All-Encompassing Christopher Nolan Discussion Thread

[DA_Champion]

I too had that issue. I'm tempted to sit down today to watch all 3 films in a row for the first time as it's a public holiday down here. Just wanna see how that affects things.

Enjoy Anzac Day mate.

 

[redhawk23]

Unfortunately there are few movies today which when I watch make me go - wow that was some truly exemplary direction.

And its few movies of the past that had that as well, the crap films of yesterday are simply forgotten. I mean yeah Raiders was great, but film making of that sort was hardly the norm in 1981, or any other year.

 

[DA_Champion]

The thing with Batman just waltzing into Gotham is an argument I get. I understand the "he's Batman" and "Do we have to see everything?" issues and in most cases I would be on board with it but not when the issue is directly contradicting a plot point. In this case it does. Like someone else said it was made clear that Bane had locked down the City. It doesn't drag the film down for me at all that they dont show it but when he does come back you are like "what the hell?".

IMO they should have showed it, yes we can fill in the gaps but when it's an actual plot point that the City is locked down just show his way of sneaking in. It would have been cool to see. In fact they didn't even need to show it, when Bruce walks up to Selina just have him disguised as a Mercenary. All is told in one shot.

The other thing is that Batman has been implausibly getting from point A to point B the entire trilogy, without explanation.

In Batman Begins, he makes it to the top of a glaciered mountain with street clothes, yeah right. He then beats up some people near the docks in an impossible manner, he's running around over metal containers and they can't tell where he is.

In The Dark Knight, he can leave a scene unnoticed, which is far more impossible than getting into Bane's Gotham, like how did he get out of that bank vault without Gordon or anybody else noticing. In the Hong Kong scene, he somehow starts at the top of a skyscraper before sky gliding to the other skyscraper, dressed as Bruce Wayne, how did he get up there without anyone noticing?

It's something Batman does in the Nolan movies, he can get from point A to point B in manners we can't conceive.

They make fun of this in The Lego Movie, when Batman robs the Millennium Falcon. Batman sneaks onto the millennium falcon to steal their hyperdrive, but he pretends that he was abandoning his friends to join the star wars characters. His friends then lament. A minute later, he is somehow on the back of the boat with the hyperdrive, and nobody's explained how he made it from the millennium falcon back to the boat -- they don't need to explain because lego batman follows nolan batman logic.

 

[DA_Champion]

Anyone else think Nolan signing an exclusive deal with Disney is inevitable? He mentioned that he wanted to do more family friendly films, Alan Horn is there, WB is clearly more in love with him than he is with them, etc.

Nolan has WB by the balls. He's their best franchise. If he asks them to change the name of the company to "Nolan Brothers" they'll probably take it into consideration.

My only problem with TDKR is that it relied too heavily on BB and TDK without being its own film. If you watch BB and TDK, they literally have nothing to do with each other. TDK is easily its own film, and you're not even required to watch BB beforehand to know everything you need to know. It didn't refer to Ra's Al Ghul or the Narrows, or Richard Earle, hardly even Falcone, or anything.

TDKR asks the audience to know things from two movies ago, and if you didn't do a BB/TDK marathon before going to the theater, you would've easily been a little confused. All of a sudden Liam Neeson is just showing up out of nowhere but he's a hallucination. The movie should've been its own movie, and was too much of a sequel. TDK wasn't a sequel at all.

The problem lies somewhere in the fact that BB and TDK have nothing to do with each other, yet TDKR basically smooshed BB and TDK together into one film and called it "TDKR". TDKR relies on Harvey Dent's story AND Ra's Al Ghul's story simultaneously, and neither character were connected in any way. BB and TDK have completely different themes and approaches - one is more fantasy-based and more Sci-Fi based, while TDK is an urban crime drama. The problem isn't that they dropped the ball with TDKR, the problem is that the two previous films didn't give it a good foundation to build off of. They should've just ignored BB and TDK all together, like TDK did with BB.

They had a problem with Heath Ledger dying in real life and The Joker living in film, and Aaron Eckhart living in real life and dying on film. They had the complete opposites of what they needed for a sequel. So the clever solution was to jump forward 8 years, and doing that would've been perfect if they didn't refer to anything 8 years ago. Instead, they relied on everything from 8 years ago AND everything from two movies ago that meant nothing in TDK, WHILE completely ignoring The Joker. It just doesn't compute. If you're going to rely on everything that came before, there's no reason to make it 8 years. It could've been 6 months. 8 years is a good time to say "Okay, we're past all that from before." THAT'S how you solve the Ledger problem.

