Will Christopher Nolan mit seinem neuen Film Batman – »The Dark Knight Rises« die »Occupy«- Bewegung diskreditieren? Anmerkungen zu der verstörenden Vision einer Stadt, in der die 99 Prozent die Macht übernehmen – und ein Blick hinter die Kulissen der Nolan-Trilogie.
The Dark Knight Rises attests yet again to how Hollywood blockbusters are precise indicators of the ideological predicament of our societies. Here is a (simplified) storyline. Eight years after the events of The Dark Knight, the previous instalment of the Batman saga, law and order prevail in Gotham City: under the extraordinary powers granted by the Dent Act, Commissioner Gordon has nearly eradicated violent and organized crime.
He nonetheless feels guilty about the cover-up of Harvey Dent's crimes (Dent tried to kill Gordon's son, Batman saved him, Dent fell to his death, and Batman took the fall for the Dent myth, allowing himself to be demonized as Gotham's villain) and plans to admit to the conspiracy at a public event celebrating Dent, but decides that the city is not ready to hear the truth.
No longer active as Batman, Bruce Wayne lives isolated while his company is crumbling after investing in a project to harness fusion power, but shut it down after learning that it could be modified to become a nuclear weapon.
Here the (first) villain of the film enters: Bane, a terrorist leader who was a member of the League of Shadows. Learning that Bane also got hold of his fusion core, Wayne returns as Batman and confronts Bane, who says that he took over the League of Shadows after Ra's al Ghul's death. Crippling Batman in close combat, Bane detains him in a prison from which escape is virtually impossible. While the imprisoned Wayne recovers from his injuries and retrains himself to be Batman, Bane succeeds in turning Gotham City into an isolated city-state.
He first traps most of Gotham's police force underground; then he sets off explosions which destroy most of the bridges connecting Gotham City to the mainland, announcing that any attempt to leave the city will result in the detonation of the fusion core, which has been converted into a bomb.
The ultimate Wall Street Occupier. Here we reach the crucial moment of the film: Bane's takeover is accompanied by a vast politico-ideological offensive. Bane publicly reveals the cover-up of Dent's death and releases the prisoners locked up under the Dent Act. Condemning the rich and powerful, he promises to restore the power of the people, calling on the common people to „take your city back“ – Bane reveals himself to be the ultimate Wall Street Occupier, calling on the 99 percent to band together and overthrow societal elites. What follows is the film's idea of people's power: summary show trials and executions of the rich, streets littered with crime and villainy.
A couple of months later, while Gotham City continues to suffer popular terror, Wayne successfully escapes prison, returns to Gotham as Batman and enlists his friends to help liberate the city and stop the fusion bomb before it explodes. Batman confronts and subdues Bane. Using a special helicopter, Batman hauls the bomb beyond the city limits, where it detonates over the ocean and presumably kills him.
Batman is now celebrated as a hero whose sacrifice saved Gotham City, while Wayne is believed to have died in the riots. As his estate is divided up, Alfred, Wayne's faithful butler, witnesses Bruce alive in a café, while a young honest policeman who knew about Batman's identity, inherits the Batcave. In short, Batman saves the day, emerges unscathed and moves on with a normal life, with someone else to replace his role defending the system.
The first clue to the ideological underpinnings of this ending is provided by Alfred, who, at Wayne's (would-be) burial, reads the last lines from Dickens's Tale of Two Cities: „It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.“ Some reviewers of the film took this quote as an indication that it „rises to the noblest level of Western art. The film appeals to the center of America's tradition – the ideal of noble sacrifice for the common people. Batman must humble himself to be exalted, and lay down his life to find a new one. An ultimate Christ-figure, Batman sacrifices himself to save others.“
And, effectively, from this perspective, there is only one step back from Dickens to Christ at Calvary: „For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it. For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?“ (Matthew 16:25 26) Batman's sacrifice as the repetition of Christ's death? Is this idea not compromised by the film's last scene, Wayne in a café? Is the religious counterpart of this ending not rather the well-known blasphemous idea that Christ really survived his crucifixion and lived a long peaceful life? The only way to redeem this final scene would have been to read it as a daydream of Alfred.
