Introduction

Given the subversive interpretation of these three movies that I’m about to make, I find it fitting that the actor cast to play billionaire/playboy Bruce Wayne and his alter ego, the Batman, should be the same actor who only five years earlier played yuppie psychopath Patrick Bateman, a personification of the cruelties of capitalism, as I observed in my analysis of that film.

Though director Christopher Nolan is undoubtedly one of the best talents in filmmaking over the past two decades, he’s also a very bourgeois one, and this trilogy of films solidly demonstrates bourgeois liberal values, if, on occasion, in a somewhat conflicted way. Though Batman, Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman), Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), Rachel Dawes (Katie Holmes, and later, Maggie Gyllenhaal), Alfred Pennyworth (Michael Caine), Robin John Blake (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), and Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman) are, of course, supposed to be the heroes, and Ra’s al Ghul (Liam Neeson), the Scarecrow (Cillian Murphy), the mob, the Joker (Heath Ledger), Bane (Tom Hardy), and Catwoman (Anne Hathaway) are supposed to be the villains, there’s a moral ambiguity in the Batman story that leaves a huge grey area between the black and white of stereotypical good and evil.

For the true centre of evil, as powerfully given in these three movies, is Gotham City itself, a city said–repeatedly by those who wish to destroy it–to be impossible to save. A city in which the hero, a billionaire and a glorified, militarized policeman, represents justice, and in which many are so poor and desperate that they have to resort to crime in order to survive, is one in which the mob (i.e., criminal businesses) rules–this tells us all we need to know about what Gotham City symbolizes…capitalism.

As we know, what prompted the reboot of the Batman franchise was the disastrous failure of Joel Schumacher‘s Batman and Robin (1997), which gave us the generally loathed, campy presentation of Batman, as opposed to the preferred dark antihero version as seen in Nolan’s trilogy. A nauseatingly fitting song in the soundtrack of Schumacher’s film is “Gotham City,” by R. Kelly, with a lyric that includes the line “A city of justice, a city of love, a city of peace…” a line that is as totally misrepresentative of the fictional city as it is barf-inducing in its mawkishness.

If Gotham City is a place of justice, love, and peace, why is Batman needed? Why are villains like Mr. Freeze, Poison Ivy, and Bane there? No, the very last things that Gotham City represents are justice, love, and peace: its name, which to me suggests a pun on Gothic, has connotations of darkness and evil that Schumacher’s film willfully avoided presenting to moviegoers in its proper tone.

In terms of theme and its presentation of the subject matter, Nolan’s trilogy has an aesthetically appealing ABA structure, as in much classical music: statement, departure, return. Batman Begins and The Dark Knight Rises share not only references to Ra’s al Ghul and the League of Shadows, if not outright presenting them, but also the theme of fear. The Dark Knight, on the other hand, has the theme of escalation, and as far as the Joker and Harvey Two-Face are concerned, the latter is referred to and briefly shown in Rises, while the former is never referred to or shown, not even once, though the effects of his actions are thoroughly felt in Rises.

Batman Begins

With the establishment of the fear of bats of young Bruce Wayne (played by Gus Lewis), we are also introduced to his father, Thomas Wayne (played by Linus Roache). Billionaire Thomas is a doctor, head of Wayne Enterprises, and a liberal through and through. As a kind and charitable man, he is not only a child’s ideal father, he’s also the exemplar of bourgeois generosity. Still, all these virtues are a mask, a distraction from the plain and simple fact that billionaires simply shouldn’t exist, especially in a city riddled with poverty, desperation, and crime.

What must be emphasized in such a world is that the only difference worth noting between businesses like Wayne Enterprises and the mob is that the former are law-abiding capitalists, while the latter are not law-abiding capitalists. As far as law enforcement is concerned, the cops touch neither group of capitalists because they are paid for through two channels: the former, through taxes; the latter, through bribes. All three groups–legitimate business, the mob, and the law enforcers–keep the capitalist, class system intact.

The first and third of these groups thus represent the government-regulated forms of capitalism, while the mob represents the deregulated, “free market” form. Incidentally, there will emerge another character, who in his lawless, privatized form of law enforcement, will also represent that “free market” form of capitalism…the Batman.

That we.see such an intermingling of the state-regulated vs. deregulated forms of capitalism–sometimes cooperating and complementing each other, sometimes fighting with each other–in this trilogy makes it a perfect portrayal of our neoliberal world.

It’s interesting to compare and contrast the Thomas Wayne of this film with him in Joker, the film I looked at here, and more in depth here. Nolan’s Thomas is so kind, gentle, and liberal, whereas the Thomas of the 2019 film (played by Brett Cullen, who also played Congressman Byron Gilley in The Dark Knight Rises) is gruff, mean-spirited, and even Trumpish. Could it be that the superrich and those in power are…two-faced? (For reasons that should be obvious to you, Dear Reader, I’ll be exploring this idea much more in the Dark Knight section of this analysis.)

With Joe Chill‘s killing of young Bruce Wayne’s parents, it’s only natural that he, as a kid, will be focused on only his own pain. His focus on his own trauma stays with him until his young adulthood, when he considers shooting Chill when he’s about to be released early in exchange for testifying against crime boss Carmine Falcone (Tom Wilkinson). A woman hired by Falcone shoots Chill instead.