I like the fact that the Nolan movies are the truest sequels we've seen in comic book films. Every movie is a natural sequel of the first.

You say that TDK is its own thing, yeah maybe, but it's very much about the consequences of the events of the first movie. I like that.

 

[redfirebird2008]

Anyone else think Nolan signing an exclusive deal with Disney is inevitable? He mentioned that he wanted to do more family friendly films, Alan Horn is there, WB is clearly more in love with him than he is with them, etc.

Only if they give him final cut on everything. Disney tends to meddle in a lot of their projects. For good or bad, Nolan is not the type to put up with that.

 

[slumcat]

Why can't Batman just be Batman? He's got resources. It's an entire city. Nobody has the slightest clue when he came back, how he came back, how long it took... He's just back. It doesn't matter. That's the mystique of the character. He's the world's greatest detective. Why do you want to waste a half-hour watching him sneak his way back into Gotham? It's such a lame complaint.

This is one of those absolutely ridiculous "Because he's batman! " responses that people make in a satirical way but you know the myth has caught on when people start spouting that as a plausible reason.

Seriously? That's all there is? How did he get into Gotham? Because he's Batman????

Such a ridiculous explanation doesn't cut it with people who think I am afraid.

Lets see some of these famed resources that he has, what are they? Supernatural? Apparition? What??? This might have been a way to demonstrate Batman's genius as to how he was able to get in when the US military and navy seals couldn't but Nolan just skated over it to produce one of the most head-scratching plot holes in recent memory.
--
I'll tell you what this scene is akin to... imagine a heist movie where they spend an hour demonstrating how un-steal-able a certain jewel is in a high tech maximum security prison. Basically a jewel that they say cannot be stolen any which way due to the technology and resources shown on screen. And in the next scene they directly cut to the thief running away with the jewel without showing how he stole it.

How did he steal the jewel? Because he's Batman I suppose.

 

[BatLobster]

Again...special forces DID get into Gotham. We were shown how they did so relative ease, smuggling themselves in on a supply truck. That's just one way.

This is no different than Bruce being able to put together the sonar machine in TDK in an extremely short timespan, all off-screen. Or Bruce being able to pilot an aircraft, despite us never seeing him get any training to do so. By the time we reach film number 3 and we've set a precedence for this character doing extraordinary things off-screen, it's really not a stretch to assume that he, again a NINJA, can find a way back onto an island that he knows like the back of his hand. He's ONE person, and sheer math says that the mercenaries can't be guarding every entry point to the island...not with the river frozen. Him getting into Gotham does nothing for his character arc and does nothing to advance the plot of the film, it would've just been there to show off a cool scene. And yes, it would've been a cool scene. That does not mean it's essential.

It's ironic that all the people "who think" can't seem to think of all the possible ways he got in based on what the film shows us and what we know about Bruce's skill-set. I can think of at least 3.

 

[mclay18]

Only if they give him final cut on everything. Disney tends to meddle in a lot of their projects. For good or bad, Nolan is not the type to put up with that.

They only meddle if the movie is either going wildly over budget (The Lone Ranger) or in the case of Earth to Echo, the movie isn't what they expected or doesn't fit their 'brand'. In the case of the latter, they sold it to Relativity.

Besides, Alan Horn will run interference if Nolan does move to Disney... but WB is working overtime to keep Nolan happy at their studio.

 

[DA_Champion]

Again...special forces DID get into Gotham. We were shown how they did so relative ease, smuggling themselves in on a supply truck. That's just one way.

This is no different than Bruce being able to put together the sonar machine in TDK in an extremely short timespan, all off-screen. Or Bruce being able to pilot an aircraft, despite us never seeing him get any training to do so. By the time we reach film number 3 and we've set a precedence for this character doing extraordinary things off-screen, it's really not a stretch to assume that he, again a NINJA, can find a way back onto an island that he knows like the back of his hand. He's ONE person, and sheer math says that the mercenaries can't be guarding every entry point to the island...not with the river frozen. Him getting into Gotham does nothing for his character arc and does nothing to advance the plot of the film, it would've just been there to show off a cool scene. And yes, it would've been a cool scene. That does not mean it's essential.

