When Structures Become Shackles

WHEN STRUCTURES BECOME SHACKLES

IDEOLOGY IN THE DARK KNIGHT RISES


This analysis contains spoilers.

Recently a right-wing analysis of the final instalment of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy emerged online and promptly went viral. In the piece, John Nolte argues that The Dark Knight Rises is a searing indictment of liberal policy, that the poor of Gotham City who migrate to the sewers to find employment with Bane are “...insecure thumbsuckers raging with a sense of entitlement, desperate to justify their own laziness and failure...” and it suggests that the film is a love letter, by proxy, to liberty, free-markets and capitalism.

This is certainly an interesting theory.

If we look at the second film – The Dark Knight – we could also interpret certain elements as displaying a clear conservative ideology. In the film our hero, Batman, in order to catch a nihilistic, existentialist terrorist who is seeking to destroy the city, decides to impinge on the basic human right to privacy; he hacks into citizen’s mobile phones in order to use this information to track down The Joker. He justifies this to Lucius Fox as a necessary evil. This is remarkably similar to the debate surrounding The Patriot Act – the piece of legislation created by the Bush administration that gave them unprecedented power to hack into emails, phone calls and personal messages if there was even the slightest possibility that it could lead to information on terrorist activity. This was derided in left-wing circles as a government using fear and manipulation in order to push through its own republican agenda. But whichever way you choose to respond to The Patriot Act itself, there is an undeniable link between that and what happens in the final third of The Dark Knight.

Many will see this as conclusive proof that the only way to read The Dark Knight is as a conservative parable; they read Batman as George W Bush – a leader who must make difficult decisions while his people fight a war against a terrorist who is willing to sacrifice himself for his own cause. These people might apply this same ideological approach to The Dark Knight Rises. Here, they might see Bane as representative of the Occupy Wall Street Movement – in the film we see the poor of Gotham join forces to attack the Stock Exchange. We see them throw the rich out of their luxurious abodes and set up a people’s court that tries the 1% and sentences them to icy death. We see them led and inspired by an evil, hulking villain and we see our hero, Bruce Wayne, placed in cold opposition to them. Here is a film where our protagonist is a billionaire capitalist seeking to destroy and suppress an uprising by the people of Gotham City who are sick and tired of being marginalised and mistreated by the wealthy. As Selina Kyle whisper’s into Wayne’s ear: “You and your friends better batten down the hatches, cause 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." But even she, eventually, comes round to Batman’s way of thinking.

So that’s that then, yes? Nolan has presented us with a right-wing, conservative epic?

I don’t think so.

The main issue here for me is that commentators and critics seem to be looking at this from only two fixed perspectives; left-wing and right-wing. My suggestion is that there is a third way to look at the film which is not as inherently political but more humanistic in its approach.

To me, The Dark Knight Rises seems to be a film that wholeheartedly supports the ideological viewpoint of Individualism.

Consider this: what Nolan appears to be presenting to us is a world where all structures are broken. Yes, he seems to suggest that an anarchic uprising of people will ultimately lead to violence and chaos. This pleases right-wing commentators. But they are conveniently ignoring the fact that Nolan also, in an even clearer fashion, presents the police, the government and rich corporations as corrupt and morally-bankrupt, all the way from Batman Begins.

In Batman Begins, Rutger Hauer plays a businessman who seeks to bully his way into a position of power in a large conglomerate, a position he then ruthlessly exploits. Meanwhile Ra’s Al Gul reminds Batman that Gotham is so corrupt he has managed to infiltrate its entire infrastructure.  In Batman Begins and The Dark Knight the police force is portrayed as being riddled with leaks and informants and as containing officers willing to use their positions of authority for greed or personal gain. Even believing in Harvey Dent isn’t good enough – Gotham’s saviour and District Attorney ends up a homicidal maniac who almost kills a child.

This extremely negative portrayal of the institutions and people that the right-wing usually holds up as examples of heroism and pride reaches its conclusion in The Dark Knight Rises when arguably the trilogy’s most decent human being – Commissioner Gordon – is accused of being morally corrupt. As Officer Blake tells him – “Your hands look plenty filthy to me.”

And this is where the third way of looking at The Dark Knight Rises – the Individualism Approach – really starts to take shape. It is too easy to label Nolan’s film as right-wing or left-wing. Or rather, it’s too difficult, because it just doesn’t fit. Nolan isn’t siding with either liberals or conservatives  – he is saying that all institutions, all organisations are corrupt. What he seems to say is that the power to really change things lies in the hands of the individual.

Batman, when boiled down to his bare essentials, is a vigilante. An individual who seeks to make a difference. Nolan allows Batman to exist all the way through the trilogy in a moral grey area; he never really attempts to decide whether Batman is right or wrong because he is often both or neither. He never really attempts to align Batman with a strong political ideology because he doesn’t have one. He is an individual. Gotham City is ultimately saved from annihilation not from an organisation or the government or the police or the people – they are saved by the heroic sacrifice of an individual. There are also obvious Christ parallels in Batman’s story arc – left for dead, betrayed by his own people, destroyed and buried, only to rise, save the people and ascend into the light. This makes sense when we acknowledge the possibility that Christ himself was resolutely individualist in his outlook and preached about how one man could make a difference and, if he existed at all, it is almost certain he would be appalled by the wealth, hypocrisy and structures of the modern day, morally suspect Catholic Church. 

When, at the end of the film, John Blake – the only character in The Dark Knight Rises whose dignity and morality remain intact throughout – symbolically throws his police badge into the river and claims that structures become shackles, this is the clearest evidence to back up the Individualism Approach. This is a film that above everything seeks to remind us about the difference that one person can make. It tells us that as personal visions and ideas become diluted and distorted by committee and ‘structure’, they become corrupt and less powerful in their ability to create actual change for the better. It’s no accident that the final image we are left with is Blake rising into the light. Nolan is telling us that he is the best hope for Gotham because he, like Batman, believes in the power of the individual. Nolan is telling us that what the world needs, more than anything, is for individuals to act, regardless of politics.

As Rachel Dawes said:

“It's not who you are underneath, it's what you do that defines you.”

It seems Individualism was right there from the start in Batman Begins.