The Dark Knight Rises The Dent Act

I figure this probably deserves its own thread since it took center stage in the Characterization of The Knight thread. Maybe it's too late and the debate is dying down, but worth a shot, right?

Anyway, here's my thought on the Dent Act:

TDK established that Dent prosecuted 549 mob-related criminals. TDKR establishes that 1,000 men are in Blackgate "languishing" under the Dent Act and being denied parole.

Logically, this seems to suggest that either the other some odd 500 are either previously convicted criminals (predominantly non-mob,) that are now being denied parole OR that the Dent Act has helped locked up more criminals, also without parole. Personally I think the second option makes more sense but the movie doesn't provide enough evidence to determine which is true. However, the one determination than can be made is that whether the Dent Act heightened police power or simply abused the judicial system or both, it turned Gotham into much more of a police state than it had previously been. And that is pretty much the point.

More importantly though, denial of parole is, in fact, not the only change made by the Dent Act that's referenced in the film. We can't forget that Selina Kyle was locked up in that prison with all those mob thugs as the only female prisoner. That's extreme. The prison guard says that "The Dent Act allows non-segregation based on extraordinary need". So there, denial of parole is not the only statute of the Dent Act, this proven within the movie. No conjecture. And wouldn't it be pretty random if denial of parole and gender segregation are the only things the Dent Act changed? As if female crime was a huge problem in Gotham. This just illustrates how dominant and meticulous a piece of legislation the Dent Act had to have been.

 

Right, she had a huge record. My point was just that the movie shows that the Dent Act is more sweeping and powerful than a legislation that simply denies people who were already in jail parole. It allowed them to lock up a woman in an all-male facility, when that previously wouldn't have been possible in Gotham. Denial of parole and gender non-segregation are two aspects of the Dent Act we're explicitly told about, but common sense dictates that there has to be more to it in order for them to have wiped out organized crime as we're shown in the film. This is where a splash of imagination can do wonders.

 

Actually, now that you mention it...when exactly was Selina sentenced in the film?

 

I took it as she was awaiting trial, which made it seem more extreme that they'd throw her in Blackgate. Then again, time is a bit elastic in the film so it's tough to say. I'll buy it though.

Anyhow, in my original post what I said was we have to account for those extra 500 one way or another. Even if you want to argue that the Dent Act did nothing to ease the process of prosecution mob, the point still remains that either more mobsters were locked up over the course of 8 years or that the Dent Act is denying parole to a bunch of other criminals with varying degrees of charges. Either way, the fact that the Dent Act allows the law to throw a female into an all male facility shows that it's infringing on what may be seen as "basic rights" of the criminals. And why would it stop at gender? Better yet why would it START at gender? There are questions just begging to be asked.

I can't speak for everyone, but what I'm debating is simply that the Dent Act was something more than simply denying the men Dent locked up parole, and therefore its role in putting the mob out of business (as evidenced and implied in TDKR) can be seen as valid. Whether or not you one likes this as a plot device or not has become irrelevant in the discussion, and it seems we're simply debating whether or not Gotham being crime free after 8 years is too great a conceit for the film to make or not.

 

^ Exactly. For the Dent Act to actually work the way the film implies it does, it would probably have to be downright unconstitutional in some regards, or perhaps the constitution would have to be amended in order for it to be passed.

It leans on the fact that this is a fictional city in an alternate universe close to our own, but not quite. It's a fictional bill that could probably never get passed in reality. But this is a reality in which a city relies on a masked vigilante to save them from a psychopathic clown who nearly single handedly cripples the mob and plunges the city into chaos. You either go along with it or you don't.

Don't let the recent overuse of that word make you think that. "Conjecture" implies a conclusion based on insufficient evidence. Sometimes films leave things out and we are in fact meant to arrive at conclusions on our own based on surrounding evidence. Nolan does this all the time, and sometimes invites actual conjecture in the process (ending of Inception for example) of interpreting his films.

 

Quoting you from the other thread Joker hope you don't mind:

What I've bolded is exactly what I'm trying to argue though. I'm saying that movie definitely suggests that the Dent Act was a strong, effective piece of legislation which is the only important thing. Two entirely separate and unrelated aspects of it are enough to form the idea that this thing is a huge bill.

