Do you approve of Ben Affleck as the new Batman? Obama voters - 35% approve Romney voters - 26% approve
Who was the best Batman? Obama voters - Michael Keaton (24%) Romney voters - Christian Bale (26%)
What is your favorite Superhero franchise? Obama voters - 1. Batman (23%), 2. Don't Know (21%), Superman (18%) Romney voters - 1. Batman (26%), 2. Iron Man (23%), Superman (15%)
Do you have a favorable view of Tom Hanks? Obama voters - 87% favorable Romney voters - 73% favorable
Do you have a favorable view of Clint Eastwood? Obama voters - 60% favorable Romney voters - 84% favorable
Do you have a favorable view of Arnold Schwarzennegger? Obama voters - 42% favorable Romney voters - 37% favorable
Do you have a favorable view of Jane Fonda? Obama voters - 60% favorable Romney voters - 13% favorable
Do you have a favorable view of Pauley Shore? Obama voters - 23% favorable Romney voters - 16% favorable
The Batman stuff is not that interesting. But what I find interesting here is Schwarzenegger. Not only the fact that he still has a decent approval rating (yeah, it's below 50%, but far above many others) but also that despite being an unapologetic GWB fan, he still gets higher ratings from Obama voters.
“Life is a shipwreck, but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats.” ― Voltaire
Dukasaur wrote:The Batman stuff is not that interesting. But what I find interesting here is Schwarzenegger. Not only the fact that he still has a decent approval rating (yeah, it's below 50%, but far above many others) but also that despite being an unapologetic GWB fan, he still gets higher ratings from Obama voters.
Because AHnold represents the dictatorship model for resolving situations. OF COURSE THOSE STATISTS WOULD SUPPORT SUCH A MAN! They see themselves as the beneficiaries of a benevolent despot!
If you support freedom and liberty, do not watch any Schwarzenegger movies. Speak poorly of him in public. That is the only way toward the Free Society.
It's no secret Bale played a very Conservative Batman. Billionaire corporate fat-cat who also has compassion for others but operates off the government grid and has little faith in police and court systems so he handles things himself. He continually does the right things for the right reasons, even when there is no good option he makes the best of it. He truly is incorruptible and serves his fellow man while asking nothing in return. When it came to the abilities he created as far as spying on the entire population in order to keep the city safe, he used the tools for good and destroyed the tools when the threat was over.
As for the reason Obama voters hold a higher view of Schwartz, it's because he is not Conservative. He says he holds a lot of similar basic values that Conservatives do, but when it comes to social policies he is as Progressive as they come. Maybe that was because of how California is, but I think that's the way he is too. And he attends Bilderburg meetings, so he is a player of the game and hob-knobbing with the jet sets. He has not been attacked on a national scale.
I think Tom Hanks ranks so high amongst both is because of his directing. Anyone who wants to see his work, I HIGHLY recommend HBO's John Adams mini-series.
Phatscotty wrote:It's no secret Bale played a very Conservative Batman. Billionaire corporate fat-cat who also has compassion for others but operates off the government grid and has little faith in police and court systems so he handles things himself. He continually does the right things for the right reasons, even when there is no good option he makes the best of it. He truly is incorruptible and serves his fellow man while asking nothing in return. When it came to the abilities he created as far as spying on the entire population in order to keep the city safe, he used the tools for good and destroyed the tools when the threat was over.
Is this like a normal essay where you write the statement then list the support for that statment?
Because I cant see how your statment (Bale = Conservative) links to your supporting information (your description of him)...
I go to the gym to justify my mockery of fat people.
Phatscotty wrote:It's no secret Bale played a very Conservative Batman. Billionaire corporate fat-cat who also has compassion for others but operates off the government grid and has little faith in police and court systems so he handles things himself. He continually does the right things for the right reasons, even when there is no good option he makes the best of it. He truly is incorruptible and serves his fellow man while asking nothing in return. When it came to the abilities he created as far as spying on the entire population in order to keep the city safe, he used the tools for good and destroyed the tools when the threat was over.
Is this like a normal essay where you write the statement then list the support for that statment?
Because I cant see how your statment (Bale = Conservative) links to your supporting information (your description of him)...