It takes Rachel Dawes, now no longer just a childhood friend of Bruce’s, but a DA, to get him to understand that it’s the mafia of Gotham, with their control of the economy, police, and politicians, that drives the poor to such desperation that people like Chill rob and kill. Up until this point, we’ve been sympathizing with Bruce; now, we finally manage to spare some sympathy for the poor.

What’s not acknowledged in this liberal film is that Bruce Wayne’s family is part of the problem. The rich become that way not through hard work, contrary to popular belief, but through exploitation of the working class. The money the rich get through their profits, surplus value, is just money not paid to their employees. Put another way, the rich get rich through stealing from their overworked, underpaid workers…and it’s all legal.

Though as I said, this reality isn’t acknowledged in the film, that doesn’t mean there are no Freudian slips that occasionally give away the hidden meaning. William Earle (Rutger Hauer), CEO of Wayne Enterprises, tells young Bruce around the time of the funeral of Thomas and Martha Wayne that he’ll be watching over “the empire” until Bruce grows up and can take over. Don’t get me started on how capitalism leads to empire. Read this and this instead.

As a young man, Bruce travels to the Far East to learn about such things as hunger and the drive to commit crimes. Bruce, you’re still a billionaire: you can take a vacation from starvation and desperation any time you like; the scrawny, dirty East Asians all around you cannot.

His hanging out with and helping criminals steal show, in symbolic form, the blurred line between law-abiding capitalists and the criminal businesses of the mafia. Still, when arrested, Bruce insists that he not a “犯人.” In a Bhutan prison, he often has to fight off the local prisoners, who just see in him a rich white man. It doesn’t matter whether or not they know he’s billionaire Bruce Wayne: in the Third World, anyone from the First World is correctly understood to be the 1% of the Earth, regardless of whether they happen to be of the ruling class, the middle class, or even the working class of the richer countries.

The League of Shadows learns not only of Bruce being in East Asia, but also of him fighting off groups of prisoners, so “Henri Ducard” goes to the prison to offer Bruce membership in the League, as well as training, and “a path.” Upon release from the prison, Bruce goes to find Ducard in the mountains.

Bruce learns all he needs to know about engaging groups of fighters and taking them all out. He learns that “training is nothing” and “will is everything.” Ducard also tells Bruce of how, many years back, he lost his “one true love,” something that will be developed in the third film, one of many examples of the ABA structure of the trilogy that I mentioned above.

When Bruce finishes his training and proves himself to be the best pupil of the League of Shadows, he is disappointed to learn that he is expected to practice extrajudicial killings. The liberal in Bruce, something he learned from his father and from Rachel, cannot just execute a man without there first being a trial for him.

Ducard insists that in a world of corrupt bureaucrats, there is no such thing as a fair trial. What we see in the contradiction between Bruce’s liberal point of view and the hard line of the League of Shadows is what essentially amounts to a straw man, if looked at more closely. The hard line is portrayed as cruel, extreme, and unreasonable compared to the liberal position. This becomes especially apparent when Bruce learns that he’s expected to lead the League of Shadows into Gotham City and destroy it, which of course he’ll never do.

When we remember that Gotham, permeated throughout with corruption and crime, represents capitalism, which cannot be reformed or saved, the League of Shadows’ position is not so unreasonable or extremist. Also, the film portrays the group of assassins as mere destroyers, rather than revolutionaries who would rebuild a just society on the ruins of the old, capitalist one. We thus see a narrow Overton Window that misrepresents our options as only capitalism, or nihilist destruction…no room for socialism.

Wayne’s belief that there are some good people in Gotham, as against Ducard’s insistence that there isn’t even one good person there, reminds one of Abraham’s negotiating with God (Genesis 18:20-33) over whether there are any in Sodom and Gomorrah who are worth sparing the destruction of the sinful cities by fire and brimstone. Such a suggestion reinforces the idea that Gotham City is beyond redemption, in spite of Bruce’s protestations. Note in this connection the “immortality” of Ra’s al Ghul (Ducard’s secret identity, as we learn soon enough), which makes him rather Godlike in relation to Bruce-as-Abraham.

Bruce escapes and destroys the home of Ra’s al Ghul, thinking he’s left him for dead, too (though actually killing an Asian decoy played by Ken Watanabe), and saving “Ducard.” Bruce returns to Gotham to take over the helm of Wayne Enterprises, only to learn that William Earle, thinking Bruce is dead, is making the company go public. In this we see how Earle, another cutthroat capitalist, is trying to wrest the power of Wayne Enterprises from the Wayne family.

Bruce discusses with Alfred his plan to save Gotham from the mob by presenting himself as a symbol, wearing a mask to conceal his identity and thus keep safe those he cares about. Since bats have always frightened him, he’ll dress in a Batsuit. By ordering the different parts from various manufacturers in places all over the world, he hopes it will be harder to trace them all to him. Adding to this all of the equipment he’ll get from Lucius Fox (the cape, the utility belt, the Batmobile, etc.) and the cave beneath Wayne Manor, the Batman is born.

Note how the Batmobile has been reimagined to become “the Tumbler,” essentially a kind of tank. This ties in well with what I said above, that Batman is a glorified, privatized, militarized policeman. The police, properly understood, don’t ‘fight crime’ per se, or ‘enforce justice’ so much as they protect the interests of the capitalist class. The recent militarizing of the police, a perfect preparation for any attempts at proletarian revolution, has made them particularly threatening to the common people.