You are more than entitled to be unsatisfied with that explanation, just as myself and others are entitled to be content with it. If this movie actually centered around the mob and them being prosecuted like TDK was, it would be an entirely different issue and I'd agree with you that it's under-explained. But TDKR made the genre shift into war/disaster/epic, much like TDK made the genre shift to crime saga from superhero adventure, and I think this shift necessitated a different emphasis when it comes to certain story aspects. I love how genre fluid this trilogy is, that is why I'm fine with just accepting the Dent Act at "face" (heh, get it? ) value, despite me feeling that there is adequate evidence provided in the film to feel assured that it was a hardcore piece of legislation that devastated the mob.

And to be honest, the only reason I personally keep coming back to this discussion is because I enjoy discussing the movie and in the course of thinking about this movie I personally come to love it more. That's been my experience since first seeing the film and reflecting on it. Also because I think it'd be nice to just agree to disagree. I'm still waiting for that to happen without being labeled a "conjecture-theorist" or w/e.

 

I too preferred the sparsity in how they dealt with the Dent Act in the film. The two scenes in which its changes are discussed don't feel like force-fed exposition, which we know Nolan is sometimes guilty of. One moment (Selina being thrown in Blackgate) provides us a fun badass Selina moment, the other (Blake and Gordon) is a character driven, emotionally charged moment. It's enough to give you an idea without beating you over the head with it and making the film drag. No amount of exposition is really enough to give you the full story of 8 years, so I think the film was wise to avoid trying to explain it to death and leaving things to the viewer's inference and imagination. Too much explanation would violate the illusion of the passage of time I feel. The way it's presented in the film, it just feels like "this is the way it is", and Gotham has been living under these conditions for a while. The sparsity actually helps keep you in the here and now of the story, which is important from a writing standpoint.

I also think we've been underestimating how devastated the mob was by the end of TDK. I always felt the only way the mob was coming back in a third movie was if they came back under the leadership of freaks (like Black Mask) and completely changed their game, became more unpredictable, ruthless, etc. It seemed certain that an inability to evolve would render them extinct in Gotham. Joker himself told them they were on their way out as he burned their cash. I understand that there's a thematic way to interpret his line about giving Gotham a "better class of criminal", and that it might allude to the rise of freaks, Batman's rogues gallery, etc. But in a literal sense he's also talking about taking over the Chechen's gang. Joker was right almost all the time in the movie, but he wasn't totally infallible. He was wrong about the ferries, he hadn't planned to get caught so soon and he couldn't foresee Batman taking the fall for Harvey, which is the moment that altered the course of the story going forward. It was Batman's ace in the hole.

I will say...I do understand where the other side of the argument is coming from. Something like this bothered me in Iron Man 2. I wasn't a fan of Tony's blood being poisoned and him dying at the start of the movie. It didn't feel natural coming off the high note the first film ended on, seemed to come out of nowhere. Looking back though, I think I would have been able to get over that if I found that particular subplot led anywhere useful. Instead, it just felt like an excuse to throw in a "dark" but disjointed subplot with Tony curing himself that crammed in a bunch of Avengers setup and was not essential to the rest of the story. So I do get it. You feel like you had the rug pulled out from under you and got a different story than the one you felt should have been told. At the end of the day that's all it comes down to I think. All the disagreements that have played out on the boards, from the merits of the Dent Act, to Bane and the LOS's motivation for coming to Gotham, to Talia's role in the story, all consistently point to this conclusion. If you changed all those things you'd have a radically different movie. A better movie? I couldn't possibly say.

 

I wouldn't say viral marketing is nothing. It's peripheral, but for TDK I definitely considered it canon and part of the overall experience. Especially those Gotham Tonight videos that were included on the DVD. You can ignore it you want, but it doesn't contradict anything in the movie. In fact it usually serves to enrich the experience. I know for a fact that Jonah Nolan consulted with 42E on the TDK viral marketing, not sure about TDKR but I would imagine someone from the Nolan camp relayed info.

Besides, let's call a spade a spade. You say only fanboys care about viral marketing? Newsflash, we're all fanboys arguing over fanboy detail stuff in this case. You think the general audience put this much thought into ramifications the Dent Act? No friggin' way. It's not even cited as one of these major flaws of the movie, and as we know there's quite the extensive list of plot holes and nitpicks all around the blogosphere. Nobody seemed to have much trouble grasping it, and it's not nearly as important to your average Joe as it is to us. That piece of viral merely confirms what you can infer from the movie. I didn't even see that piece DewGothamCity article until after I saw the movie, but it wasn't like it was a huge shock. It jived with what I had already gathered from watching the movie.