2012 Film Series: The Dark Knight Rises

 

I have never really liked most comic book movies for a very bizarre reason. They don’t take place in the real world.

I’m not talking about the aliens or the demigods or the costumes. I mean that none of the problems that Superman or Wonder Woman or Spider Man or almost any of those beloved costume heroes are dealing with exist in a recognizable world. It’s that the only think that happens in these worlds are alien invasions or interdimensional wormholes or crises with mutants or threats that can be resolved in two hours. The comic book world has always solved crises but not problems. Perhaps that is the real reason so many of us have been drawn to Watchmen: it shows that at end of the day, the smartest man in the world or a man who can see every bit of time and space still can’t do anything to stop the fact that mankind will destroy itself even with them existing. (At  some point I will review both the film and HBO adaptation of Watchmen because I do consider them both masterpieces.) Superman might be able to get the earth to rotate backwards, but can he stop bigotry? Can Wonder Woman stop poverty? At least Tony Stark was willing to spend some of his money on saving a city rather than giant iron suits.

The only comic book character who I have ever thought existed at least in part in the real world is Batman. And that’s because he’s not a superhero in the conventional sense. For all intents and purposes, he’s a vigilante. The only think that truly separates him from the criminals he spends the nights beating up is that he has decided he wouldn’t kill any of them, and we all know that’s done more harm than good. Bruce Wayne by any definition of the term is insane. All of the criminal he fights are institutionalized rather than jailed. Christopher Nolan has acknowledged as much in The Dark Knight. In the midst of locking up Scarecrow (Cillian Murphy) Batman yells at some fellow vigilantes: “I don’t need any help.” Scarecrow says: “That’s not my diagnosis” and he’s spot on. Rachel Dawes, the woman Bruce Wayne loves, knows this and tells him so at the end of Batman Begins. He never gets a letter from her before she dies that she knows that he will never not need the Batman, that Bruce Wayne is essentially the costume.

Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy will, in my opinion, always be the gold standard for all comic book movies and while individual films within the DC universe and the MCU might surpass some of the films in quality, I feel assured that none will ever surpass the accomplishment that Nolan showed in these three films. There are many reasons for this but there are three critical ones. The first is simple: Nolan uses his three films to tell a complete saga from beginning to end. In the more than a decade since The Dark Knight Rises Nolan has never attempted to revisit the world he has created and while the most recent version of Batman at least tried to hit on some of the themes Nolan did, Matt Reeves film essentially started with Batman essentially in media res.

The second equally important one, is that from beginning to end, much of what happens in the Dark Knight series is based in real life situations. Only Nolan has ever used the lens of the comic book movie to hold a mirror to the world we currently live in. Many people considered The Dark Knight the most accurate reflection of the War on Terror that we saw in the first decade following 9/11. Few movies – and fewer comic book films – have raised the moral issues about the compromises we make as a society for security and how thin the moral layer that we consider truly is.

The third is subtler but no less important. Nolan’s movies are as much about Bruce Wayne as they are about Batman. Indeed, in The Dark Knight Rises Batman has much less screen time then he does in the previous two films. The Caped Crusader only appears in a short sequence halfway through the movie, a major fight sequence about twenty minutes later and then only for the film’s final half-hour. The rest of the time the movie is focused on Bruce Wayne. In that sense The Dark Knight Rises is unique among comic books movies as it as much about the absence of its hero then his actual presence. This gives Nolan a chance to do something I never saw any other comic book film do actually argue whether the hero at the center is even a positive force in his own franchise.

I don’t think this could have been done with any other character but Batman, who has been famous for more than eighty years not only for being isolated but not truly highly regarded by even the people he wants to help. Batman has always been regarded as a menace, not only by the villains and criminal elements of Gotham City, but by law enforcement and indeed most civilians. In a sly referral to this in The Dark Knight, a media figure spends much of the movie considering that Batman is a threat that needs to be stopped (in typical fashion Batman saves him by the end of the film) but it’s clear that he is speaking for the majority of the public. Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) is the only true ally he has among the police force and throughout the first two movies he is barely tolerated. It is only when we meet Jon Blake (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) that we realize Batman has had a positive impact at all, and he has to threaten to expose him in order to even get in the door of Wayne Manor.

The Dark Knight Rises makes perhaps the strongest argument possible that Bruce Wayne and by extension Batman’s quest is ultimately futile: that he needs it more than Gotham City does. The movie opens eight years after the end of The Dark Knight and not only has their been no sign of Batman since then, Bruce Wayne has disappeared from sight as well. Early in the movie a Congressman says that Wayne spends his days ‘peeing into Mason jars’ and he’s not far off. Alfred tells Bruce early in the film that you stopped being Batman “but you didn’t get a life. You’ve just been waiting for things to get bad again.”  When Bruce begins to take on the mantle Alfred keeps warning him not to get involved. “You’re afraid I’ll fail.” Bruce says. “No. I’m afraid you want too.”

