The Dark Knight Shrugged
Spoilers abound for all three Nolan Batman Movies.
I’m currently listening to the Dark Knight Rises soundtrack here and reading the hilarious @god_damn_batman twitter feed here and thinking about the movies. After seeing Rises in theaters I wrote this on an IGN forum, responding to a video discussion of the latest movie:
Sort of amazed that there was no mention of the obvious anti-Occupy, or really, anti-nihilist message in the film. All of the films hint at this (and it’s not a coincidence that Ledger’s Joker is such a popular character with Occupiers), but this film barely hid it’s all out attack on leftist populism and class warfare. Given Obama’s campaign decision to make this election all about class warfare, I was amazed at how relevant this film’s message is.
Nolan knows that Bane’s Gotham is the natural outcome Occupy’s philosophy. He presents it with no half-measures: kangaroo courts, the “victim” class destroying both the affluent AND their accomplishments (the city itself), even Kyle’s blond friend saying “It’s everyone’s home now”.
1984, Animal Farm, Atlas Shrugged, Fountainhead, Nolan’s Batman Trilogy. Amazing.
I was going to write a longer blog post about it, detailing all the various ways in which Batman could be considered an Objectivist. I’ll still probably do that after I get my hands on the DKR DVD and go through it with a fine-toothed comb. But something on that twitter feed jumped out at me. God_Damn_Batman often jokes about how he cripples and maims drug dealers. And it’s true, in the comics and non-Nolan movies and such, Batman does indeed go after drug dealers. Why, then, does Batman not do this in the Nolan movies? Oh sure, he goes after people handling Crane’s weaponized hallucinogen, which could be argued to represent all drugs. But I’m talking about things like heroine and cocain and all of the real life drugs.
It’s not for lack of realism. Nolan’s movies are dripping with realism. It’s not for lack of grit. One look at Harvey’s burned off face tells you that Nolan isn’t shy about showing the dirty side of life. I believe that Nolan chose, specifically, for Batman to battle immorality, not illegality. Drug use, while never smart and always deplorable, is not a moral issue, at least not in the sense that we need protection from it. Except in rare (conceptually rare, not chronologically rare) cases such as intoxicated drivers, drug use only harms innocents when it is illegal. Indeed, if Batman fought drug dealers, and that battle hurt an innocent, Batman would be in a very sticky moral situation. He would have to justify hurting someone innocent in order to save people from willingly choosing to harm themselves. Not even a dude wearing a bat getup can justify that (though governments are crazy enough to).
Similarly, Nolan’s Batman doesn’t choose to fight for or against national interests or even government laws (he’s actually usually breaking tons of laws). He doesn’t care about police badges in the slightest. He didn’t try to make his case to Chief Loeb in Batman Begins, he went to Gordon. Why? Because those artificial facades that government and society establish are meaningless. What made Gordon the right man for the job wasn’t his rank or past achievements or accolades, it was his morality. The only thing Nolan’s Batman cares about is morality. Hunting down drug dealers isn’t moral. It would be playing hall monitor, enforcing whatever whims the tyrannical majority chose to enact. If the majority of Gotham residents made it illegal to speak negatively of the Gotham police, do you think Batman would be breaking limbs of people protesting the police? No way.
So if Nolan’s Batman only fights what is immoral, where does that leave him? What does he battle? The answer is an Objectivist one: he battles nihilism. He fights against immoral ideas. And while some would do this via politics using words or with money by building a successful business, Batman, like Ragnar Danneskjold in Atlas Shrugged, chooses to meet those in forceful battle who reside on the extremes of that philosophy. As people like Barak Obama and Rick Santorum, the sophist proponents of nihilistic philosophy, must be battled in their own arena, Batman deals with the other end of that equation, the end product: the random, mindless savage that has been raised on those ideas since birth. The Occupy Wallstreet looter that decides that because he wants what the rich have, he can simply take it. The murderer of abortion doctors that decides that because his imaginary deity tell him that zygotes are human beings, he can kill wantonly. These aren’t monsters or psychopaths. These are the living embodiments, the natural outcomes of corrupt philosophies.