Billionaire corporate fat-cat who also has compassion for others but operates off the government grid and has little faith in police and court systems so he handles things himself. He continually does the right things for the right reasons, even when there is no good option he makes the best of it. He truly is incorruptible and serves his fellow man while asking nothing in return. When it came to the abilities he created as far as spying on the entire population in order to keep the city safe, he used the tools for good and destroyed the tools when the threat was over.
doesn't strike me as conservative (or liberal for that matter). The way you worded makes it sound like conservatives have the monopoly on being a good bugger (er good guy, top bloke, gary good c**t, etc).
I go to the gym to justify my mockery of fat people.
Billionaire corporate fat-cat who also has compassion for others but operates off the government grid and has little faith in police and court systems so he handles things himself. He continually does the right things for the right reasons, even when there is no good option he makes the best of it. He truly is incorruptible and serves his fellow man while asking nothing in return. When it came to the abilities he created as far as spying on the entire population in order to keep the city safe, he used the tools for good and destroyed the tools when the threat was over.
doesn't strike me as conservative (or liberal for that matter). The way you worded makes it sound like conservatives have the monopoly on being a good bugger (er good guy, top bloke, gary good c**t, etc).
well, there is also the corporate billionaire thing, he is definitely a fat-cat 1%er. He is big on giving to charity and the orphanage he gave to was religious.
And when it came to hacking cell phones to catch the Joker, he gave up that immense power when he got him, much in the way Civil Libertarians believe the NSA should be defunded/scaled back, whereas Obama/Bush keep renewing the patriot act and supporting more NSA power and special privileges. Batman is clearly anti-government.
Not to mention, the Dark Knight Rises was clearly a Tea Party vs. Occupy Wall Street theme. Hell, Wall Street JPMorgan building was literally occupied in the movie. I have read articles in the past that have picked up on Batman's Conservatism as well. It's a new trend in Hollywood...Characters with Conservative values. Just look at Rorschach and Superman....Did you see Man of Steel?
The third film in the Batman series is a direct polemical assault on the French Revolution and its political heirs, which includes Occupy Wall Street and perhaps Barack Obama. I would say that it is the exact opposite of so many revolutionary-wannabe films from Fight Club to V for Vendetta (which has provided the tell-tale Guy Fawkes masks to the Occupy movement), except that in order to be opposite, they must in some sense be comparable and DKR is far superior to the others artistically, commercially and philosophically. The crazed theater shooter, if he turns out to be as much of an attempted revolutionary hero of the poor, the depressed, and the downtrodden as his predecessor at Virginia Tech, will prove to be a better match for the villain in the third film than for the one in the second film.
While superficial analysis has tried to make hay out of the name of the villain, Bane, which is a homonym for Bain, the private equity firm founded by Mitt Romney, the truth is that Bane the villain is philosophically much closer to Bam the President than to Bain the firm. Spoilers from here on…Bane is a man who speaks for the ‘oppressed’ (his word) masses against the upper classes. He is Gotham’s revolutionary ‘reckoning’ who urges the people to ‘storm’ (again his words) Blackgate prison and release the prisoners within. That’s the moment in the film at which I became sure that the French Revolution theme was intentional. Bane, like Robespierre, the real life villain of the French Revolution, uses the freed prisoners as the vanguard of the revolution and as citizen brigades to roust the affluent from their homes and expropriate their property, dragging them before citizen tribunals before which their guilt is already determined based on their class. They are then executed, judged by the lawless element of the city which had until the revolution been festering on the edge of society. The Politics of Batman: The Dark Knight Of The Soul Rises Jerry Bowyer Jerry Bowyer Contributor The Politics Of Ridley Scott's Blockbuster Film Prometheus Jerry Bowyer Jerry Bowyer Contributor How The Bowyer Family Played The College Tuition Bubble Jerry Bowyer Jerry Bowyer Contributor A College Bubble So Big Even The New York Times And 60 Minutes Can See It...Sort Of Jerry Bowyer Jerry Bowyer Contributor
This film shows no ideological sympathy for the Occupy Movement. Bane, the terrible villain of the film, literally occupies Wall Street, taking control of the trading floor of the stock exchange. Police are hesitant to deal with the problem partly based on class warfare complaints that it’s not their money at risk, but the money of the wealthy Wall Street guys. But a trader explains that it is indeed the cops’ money too: that it’s everybody’s money that is part of the financial system, including cops’ pensions.
