought you could live
so large and leave so little for the rest of us.” Nolan, like any good liberal,
is “worried” about the disparity and has said that this worry permeates the
film: “The notion of economic fairness creeps into the film . . . I don’t feel
there’s a left or right perspective in the film. What is there is just an
honest assessment or honest exploration of the world we live in – things that
worry us.”
Although viewers know Wayne is mega-rich, they often forget
where his wealth comes from: arms manufacturing plus stock-market speculation,
which is why Bane’s games on the stock exchange can destroy his empire. Arms
dealer and speculator – this is the secret beneath the Batman mask. How does
the film deal with it? By resuscitating the archetypal Dickensian theme of a
good capitalist who finances orphanages (Wayne) versus a bad, greedy capitalist
(Stryver, as in Dickens). As Nolan’s brother, Jonathan, who co-wrote the
screenplay, has said: “A Tale of Two Cities, to me, was the most . . . harrowing
portrait of a relatable, recognisable civilisation that had completely fallen
to pieces. You look at the Terror in Paris, in France in that period, and it’s
hard to imagine that things could go that bad and wrong.” The scenes of the
vengeful populist uprising in the film (a mob that thirsts for the blood of the
rich who have neglected and exploited them) evoke Dickens’s description of the
Reign of Terror, so that, although the film has nothing to do with politics, it
follows Dickens’s novel in “honestly” portraying revolutionaries as possessed
fanatics.
The good terrorist
An interesting thing about Bane is that the source of his
revolutionary hardness is unconditional love. In one touching scene, he tells
Wayne how, in an act of love amid terrible suffering, he saved the child Talia,
not caring about the consequences and paying a terrible price for it (Bane was
beaten to within an inch of his life while defending her).
Another critic, R M Karthick, locates The Dark Knight
Rises in a long tradition stretching from Christ to Che Guevara which
extols violence as a “work of love”, as Che does in his diary:
Let me say, with the risk of appearing ridiculous, that the
true revolutionary is guided by strong feelings of love. It is impossible to
think of an authentic revolutionary without this quality.
What we encounter here is not so much the “christification
of Che” but rather a “cheisation” of Christ – the Christ whose “scandalous”
words from Luke (“If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and his
mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters – yes, even his own
life – he cannot be my disciple”) point in the same direction as these ones
from Che: “You may have to be tough but do not lose your tenderness.” The
statement that “the true revolutionary is guided by a strong feeling of love”
should be read together with Guevara’s much more problematic description of
revolutionaries as “killing machines”:
Hatred is an element of struggle; relentless hatred of the
enemy that impels us over and beyond the natural limitations of man and
transforms us into effective, violent, selective and cold killing machines. Our
soldiers must be thus; a people without hatred cannot vanquish a brutal enemy.
Guevara here is paraphrasing Christ’s declarations on the unity
of love and the sword – in both cases, the underlying paradox is that what
makes love angelic, what elevates it over mere sentimentality, is its cruelty,
its link with violence. And it is this link that places love beyond the natural
limitations of man and thus transforms it into an unconditional drive. This is
why, to turn back to The Dark Knight Rises, the only authentic love
portrayed in the film is Bane’s, the terrorist’s, in clear contrast to
Batman’s.
The figure of Ra’s, Talia’s father, also deserves a closer
look. Ra’s has a mixture of Arab and oriental features and is an agent of
virtuous terror, fighting to correct a corrupted western civilisation. He is
played by Liam Neeson, an actor whose screen persona usually radiates dignified
goodness and wisdom – he is Zeus in Clash of the Titans and also plays Qui-Gon
Jinn in The Phantom Menace, the first episode of the Star Wars series. Qui-Gon
is a Jedi knight, the mentor of Obi-Wan Kenobi as well as the one who discovers
Anakin Skywalker, believing that Anakin is the chosen one who will restore the
balance of the universe, and ignores Yoda’s warnings about Anakin’s unstable
nature. At the end of The Phantom Menace, Qui-Gon is killed by the assassin
Darth Maul.
In the Batman trilogy, Ra’s is the teacher of the young
Wayne. In Batman Begins, he finds him in a prison in Bhutan. Introducing
himself as Henri Ducard, he offers the boy a “path”. After Wayne is freed, he
climbs to the home of the League of Shadows where Ra’s is waiting. At the end
of a lengthy and painful period of training, Ra’s explains that Wayne must do
what is necessary to fight evil, and that the league has trained Wayne to lead
it in its mission to destroy Gotham City, which the league believes has become
hopelessly corrupt.
