Dictatorship of the Proletariat in Gotham City | on ‘The Dark Knight Rises’
By Slavoj Žižek
Exclusive on Boitempo’s Blog.
Warning: the following article contains spoilers of The
Dark Knight Trilogy.
The Dark Knight Rises attests yet again to how
Hollywood blockbusters are precise indicators of the ideological predicament of
our societies. Here is a (simplified) storyline. Eight years after the events
of The Dark Knight, the previous installment of the Batman saga, law and
order prevail in Gotham City: under the extraordinary powers granted by the
Dent Act, Commissioner Gordon has nearly eradicated violent and organized
crime. He nonetheless feels guilty about the cover-up of Harvey Dent’s crimes (when
Dent tried to kill Gordon’s son before Batman saved him, Dent fell to his
death, and Batman took the fall for the Dent myth, allowing himself to be
demonized as Gotham’s villain), and plans to admit to the conspiracy at a
public event celebrating Dent, but decides that the city is not ready to hear
the truth. No longer active as Batman, Bruce Wayne lives isolated in his Manor
while his company is crumbling ling after he invested in a clean energy project
designed to harness fusion power, but shut it down after 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
with society and continue his philanthropic 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 the
copy of Gordon’s speech. After Bane’s financial machinations bring Wayne’s
company close to bankruptcy, Wayne entrusts Miranda to control his enterprise
and also engages in a brief love affair with her. (In this she competes with
Selina Kyle, a cat burglar Selina Kyle who steals from the rich in order to
redistribute wealth, but finally rejoins Wayne and the forces of law and order.)
Learning about Bane’s mobilization, Wayne returns as Batman and confronts Bane,
who says that he took over the League of Shadows after Ra’s Al Ghul’s death.
Crippling Batman in a close combat, Bane detains him in a prison from which
escape is virtually impossible: inmates tell Wayne the story of the only person
to ever successfully escape from the prison, a child driven by necessity and
the sheer force of will. 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 which destroy most of the
bridges connecting Gotham City to the mainland, announcing that any attempt to
leave the city will result in the detonation of Wayne fusion core, which has
been taken hold and converted into a bomb.
Here we reach the crucial moment of the film: Bane’s
takeover is accompanied by a vast politico-ideological offensive. Bane publicly
reveals 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 the common people to “take your city back” –
Bane reveals himself to be “the ultimate Wall Street Occupier, calling on the
99% to band together and overthrow societal elites.”[1] What follows is the film’s idea of people’s power:
summary show trials and executions of the rich, streets littered with crime and
villainy… A couple of months later, while Gotham City continues to suffer
popular terror, Wayne successfully escapes prison, returns to Gotham as Batman,
and enlists his friends to help liberate the city and stop the fusion bomb
before it explodes. Batman confronts and subdues Bane, but Miranda intervenes
and stabs Batman – the societal benefactor reveals herself to be Talia al Ghul,
Ra’s daughter: it was she who escaped the prison as a child, and Bane was the
one person who aided her escape. After announcing her plan to complete her
father’s work in destroying Gotham, Talia escapes. In the ensuing mayhem,
Gordon cuts off the bomb’s ability to be remotely detonated while Selina kills
Bane, allowing Batman to chase Talia. He tries to force her to take the bomb to
the fusion chamber where it can be stabilized, but she floods the chamber.
Talia dies when her truck crashes off the road, confident that the bomb cannot
be stopped. 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, while Wayne is believed to have died in the riots. As his estate
is divided up, Alfred witnesses Bruce and Selina together alive in a cafe in
Florence, while Blake, a young honest policeman who knew about Batman’s
identity, inherits the Batcave. In short, “Batman saves the day, emerges
unscathed and moves on with a normal life, with someone else to replace his
role defending the system.”[2]The first clue to the ideological underpinnings of this ending
is provided by Gordon, who, at Wayne’s (would-be) burial, reads the last lines
from Dickens’sTale 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 of the film took this quote as an indication that
it “rises to the noblest level of Western art. The film appeals to the center
of America’s tradition – the ideal of noble sacrifice for the common people.