Bane was created by Chuck Dixon and Graham Nowlan, two “life long conservatives”, which is pretty unusual in the world of comic book creatives. He is, as his name implies, a curse, in this case the curse of class warfare. Interestingly, Dixon complained about Rush Limbaugh’s misfire in trying to link the villain with Bain capital as part of some liberal media conspiracy.
How did things get so bad for Gotham? Partly it was a lack of profit. Bruce Wayne had become a recluse in his mansion, shrugging off the responsibility of running his company, and as his inner circle points out, where there are no profits there is no philanthropy. The Wayne Foundation ceased supporting the private religious program for at-risk motherless and fatherless youth who had aged out of the traditional government foster care system. The at-risk children became risky adults and became a feeder system for the army which Bane was gathering in the sewers beneath the city, literally chipping away at the foundations of the old order.
But it was not just a shortage of financial capital that ruined Gotham: moral capital was deficient too. Gotham’s social order was based on a lie: that Batman was evil and that the crusading District Attorney Harvey Dent died as a righteous martyr. As I pointed out in my review of the other two films in the series, the Platonic (and Machiavellian) useful lie is a major theme of the trilogy, and as I expected the lie would be found to be an inadequate foundation for long-term civil order. Alfred Pennyweather, the moral voice of the story, argues that it’s time to stop suppressing the truth, that truth must in the end have its day and be allowed to speak, whatever the consequences. Commissioner Gordon, the promulgator of the lie, is wracked with guilt and indecision about the lie and longs to correct it. Eventually, Bane uses the lie against the city, depriving it of legitimacy.
The film is not without some emotional, if not moral, sympathy for the foolish young idealists of OWS. Selina Kyle, AKA Catwoman, is a morally confused young woman who wages class warfare through jewel thievery. She takes from those who, in her estimation, have too much. She delights in the fact that “There’s a storm coming,” and that Gotham’s rich are living too well, and on borrowed time. But when the storm comes, she sees the evil of it. A young protégé reminds Selina that this is exactly what she has been calling for, but now that it’s here, Selina sees that it is far worse than what it replaced. This is Nolan’s way of saying “Hey, idiot in the Che t-shirt, smarten up. If deep down you are the decent person you claim to be, you’ll hate the revolution you’ve been wishing for.”
About halfway through the film, I turned to my wife and said “It’s Dickens.” By which I meant the movie is a modern retelling of A Tale of Two Cities, albeit much lousier with hovercrafts and nuclear bombs. Bane is Robespierre, Miranda (played by French actress Marion Cotillard) is Madame Defarge. Batman is Sydney Carton. Now every time I write something like this, some joker (pun not intended) writes to me and says that I’m reading too much into it, and sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and it’s just a movie. I think I dislike those comments even more than the purely oppositional ones because they wallow in their own laziness and ignorance.
Toward the end of the film, Gordon offers a eulogy in the form of a long quote which begins “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.” That’s the speech which Sydney Carton, the former ne’er do well playboy-turned-sacrificial-hero, gives before offering his life in exchange to save another. I told this to my son, Christopher, and he pointed out that the co-writer of the screenplay, Jonathan Nolan, told his brother (and the film’s director) Christopher to read A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens before making the film.
The debate between left and right in the modern world has largely been a debate for and against the French revolution. Russell Kirk, the intellectual father of American conservatism, attributes the intellectual founding of the philosophy to the British statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke, author of the Reflections on the Revolution in France, the most important anti-revolutionary book ever written. The right argues for tradition; the left for revolution. In fact, the idea of ‘left’ and ‘right’ come from revolutionary era France. Those who sided with the old order sat on the right side of the French general assembly. Those who wished to overthrow it sat on the left side.
In some ways the film is a throw-back to the original Batman, not the comic book one, but the one on whom the whole masked hero genre was based, the Scarlett Pimpernel, the nobleman cum masked counter-revolutionary hero who went about saving victims of ‘the people’s justice’ from the guillotine. Now conservatives have a new hero, and this time he has a much cooler name than “Pimpernel.”
