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Movie Takes
The Dark Knight Rises
Why have some conservatives fallen for this formulaic film?
When I last reviewed one, I wrote that a film critic reviewing a James Bond movie inevitably feels like a food critic reviewing a McDonald’s Restaurant. In both cases there is really nothing to review, as the effort expended by the authors has not been to produce something new that, in their judgment, will please us but merely something that is as close as possible to what we already know pleases us. Thank you for not surprising! Even if it doesn’t please, the point is the same: to follow a formula in order to reproduce an experience that the same formula has produced in the past, whether we like the result or not, since the audience that likes it is a large and loyal one that keeps coming back for more of the same whatever those who don’t like it may do. And from the point of view of the franchisees, one of the advantages of ownership is that it short-circuits the critical process by reducing it to irrelevance. Every review will amount to this: for those who like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing they will like. Everybody already knows that anyway.
I think much the same is true of superhero movies. As someone who has been criticizing them for years after a long period of regarding them as a harmless indulgence and irony practice for the largely irony-free American film industry, I have now arrived at the point where the criticism seems as automatic as the movie formulae themselves. For one thing: no more irony. Criticism, I find, is dumbfounded by those who take such stuff seriously — as, hitherto, only children have been able to do. You have only my word to go on that each time I force myself to go to another one of these dire productions — and I don’t go to many anymore — I really do try to find something to like about it, something that can be taken seriously. But each time I find that the fantastical element, which is of the very essence of the superhero genre, so overwhelms anything that might in its absence have been a good idea that my optimistic impulses are crushed. The need to stick to the formula makes anything new or interesting extremely difficult, if not impossible.
This loss — and I do feel it as a loss — is the more to be regretted because it puts me at odds with the legion of younger critics who have grown up with these movies and seem to like them all the better for not treating their camp heroes as jokes anymore. What more natural than that they should think my not liking them merely a result of being old and out of touch, stuck in an era when, admittedly, almost nothing was taken seriously? Perhaps they are right. But even if they are, it doesn’t make it possible for me to regard the third and final movie in Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises, as having anything more truthful or interesting to say than its two predecessors did. This must be all the more galling to my colleagues who do, at least the conservative ones, because there is something of a consensus that Mr. Nolan has a conservative message for them, which they regard as reason enough for them to like it.
John Podhoretz of the Weekly Standard, for example, is at pains to distinguish this movie and its predecessor from the run of superhero movies, saying not only that “most of these movies are lousy” but that this is a fact about which “even diehard fans agree.” That is not my impression, but let’s say he’s right. Where, it seems to me, he cannot be right is when he claims that it is precisely by eschewing irony about super-heroism that The Dark Knight Rises triumphs. It “represents the true maturation of the superhero movie,” he writes in defiance of what seems to me the undeniable fact that it is of the very essence of the superhero movie, like the comic books on which it is based, to be immature by favoring fantasy over reality. Mr. Podhoretz handsomely admits that all superheroes represent an “empowerment fantasy” for “young kids and teenagers who feel so powerless in their own lives,” but they are more than that. They also depend for their success on what we might call a disempowerment fantasy about the rest of the world.
In other words, for Batman and his adversaries to be super, everybody else has to be negative super, or sub-ordinary. This is the key point about the formula to which Mr. Nolan is confined, like Batman (Christian Bale) himself, in his giant open garbage can of a dungeon but without even the Caped Crusader’s plainly fantastical prospects of escape. For the immature not only seek the imaginative means to feel implausibly strong themselves, they also seek confirmation of their belief in the implausible weakness or wickedness of pretty much everybody else. Mr. Nolan’s Batman movies spend far more time and energy on promoting this vision of the world than they do on the superpowers of Batman and his Bat-machines which stand out against it. The masses in Mr. Nolan’s account are corrupt and cowardly: good when untroubled by evil-doers but quickly yielding to the bad (or simply seeking to escape it) when evil-doers gain power, as they periodically do. Batman’s appeal is based not just on the uniqueness of his strength and ingenuity and fighting prowess but on his moral solitariness. Unselfish and courageous, he’s really the only one in his world who is. His example may inspire Catwoman (Anne Hathaway) and a guy (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) who turns out — spoiler alert! — to be auditioning for the part of Robin, but as Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) points out, there’s no one but he who can save Gotham.