Batman must humble himself to be exalted, and lay down his life to find a new
one. /…/ An ultimate Christ-figure, Batman sacrifices himself to save others.”[3]
And, effectively, from this perspective, there is only one
step back from Dickens to Christ at Calvary: “For whosoever will save his life
shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it. For
what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”
(Matthew 16:25 26) Batman’s sacrifice as the repetition of Christ’s death?
Is this idea not compromised by the film’s last scene (Wayne with Selena in a
Florence café)? Is the religious counterpart of this ending not rather the
well-known blasphemous idea that Christ really survived his crucifixion and
lived a long peaceful life (in India or even Tibet, according to some sources)?
The only way to redeem this final scene would have been to read it as a
daydream (hallucination) of Alfred who sits alone in the Florence café. The
further Dickensian feature of the film is a de-politicized complaint about the
gap between the rich and the poor – early in the film, Selina whispers to Wayne
while they are dancing at an exclusive upper class gala:
“There’s a storm 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, as every good liberal, is “worried” about this disparity
and he admits this worry penetrates the film:
“What I see in the film that relates to the real world is
the idea of dishonesty. The film is all about that coming to a head /…/ The
notion of economic fairness creeps into the film, and the reason is twofold.
One, Bruce Wayne is a billionaire. It has to be addressed. /…/ But two, there
are a lot of things in life, and economics is one of them, where we have to
take a lot of what we’re told on trust, because most of us feel like we don’t
have the analytical tools to know what’s going on. /…/ 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.”[4]
Although viewers know Wayne is mega-rich, they tend to
forget where his wealth comes from: arms manufacturing plus stock-market
speculations, which is why Bane’s stock-exchange games can destroy his empire –
arms dealer and speculator, this is the true secret beneath the
Batman mask. How does the film deal with it? By resuscitating the archetypal
Dickensian topic of a good capitalist who engages in financing orphanage homes
(Wayne) versus a bad greedy capitalist (Stryver, as in Dickens). In such
Dickensian over-moralization, the economic disparity is translated into
“dishonesty” which should be “honestly” analyzed, although we lack any reliable
cognitive mapping, and such an “honest” approach leads to a further parallel
with Dickens – as Christopher Nolan’s brother Jonathan (who co-wrote the
scenario) put it bluntly: “Tale of Two Citiesto me was the most sort of
harrowing portrait of a relatable recognizable civilization that had completely
fallen to pieces. The terrors in Paris, in France in that period, it’s not hard
to imagine that things could go that bad and wrong.”[5] 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, and thus provides
“the caricature of what in real life would be an
ideologically committed revolutionary fighting structural injustice. Hollywood
tells what the establishments want you to know – revolutionaries are brutal
creatures, with utter disregard for human life. Despite emancipatory rhetoric
on liberation, they have sinister designs behind. Thus, whatever might be their
reasons, they need to be eliminated.”[6]
Tom Charity was right to note “the movie’s defense of the
establishment in the form of philanthropic billionaires and an incorruptible
police”[7] – in its distrust of the people taking things into their
own hands, the film “demonstrates both a desire for social justice and a fear
of what that can actually look like in the hands of a mob.”[8] Karthick raises here a perspicuous question with regard
to immense popularity of the Joker figure from the previous film: why such a
harsh disposition towards Bane when the Joker was dealt with lenience in the
earlier movie? The answer is simple and convincing:
“The Joker, calling for anarchy in its purest form,
critically underscores the hypocrisies of bourgeois civilization as it exists,
but his views are unable to translate into mass action. Bane, on the other hand
poses an existential threat to the system of oppression. /…/ His strength is
not just his physique but also his ability to command people and mobilize them
to achieve a political goal. He represents the vanguard, the organized
representative of the oppressed that wages political struggle in their name to
bring about structural changes. Such a force, with the greatest subversive
potential, the system cannot accommodate. It needs to be eliminated.”[9]
However, even if Bane lacks the fascination of Heath
Ledger’s Joker, there is a feature which distinguishes him from the latter:
unconditional love, the very source of his hardness. In a short but touching
scene, we see how, in an act of love in the midst of terrible suffering, Bane
saved the child Talia, not caring for consequences and paying a terrible price
for it (he was beaten within an inch of his life while defending her).