It is in this context that we should understand the Dark Knight, a metaphor expressing the idea of protecting a king, a wealthy, landowning ruler. It should come as no surprise that this Dark Knight should be a billionaire, called “Master Wayne” by his butler. This masked vigilante is privatized law enforcement helping the cops; this combination of private and state law enforcement is symbolic of the combination of free enterprise and state-regulated economies, just the right combination for the convenience of the ruling class: “free market” (i.e., low taxes and minimal social programs, to ensure a maximization of profit at the expense of the poor) when convenient, and government involvement (e.g., state subsidies for corporations) when convenient…the essence of neoliberalism.

Batman’s fighting of the mob, who are just another kind of capitalist (as I’ve argued elsewhere), and his helping the cops to fight the mob, should thus be seen as different factions of the capitalist class competing over who will rule the city. Some represent a more state-regulated version of capitalism (the cops), while others, in their relative or extreme lawlessness, represent the “free market” version, Batman and the mob.

Note how the “free market” representatives can be ‘good’ (Batman) or evil (the mob). The representatives of the state-regulated version of capitalism (the cops) can be horribly corrupt, too, as becomes especially apparent in the second movie.

Now, with the excesses of this kind of world, with the extreme wealthy on one side, as well as the mob and the corrupt cops, and the desperately poor and exploited on the other side, it is inevitable that all of these contradictions and conflicts will lead to massive numbers of cases of mental illness.

Here’s where Dr. Jonathan Crane, the Scarecrow, comes in.

As a psychiatrist with a fear toxin, a hallucinogenic drug, that he uses to induce insanity on anyone deemed a threat or just because it’s convenient to do so, Crane is an example of the corruption in the field of psychiatry that I discussed here. Though he thinks that his collaboration with Ra’s al Ghul, to threaten Gotham with his fear toxin, is meant to hold the city to ransom, it will actually be used by the League of Shadows to make the people of Gotham tear each other apart with fear and madness, thus destroying the city as Ra’s al Ghul intended.

Of course, Batman also uses fear to fight crime, as we see him do to Arnold Flass (played by Mark Boone Junior), a corrupt cop working for Falcone and corrupt Commissioner Loeb. Though in the scene in question, we see Batman intimidating a cop, Batman as privatized cop (even though he insists he doesn’t look like one!) is simply doing what we know regular cops do all the time, those bullies with bullets. And as the ‘good,’ privatized cop going after the corrupt state police, we see another example of the neoliberal agenda in The Dark Knight trilogy.

While Batman is one mask that Bruce wears, another is the act he puts on as Bruce Wayne, billionaire playboy, going about everywhere in public with beautiful women on his arms. But of course, this playboy persona isn’t the “real” Bruce, either, since our hero is far too noble to be chasing skirt in earnest. Besides, he’s still in love with Rachel.

And since Rachel is the love interest of this conservative trilogy, she must also be the damsel in distress…in spite of, or rather because of, her pluck as an assistant DA fighting corruption in Gotham. First, Falcone hires some muscle to kill her, from whom Batman saves her; then, after she’s exposed to Crane’s fear toxin upon her discovery that it is being put into the city’s water supply, Batman has to rush her to the Batcave to give her the antidote Fox has made.

What’s interesting is how interconnected all the actors are in the conspiracy to destroy Gotham City. Ra’s al Ghul and the League of Shadows are at the centre of the conspiracy, but not only is the Scarecrow involved–as mentioned above–with his fear toxin, but also Wayne Enterprises is, through the use of a powerful microwave emitter that will vaporize the liquid toxin so all of the people of Gotham breathe it in and go mad with fear.

Though Bruce doesn’t know about the microwave emitter until the climax of the film, William Earle and other senior staff at Wayne Enterprises surely know about it, some of them–including Earle in all probability, since he fires Fox for asking too many questions about it–also being in on the conspiracy to at least some extent. That these capitalists, along with a corrupt psychiatrist and at least some corrupt cops like Flass, have at least an inkling of the plot to destroy capitalist Gotham is symbolic of how it’s been predicted that capitalism will one day destroy itself through its own contradictions.

Ra’s al Ghul and the League of Shadows, on the other hand, represent a leftist revolutionary movement, though in this bourgeois film, such a political movement can only be portrayed unsympathetically. They’re just destroyers, bent only on tearing down the old, oppressive order. As such, they’re more like nihilists or Trotskyists, since Ra’s al Ghul’s boast that the League of Shadows has existed throughout history, tearing down one decadent city after another, sounds a lot like permanent revolution. There’s never an interest in rebuilding society along socialist lines, such as providing universal free education and healthcare, subsidized housing for all, 100% employment, and a social safety net for the poor. A bourgeois film like this one is content with such omissions.

Wayne Enterprises having the microwave emitter, which can be used to make the Gotham population kill each other through maniacal fear, has its parallel in the third film (recall the trilogy’s ABA structure) with the fusion reactor, ostensibly meant to provide eco-friendly energy, but which can also be converted into a nuclear bomb that Bane will use to destroy Gotham. And Bane is an excommunicated member of the League of Shadows.