In the eight years between the films, it truly seems like Gotham has recovered. The Mayor tells a crowd that the city has seen a historical rebirth, and while this is clearly only on the surface it is very clear that Wayne has been waiting all this time to be proven wrong, for him to be needed again. Commissioner Gordon seems to have taken a similar approach: in an early scene we see him by the ruins of the Batsignal and he actually seems to be happy that a Congressman has been abducted. (In truth, he’s just gotten drunk and run off with Selina Kyle as leverage.) In both his case and that of Bruce Wayne, you realize that they have never stopped waiting for things to go wrong, no matter how great the cost. Gordon’s wife and son, who he risked his life to save at the climax of the last film, have left him in the interim and Gordon had chosen the city over his family. In Bruce Wayne’s case Rachel’s words have proven a prophecy: he will always need it more than human contact.

The Dark Knight Rises bares the closest resemblance to any actual comic book storylines: Knightfall, the saga in which Bane arrives in Gotham, breaks Batman’s spine in battle and he spends months in recovery; and No Man’s Land, when the government decides that Gotham is a lost cause, essentially isolates from it the rest of America, and the city is left to fend for itself. However as with the previous movies in the trilogy, Nolan uses the trappings of the comic book to paint a larger picture of our society.

In the years that followed many would consider the actions of Bane to be a parallel of the populism and politics of rage that would be the focus of the 2016 election. Despite so many of the scenes that show the rich celebrating in glamor, an action by Bane at the stock exchange in which the head insists that it’s a robbery (“It’s everybody’s money” he says when a police official balks at stopping the trading first) and the nature of Bane’s ‘revolution, Nolan would say that this message was unintentional. I am inclined to view the film as a continuation of the story that Nolan was telling in The Dark Knight about the consequences of the War on Terror, particularly long term.

When the film begins, the Mayor is celebrating the anniversary of The Dent Act, which we later learn is an action to lock criminals up in a maximum security prison known as Bloodgate and deny them parole. The Mayor says when it comes to repealing the Dent Act, “Not on my watch.” It is hard not to think of both the passage of the Patriot Act after 9/11 and the problems we’ve had closing Guantanamo. When Bane (Tom Hardy) begins his revolution, one of his first major acts is to reveal the reasons behind the Dent Act were a lie, and that these criminals were falsely imprisoned. This lie is in fact called out by Blake to Gordon over TV. Gordon gives a speech about how there comes a point where the rules become shackles and that there will come a point when you’ll want ‘a friend like man, willing to bloody his hands to keep yours clean.” Blake says to Gordon: “Your hands look plenty dirty to me.” That he comes around to Gordon’s way of thinking at the end of the film basically takes the form of the ends justifying the means – which has been one of the basic tenets of the War on Terror.

The symbolism is clear in other forms; some more direct. Bane begin his attack on Gotham after a young man sings the National Anthem at a football game. His comments while it is going on are: “That’s a lovely voice” before he says: “Let the games begin!” and then blows up the field while the players are still on it. The image of a running back eating up yardage while the field collapses behind him is one of the most striking in the film. Like all of Nolan’s films, he is a master of the visual: the movie opens with a scene where Bane uses a larger plane to kidnap a doctor in mid-air that I have never been able to forget. Just as he takes the man hostage he says: “Now is not the time for fear. That comes later.”

Hardy’s portrayal of Bane took a lot of abuse at the time because filmgoers had difficulty understand his speech during the movie. I never had any real difficulty with that when I saw the film. Lost under that is the fact that Bane is by far the most interesting villain in Nolan’s world (though as we find out, he is in a sense a red herring) Bane comprehends what Bruce Wayne has fundamentally been in denial about in all his years in the comics: that Gotham is beyond saving. Bane wants to torture both Gotham and Batman who he is sees as two sides of the same coin.

 In this sense, he decides to use methods that are not unlike the ones we see the government using in both Afghanistan and Iraq: by using the threat of destruction to get the military itself to hold Gotham hostage by essentially making the city a nuclear deterrent. There is footage of the military looking on from TV and we see an official saying: “We do not negotiate with terrorist but we do accept reality.” Nolan is no doubt using this as a metaphor for the failed occupation of Iraq; at one point, he uses the government’s attempt at obtaining intelligence by ‘hanging them where the world can see’. One can just as easily see this as a metaphor for Al-Qaeda’s beheading of American soldiers online. The fact that Bruce Wayne in his prison around the world has a television perpetually tuned to what is happening  in Gotham is a metaphor for how America views so much of foreign policy these days.