Conservatives used not to believe people were in need of that kind of saving. Conservatives, at least of the American variety, used to have faith in the people to save themselves. Their heroes were not of the Super- variety but regular guys like Gary Cooper’s Sergeant York or John Wayne’s Sergeant Stryker in The Sands of Iwo Jima, guys whose rising to the occasion inspired others to do likewise but who didn’t give themselves airs — let alone run around in a mask and a rubber suit and the coolest vehicles in town. Mr. Podhoretz’s Weekly Standard colleague Jonathan V. Last is of one mind with him in claiming that “Batman is different” from the other superheroes in having a genuine claim to be treated philosophically.
He is not an avatar for a particular political argument or idea. Batman is about the liberal order itself — specifically about the durability of classical liberalism in the face of modernity. From the beginning, Batman concerned himself with justice. Whereas Superman spent the 1930s and '40s fighting for the common man against powerful interests — corrupt industrialists, scheming munitions manufacturers, dirty bankers — Batman fought mobsters. If you look at the original Batman comics, he’s forever chasing gangsters and colorful criminals, such as the Joker. Sometimes he’d arrest the evildoers; sometimes, if they were particularly repugnant, he’d kill them. In later years he evolved and swore never to take a life.
One might agree with his contention that the movies — for he, too, celebrates both this one and the previous one in the series — promote a conservative vision of the contemporary world if they presented anything even remotely similar to the contemporary world. They don’t. Like the classical heroic literature of which they are a parody, they depend utterly on creating a special (super-) heroic world of their own, remote from everyday experience, wherein such amazing deeds as they present for our inspection may be believed actually to have happened.
Comic books and their superheroes are also like heroic literature in this, that they imagine their greatest figures as lonely men, standing far above the run of mankind to which their powers make them superior. For the Greek heroes Achilles or Odysseus, this was enough. The proto-Roman Trojan Aeneas introduced the idea of a moral superiority to match the physical, though this superiority was based on what Virgil calls “piety” and not what we think of as moral or ethical behavior. The lone heroes of today are also seen as saviors of the good, but where they differ is in the comics’ penchant for building up their heroes by tearing down those around them. As the only unsullied hero in a world of evil-doing, cowardice and corruption, Batman naturally shares the adolescent penchant for brooding. He broods not only over the death of his parents, which turns him into Batman in the first place, but also over his inability to escape being Batman and thus someone alone and untouchable in a world of his manifest inferiors.
In The Dark Knight his brooding in the prison of himself took the form of a pseudo moral quandary in which he could not but see himself as equaled only by the supercriminal he opposes, so that the duel between them became a mere spectator sport for the rest of the world — or that part of it which managed to escape being among the Joker’s victims. Like Batman’s priggish and nonsensical refusal to use firearms (apart from those mounted on his mega-cool Bat-vehicles), this clash of the titans was meant to appeal to those who are still capable of thinking they might be too good to live in this naughty world with all its shameful hypocrisies. That’s the same way the teenager looks with scorn on the adult world: because he is afraid of having to join it. In The Dark Knight Rises, Batman broods over his inability to fit in romantically, as well as his being misunderstood by the world as a bad guy himself. The adult way out of both these emotional dead-ends is to say: Get over yourself! Get real! We know that that is not how the world is, not even for the super-est of superheroes. But reality is not an option for the irony-free superhero movie.