It's ironic that all the people "who think" can't seem to think of all the possible ways he got in based on what the film shows us and what we know about Bruce's skill-set. I can think of at least 3.

Nolan, Nolan, and Goyer were likely making a commentary on Afghanistan, Iraq, etc (perhaps unintentionally). It wasn't hard to get into Gotham. It was easy to get into Gotham -- the Navy seals had no trouble getting it. The hard part was assuming control of Gotham and re-establishing order.

Interestingly, not only does that critique completely fly over the heads of audiences, but the audiences make the same mistake as what the critique is pointing out "but how did Batman get into Gotham !?!?!". Slumcat and countless other Americans seem to think that this is the hardest piece of the puzzle. It's like Bush in 2003, just get into Iraq, once the army is inside, mission accomplished, but the hardest part is getting in, that was the belief. As revealed later on, there was far more preparation with respect to getting into Iraq than there was about what to do once the army got in.

Nope, getting into Gotham is fairly easy, as established by the navy seals in TDKR. Nolan focused on the harder part: taking control of Gotham. The point was that knowledge of the landscape and the local population and authorities was needed to have an impact.

 

[Kane52630]

http://kane52630.tumblr.com/post/84809408069/the-movies-of-christopher-nolan-kane52630-gifs

 

[KRYPTON INC.]

What? Seriously? Bruce getting into Gotham is a critique of American foreign policy now too? Along with Zod's "I will find him!!" some how being a critique of Obama? And Superman destroying an observation drone being some kind of commentary about the issues of surveillance?

Where do you come up with this stuff? Please show me one interview, one shred of evidence that any of this is the intention of the creative minds involved with these projects. I know you feel the rest of us are just not mentally capable of seeing these things, since it flies over our heads and all, but other than you WANTING to see these things do you have anything to back this up with? Not every thing is a deep political allegory.

 

[DA_Champion]

What? Seriously? Bruce getting into Gotham is a critique of American foreign policy now too? Along with Zod's "I will find him!!" some how being a critique of Obama? And Superman destroying an observation drone being some kind of commentary about the issues of surveillance?

Where do you come up with this stuff? Please show me one interview, one shred of evidence that any of this is the intention of the creative minds involved with these projects. I know you feel the rest of us are just not mentally capable of seeing these things, since it flies over our heads and all, but other than you WANTING to see these things do you have anything to back this up with? Not every thing is a deep political allegory.

Next thing you know, people will be saying that TDK related to surveillance issues in the war on terror !!!

The Dark Knight's War On Terrorism Moritz College Of Law
http://www.pdfdom.com/the/the-dark-knight-war-on-terrorism-moritz-college-of-law.html

You should send the Moritz College of Law an email telling them they're stupid and that politics never makes it into Hollywood movies.

******

If you ever take a (good) literature class, you'll be taught that a lot can be learned of a piece of writing from the historical context and period in which the author lived and was writing.

 

[DA_Champion]

Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, a man many people consider to be one of the world's greatest intellectuals, briefly comments on The Dark Knight Rises.

http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/culture/2012/08/slavoj-žižek-politics-batman

Slavoj Žižek: The politics of Batman
From the repression of unruly citizens to the celebration of the “good capitalist”, The Dark Knight Rises reflects our age of anxiety.

The Dark Knight Rises shows that Hollywood blockbusters are precise indicators of the ideological predicaments of our societies. Here is the storyline. Eight years after the events of The Dark Knight, the previous instalment of Chris*topher Nolan’s Batman series, law and order prevail in Gotham City. Under the extraordinary powers granted by the Dent Act, Commissioner Gordon has nearly eradicated violent and organised crime. He nonetheless feels guilty about the cover-up of the crimes of Harvey Dent and plans to confess to the conspiracy at a public event – but he decides that the city is not ready to hear the truth.

