Everything Wrong With The Dark Knight Rises

I've decided to make what I'm sure will be the first of many posts on this much-anticipated movie a kind of list of reactions. Which are in no particular order. Make of it what you will:

SPOILERS AHEAD

 

1. Pacing.
2. Tone.
3. Maniacal supervillanry.
4. Doomsday devices.
5. Uncompelling action sequences.
6. A much, much too brief "re-training" period for Bruce. (Screen-time, I mean. 3 months in a few minutes? Cue sit-up montage.)
7. A much, much too brief parallel "under seige" period for Gotham.
8. Lucius Fox and Commissioner Gordon are side-lined.
9. "Get the President on the line," etc.
10. The old "fly away from the city, detonating the bomb and sacrificing yourself" trope (or should I say cliché) already used once this year by Avengers.
11. A half-assed romance with Miranda Tate that means nothing and goes nowhere.
12. "The Bat." That's a big one.
13. Political commentary.
14. Camp.
15. Cat-woman's goggle, ear, things.
16. Yet again, Bane is really just a tool.
17. Batman having gone into retirement period. Batman doesn't retire for 8 years, no matter how good it is. Come on.
18. No redemption for Gordon.
19. The trivialization of Alfred's mourning.
20. Alfred pretty much just showing up a couple of times to have rushed conversations that culminate in him saying something profound and insightful and then walking away dramatically.
21. The Bat Cave? Meh.
22. Everything, I mean everything about the ending.

Right after The Dark Knight came out I said that Christopher Nolan is gonna do another one, and it's going to be too huge, have nine million villains, in other words, fall into all the same "traps" the third installments in superhero series are famously plagued with. But for Nolan these wouldn't be traps. He would manage to unite it all into one cohesive story which hit at the heart of Batman and morality and all that stuff we love Nolan for.

The verdict? Nope. He couldn't do it. Pretty good effort I have to say. Not fundamentally flawed, I don't think, just poorly executed. Most of all I think it's pretty clear that Nolan didn't really wanna make this movie.

Batman Characters As Reflections

One of the things Christopher Nolan has done amazingly well in his Batman Trilogy is to push along Batman's struggle with his identity and mission. This is, after all, the heart of any work of literature, the protagonist's inner struggle to come to terms with himself. As an Epic hero, however, this is not just Batman's struggle, but Gotham's too.

One of the chief ways in which Nolan has accomplished the task of pushing Batman to question himself is to confront him with characters which are mirror images of himself. Let's examine some of them:

Ra's al Ghul - Made Batman who he is. Nevertheless, as Batman himself says, there is something that makes Ra's al Ghul and his League of Shadows vigilantes while Batman remains a legitimate source of order and justice. That is the fact that Ra's al Ghul seeks to impose his own will on the world, his own idea of what's good for it, rather than freeing it up to do the right thing itself, first from the Mafia which had the city by its throat and then fromt he Joker's chaos. As Batman says, he hopes for the day when Gotham will no longer need him. As the opening sequence of The Dark Knight proves, his presence is preventative as well as punitive.

The Scarecrow - Uses fear to conquer his opponents. How is Batman different? The Scarecrow is a weak, calculating wimp who uses a gas to induce fear chemically. Batman is big and strong, and strikes fear into the heart of criminals by his very existence. Remember that in art, exterior attributes are never arbitrary, but illustrative of the interior realities of the characters. What this means here, I think, is that Scarecrow is a snake, a fraud. He uses a fake fear to get his way. Batman on the other hand, has more in common with the fear we should have for God. It is his very being which should be respected and looked upon in awe.

Commissioner Gordon - In one of the comic books that inspired Christopher Nolan, Frank Miller's Batman: Year One, you can almost split the pages up evenly between Batman and Gordon as you alternate perspectives on their parallel roles in the main plot and character development. Nolan has done the same thing in his films, drawing the comparison as often as possible. How they're alike? They are both keepers of the peace and ministers of order. How do they differ? Gordon operates inside the written law. Batman serves a higher law because he believes the lower law of men has failed.

Thomas Wayne - Like his father before him, Bruce Wayne seeks to work toward the good of his city and people. Unlike his father, Bruce got to witness first hand his father's lack of success. In Batman Begins, the Mob has made Gotham so afraid to go out that they won't use the train Bruce's father built for them, having left it to rot and decay from misuse and maltreatment. I think it's significant that the solution to impending disaster is the destruction of the train. Batman has established a new order, one in which such half-measures have been done away with.

Two-Face - Like Two-Face, Batman must play host to two personalities, one forever challenging the other for supremacy. Unlike Two-Face, Batman's decisions about who he wants to be (not to mention his decisions in general) are purely his own, settled on after thought and deliberation rather than the flip of a coin.

The Joker - "You're just a freak, like me." "You complete me." Notice how in the last Joker scene in The Dark Knight, Batman has him strung upside down. They are set in opposition to one another during their conversation. Yet, as it progresses, Nolan rotates the camera on the Joker so that he is upside-down from Batman's perspective, but cutting back and forth between the two of them, they appear to us as if they're both upright. It's a masterful visualization of how the two characters are a mirror for one another and also polar opposites.