The conservative virtues that some say are celebrated by these films are not, whatever else they may be, solitary ones, any more than they can include the idea of “a one-man department of justice,” to cite the title of Mr. Last’s piece. They depend for their coherence on a belief not just in virtuous individuals but a virtuous people. That’s also why it is a mistake to claim, as Jonathan Last does, that “the Joker is the kind of foreign, illiberal threat that al Qaeda presented to the West.” No he’s not. Al Qaeda doesn’t want to “watch the world burn” as the Joker is said to do. For all the horrible deeds Islamicist extremists commit, they have a positive, rational aim in view in the worldwide triumph of Islam which, however repugnant it may be to us, is not merely nihilistic, like that of the Batman villains, and nor does it even remotely threaten a total breakdown of civil order and decency, as it does in The Dark Knight Rises. The idea that Occupy Wall Street might do so is as much a fantasy as anything in the picture. The paranoia that sees such threats in the real world is more associated with the left than with the conservatism that well-intentioned apologists are trying to attribute to Christopher Nolan.
There are all kinds of ways in which Americans of today may be supposed not to measure up to the sturdy republican virtues of their forefathers, but it’s ridiculous to find any resemblance at all to the mere mob they have become in Mr. Nolan’s eyes. That image is simply the complement of the lonely Batman-hero. His moral isolation is what is being celebrated, and it depends on the immorality or amorality of those around him, both of which things are adolescent fantasies and nothing to do with real-world politics or those who engage in them. But the media have been promoting this dream of their own purity in the midst of a corrupt and vicious political world since Watergate, and the movies have gone along with it, pari passu, ever since, cranking out fantasies to that effect both acknowledged, like the Dark Knight ones, and unacknowledged, like All the President’s Men (1976) — a movie whose central idea of massive corruption at the heart of power opposed only by one or two lonely outsiders is still going strong in, say, the latest Bourne picture, which is nothing but yet more superhero fare thinly disguised.
For those who like such things, as I have foretold you, The Dark Knight Rises is the sort of thing they will like. But then you knew that anyway. I very much regret being Batman-lonely myself in feeling obliged to correct their taste — so much so, indeed, that I am more than half doubtful that I should even attempt to do so. I am certainly under no illusions that I can peel off any of the movie’s millions of fans, let alone a significant number of them. When criticism has become irrelevant, perhaps it is time for the critic to shut up. If I have not yet done so, it is only because I think there is some value in reminding people that the culture once offered up something better and more wholesome to the popular appetite for excitement and moral models — and that, if we ever weary of that which we have got instead, it might do so again.
About the Author
James Bowman, our movie and culture critic, is a resident scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He is the author of Honor: A History and Media Madness: The Corruption of Our Political Culture, both published by Encounter Books.
Letter to the Editor View all comments (28) | Leave a comment
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Appleby| 8.14.12 @ 7:18AM
Since I have seen no Batman movies but the first one (except the Sixties TV show, which was unintentionally funny at first and realized that being funny was its strongest point soon enough to make itself a success), I can't answer the points you make about this one. But as one who followed the Harry Potter saga to its conclusion, I would like to say that in the long run, it's only a movie. The subtext in the Harry Potter movies was more interesting to me than the overtext; but that's because I majored in Victorian History and know a lot about World War II. I daresay those who enjoy the Batman movies are the same ones who enjoy the Matrix and the Transformers; they like seeing Somebody Else solve their problems while they duck and cover on the sidelines. And nobody ever answers the question, "Who's going to clean up that mess when the kiddies are done wrecking the joint?"
JP| 8.14.12 @ 7:37AM
A few nights ago, my 2 younger sons turned on the TV for the first time in months and tuned into our local independent station. The old Batman series from the 1960s was on, and they just couldn't stop laughing. The older of the 2 is 9, the younger is 5 years old. They thought the show was a comedy. Perhaps the orginal writers intended that the over-the-top drama should be so ironic that it couldn't help but be funny.
What is interesting is that the old Batman series aired on ABC during primetime.
C. Vernon Crisler | 8.14.12 @ 1:01PM
I loved Batman when I was a kid -- especially the car -- but I didn't get the campy humor. It's only when I watch it as an adult that I see what they were doing.
Occam's Tool| 8.14.12 @ 1:09PM
The TV show was a comedy. It was high camp, as Adam West himself alluded in the MST3K host segments for Thanksgiving, aka "turkey day."
