The people of a democratic New York come to Peter Parker’s rescue in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 2, a scene that has no parallel in the (arguably) aristocratic Gotham City of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises or either of his first two Batman movies.
This is a direct follow-up to my Fourth Bat-Thought, which, by the way, has been bat-updated.
With this post at Crooked Timber, Henry Farrell has me half-convinced that there is a political idea at work in The Dark Knight Rises. It’s not a conservative idea or a liberal idea, he argues. It’s an aristocratic one. Farrell’s noticed something about Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies that I missed. The regular citizens of Gotham City don’t seem to matter, not to Batman, not to any of the other characters, not even to themselves. They’re just part of crowds watching various elites, economic, political, and criminal, fight it out for the power to run their city. This makes Nolan’s Batman movies very different from the Christopher Reeve Superman movies and Sam Raimi’s and Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man films and from The Avengers.
In those movies, Superman, Spidey, and the Avengers are the protectors of the people of Metropolis and New York City not of the political, corporate, or economic entities called Metropolis and New York. And all along the way individual citizens pop up as characters in themselves. In Raimi’s Spider-Movies they don’t just show up to comment or be rescued. They take part in the battles Spidey fights on their behalf. They even come to Spider-Man’s rescue. (This happens in The Amazing Spider-Man,too, but the scene with the cranes swinging into place is not as moving or as emphatic as the scenes on the bridge in the first Spider-Man and on the train in Spider-Man 2. And it is literally mechanical.) The only regular citizen of Gotham I can recall in Batman Begins who makes himself felt as a character---I don’t remember any from The Dark Knight---is the homeless guy Bruce gives his overcoat to before he sets off to wander the world in search of his destiny. And that’s not symbolic of Bruce becoming one with the people in any ennobling and democratic sense. It’s him literally giving up his identity. To be one with the people is to be anonymous.
As a contrast, think about Bruce Campbell’s cameos in the three Spider-Man movies or the guy in the elevator in Spider-Man 2. These are characters who exist apart from their relationship to the hero, who have personal lives outside the plot. And they are representative of the people of New York City.
In The Dark Knight Rises the people are represented by John Blake, who is a cop, which makes him the People’s Tribune and so not really one of them and not a democratic character.
In the Spider-Man movies, the ones starring Maguire and (particularly) the new one with Andrew Garfield, the cops are clearly not representative of the people, at least not in their relationship to Spider-Man.
So I can see Farrell’s point. Nolan does tend to present the people of Gotham as a crowd to be controlled and, implicitly, a mob in the making if they aren’t controlled. But like I said, I’m only half-convinced that The Dark Knight Rises is meant to convey any explicitly political message. Nolan’s neglect of the common folk may tell us something about his personal politics or prejudices. But it seems to me more a result of his artistic ambitions.
Nolan makes movies in order to design and play elaborate games. His characters are pieces in those games. I don’t think he’s uninterested in his characters as characters. They’re not like Professor Plum and Miss Scarlett (except when they are), stereotypes on which the audience, playing along at home, can project whatever personalities we want. But I think Nolan’s way of exploring character is to put people into his game and move them around as if they were the top hat or the race car and see how they react. There just isn’t room on the game board or enough playing time (or money in the budget) for anything or anybody that isn’t part of the game except as background or obstacle.
Think of Inception. Nobody’s dreams include any random characters showing up to no plot-related purpose. Leonardo DiCaprio’s character always dreams of his wife and children, never of his tenth grade geometry teacher or kids from a McDonald’s commercial. Of course, all the dreams are being manipulated, but that’s the point. It’s the movie slyly commenting on itself. Nolan’s movies are like his characters’ manipulated dreams.
Politics of one kind or another, Nolan’s own or whatever the audience chooses to read into it, may seep into The Dark Knight Rises but if so, they are rather incoherently addressed. In fact, they are incompetently expressed.
And I just don’t think of Christopher Nolan as an incompetent filmmaker.
Editor’s note to readers who aren’t fanboys or fangirls: Under pressure from us, the author has promised to start writing about subjects other than superheroes again soon.
