The Dark Knight of Conservative Values

The Dark Knight of Conservative Values 17-03-2013 We all know, in this privileged world we live in, the story of Bruce Wayne's ascension to Batman. With his parents dead from a young age, gunned down in front of him by some lowly crook, he developed a sense of amoral justice (re. vengeance). From here, he shrouded himself in a cape, skulked beneath his mansion in a cave, and created his alter ego: The Batman. The saga has been told and retold; has died and been exhumed countless times. With Christopher Nolan's "serious" and "gritty" reimagining now in the rear view mirror, it is probably time to exhume it and carry out a post-mortem of sorts. Indeed, with quiet hullabaloo, other critics have gleaned at the idea that there were some hidden values riding close to the surface of Nolan's adaptation of comic book noir. Murmurings of conservative platitudes and anti-Occupy Wall Street (OWS) sentiments whistled through the internet's lonely corridors of lost information; cherry picked by those who would rather see Frank Millar's ramblings for what they are: paranoid, fear-mongering screeds from that hateful loner in the corner. It is nothing surprising really. The man who brought us such tales of lone vengeance (Sin City) and hyper-masculinity battling alone against a feminized enemy (300), stumbles around his blog, spouting vile nonsense about a bunch of vaguely disorganised well-wishers down in Zucotti Park. Perhaps Batman could take care of those "louts, thieves, and rapists," (Miller, 2011). Perhaps he could swoop down in an incomprehensibly expensive military plane and lead the uniformed officers against the unruly mob of the Left. Now, if only someone had the guts to film this for the masses, so that they too could realise this vision of a magnificent plutocracy. 1 Never fear, Nolan and Goyer are here. Yes, this crack team of Hollywood visionaries have given us the motion picture adaptation of Miller's insane vision. Spread across a trilogy of Neo-Conservative armchair philosophizing and amoralist judgement, our liberal-fighting duo have wowed and excited, intrigued and carried along entire theatres of generally left-leaning Yuppies into the reheated fear of Cold War conservatism. After the 140 minute exposition that was Batman Begins, Goyer et al. settled down to craft an adaptation of Miller's 'Dark Knight' series. The resulting box-office wet dream became one of the most successful and culturally prevalent franchises to date. Grossing in excess of US$1.1 billion, Nolan's saga of upper-class vengeance has titillated, wowed and aroused the world's attention to the plight of the Financial Elite, at a time when they really needed some back-door publicity. Indeed, the latter two films entered IMDB at the top of the charts, usually a few days before even the critics had seen it. So furtive was the public's expectation of these films, that they would be pre-destined to be brilliant, only slipping down the rankings when people calmed their senses. Either that or threatening film critics with death lost its charm... Writing for Salon.com about The Dark Knight Rises, Andrew O'Hehir posited that "it’s a trap to read too much into this movie by way of political commentary". Simultaneously acknowledging the presence of Straussian Neo-Conservatism throughout the plot, he suggested that "the Gotham status quo is a cynical regime based on 'useful lies,' false heroes and systemic inequality — straight out of the playbook of Neo-Con founding father Leo Strauss — that corrupts even decent men like Gary Oldman’s Commissioner Gordon." However, after wandering through the film's predecessor, I would argue that Gotham city itself is not the representation of cynical Neo-Conservatism, rather it is Nolan and Goyer's Batman Universe that actively propagates the Neo-Con myth. Offsetting artistic accountability by placing the dark, Straussian mythos as part of the city's characterisation is fundamentally disingenuous considering how active a part the characters have within the plot construct and wider narrative vision. 2 *** It is somewhat useful then to begin with 2008's The Dark Knight. At this stage, we have all seen the film several dozen times. While filmed with a grace in style that has rarely, if ever, graced the blockbuster form, the narrative is a dark and murky celebration of all that is right and true about controlling society and governing crime. It is true to say that the two are inextricably linked. A character within the film cannot separate society and crime and sees them merely as cause and effect factors. The central premise of this narrow dialectic revolves around The Joker and Batman. The former, a criminal so fiendishly malevolent, hateful and psychotic that his very presence elicits simultaneous pangs of fear and admiration. The latter, our Dark Knight of justice (re. vengeance), suavely cloaked in mystery and selfaggrandising moralisms; not the hero we need right now, but the one we deserve (such a line is lost in its own self-importance, much like the character of Bruce Wayne in Nolan's universe). What ensues, is a stratigraphy of hyperbolic comic book prose spread over a worthy run time. The climactic scenes detail our final descent into the crafted lies and conceits of Neo-Con platitudes. Dent (the White Knight of Gotham) starts us off by falsely outing himself as the Batman. This lie is carried by Bruce/Batman and Gordon, with a