The Dark Knight Rises, and the Revolution flops

Market fears of a masked madman have depressed stock prices in NY
On a sunny day in London, I went to the cinema with Silas. Saying no to the sun in England felt like a special luxury, though by the time we finished the bottle of wine outside Hackney Picturehouse, I for one was ready for the dark.

And in that dark, one finds a story whose analysis of modern society is remarkably poignant and, this surprised me most, frank in its condemnation of the plutarchy of Gotham - a city which Chris Nolan clearly identifies with New York, leaving no doubt that this is not even an allegorical tale of greed and human stupidity, but rather quite clear cut social commentary. As cat woman puts it: "You think this can last? There's a storm coming Mr. Wayne. You and your friends better batten down the hatches, because when it hits, you're all gonna wonder how you ever thought you could live so large and leave so little for the rest of us."

The rich, having gotten away with passing all sorts of restrictive legislation, have locked up the other kind of criminal mob, leaving them in charge. The bat man is simply not needed as long as the champagne flows and charity galas are well attended, but signs of moral decay abound. Orphans in the streets, bodies washing up from the sewers, all dancing to the beat of the stock exchange, all hurtling towards some point in the future where the capitalist dream becomes impossible to maintain. Worse still, the seeds of its destruction are contained within it. When John Daggett employes Bane to aid in his hostile takeover bid for Wayne's company, he is letting his greed cloud his judgement and in a Marxian twist, the infrastructure and productive capabilities of the capitalist Daggett become, quite literally, the tools with which the underground masses of the poor, the unwanted, the invisible and the forgotten will rise up.

What comes next however, is where the plot of Batman starts to twist back to a more conservative view. Bane's revolution is bloody. Any revolution is messy, right? Old, helpless rich people are wandering the streets in fur coats, harassed by mobs of the poor high off looting and pillaging. The court, presided over by a mad academic, dishes out death sentences in what seems to be a hybrid of the French and Russian revolutions. Bane, the young Stalin, is a perverted revolutionary, his hope is false and his goal is the destruction of Gotham, not its redemption (unless you consider immolation as a form of redemption). The message here is clear: while the current plutarchy is unfair, unstable, fuelled by greed and will slowly eat the planet alive, the alternative is a masked madman, looting, death and chaos. And the solution? For the good rich, i.e. Bruce Wayne, to bring back the ancien rĂ©gime. Balzac would have approved.

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