Part of the destruction of Gotham as a nerve-centre of capitalism is the burning-down of Wayne Manor by the League of Shadows, an arson even Bruce himself has spoken of wanting to commit. If revolutionaries don’t destroy capitalism, it will destroy itself by its own contradictions. But of course, liberals will fight to keep capitalism alive by attempting to reform it, either by social democrat means or through the libertarian ideal of market fundamentalism. We see this symbolically through the joint efforts of Gordon and Batman defeating Ra’s al Ghul.

…and one day, when Batman retires, Bruce can have a real love life–but with Rachel?

The Dark Knight

Batman Begins ends with Gordon, promoted to lieutenant, warning Batman of the dangers of escalation and giving him the Joker’s card. This anticipates not only the arrival of the Joker, of course, but also the main theme of the second film: escalation.

Normally, we think of the Joker as being just a murdering psychopath, a mad dog chasing tires and foaming at the mouth. Now, unlike the Joker whom Joaquin Phoenix played, Heath Ledger’s Joker has very little backstory to explain how he became a homicidal maniac, apart from his two contradictory stories for how he got his Glasgow smile.

However he got those scars, be it from an abusive father (far more likely than him giving them to himself, in an attempt to appease the woman he loved), they’re an obvious sign of trauma that, among other things presumably, drove him to a life of crime. Bourgeois ideology have very little interest in exploring the real roots of crime in class conflict; hence, we get very little, if any, backstory on the Joker, as we do in the 2019 film.

What we do know of this Joker, though, is surprising. Consider who he attacks throughout the movie. We see him and his gang of wearers of clown masks rob a bank…run by the mob. He kills cops and imitators of Batman, who as I’ve said above is a glorified cop himself. We’ve never sympathized with the mafia, and sympathy for the cops has recently–at best–been dwindling. By the end of the film, the mayhem he’s caused results in the bulk of Gotham’s criminals behind bars, aided by the myth of Harvey Dent’s heroism. Is the Joker the secret hero of this film?

Now, the Joker isn’t an anarchist in the strict sense of the term. We don’t see him set up the anarchist, i.e., stateless, version of socialism because, as I said about Ra’s al Ghul and the League of Shadows, the bourgeois liberal ideology of these films insists on an Overton Window narrow enough to exclude even the contemplation of socialist possibilities. This is because ‘There Is No Alternative to capitalism,’ apparently.

The Joker does, however, personify the anarchist solution to the problem of capitalism, if only in a stereotyped form. He speaks of the only sensible way to live being one without rules, and that he’s an “agent of chaos.” Now, such ideas are not truly anarchist, of course, but they are stereotypically associated with anarchism (meaning “no rulers,” not “no rules,” actually), and this film’s bourgeois agenda would have you continue to believe the misleading conception of anarchism, in the hopes that you’ll never consider such a radical solution to society’s ills. His saying to scarred Harvey, “Introduce a little anarchy, upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos,” is meant to reinforce the stereotyped association of chaos with anarchy.

At the same time, who does the Joker kill, for the most part? Cops, mafia men and their bosses (criminal capitalists, remember), lawyers, judges, anyone in a position of power and authority. No rulers, in effect. Yet as with the League of Shadows, there’s no rebuilding of society, because the bourgeoisie cannot allow the people to see a newer, better world.

The Scarecrow makes a brief appearance, having sold his fear toxin as a supposed narcotic. A mobster known as the Chechen (played by Ritchie Coster), who works for Sal Maroni (Eric Roberts), is upset that the fear toxin’s ‘bad trip’ won’t produce “repeat customers.” In this scene, we see an example of how the mob are just another kind of capitalist. The Scarecrow doesn’t care about money, though: he, being a psychopath, just wants to spread fear into the world, his toxin being symbolically a projection of his own fears and traumas brought on by his having been bullied and abused as a child.

In all of the imitators of Batman, we see people admiring the notion of Batman as the ‘Great Man,’ another myth the ruling class has always used to justify its existence. The faux-Batmen can never measure up to the real Dark Knight, of course, because they wear “hockey pants” instead of the proper armoured Batsuit. In other words, these ordinary men lack the money to pay for a proper Batsuit, which Bruce can even afford to replace with one that will let him turn his head more comfortably.

The new district attorney, Harvey Dent, represents the lawful way of defeating the mob, and therefore Bruce has high hopes that Dent will make Batman no longer necessary. Then, he imagines, he can be with Rachel…only she’s been seeing Harvey.

In the shift from Batman being Gotham’s hero to Harvey being that hero, that is, from lawless protector to lawful protector, we see how capitalism can shift from a deregulated to a regulated system, depending on the social, economic, and political conditions of the time. Yet even at this early point in the movie, those corrupt cops Harvey has been monitoring have already been calling him “Two-Face.” This unflattering nickname suggests the dual nature of the capitalist system: regulated at one time, when convenient, and non-regulated at another time, when convenient.

It’s an economic system of multiple faces, with a liberal smile, a libertarian sneer, and a fascist scowl.

Since the Joker has been stealing the mob’s money, and Batman has been giving them a hard time, Sal Maroni, Gambol (played by Michael Jai White), and the other mafia men have had to meet in secret places. Lau (played by Chin Han), a mafia banker from Hong Kong, has moved all their money to keep it safe where he is.

The Joker barges in on their meeting, laughing at Lau’s feeble promise of protection, knowing that even though the Chinese would never extradite Lau, Batman has no jurisdiction: he will bring Lau back to Gotham, make him squeal, and get the cops all over the mob, which, of course, the Batman does.