Karthick is totally justified in locating this event into
the long tradition, from Christ to Che Guevara, which extols violence as a
“work of love,” as in the famous lines from Che Guevara’s 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.”[10] What we encounter here is not so much the
“Christification of Che” but rather a “Cheization” of Christ himself – 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”(14:26)) point in exactly
the same direction as Che’s famous quote: “You may have to be tough, but do not
lose your tenderness.”[11] The statement that “the true revolutionary is guided by
a great feeling of love” should be read together with Guevara’s much more
“problematic” statement on 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.”[12]
Or, to paraphrase Kant and Robespierre yet again: love
without cruelty is powerless; cruelty without love is blind, a short-lived
passion which loses its persistent edge. Guevara is here paraphrasing Christ’s
declarations on the unity of love and sword – in both cases, the underlying
paradox is that what makes love angelic, what elevates it over mere unstable
and pathetic sentimentality, is its cruelty itself, its link with violence – it
is this link which raises love over and beyond the natural limitations of man
and thus transforms it into an unconditional drive. This is why, back to The
Dark Knight Rises, the only authentic love in the film is Bane’s, the
“terrorist’s,” in clear contrast to Batman.
Along the same lines, the figure of Ra, Talia’s father, deserves
a closer look. Ra is a mixture of Arab and Oriental features, an agent of
virtuous terror fighting to counter-balance the corrupted Western civilization.
He is played by Liam Neeson, an actor whose screen-persona usually radiates
dignified goodness and wisdom (he is Zeus in The Clash of Titans), and who
also plays Qui-Gon Jinn inThe 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, ignoring Yoda’s
warnings about Anakin’s unstable nature; at the end of The Phantom Menace,
Qui-Gon is killed by Darth Maul.[13]
In the Batman trilogy, Ra is also the teacher of
the young Wayne: in Batman Begins, he finds the young Wayne in a Chinese
prison; 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, although presenting himself as the servant of another man
called Ra’s al Ghul. At the end of a long and painful training, Ra explains
that Bruce must do what is necessary to fight evil, while revealing that they
have trained Bruce with the intention of him leading the League to destroy
Gotham City, which they believe has become hopelessly corrupt. Ra’s is thus not
a simple embodiment of Evil: he stands for the combination of virtue and
terror, for the egalitarian discipline fighting a corrupted empire, and thus
belongs to the line that stretches (in recent fiction) from Paul Atreides in Dune to
Leonidas in 300. And it is crucial that Wayne is his disciple: Wayne was
formed as Batman by him.
Two common sense reproaches impose themselves here. First,
there weremonstrous mass killings and violence in actual revolutions, from
Stalinism to Khmer Rouge, so the film is clearly not just engaging in
reactionary imagination. The second, opposite reproach: the actual OWS movement
was not violent, its goal was definitely not a new reign of terror; insofar as
Bane’s revolt is supposed to extrapolate the immanent tendency of the OWS
movement, the film thus ridiculously misrepresents its aims and strategies. The
ongoing anti-globalist protests are the very opposite of Bane’s brutal terror:
Bane stands for the mirror-image of state terror, for a murderous
fundamentalist sect taking over and ruling by terror, not for its overcoming
through popular self-organization… What both reproaches share is the rejection
of the figure of Bane. – The reply to these two reproaches is multiple.