The further Dickensian feature of the film is a de-politicized complaint about the gap between the rich and the poor – early in the film, a female figure whispers to Wayne: „A storm is coming, Mr. Wayne. You and your friends better batten down the hatches. Because when it hits, you're all going to wonder how you thought you could live so large, and leave so little for the rest of us.“ Nolan, as every good liberal, is „worried“ about this disparity and he admits this worry penetrates the film.
Although viewers know Wayne is mega-rich, they tend to forget where his wealth comes from: arms manufacturing and stock-market speculations. This is the true secret beneath the Batman mask. How does the film deal with it? By resuscitating the archetypal Dickensian topic of a good capitalist who engages in financing orphanage homes (Wayne) versus a bad greedy capitalist. In such Dickensian over-moralization, the economic disparity is translated into „dishonesty“ which should be „honestly“ analyzed, although we lack any reliable cognitive mapping, and such an „honest“ approach leads to a further parallel with Dickens – as Christopher Nolan's brother Jonathan (who co-wrote the scenario) put it bluntly: „Tale of Two Cities to me was the most sort of harrowing portrait of a relatable recognizable civilization that had completely fallen to pieces. The terrors in Paris, in France in that period, it's not hard to imagine that things could go that bad and wrong.“
The scenes of the vengeful populist uprising in the film (a mob that thirsts for the blood of the rich) evoke Dickens' description of the Reign of Terror, so that, although the film has nothing to do with politics, it follows Dickens' novel in portraying revolutionaries as possessed fanatics, and thus provides „the caricature“ of what in real life would be an ideologically committed revolutionary fighting structural injustice. Hollywood tells what the establishments want you to know – revolutionaries are brutal creatures, with utter disregard for human life. Despite emancipatory rhetoric on liberation, they have sinister designs. Thus, whatever might be their reasons, they need to be eliminated.
A hero in a liberal order. Tom Charity was right to note „the movie's defense of the establishment in the form of philanthropic billionaires and an incorruptible police“ – in its distrust of the people taking things into their own hands, the film „demonstrates both a desire for social justice and a fear of what that can actually look like in the hands of a mob.“ This raises a perspicuous question with regard to immense popularity of the Joker figure from the previous film: why such a harsh disposition towards Bane when the Joker was dealt with lenience in the earlier movie?
The answer is simple and convincing: The Joker, calling for anarchy in its purest form, critically underscores the hypocrisies of bourgeois civilization as it exists, but his views cannot be translated into mass action. Bane, on the other hand, poses an existential threat to the system of oppression. His strength is not just his physique, but also his ability to command people and mobilize them to achieve a political goal. He represents the organized representative of the oppressed that wages political struggle in their name to bring about structural changes. Such a force, with the greatest subversive potential, the system cannot accommodate. It needs to be eliminated.
Back to Nolan, the triad of Batman-films follows an immanent logic. In Batman Begins, the hero remains within the constraints of a liberal order: the system can be defended with morally acceptable methods. The Dark Knight is effectively a new version of the two John Ford western classics (Fort Apache and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance) which deploy how, in order to civilize the Wild West, one has to „print the legend“ and ignore the truth – in short, how our civilization has to be grounded onto a lie: one has to break the rules in order to defend the system. Or, to put it in another way, in Batman Begins, the hero is simply a classic figure of the urban vigilante who punishes the criminals where police cannot do it.
The problem is that police, the official law-enforcement agency, relates ambiguously to Batman's help: while admitting its efficiency, it nonetheless perceives Batman as a threat to its monopoly on power and a testimony of its own inefficiency. However, Batman's transgression is here purely formal, it resides in acting on behalf of the law without being legitimized to do it: in his acts, he never violates the law.