Batman catches Lau in Hong Kong, making him beg Batman to let go of him and promising to give him anything he wants. This is the first time we’ve known Batman to go outside of Gotham to catch a criminal; note that Hong Kong can be seen as a capitalist Gotham in its own right. In this scene, we see again how Batman, in his lawless fighting of crime and defying China’s forbidding of the extradition of any of its citizens, represents the deregulated, privatized form of policing. His apprehending of Lau, a mafia capitalist, is also an example of how these three films aren’t so much about good vs evil as they are about competing forms of capitalism.

As a result of Lau’s squealing, Harvey, Rachel, and the police are able to arrest a whole slew of the mob; only high-ranking members like Maroni and the Chechen have the money to make bail. In this great success of Harvey’s, Bruce sees a real hope that he can hang up his cowl soon, and then be with Rachel. He hosts a fundraising party for Harvey in his new home (while Wayne Manor is being rebuilt), repeating the slogan, “I believe in Harvey Dent.”

Bruce’s entrance to his party, from a helicopter, wearing a nice suit, and with not one, not two, but three beautiful women (Russian ballerinas, I assume) on his arms, deserves comment. I’m sure I’m far from being the only man who was awed by this amazing entrance of Bruce’s, back when the film came out in theatres. A similar feeling comes when one sees the home, cars, suits, and technology of Tony Stark in the Marvel movies: the effect is to engender more simping for billionaires among young men, who fantasize about attaining such wealth themselves one day.

Now, hitting the mob as hard as Batman, Dent, and Gordon have done is not going to pass without any retaliation. Here is where the escalations begin. Maroni, the Chechen, et al decide to hire the Joker to go after Batman. By saying he’ll kill people for every day that Batman doesn’t reveal his true identity (something Batman will never do, of course), the Joker is making Batman into a scapegoat for all of these deaths. Once again, we see a blurred line separating the ‘good’ from the bad.

Commissioner Loeb’s liquor is poisoned, a judge is killed by a car bomb, the Joker crashes Bruce’s fundraiser, looking for Dent and dropping Rachel from a window, forcing Batman to rescue the damsel in distress again. Disguised as a policeman, the Joker makes an attempt on the life of Gotham mayor Anthony Garcia (played by Néstor Carbonell), for whom Gordon takes a bullet, seeming to kill him and causing his grieving wife to blame Batman.

To stop the violence, Bruce is ready to reveal himself as Batman and turn himself in to the cops, who are portrayed very sympathetically in this conservative film. But Harvey claims to be Batman, and Bruce lets him do it. Just before doing so, Harvey tries to reassure the frightened public that “the night is darkest just before the dawn,” implying that the film’s title is a pun on The Dark Night, a reflection of how bad the escalations are getting.

Of course, Harvey, as a reflection of how the law ‘should’ be enforced, as someone so ‘incorruptible,’ and as someone taking the fall for Bruce, is Gotham’s White Knight…but if you’re familiar with my ouroboros symbolism, you’ll know how quickly and easily the whitest of innocence can fall to the darkest of evil. “You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.”

After the exciting car chase scene, in which the Joker fires a bazooka at the armoured police vehicle carrying Harvey, and when Batman’s Tumbler takes the hit, totaling his armoured vehicle and making Batman convert the remains into his Batcycle, or “Batpod,” the Joker is apprehended, and we learn that Gordon never died…he’s soon to be promoted to commissioner by the mayor, too.

The pressure is being put on both Harvey and Batman when they realize that Rachel is being targeted by the Joker. They are increasingly being tempted to sidestep the rule of law to stop the bad guys, putting themselves in danger of becoming bad guys themselves. And when law enforcement, whether in its privatized or state forms, protects the capitalist system as illegally as the mob practices capitalism, we know that Gotham’s ‘good guys’ are no better than its bad guys.

When Harvey, pointing a gun at the Joker’s paranoid schizophrenic henchman Thomas Schiff (played by David Dastmalchian), is flipping a coin with two good sides, we know he’s showing his potential for evil already. He’s already Harvey Two-Face. When Batman, as the “bad cop,” is beating the crap out of the Joker, and Gordon as the “good cop” assures the other cops watching the beating that it’s “in control,” we see again how the police’s defence of private property is nowhere near as justified as it would seem to be. Such a lack of justification is all the more apparent when we see Batman, the privatized form of ‘law enforcement,’ is also willing to bend the law by using a cellphone surveillance system to monitor all of Gotham, violating citizens’ privacy, in order to catch the Joker.

The Joker’s method is a form of accelerationism. He pushes the law enforcers to their limit to get them to show their repressed, ugly sides. Killing Rachel and burning half of Harvey’s face, as well as burning one side of his coin, has turned him from a liberal defender of the class system to one comparable to a violent fascist. The Joker tries to do the same with Gotham’s citizens, with the threats to blow up hospitals if Wayne Enterprises employee Coleman Reese (played by Joshua Harto) isn’t killed for trying to reveal Batman’s identity, and with the threat to blow up the two boats (with the “sweet innocent civilians” on one, and Gotham’s “scumbag” convicts in the other), but without the same success.

When the Joker, disguised as a nurse in Gotham General Hospital, tells Harvey that no one gets upset if a truck of soldiers gets blown up, a theory was formed that the Joker could be an Iraq War veteran, his trauma from that causing his psychopathy. When people from the bottom part of society are killed, like troops or a “gangbanger,” who cares? But if someone from the top, like a mayor, is killed, “then everyone loses their minds,” because such upper echelon deaths are not “part of the plan.”