One admits that there are flaws in the film that don’t make sense as part as canon of the world of DC but I’d argue that they make sense in part of the larger narrative Nolan is telling. A third of the way through the movie, Alfred tells Bruce that he has no intention of helping him any more and that he won’t watch him die. While this is inconsistent with the narrative we saw in Batman Begins where Alfred was Batman’s biggest cheerleader, one can see this as part of Alfred’s own arc. Over more than a decade, he has seen the man he considers a son essentially lose any human contact he might have for a city that thinks nothing for him and who refuses any desire to try and move past it.

This has honestly been a flaw that many long time fans of Batman have discussed. It’s worth noting that while Bruce is being held prisoner he has a vision of Ras (Liam Neeson) and in a sense, his subconscious is telling him what he has to have known: “You thought the evils of Gotham. With all your strength. All your resources. All your moral authority. And the only victory you could achieve was a lie.”  It is worth noting that Bruce returns to Gotham only to save it from being wiped off the face of the earth. At a critical moment Selina Kyle tells him: “You don’t owe Gotham any more. You’ve given these people everything.” Bruce says: “Not everything.” In a sense his actions in the final third of the film are perhaps his epiphany: that the battle will never end, and that only by giving his life can he finally be free of the struggle.

Because Batman is fundamentally absent from the film for much of the movie, far more attention is focused on the police, most notably Gordon and Blake. Oldman does some remarkable work in the film that shows his power as an actor. He spends the first half of the movie in a hospital bed recovering from an earlier attack. When Bane launches his attack on Gotham, he sends two of his henchmen to seek him out. Blake runs through the streets and we intercut between the men, Gordon in the hospital bed, and finally Blake arriving to hear gunshots. He reaches Gordon’s room to find his bed empty. Then we hear a gun cock. “Clear the corners, rookie,” he says simply. “Get my coat.”

Gordon spends most of the film to try to organize a resistance, tracking a truck that has the bomb, determined to find a way to stop it. Near the end of the film, he tracks down a colleague of his (Matthew Modine)who has lost his nerve and urges him to find a way to fight: “This only gets fixed from inside the city!” he shouts. When the final battle for Gotham rages we see Modine in his dress blues with a baton, walking down the streets. When the military tells him to disperse he says: “There’s only one police in this town.” The final battle for Gotham is not so much between Batman and Bane but between the police and the army and its more brutal than anything we’re used to in this kind of film.

The last half hour of the film have been said to have so many flaws that they stop The Dark Knight Rises from being a true masterpiece the way the second film was. Perhaps Nolan, who had basically spent most of the movie ignoring typical comic book references, decided to satisfy the fanboys and put in one too many easter eggs. Yet as a body of work  the film is a fitting conclusion to the trilogy because Nolan makes clear it’s a conclusion. Batman might well exist in some form, but Nolan has made it very clear in the age of the endless sequels and reboots that he has no intention of ever revisiting the world of Batman. And he does not need too. His saga of Batman had a beginning, middle and end. In the world where everything has to be a franchise, that’s a testament to him as an artist.

Nolan has been one of the greatest filmmakers in the 21^st century, one whose films appeal to your brain as much as the eye. Such has been the case since he broke on to the national scene with Memento one of the true masterpieces of independent film and one of the greatest mindbenders in history. When he took over the world of Batman he completely redefined what a superhero movie was capable of. Nor did he rest on his laurels: before The Dark Knight came out he made the remarkable The Prestige and before The Dark Knight Rises, he brought us Inception. People are still trying to figure out what the endings of those films meant years after the fact, but few would deny the visual power and the way they make you think.

After The Dark Knight Rises, he created the complicated space opera Interstellar,  a movie that dealt with the possibility extinction of humanity, the limits of space and time and how love can drive us. Dunkirk told the story of one of the most famous events in World War II from three very different perspectives. (By Nolan’s standards, it was a short film, clocking in at an hour and forty five minutes; most of the films he’s made since Batman Begins have been in the two and a half hour range.) Tenet, which Nolan insisted have theatrical release even when the world was in lockdown, would unlikely have been a box office success even had it come out in a normal release; it is far too confusing and cerebral to follow even after multiple viewings but few filmmakers would have bothered to tell a story this complicated at all.

From the moment Oppenheimer was greenlit in the spring of 2022, many entertainment critics viewed that it might very well be the last of its breed: a big budget studio epic that was going be released in multiple theaters. Even when Americans lit up at the sight of the trailers and the early critical praise began to roll in, few really thought that audiences would go to see an R-rated three hour film in the middle of July. On its opening weekend, Oppenheimer grossed $81 million domestically and over $180 million internationally, one of the best starts ever for either an R-rated movie or a biographical drama. Christopher Nolan has managed many remarkable feats in his incredible career. If he manages to completely change how studios think about releasing serious movies in the summer and funding them at all, that is a far greater act of salvation than anything Batman ever accomplished Nolan made about him.