The Dark Knight changes these coordinates: Batman's true rival is not Joker, his opponent, Harvey Dent, the „white knight“, the aggressive new district attorney, a kind of official vigilante whose fanatical battle against crime leads him into killing innocent people and destroys him. It is as if Dent is the reply of the legal order to Batman's threat: the system generates its own illegal excess, its own vigilante, much more violent than Batman, directly violating the law.
There is thus a poetic justice in the fact that, when Bruce plans to publicly reveal his identity as Batman, Dent jumps in and instead names himself as Batman – he is „more Batman than Batman himself“, actualizing the temptation Batman was still able to resist. So when, at the film's end, Batman takes upon himself the crimes committed by Dent to save the reputation of the popular hero who embodies hope for ordinary people, his self-effacing act contains a grain of truth: Batman in a way returns the favor to Dent. His act is a gesture of symbolic exchange: first Dent takes upon himself the identity of Batman, then Wayne – the real Batman – takes upon himself Dent's crimes.
Open class warfare. Finally, The Dark Knight Rises pushes things even further: is Bane not Dent brought to extreme, to its self-negation? Dent who draws the conclusion that the system itself is unjust, so that in order to effectively fight injustice one has to turn directly against the system and destroy it? And, as part of the same move, Dent who loses last inhibitions and is ready to use all murderous brutality to achieve this goal? The rise of such a figure changes the entire constellation: for all participants, Batman included, morality is relativized, becomes a matter of convenience, something determined by circumstances: it's open class warfare, everything is permitted to defend the system when dealing not just with mad gangsters but with popular uprising.
Is, then, this all? Should the film just be flatly rejected by those who are engaged in radical emancipatory struggles? Things are more ambiguous, and one has to read the film the way one has to interpret a Chinese political poem: absences and surprising presences count. Recall the French story about a wife who complains that her husband's best friend is making illicit sexual advances towards her: it takes some time until the surprised friend gets the point – she is inviting him to seduce her.
It is like the Freudian unconscious which knows no negation: what matters is not a negative judgment on something, but the mere fact that this something is mentioned – in The Dark Knight Rises, people's power is here, staged as an Event, in a key step forward from the usual Batman opponents (criminal mega-capitalists, gangsters and terrorists).
Here we get the first clue – the prospect of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) taking power and establishing people's democracy on Manhattan is so patently absurd, so utterly non-realist, that one cannot but raise the question: Why does a Hollywood blockbuster dream about it, why does it evoke this spectre? Why even dream about OWS exploding into a violent takeover? The obvious answer (to smudge OWS with accusations that it harbors a terrorist-totalitarian potential) is not enough to account for the strange attraction exerted by prospect of „people's power“. No wonder the proper functioning of this power remains absent: no details are given about how this power functions, what the mobilized people are doing (Bane tells the people they can do what they want – he is not imposing on them his own order).
This is why external critique of the film („its depiction of the OWS reign is a ridiculous caricature“) is not enough – the critique has to be immanent, it has to locate within the film itself a multitude of signs which point towards the authentic Event. In short, pure ideology isn't possible, Bane's authenticity has to leave trace in the film's texture. This is why the film deserves a close reading: the Event – the „people's republic of Gotham City“, dictatorship of the proletariat on Manhattan – is immanent to the film, it is its absent center.
zum Autor
Slavoj Žižek ist slowenischer Philosoph, Sozialkritiker und Kulturtheoretiker. Er gilt als bedeutender Vertreter des Poststruktura-lismus, bezeichnet sich selbst aber gerne als „altmodischen Marxisten“ oder „radikalen Linken“.
Žižek hat mehr als drei Dutzend Bücher verfasst, die zumeist auch auf Deutsch erschienen sind. Seiner Lust zur Provokation wegen gilt er auch als Enfant terrible der Philosophenszene.
Den vorliegenden Text hat er für die „Presse am Sonntag“ verfasst.
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("Die Presse", Print-Ausgabe, 12.08.2012)