No longer active as Batman, Bruce Wayne lives isolated in his manor. His company is crumbling after he invested in a clean-energy project designed to harness fusion power but then shut it down, on 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 society and continue his philanthropic good 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 a copy of the commissioner’s speech. After Bane’s financial machinations bring Wayne’s company close to bankruptcy, Wayne entrusts control of his enterprise to Miranda and also has a brief love affair with her. Learning that Bane has also got hold of his fusion core, Wayne returns as Batman and confronts Bane. Crippling Batman in close combat, Bane detains him in a prison from which escape is almost impossible. 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 that destroy most of the bridges connecting Gotham to the mainland and announces that any attempt to leave the city will result in the detonation of Wayne’s fusion core, which has been converted into a bomb.

Now we reach the crucial moment of the film: Bane’s takeover is accompanied by a vast politico-ideological offensive. He publicly exposes 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 citizens, “Take your city back.” Bane reveals himself, as the critic Tyler O’Neil has put it, to be “the ultimate Wall Street Occupier, calling on the 99 per cent to band together and overthrow societal elites”. What follows is the film’s idea of people power – summary show trials and executions of the rich, the streets surrendered to crime and villainy.

A couple of months later, while Gotham City continues to suffer under popular terror, Wayne escapes from prison, returns as Batman and enlists his friends to help liberate the city and disable the fusion bomb before it explodes. Batman confronts and subdues Bane but Mir*anda intervenes and stabs Batman. She reveals herself to be Talia al-Ghul, daughter of Ra’s al-Ghul, the former leader of the League of Shadows (the villains in Batman Begins). After announcing her plan to complete her father’s work in destroying Gotham City, Talia escapes.

In the ensuing mayhem, Commissioner Gordon cuts off the bomb’s remote detonation function, while a benevolent cat burglar named Selina Kyle kills Bane, freeing Batman to chase Talia. He tries to force her to take the bomb to the fusion chamber where it can be stabilised, but she floods the chamber. Talia dies, confident that the bomb cannot be stopped, when her truck is knocked off the road and crashes. Using a special helicopter, Batman hauls the bomb beyond the city limits, where it detonates over the ocean and pre*sumably kills him. Batman is now celebrated as a hero whose sacrifice saved Gotham City. Wayne is believed to have died in the riots. While his estate is being divided up, his butler, Alfred, sees Wayne and Selina together alive in a café in Florence. Blake, a young and honest policeman who knew about Batman’s identity, inherits the Batcave. The first clue to the ideological underpinnings of this ending is provided by Alfred, who, at Wayne’s apparent burial, reads the last lines from Dickens’s A Tale 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 took this as an indication that, in O’Neil’s words, the film “rises to the noblest level of western art . . . The film appeals to the centre of America’s tradition – the ideal of noble sacrifice for the common people . . . An ultimate Christ-figure, Batman sacrifices himself to save others.”

Seen from this perspective, the storyline is a short step back from Dickens to Christ at Calvary. But isn’t the idea of Batman’s sacrifice as a repetition of Christ’s death not compromised by the film’s last scene (Wayne with Selina in the café)? Is the religious counterpart of this ending not, instead, the well-known blasphemous idea that Christ survived his crucifixion and lived a long, peaceful life in India or, as some sources have it, Tibet? The only way to redeem this final scene would be to read it as a daydream or hallucination of Alfred’s.

A further Dickensian feature of the film is a depoliticised complaint about the gap between rich and poor. Early in the film, Selina whispers to Wayne as they are dancing at an exclusive, upper-class gala: “A storm is 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, like any good liberal, is “worried” about the disparity and has said that this worry permeates the film: “The notion of economic fairness creeps into the film . . . 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.”

Although viewers know Wayne is mega-rich, they often forget where his wealth comes from: arms manufacturing plus stock-market speculation, which is why Bane’s games on the stock exchange can destroy his empire. Arms dealer and speculator – this is the secret beneath the Batman mask. How does the film deal with it? By resuscitating the archetypal Dickensian theme of a good capitalist who finances orphanages (Wayne) versus a bad, greedy capitalist (Stryver, as in Dickens). As Nolan’s brother, Jonathan, who co-wrote the screenplay, has said: “A Tale of Two Cities, to me, was the most . . . harrowing portrait of a relatable, recognisable civilisation that had completely fallen to pieces. You look at the Terror in Paris, in France in that period, and it’s hard to imagine that things could go that bad and wrong.” 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.