Now, of course, the stakes were always much higher in the movies than Batman stopping a lone murder or looter (nuclear weapons and microwave emmitters and such). But Bane, Joker, Dent, Crane, Ra’s Al Ghul, the League of Shadows…these are all larger-than-life representation of nihilism. They are people that understand values, they understand morality, they understand beauty and productivity. They understand those concepts and they want to destroy them, not because of psychosis or ignorance or any other easily dismissed triviality. They want to destroy values because they are values. And so then, what is Batman? He is the guardian of values, of beauty, of productivity, of values, of humanity and living.
Even if he isn’t a pure Objectivist, Nolan’s Batman is undoubtedly an anti-nihilist. And in this current, darkening world of ours, the popularity of these movies shows a glimmer of hope.
Interesting article. Is Ra’s Al Ghul really a nihilist though? I thought they saw Gotham as a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah, and wanted society to wipe itself out to create a clean slate. So isn’t their agenda a kind of utopia achieved through destruction of the bad elements? It seems like a nihilist would believe in the destruction part, but not in the purging for a better future part.
Well who’s to say? They talked about purging the corrupt elements but I believe they never spoke of “what next”. Maybe the idea was that a society with a zero-tolerance policy towards crime would be a utopia. But the League makes the mistake of separating the practical from the principle. The philosophy that allows them to destroy so cavalierly is the exact same philosophy that the criminal uses to justify his personal immorality. I mean, that’s exactly why Batman doesn’t kill. He stops, often with violent force, but he’s not an executioner as the League is.
And certainly the Bane version of the League of Shadows in Dark Knight Rises is nihilist. Is there really much of a difference between the ninja-style League and the thug-style League? Only superficially, not philosophically.
I see Ra’s Al Ghul’s motivation as being one of the trilogies biggest flaws–i.e. Nolan never explains the political/philosophical motivation behind his actions fully, which makes a lot of the events in BB and, especially, DKR kind of silly. In BB we are told, simply, that the League of Shadows has destroyed cities from the inside for centuries by identifying cities it sees as corrupt and then manipulating things so that these cities essentially self destruct. And that’s basically all we are told about their motivations for the entire trilogy. So we are left to guess at the political or philosophical reasons for why they would go to so much trouble to do this over and over again (I mean, you could fit a whole sh&tload of ideologies in here, take your pick) .
Anyhow, this wasn’t such a big deal in BB because despite its realist sheen, it was very, very, much a comic book movie at heart (and, honestly, I don’t think the motives of 90% of comic book villains would really hold up to scrutiny, nor are they meant to).
But by the time Nolan got to DKR he had gotten it into his head that he wanted to make “serious” “important” comic book movies. The problem is, however, that he still fails to give Bane/Talia Al Ghul any credible motives for their actions, which under the weight of the franchise’s self-serious, import, it took on in TDK, only exacerbates how underdeveloped and silly their villainous enterprise really is. I mean, Talia didn’t seem on the best terms with her father to begin with, yet despite this, she is for some reason motivated to carry out a radicalized version of his original plans to destroy Gotham—even to the point of living a double life for years and basically becoming a suicide bomber to achieve it. Why? We don’t really know, other than some hinted at daddy issues. Bane does tap into a vaguely populist sort of revolutionary sentiment to get people stirred up on the street, but this is never developed into a full fledged political or philosophical purpose, and, honestly, I think it’s questionable whether Bane sincerely believes in this or if he’s just using it to further along the whole “let’s destroy Gotham because this chick’s dead dad wanted it that way for some reason” agenda (and judging from his actions behind the scenes, I think it’s clear that he doesn’t buy into his own rhetoric).