Stuart Koehl| 8.14.12 @ 7:46AM
"The subtext in the Harry Potter movies was more interesting to me than the overtext"
Well, duh! That's why it's called "allegory".
Appleby| 8.14.12 @ 7:54PM
The allegorical aspects are not what I'm talking about. It's a story with a much simpler and more direct story wrapped around it...it's just the story a foster child in an abusive home would spin.
My sister and I used to make jokes about the gypsies who left us on the doorstep -- we couldn't possibly belong to this family of ordinary people -- but sometimes on summer nights our ears were tuned for the sound of gypsy violins...
Stuart Koehl| 8.14.12 @ 7:44AM
I still wonder why a man who hates film decided to become a film critic. Is that how you address your inner Batman, Bowman?
Louis Jenkins| 8.14.12 @ 8:54AM
I have not seen a Batman movie in years. With all the trash coming out of communistic Hollyweed I can not stomach it. They say art reflects life, and if this is life, we're up the creek without a paddle.
Stuart Koehl| 8.14.12 @ 12:45PM
Communistic trash that is the "Classics Illustrated version of Edmund Burke"? This, I guess, shows the inanity of commenting on movies one hasn't seen--which begs the question of why a person who hasn't been in the movies in years sees fit to comment on a movie review.
THKrupp| 8.14.12 @ 9:21AM
I agree with Mr Bowman that many of these super hero movies arent very good. There are some that are pretty good. I liked the Ironman movies. I do have to take exception that super hero movies are the only ones that portray the lone good guy in a world thats to cowardly or incapable of standing up for it self. Most stories are like this.
You can go back to one of the oldest stories ever Beowulf...hes basically a superhero. Ulysses..same thing. King Arthur ...a flawed super hero.
THKrupp| 8.14.12 @ 9:24AM
Many of the westerns had formula plots such as this...the lone good brave man against the forces of darkness. This isnt just a liberal fetish...how many calls have we heard for the next Ronald Reagan from conservatives to lead the country back to where it should be? I do have one question. Are there any movies you do like? It seems from reading this column there are some you dislike slightly less than others.
AllAmericanAmerican| 8.14.12 @ 4:53PM
Most folks in the world today are either too cowardly, too ignorant, or too apathetic to stand up. If more folks would, there wouldn't be drug gangs running neighborhoods and "good people" too scared to do anything about it.
There wouldn't be corruption and political correctness run amok in our schools, govt, military, and police forces with few, if any, willing to stand up against it.
You wouldn't have people look the other way or walk right by as folks get mugged or raped in broad daylight.
You wouldn't have unions and their "not my job" mentality running rampant and making people less productive.
You wouldn't have men allowing their wives, mothers, and daughters to be molested by thugs with badges at out country's airports.
The "Batman" is the lone voice of reason in a world gone insane.
If you've ever stood up to political correctness, you're Batman.
If you've ever questioned or stood up to govt fraud, waste, and abuse, you're Batman.
If you've stood your ground when government jackboots come to shut down your kid's lemonade stand, you're Batman.
If you've done something the right way instead of slacking off and taking the easy way out in the face of ridicule or repercussions, you're Batman.
We need more Batmen.
Bill8472| 8.14.12 @ 9:21AM
I found The Dark Knight Rises to pretty thin gruel indeed: a rather skimpy theme to hang the plot on, i.e., Batman's physical difficulties, including arthritis, a degenerative disease, which he appears to cure by donning a knee brace (would that I could solve my arthritic hips by that method!), a Catwoman who is obvious and unrealized as a character, the obvious bid for the next film in the franchise, with Robin in a major role, the unused characters such as Commissioner Gordon, and a story that runs about 45 minutes or an hour too long. It could have been fully and more effectively told in 90 minutes.
Altogether, an overlong, boring, and unsatisfying movie, poorly told. I thought for a moment we might have something interesting happening when the Occupiers took over, but even that was boring and uninteresting, without anything out of the ordinary French Revolution "guillotining" of the undeserving. I even could see the "Death - by exile" routine coming. Why did they use the Scarecrow guy from the first movie as the judge? Is he part of the company?