The good terrorist

An interesting thing about Bane is that the source of his revolutionary hardness is unconditional love. In one touching scene, he tells Wayne how, in an act of love amid terrible suffering, he saved the child Talia, not caring about the consequences and paying a terrible price for it (Bane was beaten to within an inch of his life while defending her).

Another critic, R M Karthick, locates The Dark Knight Rises in a long tradition stretching from Christ to Che Guevara which extols violence as a “work of love”, as Che does in his 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.

What we encounter here is not so much the “christification of Che” but rather a “che*isation” of Christ – 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&#8221 point in the same direction as these ones from Che: “You may have to be tough but do not lose your tenderness.” The statement that “the true revolutionary is guided by a strong feeling of love” should be read together with Guevara’s much more problematic description of revolutionaries as “killing machines”:

Continued in next post.

 

[DA_Champion]

Part 2, as there's apparently a 20,000 character limit:

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.

Guevara here is paraphrasing Christ’s declarations on the unity of love and the sword – in both cases, the underlying paradox is that what makes love angelic, what elevates it over mere sentimentality, is its cruelty, its link with violence. And it is this link that places love beyond the natural limitations of man and thus transforms it into an unconditional drive. This is why, to turn back to The Dark Knight Rises, the only authentic love portrayed in the film is Bane’s, the terrorist’s, in clear contrast to Batman’s.

The figure of Ra’s, Talia’s father, also deserves a closer look. Ra’s has a mixture of Arab and oriental features and is an agent of virtuous terror, fighting to correct a corrupted western civilisation. He is played by Liam Neeson, an actor whose screen persona usually radiates dignified goodness and wisdom – he is Zeus in Clash of the Titans and also plays Qui-Gon Jinn in The 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, and ignores Yoda’s warnings about Anakin’s unstable nature. At the end of The Phantom Menace, Qui-Gon is killed by the assassin Darth Maul.

In the Batman trilogy, Ra’s is the teacher of the young Wayne. In Batman Begins, he finds him in a prison in Bhutan. 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. At the end of a lengthy and painful period of training, Ra’s explains that Wayne must do what is necessary to fight evil, and that the league has trained Wayne to lead it in its mission to destroy Gotham City, which the league believes has become hopelessly corrupt.

Ra’s is thus not a simple embodiment of evil. He stands for the combination of virtue and terror, for egalitarian discipline fighting a corrupted empire, and thus belongs to a line that stretches in recent fiction from Paul Atreides in Frank Herbert’s Dune to Leonidas in Frank Miller’s graphic novel 300. It is crucial that Wayne was a disciple of Ra’s: Wayne was made into Batman by his mentor.

At this point, two common-sense objections suggest themselves. The first is that there were monstrous mass killings and violence in real-life revolutions, from the rise of Stalin to the rule of the Khmer Rouge, so the film is clearly not just engaging in reactionary imagination. The second objection is that the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement in reality was not violent – its goal was definitely not a new Reign of Terror. In so far as Bane’s revolt is supposed to extrapolate the immanent tendency of OWS, the film absurdly misrepresents its aims and strategies. The ongoing anti-capitalist protests are the opposite of Bane: he stands for the mirror image of state terror, for a murderous fundamentalism that takes over and rules by fear, not for the overcoming of state power through popular self-organisation. What both objections share, however, is the rejection of the figure of Bane.

The reply to these two objections has several parts. First, one should make the scope of violence clear. The best answer to the claim that the violent mob reaction to oppression is worse than the original oppression was the one provided by Mark Twain in his novel 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 20th- century communism used too much extreme murderous violence. We should be careful not to fall into this trap again. As a fact, this is terrifyingly true. Yet such a direct focus on violence obfuscates the underlying question: what was wrong with the communist project as such? What internal weakness of that project was it that pushed communists towards unrestrained violence? It is not enough to say that communists neglected the “problem of violence”; it was a deeper, sociopolitical failure that pushed them to violence. It is thus not only Nolan’s film that is unable to imagine authentic people’s power. The “real” radical-emancipatory movements couldn’t do it, either; they remained caught in the co-ordinates of the old society, in which actual “people power” was often such a violent horror.

