With The Dark Knight Rises, Christopher Nolan ties up the themes that have been running throughout his Batman trilogy. Here’s my take on the world that he’s created.
Spoilers: Make sure you’ve watched the films before reading any further!
You’d think that he’d have an umbrella in his utility belt…
Symbols
One of the main themes running throughout these films is the power of symbols. Batman Begins starts with an idea. How can you become more than just a man in the eyes of your enemies?
After being shamed by Rachel for wanting to take revenge on the man who killed his father, an angry Bruce travels the world on a quest to understand the criminal mind, so that he can learn how to fight them.
Ducard later derides this in his teachings with the League of Shadows, “Your training is nothing. If you make yourself more than just a man, if you devote yourself to an ideal, you become something else entirely.”
Taking his words literally, that’s exactly what Bruce does. Using his chiroptophobia as a starting point, Bruce begins to craft The Batman as a brand of fear that will terrify criminals into submission.
Prime advertising space, endorsed by the Gotham City Police Department.
By the time of The Dark Knight, The Batmantm is making a roaring trade, right up until the Joker comes along and does a better job.
The Joker is much more of a showman; he makes a point of being explicitly seen by the criminals and media alike; knowingly stealing from the mafia, videoing executions, threatening to blow up hospitals etc. He becomes an anarchistic symbol, that to some, holds more fear than Batman’s authoritarian one. As such by the end of the film Gotham turns away from their hero and cast Batman in a villainous light.
As Harvey Dent predicted, “You either die a hero, or live long enough to become a villain.” This is exactly what’s happened when we join The Dark Knight Rises, which is focused largely on legacy and the way the symbol of Batman conveys truth. The Batman brand has become tarnished by compromise, so when Gotham faces it’s largest ever threat, its people don’t know where to turn. The hope is found in the children of the orphanage, their sketches of the bat symbol inspires John Blake, who adapts it into the signalling method for the GCPD resistance when they’re tracking the nuclear bomb.
Tellingly, Batman never uses the signal himself. When he returns from captivity the first thing he does is grant Gordon the opportunity to light the huge flaming bat signal on the bridge. This is Batman ensuring that the people are asking for his help, or at least granting him permission to fight on their behalf. In doing so the people of Gotham rally behind the symbol and start to fight back.
This new Batman, who has risen from the darkness, is for the first time in the series free from the trappings of fear and doubt. He allows himself not only to be seen in daylight, but to put himself forward as the figurehead of the resistance, which is what makes his final sacrifice so stunning.
Truth and Lies
Nolan’s films are completely built on lies and that’s what Bane’s quest is all about in The Dark Knight Rises – to reveal to the people of Gotham the lies on which their city is founded and to make those responsible, accountable for their actions.
From the very start, Bruce creates a lie about who he really is. His “real face is the one that criminals now fear” says Rachel at the end of Batman Begins, but to society Bruce Wayne is simply a member of the billionaire, spelunking, base-jumping crowd.
“What doesn’t kill you only makes you stranger” – The Joker
The Bruce Wayne lie serves a purpose. It is there to protect the ones he loves, but lying if unchecked, can quickly lead to escalation and that’s where the Joker enters the party in The Dark Knight. He pretends that he’s “like a dog chasing cars” when in fact it’s evident that he’s a meticulous planner. Just look at how elaborate his bank heist is at the beginning of the movie. This is how he eventually manages to break Harvey Dent and forces our heroes to create the biggest lie of all…
In The Dark Knight Rises, Gotham is going through its greatest age of prosperity. This is all thanks to the lie that Batman and Commissioner Gordon conceived: Martyring Harvey Dent so that they are able to hold all the members of organised crime in jail, without due process.
But lies come at a cost and it’s a huge one for Bruce and Gordon. Bruce has become a recluse, literally shrouding himself in shadows and cutting himself off from the world. For Gordon, the lie has corrupted Gotham’s one and only good copper and torn his family apart – long suffering Barbara has moved out of town and taken the kids with her.