IHeartDagney| 8.14.12 @ 9:48AM
This review is pointless. Another elitist turning his nose up at what most people in this world love. Good over evil stories. That will never end. There is a reason people love them. Life is nothing but an endless battle of choices between good and evil, big or small. The combinations of stories that can be told are also endless. So? If the stories are done well, they will makes lots of money. If they are done not so well, they probably will still make lots of money. Elitists turning their noses up at movies and the people who love them is what is contemptible and ignorant.
grant1863| 8.14.12 @ 10:03AM
Don't think Mr. Bowman will be invited to many Weekly Standard parties any time soon.
Glad to see his review having read the WS's last week. I do wish Mr. Bowman would share a list of good movies.
Stuart Koehl| 8.14.12 @ 12:47PM
Unless you like pointless art films, or depressing neo-realism, you'll probably be disappointed. Bowman likes his movies, like his world, to be small.
aquanomics| 8.14.12 @ 10:22AM
Mr. Bowman:
It's a movie!
C. Vernon Crisler | 8.14.12 @ 10:40AM
While I don't share Bowman's disdain for fantasy, or the comic book genre, I do agree with him that today's superhero movies are pretty awful. Compare with TV shows like Lois & Clark or Smallville or even sf fare like Stargate -- shows that had good special effects, but did not let pyrotechnics get in the way of character development.
On the other hand, most of the superhero movies, including the Bond films, are just so over the top that all verisimilitude is lost -- usually in the opening scenes. Maybe Clarence Petersen was right about the 1960s James Bond films -- that they were like sex; even bad they were still pretty good -- but I doubt whether he would say that about today's films.
Peppermint Tea | 8.14.12 @ 12:18PM
In the third and last installment, the villains were weak because their motivation was not explained. In the first, it was the mob bosses and the Teacher of Batman who was using them to destroy Gotham. In the second, it was the Joker, who was nihilist terrorist. But in the last, it was Bain and his master who really only were motivated to destroy Gotham as a means to get back at Batman, which they could have done at any time. It didn't make sense to me. I was disappointed in Nolan. Maybe he was lazy. Maybe it is the problem with all Thirds in a Trilogy (Star Wars, etc.)
And what was up with the dungeon? The Sixties TV Batman would have made short work of the climb with his skill with ropes and cables.
Loved Catwoman, though.
Stuart Koehl| 8.14.12 @ 12:48PM
The of Batman not as a person, but as a symbol, and Bane's motivation becomes more clear.
Occam's Tool| 8.14.12 @ 1:07PM
Sharia law doesn't "even remotely threaten a total breakdown of civil order and decency, as it does in The Dark Knight Rises."
Uh, yes it does. Yes, it most certainl;y does.
The Dark Knight Rises does not appear to be much good, however. I'd rather watch Riff-Trax.
AllAmericanAmerican| 8.14.12 @ 5:00PM
Wow OT I had stopped reading this review half way through and didn't catch that. Here';s the sentence in its entirety.
"For all the horrible deeds Islamicist extremists commit, they have a positive, rational aim in view in the worldwide triumph of Islam which, however repugnant it may be to us, is not merely nihilistic, like that of the Batman villains, and nor does it even remotely threaten a total breakdown of civil order and decency, as it does in The Dark Knight Rises."
Holy frigging cow. For that sentence alone he should have his conservative creds pulled (if he had any to begin with). I mean this is the kind of thing I was talking about when I replied to Krupp. This nonsensical and suicidal politically correct view of islam we ("we" meaning The West) take just boggles my mind. I don't get it.
And no, Mr Bowman, there is nothing "positive" or "rational" in ANYTHING to do with islam.
I. Just. Don't. Get. It.
John13| 8.15.12 @ 12:24AM
I would respectfully disagree with Mr. Bowman as I see the Batman Trilogy to be a fascinating intertwining of modern day culture and centuries old beliefs. In fact, it may be one of the most creative use of Christianity to come out of Hollywood in a long long time.