Ra’s is thus not a simple embodiment of evil. He stands for
the combination of virtue and terror, for egalitarian discipline fighting a
corrupted empire, and thus belongs to a line that stretches in recent fiction
from Paul Atreides in Frank Herbert’s Dune to Leonidas in Frank Miller’s
graphic novel 300. It is crucial that Wayne was a disciple of Ra’s: Wayne was
made into Batman by his mentor.
At this point, two common-sense objections suggest
themselves. The first is that there were monstrous mass killings and violence
in real-life revolutions, from the rise of Stalin to the rule of the Khmer
Rouge, so the film is clearly not just engaging in reactionary imagination. The
second objection is that the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement in reality was
not violent – its goal was definitely not a new Reign of Terror. In so far as
Bane’s revolt is supposed to extrapolate the immanent tendency of OWS, the film
absurdly misrepresents its aims and strategies. The ongoing anti-capitalist
protests are the opposite of Bane: he stands for the mirror image of state
terror, for a murderous fundamentalism that takes over and rules by fear, not
for the overcoming of state power through popular self-organisation. What both
objections share, however, is the rejection of the figure of Bane.
The reply to these two objections has several parts. First,
one should make the scope of violence clear. The best answer to the claim that
the violent mob reaction to oppression is worse than the original oppression
was the one provided by Mark Twain in his novel A Connecticut Yankee in King
Arthur’s Court:
There were two “Reigns of Terror” if we would remember it
and consider it; the one wrought in hot passion, the other in heartless cold
blood . . . Our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the
momentary Terror, so to speak, whereas, what is the horror of swift death by
the axe compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and
heartbreak? . . . A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that
brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn
over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and
real Terror, that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror, which none of us have
been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.
Then, one should demystify the problem of violence,
rejecting simplistic claims that 20th- century communism used too much extreme
murderous violence. We should be careful not to fall into this trap again. As a
fact, this is terrifyingly true. Yet such a direct focus on violence obfuscates
the underlying question: what was wrong with the communist project as such?
What internal weakness of that project was it that pushed communists towards
unrestrained violence? It is not enough to say that communists neglected the
“problem of violence”; it was a deeper, sociopolitical failure that pushed them
to violence. It is thus not only Nolan’s film that is unable to imagine
authentic people’s power. The “real” radical-emancipatory movements couldn’t do
it, either; they remained caught in the co-ordinates of the old society, in
which actual “people power” was often such a violent horror.
Finally, it is all too simplistic to claim that there is no
violent potential in OWS and similar movements – there is a violence at work in
every authentic emancipatory process. The problem withThe Dark Knight Rises is
that it has wrongly translated this violence into murderous terror. Let us take
a brief detour here through José Saramago’s novel Seeing, which tells the
story of strange events in the unnamed capital city of an unidentified
democratic country. When election day dawns with torrential rain, the voter
turnout is disturbingly low. But the weather turns by mid-afternoon and the
population heads en masse to the polling stations. The government’s relief is
short-lived, however: the count shows that more than 70 per cent of the ballots
cast in the capital have been left blank. Baffled, the government gives the
people a chance to make amends a week later at another election.
The results are worse. Now 83 per cent of the ballots are
blank. The two major political parties – the ruling party of the right and its
chief adversary, the party of the middle – are in a panic, while the
marginalised party of the left produces an analysis claiming that the blank
ballots are a vote for its progressive agenda. Unsure how to respond to a
benign protest but certain that an anti-democratic conspiracy is afoot, the
government quickly labels the movement “terrorism, pure and unadulterated” and
declares a state of emergency.
Citizens are seized at random and disappear into secret
interrogation sites; the police and seat of government are withdrawn from the
capital; all entrances to the city are sealed, as are the exits. The city
continues to function almost normally throughout, the people parrying each of
the government’s thrusts in unison and with a Gandhian level of non-violent
resistance. This, the voters’ abstention, is a case of authentically radical
“divine violence” that prompts panic reactions from those in power.