First, one should make clear the actual scope of violence –
the best answer to the claim that the violent mob reaction to oppression is
worse than the original oppression itself, was the one provided long by Mark
Twain in his 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 the XXth century Communism used too much
excessive murderous violence, and that we should be careful not to fall into
this trap again. As a fact, this is, of course, terrifyingly true, – but such a
direct focus on violence obfuscates the underlying question: what was wrong in
the XXth century Communist project as such, which immanent weakness of this
project pushed Communist to resort the Communists (not only those) in power to
unrestrained violence? In other words, it is not enough to say that Communists
“neglected the problem of violence”: it was a deeper socio-political failure
which pushed them to violence. (The same goes for the notion that Communists
“neglected democracy”: their overall project of social transformation enforced
on them this “neglect.”) It is thus not only Nolan’s film which was not able to
imagine authentic people’s power – the “real” radical-emancipatory movements
themselves also were not able to do it, they remained caught in the coordinates
of the old society, which is why the actual “people’s power” often was such a
violent horror.
And, last but not least, it is all too simple 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 with the
film is that it wrongly translated this violence into murderous terror. Which,
then, is the sublime violence with regard to which even the most brutal killing
is an act of weakness? Let us make a detour through Jose Saramago’s Seeing which
tells the story of the strange events in the unnamed capital city of an
unidentified democratic country. When the election day morning is marred by
torrential rains, voter turnout is disturbingly low, but the weather breaks by
mid-afternoon and the population heads en masse to their voting stations. The
government’s relief is short-lived, however, when vote counting reveals that
over 70% of the ballots cast in the capital have been left blank. Baffled by
this apparent civic lapse, the government gives the citizenry a chance to make
amends just one week later with another election day. The results are worse:
now 83% of the ballots are blank.
The two major political parties – the ruling
party of the right (p.o.t.r.) and their chief adversary, the party of the
middle (p.o.t.m.) – are in a panic, while the haplessly marginalized party of
the left (p.o.t.l.) produces an analysis claiming that the blank ballots are
essentially a vote for their progressive agenda. Unsure how to respond to a
benign protest but certain that an anti-democratic conspiracy exists, the
government quickly labels the movement
“terrorism, pure and unadulterated” and declares a state of
emergency, allowing it to suspend all constitutional guarantees and adopt a
series of increasingly drastic steps: citizens are seized at random and
disappear into secret interrogation sites, the police and seat of government
are withdrawn from the capital, sealing the city against all entrances and
exits, and finally manufacturing their own terrorist ringleader. The city
continues to function near-normally throughout, the people parrying each of the
government’s thrusts in inexplicable unison and with a truly Gandhian level of
nonviolent resistance… this, the voters’ abstention, is a case of truly
radical “divine violence” which prompts brutal panic reactions of those in
power.
Back to Nolan, the triad of Batman-films thus follows an
immanent logic. InBatman Begins, the hero remains within the constraints of a liberal
order: the system can be defended with morally acceptable methods. The
Dark Knight is effectively a new version of the two John Ford western
classics (Fort Apache andThe Man Who Shot Liberty Valance) which deploy
how, in order to civilize the Wild West, one has to “print the legend” and
ignore the truth – in short, how our civilization has to be grounded onto a
Lie: one has to break the rules in order to defend the system. Or, to put it in
another way, in Batman Begins, the hero is simply a classic figure of the
urban vigilante who punishes the criminals where police cannot do it; the
problem is that police, the official law-enforcement agency, relates
ambiguously to Batman’s help: while admitting its efficiency, it nonetheless
perceive Batman as a threat to its monopoly on power and a testimony of its own
inefficiency. However, Batman’s transgression is here purely formal, it resides
in acting oin behalf of the law without being legitimized to do it: in his
acts, he never violates the law. The Dark Knight changes these
coordinates: Batman’s true rival is not Joker, his opponent, but Harvey Dent,
the “white knight,” the aggressive new district attorney, a kind of official
vigilante whose fanatical battle against crime leads him into killing innocent
people and destroys him. It is as if Dent is the reply of the legal order to
Batman’s threat: against Batman’s vigilante struggle, the system generates its
own illegal excess, its own vigilante, much more violent than Batman, directly
violating the law. There is thus a poetic justice in the fact that, when Bruce
plans to publicly reveal his identity as Batman, Dent jumps in and instead
names himself as Batman – he is “more Batman than Batman himself,”
actualizing the temptation Batman was still able to resist. So when, at the
film’s end, Batman takes upon himself the crimes committed by Dent to save the
reputation of the popular hero who embodies hope for ordinary people, his
self-effacing act contains a grain of truth: Batman in a way returns the favor
to Dent. His act is a gesture of symbolic exchange: first Dent takes upon
himself the identity of Batman, then Wayne – the real Batman – takes upon
himself Dent’s crimes.