In addition to effectively exploring the anxieties of a civilization threatened more by nihilists and world-burners than by traditional geopolitical rivals, Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy is notable for being much more explicitly right-wing than almost any Hollywood blockbuster of recent memory. I had thought that some of the conservative attempts to claim 2008’s “The Dark Knight” as a brief for the Bush-era War on Terror were overdrawn, but after watching the final movie’s faux-revolutionary villain appropriate the themes and exploit the grievances of the Occupy Wall Street movement in order to launch a 21st century Reign of Terror, I don’t really think the saga’s rightward political tilt can be denied. And it’s a testament to how rarely one sees that political tilt in American cinema, I suspect, that the mere existence of conservative themes in a major summer movie has inspired extraordinary overreactions from ideologically-inclined movie writers. For instance, here’s Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir, whose title calls the Batman movie “an evil masterpiece,” and who writes:
It’s no exaggeration to say that the “Dark Knight” universe is fascistic (and I’m not name-calling or claiming that Nolan has Nazi sympathies). It’s simply a fact. Nolan’s screenplay (co-written with his brother, Jonathan Nolan, and based on a story developed with David S. Goyer) simply pushes the Batman legend to its logical extreme, as a vision of human history understood as a struggle between superior individual wills, a tale of symbolic heroism and sacrifice set against the hopeless corruption of society. Maybe it’s an oversimplification to say that that’s the purest form of the ideology that was bequeathed from Richard Wagner to Nietzsche to Adolf Hitler, but not by much.
Without digging too deep into why O’Hehir’s characterization of fascism’s supposed “purest form” manages to distill away just about every defining aspect of fascism as it actually existed, let me just submit that a genuinely “fascistic” Batman movie would have concluded with the Caped Crusader using the chaos wreaked by terrorists and revolutionaries as a justification for setting aside Gotham’s existing political institutions and ruling the city by fiat, with Wayne Enterprises merged with City Hall, the bat signal emblazoned on every public building, and the collective will of the public channeled through the superior individual will of Il Batman (and his successor, Der Robin, presumably). And the fact that Batman does not seek such power — that he serves anonymously, vanishes in times of peace, and generally has more in common with a batsuited Cincinnatus than with a would-be Caesar — illustrates one of the crucial differences between a fascist understanding of a Great Man’s role in history and a more conservative understanding of the same.
For an equally preposterous reading of the movie from the right, meanwhile, I give you Breitbart.com’s John Nolte, waxing enthusiastic about Nolan’s political themes:
[In "The Dark Knight Rises"], Gotham is going about the business of letting down its guard — a weakness that always invites aggression.
Aggression has already arrived in the form of Bane (Thomas Hardy), a hulk of a man burning with resentment against a society whose only provocation is being prosperous, generous, welcoming, and content — instead of miserable like him. In Gotham’s sewers, Bane recruits those like himself — the insecure thumbsuckers raging with a sense of entitlement, desperate to justify their own laziness and failure and to flaunt a false sense of superiority through oppression, violence, terror, and ultimately, total and complete destruction.
No one in Gotham even suspects the cancer of dangerous childish resentment growing beneath their feet …
Actually, the Batman movies pretty consistently portray Gotham as corrupt, chaotic, unequal and unjust, not “generous, welcoming, and content.” In “The Dark Knight Rises,” while the corruption and chaos have been reduced through the mass incarceration of gangland figures, the city’s basic inequities seem to have increased, and the movie gives every appearance of endorsing all of the nasty digs that Ann Hathaway’s Catwoman character takes at the Gotham elite. What’s more, the only time that we learn why a specific Gothamite has joined Bane’s underground army, the volunteer is a teenager who’s graduated out of an orphanage that lacks the resources to care for kids past the age of 16, and we’re specifically told that young men like him are going down into the sewers because there’s no work to be found up above — which suggests that something other than “laziness” is creating would-be revolutionaries. (Bane himself has been even more ill-used by the world, if not by Gotham itself.)
All of which is to say that Nolan isn’t trying to push a crude, Ayn Rand-esque parable about heroic Gotham capitalists threatened by resentful, parasitic looters. His model, as the movie’s literary references make clear, is “A Tale of Two Cities” rather than “Atlas Shrugged,” which means that he’s trying to simultaneously acknowledge the injustices of the existing regime while suggesting that both the revolutionary and anarchic alternatives would be much, much worse. Across the entire trilogy, what separates Bruce Wayne from his mentors in the League of Shadows isn’t a belief in Gotham’s goodness; it’s a belief that a compromised order can still be worth defending, and that darker things than corruption and inequality will follow from putting that order to the torch. This is a conservative message, but not a triumphalist, chest-thumping, rah-rah-capitalism one: It reflects a “quiet toryism” (to borrow from John Podhoretz’s review) rather than a noisy Americanism, and it owes much more to Edmund Burke than to Sean Hannity.