The Catwoman - Of course we can't be exactly sure what Nolan's going to do with Catwoman, but we can at least say that she will mimic Batman's wits and cunning. The struggle with Catwoman is always her skewed intentions, viz., her own good rather than that of her city. She also threatens to seduce Batman into involvement in romantic affairs, which he must be bigger than.

Bane - Bane is Batman's equal in every way. In the comics he was even runner up as Ra's al Ghul's apprentice in the League of Shadows. He uses a substance called Venom to artificially elevate his strength in order to have an edge over Batman. In the recent trailer, Bane is shown in perfect parallel to Batman, only stronger. He is shown doing push ups to train in a prison, just like we saw Batman do. He is shown climbing out of a deep well, where Batman had to be lifted out by his father. Bane has the potential to be a hero, but hes eeks his own honor and glory, not the good of his polis and people.

The Dark Knight Rises Teaser Analysis or The Three Stages Of Epic Literature

I just don't know if enough has been made of the Dark Knight Rises teaser trailer which debuted before Harry Potter a few weeks ago. Maybe it helps that I saw it that very night on a digital screen in a theater with mind-blowing sound. I flipped the eff out. I think that was a warranted reaction, though.

I just came across a fantastic shot-by-shot breakdown of the amazingness that is this teaser, so you should read that, and I'll just add some stuff.

First of all, the author does a fantastic job of drawing the visual parallel between Batman and Gotham City as presented in the trailer. Batman is an Epic hero, like Achilles or Odysseus before him. Or Jesus for that matter. In Nolan's Bat-verse he follows the same pattern they all do point-for-point. The author of the article relates Nolan's Batman to Joseph Campbell's "hero's journey," which is entirely valid. The majority of what Campbell did in comparative mythology is good and true.

At any rate, an Epic hero is always defined by his polis, the city from which he hails, for which he fights, and to which he hopes to return as king (if he's not already). For Odysseus it was Ithaca, for Aeneas it was Rome, for Christ it's the New Jerusalem. Not only is the hero defined by his polis and vice-versa, however, their fates are so completely intertwined that one could almost say the hero is the city, or at least an extension of it. Likewise with Batman and Gotham City.

As we hear Ra's al Ghul repeat from Batman Begins, a hero must be "more than a man." He must "devote himself to an ideal." A hero is not a man; he is a principle. As Alfred points out in The Dark Knight, he cannot be bound by the concerns of ordinary men. This was Hector's mistake in The Iliad, putting family and clan before duty, honor, justice, and his polis.

Much of the teaser consists of Gotham buildings in the process of crumbling. This is because Batman too is crumbling. He is Gotham's savior and champion. If he falls, all Gotham falls. Throughout the trailer Batman himself is portrayed as weak and ready to break.

(Interestingly, Batman and Commissioner Gordon can also be identified with one another. Their journeys parallel each other perfectly, as they do almost page-for-page in Nolan's inspiration Batman: Year One. As Gordon says in the teaser, they "were in this together." With Batman and Gotham hurting, it only makes sense that Gordon would end up in a hospital bed too.)

The Epic hero's journey can be divided into three stages: The Battle, The Journey (in which the hero descends to the Underworld), and the Homecoming, at which point he (re)founds his city and establishes the peace for which he fought. These three stages mirror the Tragic and Comedic stages, Infernal (Hell), Purgatorial (Purgatory), and Paradisal (Heaven). It is in Batman Begins that Batman must fight for his very right to exist. He struggles against all reason to accomplish his goal: to establish himself as an effective source of justice and order in Gotham. By the end of the first film he has successfully done this and won a small victory.

In The Dark Knight, Batman descends into the Underworld of the Joker's chaos, as does all of Gotham with him (even its favorite son Harvey Dent). Batman must wade through the Joker's madness before peace can be reign. Like the journeys of Odysseus and Aeneas, Batman's is a journey of purgatorial suffering, a journey through the valley of the shadow of death. Fittingly, Gotham will be couched in the cold death of winter for portions of The Dark Knight Rises.

Batman and Gotham have not yet emerged from this valley into which the Joker cast them. The Joker made Gotham question the validity of Batman's role as King, to the point that Batman himself questioned it. Something we know he continues to do into The Dark Knight Rises from his conversation with Gordon.

Bane is here to kick Batman, Gotham City, and Commissioner Gordon while they're down. The Joker has left them tired and weak, and Bane wants to take advantage of the situation and usurp Batman's throne, exactly as he seeks to do in the comic books. It would not be insignificant or misguided to compare Bane to the suitors which attempt to usurp Odysseys' throne in his absence. I guarantee that the climax of The Dark Knight Rises will be Batman returning to his great hall to cleanse it of Bane's evil.

By the way, it should be clear that the perfect title for this last installment would have been Gotham City, as this is when Batman must "rise up" and defeat the evil outside and within once and for all, inaugurating an (as far as we know everlasting) era of peace and order in his kingdom. Understandably, though, they wanted to reference their previous blockbuster explicitly and went with the second-best choice.