Finally, The Dark Knight Rises pushes things even
further: is Bane not Dent brought to extreme, to its self-negation? Dent who
draws the conclusion that the system itself is unjust, so that in order to
effectively fight injustice one has to turn directly against the system and
destroy it? And, as part of the same move, Dent who loses last inhibitions and
is ready to use all murderous brutality to achieve this goal? The rise of such
a figure changes the entire constellation: for all participants, Batman
included, morality is relativized, it becomes a matter of convenience, something
determined by circumstances: it’s open class warfare, everything is permitted
to defend the system when we are dealing not just with mad gangsters but with a
popular uprising.
Is, then, this all? Should the film just be flatly rejected
by those who are engaged in radical emancipatory struggles? Things are more
ambiguous, and one has to read 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 till the
surprised friend gets the point – in this twisted way, she is inviting him to
seduce her… It is like the Freudian unconscious which knows no negation: what
matters is not a negative judgment on something, but the mere fact that this
something is mentioned – in The Dark Knight Rises, people’s power IS
HERE, staged as an Event, in a key step forward from the usual Batman opponents
(criminal mega-capitalists, gangsters and terrorists).
Here we get the first clue – the prospect of the OWS
movement taking power and establishing people’s democracy on Manhattan is so
patently absurd, so utterly non-realist, that one cannot but raise the
question: WHY DOES THEN A MAJOR HOLLYWOOD BLOCKBUSTER DREAM ABOUT IT, WHY DOES
IT EVOKE THIS SPECTER? Why even dream about OWS exploding into a violent
takeover? The obvious answer (to smudge OWS with accusations that it harbors a
terrorist-totalitarian potential) is not enough to account for the strange
attraction exerted by prospect of “people’s power.” No wonder the proper
functioning of this power remains blank, absent: no details are given about how
this people’s power functions, what the mobilized people are doing (remember that
Bane tells the people they can do what they want – he is not imposing on them
his own order).
This is why external critique of the film (“its depiction of
the OWS reign is a ridiculous caricature”) is not enough – the critique has to
be immanent, it has to locate within the film itself a multitude signs which
point towards the authentic Event. (Recall, for example, that Bane is not just
a brutal terrorist, but a person of deep love and sacrifice.) In short, pure
ideology isn’t possible, Bane’s authenticity HAS to leave trace in the film’s
texture. This is why the film deserves a close reading: the Event –
the “people’s republic of Gotham City”, dictatorship of the proletariat on
Manhattan – is immanent to the film, it is its absent center.
–––
[3] Tyler O’Neil, op.cit.
[4] Christopher Nolan, interview in Entertainment 1216
(July 2012, p. 34.
[10] Quoted from Jon Lee Anderson, Che Guevara: A
Revolutionary Life, New York: Grove 1997, p. 636-637.
[11] Quoted in McLaren, op.cit., p. 27.
[13] One should note the irony of the fact that Neeson’s son
is a devoted Shia Muslim, and that Neeson himself often talks about his
forthcoming conversion to Islam.