Anyway, in case you can’t tell, I really liked the movie — and since I’m both a confirmed anti-superhero filmgoer and someone who preferred Tim Burton’s Batman movies to the good-but-overpraised “Dark Knight,” that’s saying something.
How the Dark Knight Rises reveals Batman's Conservative soul
Imagine that you are a child billionaire, orphaned in a mugging that goes terribly wrong. You decide to devote yourself to making sure that no one else will suffer as you did. But how? Do you open a series of outreach centres, hire probation workers, sponsor rehabilitation schemes? Or do you put on a rubber suit and prowl the streets at night, clobbering members of the underclass until they promise to stop breaking the law?
The answer goes to the heart of Batman’s most terrible secret – not his true identity as Bruce Wayne, playboy industrialist, but the fact that he’s secretly, wonderfully Right-wing. And it’s a secret that is now being exposed by one of the year’s biggest movies. In The Dark Knight Rises, British director Christopher Nolan explicitly casts Batman as the plutocrats’ champion, forced to defend his city against the impoverished victims of depression and globalisation. The ostensible villain may be Tom Hardy’s hulking, monstrous Bane, but the uprising he inspires is essentially Occupy Gotham City, if the “99 Per Cent” used shotguns rather than megaphones.
For some, it may come as a surprise that the Caped Crusader turns out to be a Caped Conservative. But Nolan’s played these tricks before. In his previous Batman film, The Dark Knight, he confronted the people of Gotham with a terrorist threat – Heath Ledger’s Joker – that, like al-Qaeda, could not be predicted or reasoned with. In the process, Batman wrestled with the same quandaries as President Bush. Can it be right to torture a prisoner to obtain vital information? The film’s answer, like the president’s, was an unequivocal yes. Can total electronic surveillance be justified to catch one or two bad apples? In this case, Nolan’s answer was more liberal: Batman hands control of his all-powerful spying device to that unwavering moral arbiter Morgan Freeman, the closest thing to St Augustine that our fallen age can muster.
You could say that Nolan is just reading things into the character. Yet it’s not just that Batman is a standing reproof to the liberality of the justice system, forced to pick up the pieces when lily-livered judges and incompetent guards release the bad guys to kill again. From the moment of his creation, as the comic-book writer and superhero historian Grant Morrison argues, “Batman was the ultimate capitalist hero… a millionaire who vented his childlike fury on the criminal classes of the lower orders” in his “obsessive, impossible quest to punch crime into extinction, one b------ at a time”.
Indeed, if Superman is, at heart, a power fantasy – a puny nerd who can secretly kick sand in bullies’ faces – Batman is all about cool. Or rather, a child’s idea of cool: the man with the most money and the biggest house and the best hide-out and the fastest car, chased by the prettiest girls.
That is why he strikes such a chord today. Other heroes – such as Spider-Man or the X-Men – may be marginalised loners. But, as Morrison says, it’s no coincidence that “in a world where wealth and celebrity are the measures of accomplishment… the most popular superhero characters today – Batman and Iron Man – are both handsome tycoons”. Indeed. Iron Man is the ultimate carefree capitalist, who shuts down his weapons business not in the spirit of peace and love, but because he wants to fly around in a metal suit that fires, in the deathless words of Doctor Evil, frickin’ laser beams. It’s just what Ayn Rand would have done, if she’d had the budget.
Of course, it’s possible to put too much intellectual weight on those Spandex-clad shoulders. One writer in the Wall Street Journal tried to interpret The Dark Knight as a “paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W Bush in this time of terror and war”, noting that the bat symbol looked sort of like a W (or rather, dubya). There’s even a book called Batman and Philosophy (subtitle: “The Dark Knight of the Soul”) which wrestles with such issues as whether Batman should murder the Joker to save more lives in future, and how closely Alfred the butler embodies Taoist principles. It is perhaps the only work in which Catwoman sits next to “categorical imperative” in the index, and “existentialism” beside “evil, Batman’s hatred of”.