Unlike any other "major" super hero, Batman is merely a man with no special powers. He can't fly or leap tall buildings. Like Christ, he is just a man of flesh and blood who bleeds and feels pain. This is one reason the character becomes so easily identifiable with the audience.
His most precious commodity is his desire to save Gotham even at his own sacrifice. We see him sacrifice his good family name in the first movie to save hundreds of guests as well as to throw off the scent of who he really is. It is also made clear that money alone will not save Gotham but that it needs a shift in morality or an improvement in culture. He spends the first portion of his life living with the criminals, mingling and stealing with them. Jesus mingled with the poor and decrepit. No, he didn't steal, but this is where we see Bruce Wayne's humanity. Though always well-intentioned he's still just a man.
John13| 8.15.12 @ 12:26AM
In The Dark Knight Nolan reflects the issues of the time with a nihilistic terrorist who like any Al Qaeda terrorist asks Gotham to compromise their values - just tell Batman to take off his mask and I'll stop killing you. This is akin to the Islamic terrorist who presses the knife to the throat of the Christian "just renounce your faith and you'll live" or telling the ugly Americans to simply change your views and they'll stop the terror. We see the Joker aim to corrupt the innocent as the Devil would do and continually mix lies with truth when he changes his story on how he got his scars.
In 2008 the debate over waterboarding or interrogations was still at a fever pitch. What would we do if we have the terrorist and the bomb is about to go off? Nolan infuses this into the movie with the Batman/Joker interrogation scene which becomes one of the most tense portions in the movie. At the end of the movie we see Batman take the fall for Harvey Dent's atrocities in an effort for Gotham to retain it's faith. The Christian parable here is evident - he carries the burden, he takes the blame so Gotham can survive. In fact, earlier in the movie Nolan shows us Wayne's tattered body, battered and bruised after a night of fighting. Intentioned or not, this is purely a Christian symbol 2000 years in the making.
Stuart Koehl| 8.15.12 @ 2:50PM
"He has to run, because we have to chase him".
John13| 8.15.12 @ 12:26AM
Bowman really misses the finer points in the final movie. Bruce Wayne, again, just a man - fallen like the rest of us - is still heartbroken over the death of Rachel Dawes. He hangs up the Batman suit not because of self-loathing as Bowman precludes, but because he had won and Batman wasn't needed anymore. Without Rachel, he feels he has no life. Like Christ, he is willing to remain a pariah, mocked by the very people he saved.
Again, the social morays, cultural references and more Christian parables are related. We see the Godless French Revolution-type take over of Gotham. Bane's entrance to the stadium is made wit the American National Anthem in the background - a brilliant move artistically by Nolan to contrast the two revolutions. One God-fearing in the making and the other borne of sin and jealousy.
We see the revolutionary Bane use the greedy corporatist for his
gains because the corporatist can't see past his wallet. The communistic overtones can't be missed whether it's Catwoman's warning to Bruce while dancing, "...a storm is coming...you'll wonder how you could live so large and leave so little for the rest of us..." or the later scene during the chaos where she holds the broken picture frame of a family photo. "This was someone's home", she ponders with a troubled look. Her friend replies nonchalantly, "Now it's everyone's home."
Climbing out of the pit: Batman is only able to do it when he adopts the FAITH OF A CHILD and climbs with no rope.
Stuart Koehl| 8.15.12 @ 10:41PM
Social morays? Gosh, gregarious eels--I gotta see those.
John13| 8.15.12 @ 12:27AM
One of the most obvious sub-stories is that of Catwoman and her redemption. In this case, the Savior, in this case Batman, not only forgives her several times for her transgressions - she steals from him twice and leads him into the trap with Bane, but he tells her he sees good in her and is able SAVES her with "the Clean Slate" program which enables her to start her life anew with a clean record. Wipes her sins clean.
Mr. Bowman, put down the popcorn and pay attention next time. These were very good movies with a few weak plot-tie-ins, but otherwise in my humble opinion, perhaps the best "atta boy" toward Christianity I've seen from Hollywood in a long time.