Bane uses their lie as a lever to try and break the spirit of the people. If those that the citizens of Gotham have trusted to do the right thing end up being just as bad as the rest of them, who else is there to turn to?
“There cannot be true despair without hope.” – Bane
Needless to say, Bane himself is a liar, not only does he convince everyone that he’s in charge of the coup (in any version of Batman, only Talia could succeed the throne from Ra’s), but also granting the world a glimmer of hope, that they have a chance of disarming the bomb.
It’s only in Bruce and Gordon that we see remorse for the lies that they’ve told and it’s only through them that we see a hope for atonement. Bruce says it himself, “Sometimes the truth isn’t good enough, sometimes people deserve more. Sometimes people deserve to have their faith rewarded.” Both men see in John Blake the ideals that they once upheld and together (unknowingly?) the steer him towards a path that will inevitably make him a greater symbol of truth and heroism then either of them could ever be.
(Don’t worry I’m not going to bore you with my theories on how Robin has the greatest hero journey ever… I’ll save that for a later blog!)
A real world Batman
Nolan’s Batman trilogy plays out like a Rorschach test. It holds up its themes to the audience and depending on their point of view, the cinemagoer will read different interpretations. Yes the films could just be played as summer blockbusters but alternatively they could be viewed as real world analogies.
One way of reading The Dark Knight is as a reflection of the world, post 9/11. Building upon the terrorist attack from the League of Shadows in Begins, Batman is accepted by the city as a temporary measure in response to a crisis.
The fear that grips Gotham during the Joker’s campaign allows Batman to push the boundaries of what is morally right. By hijacking the population’s mobile phone network, to track the Joker down, he’s essentially spying on everyone in the city that he’s supposed to be protecting – although of course he rigs it to self-destruct at the end…
Holding a mirror up to society, this could be asking us to look at how compliantly we’ve allowed our own levels of surveillance to be increased, in the treat of terrorism. In the UK alone there is an estimated 4,200,000 CCTV cameras, which is one for every 14 people! This begs the question, how likely is it that these security systems will ever be reduced, now that they are in place?
By the time we get to The Dark Knight Rises, terrorism has taken a new tack and has focused on social inequality. Bruce Wayne is of course a one percenter – his super power is being mind-blowingly wealthy.
“You’ll wonder how you could live so large and leave so little for the rest of us.” – Selina Kyle
This economic subtext is laced throughout the film. Bruce is surprised when Miranda Tate admits she wasn’t born into wealth and he is so caught up in his own grief that Wayne Enterprises isn’t even helping out the orphans anymore – will nobody think of the children!?
It should also be noted that Bane’s first attack on Gotham is at the stock exchange. Interestingly, the startled personnel almost scoff at the fact that he’d be stupid enough to expect there to be actual money in the building.
I think this perfectly sums up the message that Nolan is trying to represent here. In all our time worrying about the threat of attacks and bombs etc. nobody ever considered that thing that would almost bring the western world to its knees would be our own capitalist system, namely greed.
Selina Kyle has the most explicit voice of the 99 percent. Her rhetoric throughout the film is about the injustice of capitalism, but she is also the first to be horrified by Bane’s revolution and the chaos that follows. It’s an interesting counter, as what would happen if we abandoned capitalism altogether? There isn’t another system that has been proven to work more successfully, so instead is it that we need to install more checks and measures to prevent those in power from becoming corrupt?
Interestingly it could be interpreted that Nolan is trying to say that no institution or individual should be seen as civilisation’s saviour. Perhaps it’s our belief in one another, coupled with the hope of a better tomorrow which will keep humanity together?
When it comes to the themes and motifs entwined in this excellent trilogy, I’m convinced my musings here are just the tip of the iceberg, but that’s not the point. The most important thing to note is the heroic effort these films have made to prove to a wider audience that comic book movies can offer intelligence and hope, without being patronising or weighed down with too much allegory.
After all, as Batman’s final words to Gordon will attest, “Anyone can be a hero. Even a man doing something as simple and reassuring as putting a coat around a little boy’s shoulder to let him know that the world hadn’t ended.”
Dan Archibald 