On the same note, it would be stretching the metaphor to describe the colossally successful Avengers film as a paean to coalition politics – yes, various odd ducks in colourful underwear come together, but only to wreak witty and well-executed violence on a horde of almost deliberately generic alien invaders. And you can make the counter-argument that if Batman was truly the Tory of my dreams, he’d stop intervening in the market completely, on the grounds that he’s only encouraging Gotham’s foolhardy citizens to become dependent on the superhero safety net. But when I take my seat in the cinema, I’ll still be cheering him on, as he continues his age-old fight for truth, justice and the established social order.
...probably the most conservative film of all time.
The Dark Knight Rises is one of the most overhyped movies of all time. And it lives up to every word of that hype. The characterization is first-rate. It is plotted beautifully. The action is spectacular. It ties up the Christopher Nolan Batman trilogy – in fact, it ties up virtually every loose end. There is virtually nothing wrong with this movie. Katie Holmes and Maggie Gyllenhaal aren’t even anywhere nearby to screw this one up.
It is also a magnificently conservative film – probably the most conservative film of all time. It makes the conservatism of The Dark Knight look like the politics of Battleship Potemkin. It explodes leftist meme after leftist meme. Spoiler Alert! Spoiler Alert! Spoiler Alert!
(1) Occupy Wall Street: The entire film is an ode to traditional capitalism. Bane leads an attack on the Gotham stock market – and a stock market executive explains to a cop, clearly unhappy about having to risk life and limb for the fat cats, how investment makes his savings more valuable. Selina Kyle – aka Catwoman – starts off as an anti-capitalism warrior, explaining to billionaire Bruce Wayne, “Do you think this is gonna last? 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." By the time Bane takes over the city with his communist-fascist regime, she’s looking on in horror at the anti-capitalist show trials (straight from the French Revolution, including summary sentencing) and destruction of private property. When she walks into an upscale house and sees how it’s been destroyed, she says that the house used to be beautiful. Her friend replies, “Now it’s everybody’s house.” In other words, communism destroys rather than building. The totalitarianism of equality is just that: totalitarianism.
(2) Leftist Populism: When Barack Obama talks constantly about returning the power to the people, all the while monopolizing true power, he sounds an awful lot like Bane, who threatens the city with utter destruction while simultaneously informing them that they, the citizens, are in control.
(3) Criminality: In the world of The Dark Knight Rises, thousands of criminals have been put away under the new Harvey Dent Act, dedicated to the district attorney killed by Batman at the end of The Dark Knight. The Act was passed on the heels of Dent’s death because Bruce Wayne and Commissioner Gordon conspired to play Dent as a hero rather than telling the truth. Bane reveals the truth – that Dent tried to murder Gordon’s son – and tells the population to release these wrongly imprisoned criminals. The population largely complies. And the city ends up in ruins.
(4) Appeasement: The President of the United States has a choice to make with regard to Bane: keep sending food into Gotham, acknowledging the whole time that Bane is holding the city under the threat of nuclear destruction, or try to infiltrate and fight back. The President appeases, with disastrous results. And yes, the word appeasement is used.
(5) Poverty: Poverty is seen as a sort of virtue by many people on the left. Not so in The Dark Knight Rises, where those who grow up poor are held to the same moral standard as those who grow up rich. Furthermore, while we learn that Bane spent time in poverty in a prison – and that it toughened him up – Bruce Wayne can get just as tough, though he grew up with tremendous wealth. Wayne is the most self-sacrificing character in the film, even though he’s also the richest. Wealth is not an automatic moral failing in TDKR. It’s a tool to be used for good or evil. And Batman uses it for good.
(6) Guns: One of Batman’s rules is that he will not use firearms, since his parents were killed by gunshot. At one point, Kyle has to save him by using guns – and she tells him that she disagrees with his rule. It’s hard for the audience to disagree, seeing as all the bad guys have guns – and in one scene in which thousands of cops charge the Occupy Army of Bane, the Occupy Army blows the underarmed cops away.
(7) Public-Private Partnerships: Bane is able to bring the city to its knees by trapping its police force thanks to the government granting subsidies to a private company for which Bane labors. Corporatism does not go well in the world of The Dark Knight Rises.
(8) Green Energy: Bruce Wayne nearly goes bankrupt thanks to a green energy project he funds. And he also recognizes the dangers of green energy projects that are not fully ready – if the world isn’t ready for them, he says, they can’t be used. Solyndra, anyone?