Iirc, Batman never deals with common people--not even the ones he rescues. This long predates Frank Miller, but was perpetuated by him. Even in The Dark Knight Falls, Batman deals only with those who Act Out Violently, or who seek profit from Looking the Other Way (the taxi driver whose fare from the pimp beating the prostitute (and only that) Batman tears to pieces).
There is one exception (again, iirc): the shopkeeper who gets robbed. And there (as in BB), Batman is in disguise at the beginning, and deals with the shopkeeper only to give a warning: that criminal lives to face trial or he'll be back.
(If you look at the Common People in TDKF, they are unanimously anonymous. Think the heads and shoulders in the Letterman audience or the carnival goers. The exceptions are those who are only introduced to be killed, such as the woman who bought art supplies ans is blown up on the subway, or to Make A Point about the riot or to be "meat on the street" interviews. "No, I would never live here" from the fat suburbanite in the two-piece suit and tie is the closest you come to people with whom Bruce Wayne fraternizes, and Batman's world expands only to deal with the criminal element and those who would be.
Batman protects the good people of Gotham, but he never interacts with them. Nolan has known this from the start, and remained faithful to it. Unlike DC's Boy Scout ("air travel is the safest form, Lois" etc.) or Marvel's working-class genius-who-attends-the-State-University, Bruce Wayne is and always has been a member of the elite. He has Peter Parker's skills--and honestly uses them better than Parker does--with George Romney's attitude: give them opportunity and they will improve their life.
Posted by: Ken Houghton | Monday, July 30, 2012 at 12:13 PM
Another review about Nolan's Toryhood so evident in the movie:
http://exiledonline.com/the-dark-knight-rises-vs-the-99/
I agree with you in that a lot of the plot really is just so we can get to the next huge set-piece. The Occupy similarities largely don't exist - at best it was some ad wizard's idea of being socially relevant, at worst it ties into the theme of the review, which is that Nolan comes squarely down on the 'masses = mobs waiting for Robespierre'. I'm avoiding spoilers, which that review DOES NOT, btw, so I'll just say that Catwoman's character development by the end is the giveaway of Nolan's (or his screenwriter Goyer, who apparently lets his cops-rule people-vermin attitude out in other works) own leanings. She is the working girl who broke into the big game, and what she does by the end is celebrated. I always loved Batman as the one born-to-wealth guy who does right by his privilege, and though that thread does seem to continue with all the various shenanigans the rich mob-bosses and Daggett (whomever he is) try to pull, the scenes after Bane sets up his Gotham are all shown to mainly display terrible, terrible property damage.
To move away from the Tale of Two Cities aping that gets pretty strange, I heard that the reason this movie is like this at all is b/c Nolan absolutely didn't want to do a 3rd movie after Heath Ledger died. Everything he actually wanted to do in the 3rd revolved around the Joker, and w/o his muse he wanted to give it up. Only after they gave him a giant stack of money and said, 'do anything ya like Chris!', which gave us Inception, and now he'll get an even larger stack to do WHATEVER he wants with after DKR makes a significant portion of our annual GDP (which I'm sure the taxes on which will go to the proper offshore accounts), did he decide to make this. That's why it's a solid movie, regardless of my prole-status, but isn't anything like the masterpiece Dark Knight is.
Posted by: DupinTM | Tuesday, July 31, 2012 at 08:52 AM
I largely agree with Ken above, but would tweak it just a bit. Batman is not distant from the people because of elitism, but because he crafts a persona for an effect. Peter Parker is "your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man", a role that is presented in that sense almost as if someone else could step in and fill it in a pinch just like the guy who used to deliver your newspaper.
Batman is a much different masked persona, and it is crafted for a specific purpose: to create fear and dread in the criminal population. You would NEVER, for instance, find Batman making small talk in an elevator; if somehow he found himself in an elevator with someone (he wouldn't), he would drop a smoke bomb and ninja himself out through the ceiling panels. If he is approachable, he loses some of his power.
Posted by: xaaronx | Tuesday, August 07, 2012 at 07:29 PM