The Joker, as an ‘anarchist’ of sorts, is trying to prove the point that no one group of people is inherently better than another. We’re all beasts, underneath it all…but more importantly, no one has the right to exercise authority over another; so if those in authority can decide who dies and who doesn’t, so can people like the Joker. The film portrays his attitude as being merely loving of destruction for its own sake, as with the League of Shadows: “Some men just want to watch the world burn.” This is how the bourgeoisie wants us to understand socialists’ aims to be.

Though Harvey himself–overwhelmed with how deep the corruption is among the Gotham police, how the Joker and the mob can so easily pay off cops like Wuertz (played by Ron Dean) and Ramirez (played by Monique Gabriela Curnen) to have Rachel killed–betrays the very justice system he condemns these cops for betraying, Gordon and Batman know they can’t let the public know of Harvey’s crimes, including the killing of cops. All of those Harvey has had incarcerated would go free, and Gotham would no longer have any hope in eradicating crime.

The lie of the efficacy of conventional law enforcement must be maintained in this lie.

This lie must be maintained in Gotham City because it must be maintained everywhere that the capitalist system is upheld. If not, we’ll have either socialism, or barbarism.

…and we all know that socialism cannot even be considered.

So Batman has to be a kind of Christ-figure and take the fall for something he didn’t do: kill all those Harvey killed. Gordon reluctantly calls it in, to have his cops chase Batman for the killings, as well as for the threat Harvey made to his wife, himself, and his little boy.

Everybody knows that the police all too frequently use excessive force, engage in police brutality, and kill needlessly (often blacks, often with impunity). Such is the two-faced nature of law enforcement and the protection of private property. In his attempt to tear the whole system down, to remove all systems of authority–which, one might hope, would be replaced with a socialist system that produces commodities for the general need, instead of for profit–the Joker, in trying to make Gotham “[his] city,” was trying to save it.

The Joker is not interested in having huge sums of money, comparable to the way an anarcho-communist wants a society without money, so he burns it. Batman “completes” him in a dialectical sense: the Joker imagines he’ll be fighting Batman forever, an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object, in an eternal contradiction between, on the one hand, the capitalist use of state (or privatized) authority for the sake of the protection of private property, and on the other hand, the revolutionary aim of destroying those very capitalist forms of authority.

But instead of saving Gotham in the accelerationist way the Joker initially intended, the corrupt police system has remained intact; still, at least all the major criminals are behind bars. So as far as the Joker being the real hero of the second film is concerned, some might say, what he has ended up achieving is close enough.

The Dark Knight Rises

Though the streets of Gotham are generally clean, our protagonists are scarred right down to the bone. Gordon is racked with guilt over years of never telling the truth about Harvey Dent, and how he threatened the lives of the Gordon family, causing his wife to take their son and leave him. Bruce, with an injured leg, is still mourning the loss of Rachel, and has become something of a recluse.

As I mentioned above, though the Joker is never, not even once, mentioned in this third film, the effect of what he did in the second is still felt, throughout this one. Also, as I said before, this film’s themes and subject matter return us to those of the first film…fear in particular.

Bruce was mourning his parents in the first film, grieving for years afterwards; now, he’s mourning Rachel, wounded by her loss for years. His emotional wounds are symbolized by that bad leg of his. As at the beginning of the first film, at the beginning of this one, there is no Batman. Batman began in the first movie; the Dark Knight must rise in this one.

Another motif in this film, a new one, is hell. Bane and his men, the villains according to the trilogy’s bourgeois ideology, work and plot in the underground of Gotham. After Bane beats Batman in their first fight, incapacitated Bruce is put in an underground prison somewhere in the Middle East, a hell in which all hope is to be abandoned precisely because the tantalizing hope of climbing up and escaping is frustrated by its near-impossibility.

Despair is dialectically strengthened by this perpetually frustrated hope. Finally, there’s one obvious underground hell to outdo all hells: the Batcave, the headquarters of our privatized, militarized policeman who defeats the mob (hope), but keeps alive the very capitalist system that spawns more mafia (despair).

Selina Kyle is an interesting case of the dialectical opposition between seeming to be one kind of person vs actually being a completely different kind. At first, she seems timid and submissive, then revealing herself to be sly and a formidable fighter. As a cat burglar trying to find a way to wipe out her criminal record, she’s a villain going so far as to steal Bruce’s fingerprints to bankrupt him and help Bane in his revolution; yet she also turns heroine, helping Batman in the end and even killing Bane with the guns of the Batpod.

For these reasons, she is yet another example of the moral ambiguity of this trilogy. That moral ambiguity, of course, goes both ways: the one in accordance with bourgeois values, as described in the previous paragraph, and the one in accordance with the Marxist values I’ve been trying to argue for here. As I said above, billionaires shouldn’t exist; and though her saving of Batman is in aid of capitalism, her earlier helping of Bane is the helping of a revolution that needs to be properly interpreted. Recall what she whispers in Bruce’s ear: “There’s a storm coming, Mr. Wayne. You and your friends better batten down the hatches, because when it hits, you’re all gonna wonder how you ever thought you could live so large and leave so little for the rest of us.”