Finally, it is all too simplistic 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 Dark Knight Rises is that it has wrongly translated this violence into murderous terror. Let us take a brief detour here through José Saramago’s novel Seeing, which tells the story of strange events in the unnamed capital city of an unidentified democratic country. When election day dawns with torrential rain, the voter turnout is disturbingly low. But the weather turns by mid-afternoon and the population heads en masse to the polling stations. The government’s relief is short-lived, however: the count shows that more than 70 per cent of the ballots cast in the capital have been left blank. Baffled, the government gives the people a chance to make amends a week later at another election.

The results are worse. Now 83 per cent of the ballots are blank. The two major political parties – the ruling party of the right and its chief adversary, the party of the middle – are in a panic, while the marginalised party of the left produces an analysis claiming that the blank ballots are a vote for its progressive agenda. Unsure how to respond to a benign protest but certain that an anti-democratic conspiracy is afoot, the government quickly labels the movement “terrorism, pure and unadulterated” and declares a state of emergency.

Citizens are seized at random and disappear into secret interrogation sites; the police and seat of government are withdrawn from the capital; all entrances to the city are sealed, as are the exits. The city continues to function almost normally throughout, the people parrying each of the government’s thrusts in unison and with a Gandhian level of non-violent resistance. This, the voters’ abstention, is a case of authentically radical “divine violence” that prompts panic reactions from those in power.

Back to Nolan. The trilogy of Batman films follows an internal logic. In Batman Begins, the hero remains within the constraints of a liberal order: the system can be defended with morally acceptable methods. The Dark Knight is, in effect, a new version of two John Ford western classics, Fort Apache and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, which show how, to civilise the Wild West, one has to “print the legend” and ignore the truth. They show, in short, how our civilisation has to be grounded in a lie – one has to break the rules in order to defend the system.

In Batman Begins, the hero is simply the classic urban vigilante who punishes the criminals when the police can’t. The problem is that the police, the official law-enforcement agency, respond ambivalently to Batman’s help. They see him as a threat to their monopoly on power and therefore as evidence of their inefficiency. However, his transgression here is purely formal: it lies in acting on behalf of the law without being legitimised to do so. In his acts, he never violates the law. The Dark Knight changes these co-ordinates. Batman’s true rival is not his ostensible opponent, the Joker, but Harvey Dent, the “white knight”, the aggressive new district attorney, a kind of official vigilante whose fanatical battle against crime leads to the killing of innocent people and ultimately destroys him. It is as if Dent were the legal order’s reply to the threat posed by Batman: against Batman’s vigilantism, the system generates its own illegal excess in a vigilante much more violent than Batman.

There is poetic justice, therefore, when Wayne plans to reveal his identity as Batman and Dent jumps in and names himself as Batman – he is more Batman than Batman, actualising the temptation to break the law that Wayne was able to resist. When, at the end of the film, Batman assumes responsibility for the crimes committed by Dent to save the reputation of the popular hero who embodies hope for ordinary people, his act is a gesture of symbolic exchange: first Dent takes upon himself the identity of Batman, then Wayne – the real Batman – takes Dent’s crimes upon himself.

The Dark Knight Rises pushes things even further. Is Bane not Dent taken to an extreme? Dent draws the conclusion that the system is unjust, so that, to fight injustice effectively, one has to turn directly against the system and destroy it. Dent loses his remaining inhibitions and is ready to use all manner of methods to achieve this goal. The rise of such a figure changes things entirely. For all the characters, Batman included, morality is relativised and becomes a matter of convenience, something determined by circumstances. It’s open class warfare – everything is permitted in defence of the system when we are dealing not just with mad gangsters, but with a popular uprising.

Should the film be rejected by those engaged in emancipatory struggles? Things aren’t quite so simple. We should approach 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 until the surprised friend gets the point: in this twisted way, she is inviting him to seduce her. It is like the Freudian unconscious that knows no negation; what matters is not a negative judgement of something but that this something is mentioned at all. In The Dark Knight Rises, people power is here, staged as an event, in a significant development from the usual Batman opponents (criminal mega-capitalists, gangsters and terrorists).