So, anyhow, what you are reading as “nihilsm” I guess I tend to just read as bad writing. I question whether what we have here is either (a) a group of nihilist villains who want to destroy values for the sake of it or (b) a group of villains who can be read that way just because they are so poorly written that it’s impossible to tell what their real motivation (or their real “values”) are.
Which isn’t to say that the films are a-political, but rather that they just seem to me to be political in a really half assed way. Nolan seems to like the idea of comic book films which tackle serious political issues, but at the same time he seems to lack the nerve for the follow through. Thus, he just seems to look to the latest headlines and appropriate hot button issues without bothering to treat them with the weight and gravitas that they deserve. So, to name one egregious example from TDK, Nolan attempts to have his cake and eat it too, so to speak, by first invoking a patriot act type surveillance system to allow Batman to find Joker, but then, at the same time, making a solemn display of destroying the equipment at the end because it’s too dangerous. Same thing with DKR where had he actually had the balls to give Talia and Baine a political/philosophical cause worth fighting for (whether that cause was some OWS scheme or just trying to save the whales), I think it could have been an awesome film (or at least one that was a lot less unintentionally hilarious). But again he pussied out.
All that said, though, I ultimately do tend to agree that despite whatever Nolan wanted to say (or avoided to say, or failed to say…..whatever the case may be) that the films, taken as a whole, do have a very libertarian political streak to them. I’m not so much sure if that’s Nolan, though, as much as that’s just Batman—who, at his core, has always been a bit of a libertarian’s wet dream. All the best Batman writers have acknowledged this in one way or another—some, like Frank Miller, embracing it, while others challenging it or dealing with the moral/ethical dillemmas of a slightly crazy vigilante who has enough money that he can decide which “values” and “aesthetic models of beauty” are worth protecting (and which ones are not) and act entirely outside the law in enforcing his vision. On one end of this spectrum you do tend to get depictions of Batman which are pretty similar to objectivism, but on the other end of the spectrum (i.e. the ones where the writers tend to react to/challenge Batman’s “purpose” a bit more) you end up with a Batman who is more of an existentialist. I actually see Nolan’s Batman as more of an existentialist than an objectivist–he’s a libertarian who is never quite comfortable with his libertarianism (which, might be a good way of describing the film’s rather wishy washy and ambiguous politics at times: they are libertarian screeds filtered through an ever pervasive sense of liberal guilt).
Well, I can completely see what you are saying. A lot of what I’m drawing from it is certainly me filling in holes with my own bias. But there aren’t THAT many holes to fill. It’s not that Nolan presents these movies as a manifesto. It’s more that he expertly gives us snapshots of natural outcomes. Bane’s army is not Occupy Wallstreet, but at the same time, both groups of people, taken to their philosophical end point, would meet and seem almost identical. “It’s everyone’s home now”, rich people being dragged out of their houses, kangaroo courts, joyous and celebratory executions, ideals enforced viciously by killing…these are all visceral snapshots. Batman is not the answer to real life philosophical issues, obviously, but just as sci/fi has done so well in the past, looking at our world through a fun-house mirror shows just where our current world can lead.
And to a certain extent, I think that the lack of “what next” is completely in keeping with nihilism. Some nihilists destroy values and that’s the end point. But most nihilists destroy thinking that something better will naturally follow. If you ask them “How?”, they have no idea or they take tons of things for granted which don’t logically or philosophically follow. They are just so focused on the destruction that it consumes them. The Joker is probably the most intellectually honest when he says “I’m like a dog chasing a car, I wouldn’t know what to do with it when I actually caught it”. That right there sums up the nihilist mind.
Agreed, if you watch Ayn Rands talks or read her (non-fiction) books. You can correlate much of objectivist morality in the Batman character in the Nolan Trilogy. It is a struggle of ideologies in the Batman character and not a purity. After all, it is a movie for entertainment and not a diatribe of a teaching. By far the arguments of objectivism are being represented in Nolan’s Batman more so than other big budget superhero characters. If you get a chance to list many of the objective consistencies of the Batman Trilogy especially DKR it will make for a great discussion piece.