Bane’s agenda, being a return to that of Ra’s al Ghul and the League of Shadows, is the destruction of Gotham, a city regarded as far too corrupt to save…and as a symbol of capitalism, I’d have to agree that it can’t be saved. Still, as with the previous two films, the revolution ends in mere destruction: we don’t see any socialist rebuilding of society because the trilogy’s bourgeois ideology won’t have it.

What sets Bane’s revolution apart from those of Joker and Ra’s al Ghul is that Bane doesn’t just destroy Gotham immediately after beating Batman and putting Bruce in the underground prison in the Middle East: he takes over the city and protects his revolution with his men and their use of such weaponry as Tumblers from Wayne Enterprises. Such a protection of his revolution, through military force, suggests the Marxist-Leninist notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which in this bourgeois film is inevitably portrayed as a kind of death cult.

The use of the Wayne Enterprises weaponry, the blowing-up of all but one bridge connecting Gotham City to the outside world, and the relatively brief time that Bane’s men control the city, implies that Bane’s revolution, if understood as a kind of leftist one, is comparable to the short-lived Paris Commune, where cannons were kept to protect the working-class revolution.

The conversion of the fusion reactor core into a decaying neutron bomb seems meant to remind us of the fears the West has had of nuclear weapons programs in the USSR, Mao’s China, and the DPRK. Of course, so many of us in the West conveniently forget which government created the original nuclear weapons program and used it the one and only time to kill people.

If Bane’s revolutionary government and kangaroo courts seem terrifying and oppressive to you, Dear Reader, recall that, apart from the films’ propagandistic, denigrating portrayal of such revolutionary change as I’ve explained above, the Dent Act, incarcerating people based on the lie and, indeed, cult of personality surrounding Harvey, is hardly innocent, democratic, or respectful of the rule of law. Bourgeois government is predicated on force and violence every bit as much as, if not more than, proletarian government. In The State and Revolution, Lenin explained how any state, whether capitalist or socialist, is used by the dominant class to rule over the dominated class. In socialist governments, the workers rule over the capitalists; in bourgeois governments (the vast majority of governments around the world), it’s the other way around. Either way, someone is stepped on; why not have the common majority control the rich minority for a change?

Gotham Mayor Garcia has refused to repeal the Dent Act, in typical bourgeois state fashion. Gordon, for all his ‘goodness,’ hasn’t grown the courage to admit that the circumstances surrounding Dent’s death were depicted dishonestly. The rich of Gotham, the real thieves of the poor there, continue to live in luxury without ever being held accountable.

One such example of such a vampiric capitalist crook is John Daggett (played by Ben Mendelsohn), who hopes Bane will help him absorb Wayne Enterprises, and arrogantly thinks his wealth gives him the right to boss others around…fatefully, even Bane. It’s easy to feel no sympathy for him when Bane kills him, but Bruce, Gordon, Garcia, et al are in principal no better…except in how they lack Daggett’s obnoxious attitude. A capitalist nonetheless is still a capitalist, and a protector of such vampires is still a protector of them, whether polite or rude. The same applies when comparing the vices of Trump with those of Biden, Obama, Gates, etc.

Officer John Blake, being a Robin-esque cop, blurs the line between state and privatized police in a manner comparable to Batman, but as an orphan, he reminds Bruce of his social duty as a “billionaire orphan” not to forget the orphans he used to give charity to. In the end, he gives Wayne Manor to those orphans who have grown too old to stay in orphanages. Such charity is as far as liberals will allow, when the best solution to the problem of the homeless, orphan or non-orphan, is to provide housing for all, as such examples of the dictatorship of the proletariat in Cuba do.

Blake, becoming fed up with the shackles of state law enforcement by the end of the movie, will give up on being a cop. He’ll discover the Batcave at the very end, and we are to assume that he will take up the mantle of Batman once Bruce has left Gotham and retired his role as the Dark Knight…or perhaps ‘Robin’ will become Nightwing. In any case, his switch from state cop to privatized cop once again reflects the trilogy’s implied neoliberal agenda.

While The Dark Knight Rises is generally a well-made film, it is also riddled with plot holes, these mostly being based on how incapacitated Bruce becomes by the middle of the story. One must assume that the strapping-up of his bad leg is left intact by Bane’s men when he is taken to the underground prison; otherwise, that near impossible leap he makes to escape the prison just becomes all the nearer to impossible.

Also, though his cellmate fixes the vertebra in his back, surely it continues to hurt like the hell he’s trapped in, right up to his leap to freedom, again, making the leap all that harder to do, as well as making it harder for him to fight Bane again…let alone defeat him. And how was Bruce, without his money, a passport, or any of his Batman equipment, able to get back to Gotham without being detected by Bane’s men?

Apart from filling in these gargantuan plot holes with an added, impractical story arc that would have lengthened an already long film by at least another thirty minutes (Bruce presumably contacting a rich, influential friend in the Middle East, someone to lend him some money, help him get a new passport to get him back to the US, etc.), seeing him back in Gotham, with all of his miraculous return’s willing suspension of disbelief, reinforces the ruling class’s myth of the “Great Man,” able to overcome impossible odds by “the most powerful impulse of the spirit.”

The ability or inability of escaping the prison is to be understood dialectically. The only ones who have ever escaped–young Talia al Ghul, as we eventually learn, and Bruce–did so without the aid of a rope, which makes them have to look fear right in the face. Having the security of the rope, however, ensures failure.