Strange attraction

The prospect of the Occupy Wall Street movement taking power and establishing a people’s democracy on the island of Manhattan is so patently absurd, so utterly unrealistic, that one cannot avoid asking the following question – why does a Hollywood blockbuster dream about it? Why does it evoke this spectre? Why does it even fantasise about OWS exploding into a violent takeover? The obvious answer – that it does so to taint OWS with the accusation that it harbours a terrorist or totalitarian potential – is not enough to account for the strange attraction exerted by the prospect of “people power”. No wonder the proper functioning of this power remains blank, absent; no details are given about how the people power functions or what the mobilised people are doing. Bane tells the people they can do what they want – he is not imposing his own order on them. This is why external critique of the film (claiming that its depiction of OWS is a ridi*culous caricature) is not enough. The critique has to be immanent; it has to locate inside the film a multitude of signs that point towards the authentic event. (Recall, for instance, that Bane is not just a bloodthirsty terrorist but a person of deep love, with a spirit of sacrifice.)

In short, pure ideology isn’t possible. Bane’s authenticity has to leave traces in the film’s texture. This is why The Dark Knight Rises deserves close reading. The event – the “People’s Republic of Gotham City”, a dictatorship of the proletariat in Manhattan – is immanent to the film. It is its absent centre.

Slavoj Žižek’s latest book is “Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism” (Verso, £50)

 

[JackWhite]

I've always thought Rises was very much a dressed up version of a dumb action film. I really disliked it when I first saw it, mostly because I could see how much better the film could have been had it not tried to be so convoluted. I think a big issue also is that it being linked to Begins more than TDK is really off putting to me, because it makes TDK feel like the bastard son of the series.

Oh, I remember you being so flabbergasted with the film when it came out. I thank you, because you lowered my expectations before I saw the film. We share a lot of the same sentiments for the film actually. I'm more forgiving when it comes to it being linked to BB, but compared to BB and TDK, the bastard film is most definitely TDKR.

Oh, and not showing how Bruce got back into Gotham upsets me because it proves the point that Nolan tried to squeeze in as much as he could to fit IMAX time limitations. This was at least made to a storyboard, and for all we know; it could have been shot:




If I had to rank Nolan's films, which is tough, I guess this would be it, purely subjective:

1) The Prestige
2) The Dark Knight
3) Batman Begins
4) Inception
5) Memento
6) The Dark Knight Rises
7) Insomnia

I still have yet to watch Following.

 

[kvz5]

So, do you guys think we can expect a new Nolan film by 2016? His pattern of a movie every other year has been consistent since The Prestige.

 

[Team Andino]

So, do you guys think we can expect a new Nolan film by 2016? His pattern of a movie every other year has been consistent since The Prestige.

It'll be weird to that his next movie for the first time in years isn't a Batman movie. I was very happy with the system of getting The Prestige & Inception between each Batman movie. I sure hope we get another film by Nolan come 2016.

 

[redfirebird2008]

I wish he would go back to smaller scale stuff, but I understand he wants to take advantage of the prime years of his career while he still has enough power in Hollywood to get a green light on big scale projects.

 

[kvz5]

I'm very curious on what his next project would be and what studio will back it up. Didn't he say that he wanted to do more kid friendly movies?

*cough*Disney*cough*Alan*cough*Horn*cough*

 

[titansupes]

He said Interstellar specifically harkens back to the family friendly (before those became sort of dirty words) movies of the 70's/80's, specifically Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I don't think he mentioned anything about it in relation to his next film after that, though.

 

[:eek:]

It'll be weird to that his next movie for the first time in years isn't a Batman movie. I was very happy with the system of getting The Prestige & Inception between each Batman movie. I sure hope we get another film by Nolan come 2016.

I suppose it's possible. But considering there is more like two and a half years between The Dark Knight Rises and Interstellar it's also possible the next one will be ready for summer 2017. It's impossible to know for sure, considering no one knows what his next project will be. If it's another big movie or if it will be something smaller. For all we know right now he might even consider taking a longer break after Interstellar.

 

[Black Narcissus]

Anyone think Nolan had another take of Marion's death scene? Goddamn.

 

[redfirebird2008]

Anyone think Nolan had another take of Marion's death scene? Goddamn.

He needed the Fincher approach on that one. t:

 

[BatLobster]

Lol of course there were other takes, Nolan isn't Fincher but he's also not Ed Wood. Marion's husband even said there were. I firmly believe Nolan just has the occasional bout of funky taste when it comes to death scenes. Thomas Wayne's death scene was kind of awkward too.

 

[The Endless]

I'd like to see Nolan do a kinda hardboiled, gothic supernatural noir film. Think something like Angel Heart.