(9) Law and Order: The great moral arc of the film belongs to Catwoman, who transitions from a thief – she sees herself as Robin Hood, and hilariously tells Bruce Wayne that she does more for the poor than he does – to a defender of the cops. She allies with Bruce Wayne to help take down the Occupy Army after learning the evils of the communist/totalitarian Bane system.
(10) Humanity: Humanity in the Christopher Nolan world is capable of both “great and terrible things,” in the words of Ra’s Al Ghul from Batman Begins. And Nolan doesn’t shy away from either. But he clearly believes in human potential without losing the reality that when people are incentivized to do bad things, they do them. We saw shades of this in Batman Begins and a heavy dose of it in The Dark Knight, but we get the heaviest dose of realism in The Dark Knight Rises.
This is a fantastic film, the end of probably the greatest movie trilogy in film history. It is a pure joy to watch for entertainment reasons. It’s a joy to watch for moral reasons, too. If culture is upstream of politics, we can only hope that the lessons of The Dark Knight Returns seep down to the politics of its viewers.
Oh I will point out my favourite bit in one of the articles:
I would say that it is the exact opposite of so many revolutionary-wannabe films from Fight Club to V for Vendetta (which has provided the tell-tale Guy Fawkes masks to the Occupy movement), except that in order to be opposite, they must in some sense be comparable and DKR is far superior to the others artistically, commercially and philosophically.
I love how the author is, essentially, comparing a comic book story against genuine contempory fiction authors work; especially considering he completely misrepresents the latters work by calling it a revolutionary film. Clearly a very non-bias and intelligent reviewer...
I go to the gym to justify my mockery of fat people.
Lootifer wrote:Oh I will point out my favourite bit in one of the articles:
I would say that it is the exact opposite of so many revolutionary-wannabe films from Fight Club to V for Vendetta (which has provided the tell-tale Guy Fawkes masks to the Occupy movement), except that in order to be opposite, they must in some sense be comparable and DKR is far superior to the others artistically, commercially and philosophically.
I love how the author is, essentially, comparing a comic book story against genuine contempory fiction authors work; especially considering he completely misrepresents the latters work by calling it a revolutionary film. Clearly a very non-bias and intelligent reviewer...
Shockingly, that's the one from the New York Times, so the bias is up front.
V for Vandetta, originally being a "graphic novel", is basically a comic book also. Sorry to combo-break your jolly time. And I think when he calls those films "revolutionary", it's because they are about revolution.
Anyways, did you see Man of Steel or no. I wanted to talk more about the Conservative "revolution" in Hollywood
Anyhoo, I just chuckled at the classic over analysis and seeing what you want to see (confirmational bias) in your "reviews", i'm certainly not trying to engage in serious discussion here.
I go to the gym to justify my mockery of fat people.
Lootifer wrote:No I havent seen man of steel nor will I.
Anyhoo, I just chuckled at the classic over analysis and seeing what you want to see (confirmational bias) in your "reviews", i'm certainly not trying to engage in serious discussion here.
They weren't mine.
I just showed a few examples of other professionals who noticed the same thing.
Lootifer wrote:Oh I will point out my favourite bit in one of the articles:
I would say that it is the exact opposite of so many revolutionary-wannabe films from Fight Club to V for Vendetta (which has provided the tell-tale Guy Fawkes masks to the Occupy movement), except that in order to be opposite, they must in some sense be comparable and DKR is far superior to the others artistically, commercially and philosophically.
I love how the author is, essentially, comparing a comic book story against genuine contempory fiction authors work; especially considering he completely misrepresents the latters work by calling it a revolutionary film. Clearly a very non-bias and intelligent reviewer...
Shockingly, that's the one from the New York Times, so the bias is up front.
V for Vandetta, originally being a "graphic novel", is basically a comic book also. Sorry to combo-break your jolly time. And I think when he calls those films "revolutionary", it's because they are about revolution.
Anyways, did you see Man of Steel or no. I wanted to talk more about the Conservative "revolution" in Hollywood
Actually, V for vendetta began life as a serial in one of the finest comics ever, the b+w British "Warrior" in the 80's. This was shut down by Marvel with a ludicrous lawsuit over the character "Marvelman". This was why Alan Moore stopped working for Marvel titles.