One surprising plot element of this third film, which is a kind of return to an element of the first film, yet in the form of its dialectical opposite, is Alfred’s commitment to helping Bruce, through thick or thin. In Batman Begins, Alfred twice says he’ll “never” give up on Bruce. Yet in The Dark Knight Rises, in the hopes of getting Bruce to give up on trying to revive Batman and to save his life from almost assuredly being killed by Bane, Alfred does give up on Bruce! He quits!

This giving up, this quitting, is related to despair, another major theme of this third film, related to the hell motif described above (recall how Bruce, having been taken to the Middle East prison, that underground hell, wishes in his despair that Bane would kill him). The wish to destroy Gotham, as opposed to the wish to reform the city and purge it of its mafia element, is also related to despair. No inkling of an intent to rebuild Gotham along, say, socialist lines is even to be considered, of course. It is either to be a reformed capitalism, or it must be “ashes.”

Note how Gotham as a symbol of capitalism is expanded to one of American patriotism with the little boy singing The Star-Spangled Banner. The football fans, deeply moved by his “lovely, lovely voice” (which even Bane acknowledges as such), give the boy enthusiastic applause. Shortly afterwards, Bane blows up most of the football field; since his revolution is, as I described above, akin to the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, these detonations are symbolic of an anti-imperialist act, tearing American hegemony and hubris down to size.

The entirety of the Gotham police are, around the time of these detonations, trapped in the underground hell of the city. When Batman frees them, they can do battle with Bane’s army, who, far better armed, threaten the cops with violence if they don’t back off…in a manner we expect of riot police. Such an understanding exposes this presentation of belligerents as a form of projection: those cops were trapped in an underground hell because they are like John Milton‘s fallen angels turned demons. Still, we sympathize with them, not those who threaten them on the street the same way riot police would threaten protestors.

If we are to think of the Gotham kangaroo courts as being unfairly denigrated as such due to the trilogy’s biased bourgeois ideology…that is, if we should really condone the people’s condemnation of the rich, and those who work for the rich, like Philip Stryver (played by Burn Gorman), for “living off the blood and sweat of people less powerful,” then does this suddenly make Dr. Crane, the judge of these courts, a good man, in my estimation? No…as a psychopath no less corrupt than the other bad ones of Gotham, Crane is a mere opportunist in the new order, taking advantage of the vicissitudes of the time, and avoiding punishment with all the other guilty Gothamites. Having him as judge, though, for the purposes of the film’s bourgeois agenda, only reinforces the notion of the cruelty of these courts.

As far as the chanting, in 5/4 time, of “Deshi Basara” (“Rise!”) is concerned, the sympathetic, galvanizing character of the music, first heard when we see Bane’s men take over and crash the plane with the CIA men in Uzbekistan, is a case of a Freudian slip in this otherwise bourgeois film. The cruelties of the CIA over the years are so many that one should find it hard to sympathize with their agents, so seeing Bane bash the face in of one of them, while “Deshi Basara” is playing, should be quite gratifying to watch.

Conclusion

Nolan flatly denies that there’s any political message in his Batman trilogy, but the political elements, regardless of whether you assess them my way, the opposite way, or any other way, are so obvious that they scream out at you. The only way Nolan’s denials could have any honesty in them (apart from being a deflection of leftist criticisms, he presumably just wants to prevent any limits to the films’ interpretations) is that neoliberalism as an ideology has so smothered all of political and cultural life over the past several decades that many of us simply haven’t noticed it as such. (Of course, to be fair to Nolan, capitalism as a standard economic way of doing things was already so entrenched in the comic and previous TV shows, cartoons, and movies, that Nolan had only this to work with in his adaptation.)

The bourgeois liberal way of doing things is so ‘standard,’ such a default position, that the average moviegoer sees the resolution of the trilogy as satisfying. Though Bruce most charitably has given Wayne Manor to the orphans and given his estate to Alfred, he must still have plenty of money for himself (the fraudulent circumstances of his bankruptcy having been exposed), for how else could he and Selina have gone to Florence, where they see Alfred at a restaurant? Since Blake has found the Batcave (with the help of a package from Bruce), he is obviously to be the next Batman, anticipating future crime in Gotham, crime of a magnitude requiring another superhero crimefighter…or, as I would call him, another glorified, militarized cop.

All of these things mean that the class structure of Gotham City has remained intact, with a few rich at the top and a multitude of poor people at the bottom. New mafia will rise up to replace Falcone and Maroni; they will exploit the poor, driving them to desperation and more crime. Blake with have to deal with this problem, as well as any new ‘supervillains’ bent on destroying Gotham, since such a capitalist city needs to be destroyed. The trilogy ends with these contradictions only seeming to be resolved, to a ‘reasonable’ extent, at least.

Getting rid of a few billionaires (Bruce and, I assume, some of the exiled Gothamites who fell through the ice and drowned), while providing Bruce’s home to some orphans, may seem to liberals to be a generous sacrifice, but such concessions are far from enough to solve the problems of extreme class conflict. Furthermore, portraying the revolutionary but real solutions to these problems as cruel and extremist only further ensures that no real solution will even be tried, because such a solution will be deemed unthinkable.

There may be sunny skies at the end of the third movie, but a dark night will rise on Gotham again, and soon, a night that may never end in a dawn, as many of us fear the 2020s are such a night.