The Incredibly Fucked Up Classism of The Dark Knight Rises

I saw The Dark Knight Rises last night (and stayed up far, far beyond my bedtime, so if this is muddled I'm going to blame mild sleep deprivation and not my own flawed analytic skills, mmk?) and good God, someone has the most fucked-up sense of class consciousness ever.

Honestly, that was the over-arching thought in my mind as I left the theater. I initially assigned this incredibly convoluted, nonsensical world view to Christopher Nolan, and I still think that it's largely him, but he is working with characters and stories written by other people, so it might not be entirely his fault that nothing makes a whole lot of sense.

There's a fascinating little vignette near the end of the film as lightly (nightsticks, the occasional handgun) armed cops that have been being held underground for months escape and march through the streets to confront legions of heavily (automatic rifles and machine guns) armed revolutionaries that have all the power. The sense of existential vertigo is startling and almost nausea-inducing if you've been paying attention to the news. Who has power? Who should have power? How do you take power and keep it without becoming the thing you took it from? The symbolism is both stark and gradient.

This movie is both cartoonishly comic and simplistic, and simultaneously jumping on the trend of heroes as anti-heroes, or at least complex beings living in unbearable tension. Character sketches of the four main characters, with particular emphasis on class, go something like this:

Billionaire playboy/superhero.
Billionaire female investor/CEO.
Working-class female cat burglar.
Escaped male convict.

What's fascinating in Nolan's universe is the interplay of these four main characters. Both the big hero AND the big bad are wealthy elites. Both of their sidekicks are decidely neither wealthy nor elite. Both the big hero and the big bad espouse "helping humanity" rhetoric. Neither one of them does nearly as much good as they could if they weren't so fucking self-absorbed.

(Don't argue with me. Batman is a megalomaniac. I mean, it's cool to watch him play vigilante, but he is absolutely an incurable narcissist.)

So, the world is threatened and destroyed by two people of the same class. Both have help from the underclass. And really, that's where the characterizations get interesting. Before I get to gushing about the incredibly fascinating, human portrait that is Selina Kyle (and you can call me a whatever-you-want, but she was absolutely the best/most interesting part of this movie, I don't care what sort of purist opinion you've got because I've never read a comic book in my life), a few notes on Bane.

An escaped convict that we find out lost his face after protecting a six-year-old girl born in a prison, he's set up for most of the movie as the villain. It's only at the end that we find out, despite his self-consciously pseudo-Stalinist rhetoric, that he's actually been acting on behalf of that wealthy lady investor, who turns out to be the kid he saved from some hell-hole prison. So, at sort of the last possible second you realize most of his rhetoric was empty (and there are some truly hilarious/cringe-inducing/exasperating visuals, including a scene straight out of Marat's French Revolution with Cillian Murphy inexplicably holding court atop a pile of desks; the gold-velvet upholstered Regency wing chair made me sigh/sob/choke all at once) and so maybe you don't have to be terrified of people advocating for a world in which the few do not live large on the blood and tears of the many.

But, most people won't think that far, and clearly the savior is a billionaire and the villain cloaks himself in "people's revolutionary" garments and then proceeds to pretty much destroy everything, so that's the message most will take. Sigh. Christopher Nolan, fuck you.

Still, the actual villain is herself an elite and monied woman. And Bane did, years ago, save her from a pretty desperate fate at the cost of his face. He clearly does believe quite strongly in the idea of caring for others, no matter the cost. He just goes about it in spectacularly bad fashion, acting out of an implied love for the (beautiful, innocent) girl (who is very beautiful but not at all very innocent) who leads him astray. (I am not going to begin a feminist critique of this movie until I've seen it several more times.) Human beings make mistakes; maybe that's why we should be trying to make sure no one human being has the power to make mistakes that will destroy everything? Just a thought. Although I can't say definitively that it's one Nolan had. But maybe he did. Who knows. Anyway, it's just pop-culture, right?

But Selina Kyle. Selina Kyle is a goldmine of nuanced super-hero characterization. She wants social and cultural change. She can taste it. She is acutely aware that the world she lives in is stacked against people like her. And she steals. The implicit suggestion of her as a Robin Hood figure (steals expensive things from fabulously wealthy people, but lives in a small apartment in a crappy part of time; has a big-sister relationship with a young woman) is touching, but she consistently deflects it. She's equally repulsed by the wealth of Wayne's world and attracted to it. In that sense, she's a good allegory for most of us in relation to our economics: horrified at and covetous of excess.

In the final analysis, she (literally) saves Batman's life because she can't just abandon him. Clearly, there's sexual and romantic tension there (but I'm not writing a feminist critique until I've seen it WAY MORE TIMES) but I like to think at least some of that is her own morality. She believes in helping her fellow beings, so she helps, at risk and cost. And in the end, when she's being inexplicably squired around Italy in luxury by Bruce who was suppposed to have lost all his money, what came to my mind was a bitter comment she directed at him an hour earlier in the film: "You people don't even go broke like the rest of us." Maybe she's betraying her ideals, maybe she sold out, as was suggested to me in a rather incoherent phone call as I walked home from the theater at 2 am, but she, like Bane, is human, and makes mistakes, and if we're going to give him the benefit of the doubt about his motivations for being such an evil monster, she certainly gets the same consideration considering she hasn't actually done anything on his level of maliciousness. Yet. That yet is implied, of course: once you're living the high life it's hard to disentangle yourself from its siren song. As long as temptation exists, you have to fight it.

What is undoubtedly most fascinating about this film as a dissertation on class and class consciousness is the interplay of these four characters: the ways in which they are the same and the ways they are different, the way those similarities and differences were grafted on by external conditions or consciously chosen. Bane and Selena could maybe have, with different choices, ended up in each other's shoes; so, for that matter, could Wayne and Tate.

And that's why, despite all the heavy-handed, trite, simplistic SUPERHERO COMIC OMG shit, it actually is a pretty complex movie. If you're bothering to think about it. Or, overthinking it, as I'm sure I am. Then again, the real world is pretty simple on the surface, too, which is why so many people are convinced they have it figured out: they just ignore the pieces that don't fit.