Back to Nolan. The trilogy of Batman films follows an
internal logic. In Batman Begins, the hero remains within the constraints of a
liberal order: the system can be defended with morally acceptable methods. The
Dark Knight is, in effect, a new version of two John Ford western
classics, Fort Apache and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,
which show how, to civilise the Wild West, one has to “print the legend” and
ignore the truth. They show, in short, how our civilisation has to be grounded
in a lie – one has to break the rules in order to defend the system.
In Batman Begins, the hero is simply the classic urban
vigilante who punishes the criminals when the police can’t. The problem is that
the police, the official law-enforcement agency, respond ambivalently to
Batman’s help. They see him as a threat to their monopoly on power and
therefore as evidence of their inefficiency. However, his transgression here is
purely formal: it lies in acting on behalf of the law without being legitimised
to do so. In his acts, he never violates the law. The Dark Knight changes
these co-ordinates. Batman’s true rival is not his ostensible opponent, the
Joker, but Harvey Dent, the “white knight”, the aggressive new district attorney,
a kind of official vigilante whose fanatical battle against crime leads to the
killing of innocent people and ultimately destroys him. It is as if Dent were
the legal order’s reply to the threat posed by Batman: against Batman’s
vigilantism, the system generates its own illegal excess in a vigilante much
more violent than Batman.
There is poetic justice, therefore, when Wayne plans to
reveal his identity as Batman and Dent jumps in and names himself as Batman –
he is more Batman than Batman, actualising the temptation to break the law that
Wayne was able to resist. When, at the end of the film, Batman assumes
responsibility for the crimes committed by Dent to save the reputation of the
popular hero who embodies hope for ordinary people, his act is a gesture of
symbolic exchange: first Dent takes upon himself the identity of Batman, then
Wayne – the real Batman – takes Dent’s crimes upon himself.
The Dark Knight Rises pushes things even further. Is
Bane not Dent taken to an extreme? Dent draws the conclusion that the system is
unjust, so that, to fight injustice effectively, one has to turn directly
against the system and destroy it. Dent loses his remaining inhibitions and is
ready to use all manner of methods to achieve this goal. The rise of such a figure
changes things entirely. For all the characters, Batman included, morality is
relativised and becomes a matter of convenience, something determined by
circumstances. It’s open class warfare – everything is permitted in defence of
the system when we are dealing not just with mad gangsters, but with a popular
uprising.
Should the film be rejected by those engaged in emancipatory
struggles? Things aren’t quite so simple. We should approach the film in the
way one has to interpret a Chinese political poem. Absences and surprising
presences count. Recall the old French story about a wife who complains that
her husband’s best friend is making illicit sexual advances towards her. It
takes some time until the surprised friend gets the point: in this twisted way,
she is inviting him to seduce her. It is like the Freudian unconscious that
knows no negation; what matters is not a negative judgement of something but
that this something is mentioned at all. In The Dark Knight Rises, people
power is here, staged as an event, in a significant development from the usual
Batman opponents (criminal mega-capitalists, gangsters and terrorists).
Strange attraction
The prospect of the Occupy Wall Street movement taking power
and establishing a people’s democracy on the island of Manhattan is so patently
absurd, so utterly unrealistic, that one cannot avoid asking the following
question – why does a Hollywood blockbuster dream about it? Why does it evoke
this spectre? Why does it even fantasise about OWS exploding into a violent takeover?
The obvious answer – that it does so to taint OWS with the accusation that it
harbours a terrorist or totalitarian potential – is not enough to account for
the strange attraction exerted by the prospect of “people power”. No wonder the
proper functioning of this power remains blank, absent; no details are given
about how the people power functions or what the mobilised people are doing.
Bane tells the people they can do what they want – he is not imposing his own
order on them. This is why external critique of the film (claiming that its
depiction of OWS is a ridiculous caricature) is not enough. The critique has
to be immanent; it has to locate inside the film a multitude of signs that
point towards the authentic event. (Recall, for instance, that Bane is not just
a bloodthirsty terrorist but a person of deep love, with a spirit of
sacrifice.)
In short, pure ideology isn’t possible. Bane’s authenticity
has to leave traces in the film’s texture. This is why The Dark Knight
Rises deserves close reading. The event – the “People’s Republic of Gotham
City”, a dictatorship of the proletariat in Manhattan – is immanent to the
film. It is its absent centre.
Slavoj Žižek’s latest book is “Less Than Nothing: Hegel and
the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism” (Verso, £50)
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