view to trapping the Joker. The lie, however, is also what gets Joker into the police station as it is "all part of the plan." Indeed. It seems somewhat tenuous to assert, but there is no way an audience reads that the lie was a cause for this effect. The IMAX film and cataclysmically stylish mise-en-scene of the trapping of Joker diminishes any interpretive skill, even by viewing number ten. We continue our festival of public lies as the biggest one is crafted and detailed to the public. Harvey Dent did not kill those police officers. It was Batman. What a pointless lie. What a patronising thing to disseminate to the public who are paying for your film. However, this is a popular thing to do when you accept the presence of Leo Strauss and his cabal between the frames of the film. The Neo-Con platform asserts that the lie is what is needed to keep society together; united against an enemy through fear, in search of 'progress' and communal greatness. Without the constructed myth, 3 society is doomed to the rot and decay that, they believe, will inevitably come with liberal decadence. Indeed, it has been seen before as Rumsfeld et al. detailed the terrifying magnitudes of the U.S.S.R.'s armoury and capability, right at the point that they were about to economically implode because they were barely able to feed themselves. It was seen again in 2003 as codename 'Curveball' and aluminium tubes were wheeled out to justify The Gulf War's sequel. The sheer cynicism involved with this type of rightwing philosophy equates to effectively believing that the people are too stupid, too gullible and too naive to ever take the truth about a situation, therefore they must be fed a horrible fallacy; a lie that evokes enough fear to bring society together under a common goal. Indeed, the Neo-Con myth was to create a simulation of the effect that World War 2 had on societies throughout the globe; galvanising communities against one common enemy through fear or fascism and death. To this end, Bob Kane's Batman works as a contemporary embodiment of all that is present in the Neo-Con character - a fear mongering fallacy; a fictitious creation used to strike fear into the hearts of petty purse thieves and galvanise the people in line with him. Returning to Gotham, we see that this is how Gotham has chosen to operate. I choose my words carefully here. While O'Hehir claims that this is the Gotham that we are given in The Dark Knight Rises, I argue it is one that this is the Gotham borne from the White Knight, the Dark Knight and Gordon in the film's predecessor. In particular, we must remember that it was Dent's benevolent character that began the lie; Dent being a man of allegedly unshakable ethics. While Nolan told IGN in 2007 that he wanted "to tell a very large, city story or the story of a city," regarding Gotham, he also pointed out to MTV in the same year that Bruce Wayne and Harvey Dent are the "backbone" of the film. Therefore, it is not too much to assert that what we see is not the darkness of a city in the always -already throes Neo-Con ethos, but rather a dark city being "fixed" by one. Furthermore, to argue that it is then a "trap" to question this ethos seems to be grasping for entertainment when political discussion is invited. To push Nolan's own quote illustrates the bleak reality of The Dark Knight's vision. That is to say 4 that the perceived dialectic between Dent and Wayne has already failed in that the film itself realises a joint finality. Bruce and Harvey want the same thing for Gotham and before one's mutation they both seek this achievement by the same means. Wayne and Dent's thesis is the same, it is only Two-Face who differs in sentiment, but his is not part of this method. 2012s Dark Knight Rises saw audiences wander deeper into Strauss' rabbit hole. Conveniently set against a cultural context of the Occupy Wall Street movement, Nolan's filmic capstone details the ransoming of a city by a heinous villain: Bane. Bane is of vague South American heritage and seeks to capture the attention of Gotham's disenfranchised, homeless, poor and destitute. He points the finger back at Batman, Gordon and their White Knight. He details the financial corruption that had ravaged the people (something that was on the mind of nearly every audience member at one point or another). He rails against the inequality, the elitism and the plutocratic endeavours of the upper class. Moreover, he uses the truth to complete his mission. The truth that Dent was not Gotham's saviour. Just as the Joker had the element of dark validity to his ramblings in the previous film, and just as Neeson's Ra's al Ghul had merit in his understanding of Gotham's corruption, so too does Bane have the key to Batman's Achilles heel: the Truth. With the secret out, Gotham does exactly as Strauss would have predicted. They descend into unruly chaos. As usual though, Nolan and Goyer's twist with the villain is that they must be incredibly masochistic so as to offset the audience actually rooting for them as the hero. Ra's al Ghul is somewhat fascist in his execution, the Joker is admittedly a psychopath, and Bane is a powerhouse of base characteristics - violence and fundamentalism. Just as in The Dark Knight, the duality that TDKR hinges upon is between Batman's team and Bane's team. While there is a systemic lie and subsequent manipulation of the masses at the root of both sides, the question for the audience is: which one's better? What is really being fought out on screen in the penultimate scenes of Nolan's finale, is the battle between Neo-Conservative authority and imagined radical fundamentalism. This is best crystallised as we see an army of proud and uniformed police 5 officers charge against the ragged rabble that is Bane's army of the people. Batman leads his Boys in Blue against the manipulated liberal mob in a battle that quite literally revels in police brutality, akin to some of the scenes in Sacramento and Zucotti Park. The perceived sincerity of this penultimate scene contrasts beautifully against the farcical sarcasm of any of the Trial sequences, wherein the Scarecrow presides over a Kangaroo Court that resembles a Dickensian caricature more so than it does any other set piece in any of the trilogy's components. The court is portrayed as frantic and furtive; awash with biased judgements and cruel punishments. Once more set against the backdrop of OWS and worldwide public uprising, we find a certain cynicism in the treatment of those that would seek to question the established order. As these scenes compliment the climactic battle of TDKR, so too does the film's dynamic compliment the aesthetic. The undercurrent of farcical Neo-Conservative values and one-sided arguments against popular movement are reined in by a filmic style that, as I have already mentioned, is undoubtedly brilliant. Nolan is a far cry from auteur, as some critics have hyperbolically dubbed him, but there is no doubt that he has simulated the trappings of a classic Hollywood blockbuster while adding a sincerity to the frame that has caused some to revaluate how lazy they can be about crafting one. Ahem, Michael Bay, ahem. The problem is that the message riding quite close to the surface of Nolan and Goyer's trilogy is not just Conservative, but that it resembles all the tenets of propaganda. Consider for a moment the plotline of a video game that was released around the same time as TDKR. Call of Duty: Black Ops 2. In which a South-American narco-terrorist manipulates the 99% movement in order to attack America. It is left to the Navy SEALS to come and save the day, rescuing the gullible public from themselves. Now, this plot may closely resemble that of Bane's escapades throughout Gotham, and that is because David S. Goyer penned this interactive Neo-Con extravaganza as well. Therefore, in both of Goyer's releases for 2012, the public were given a good look at why authority knows best and you should just trust in their 6 potential for benevolence. In Call of Duty it is the military and JSOC that will protect you from the validity of questioning financial corruption, while in TDKR, Batman goes toe-to-toe in a fist fight with Bane to save you from the literal truth. Like all good propaganda, it is all encompassing. covering a range of learning styles - visual, auditory and kinaesthetic. Returning to TDKR, it is always important to analyse how the argument is completed. As with all Nolan films, the ending does not satisfy the narrow dialectic set up within. While Inception rested on its lazy ambiguity, TDKR tries to offer an half-thought-out synthesis as Robin (good God, really?!) toys with the idea of taking up the cowl. Robin was the only person questioning Gordon's motives regarding the lie throughout the back half of the film's excessive runtime, yet he was still stuck in a bromance with Bruce/Batman. Thus, Nolan's inherent ambiguity forces the audience to side with the only options left on the table: Batman or...well, Batman. *** In November 2001 representatives of the White House met with senior Hollywood executives to see how mainstream cinema could help out with the "War on Terror". It was evidently important to the Bush administration that America and the Western World see things 'the right way'. As Zizek notes, these meetings act as "the ultimate empirical proof that Hollywood does in fact function as an ideological state apparatus" (Zizek, 2012). Certainly then, to ignore a political reading of Nolan and Goyer's Batman series as a trap, is to ignore the idea that films can still function as a tool of propaganda. While I am not saying for a minute that Rove and Cheney were on set and in talks with Nolan, I am saying that Hollywood's power in terms of influencing ideology is not a school of academia left to critics and theorists. It is thus acknowledged, and has been for a long time, by politicians and propagandists as a useful tool in disseminating certain ideologies and arguments to the public. 7 Nolan et al. have produced three visually pleasing pieces of work. With Zimmer's score in tow, the films deliver a high calibre of production value with a surface tension of intelligence out-weighed and out-gunned by overtly expensive entertainment. A year and a bit on from the grand finale of Batman's momentary exeunt, we are being treated to Marvel's latest stock of trailers for upcoming box-office extravaganzas. Captain America 2: The Winter Soldier has had its trailer on nearly every block in every multiplex around North America and Europe for a few months now. Nick Fury and S.H.I.E.L.D. would seem to be doing some morally ambiguous things with a view to punishing criminals in advance of the crime. To this, Captain America responds, "This isn't freedom. This is fear." Indeed, audiences would do well to remember this sentiment the next time they watch Nolan and Goyer's Batman franchise. 8