by Scott Creighton
In the end, what is the final message of Christopher Nolan’s batman? He runs off to be an international playboy with his new love (a professional thief) and his man-servant sitting nearby. He leaves his caped crusade behind him and all the people of Gotham to stew in their own juices, solve their own problems, and he just enjoys his wealth and the rest of his life. Sound a little like Atlas Shrugged?
Bruce Wayne=John Galt?
Without seeing the film, I did find a website which is discussing it, especially the ending, and I figured it was worth taking a few minutes to pat myself on the back since it would appear that I was correct in my reading of the whole Batman series retooled by Christopher Nolan with his new Dick Cheney approach to the classic comic book character. And that Cheneyesque approach even goes so far as to include the mushroom cloud smoking gun. Yep, the Occupy movement is just a bunch of misanthropic followers being led around by the nose by a terrorist and his foreign handlers looking to bring our beloved economic system crashing down around us.
Yes, Batman is a 1%er fighting along side the noble police against the raging and out of control 995ers.
Yes, Bane is actually being controlled by foreign assets, terrorists who want nothing more than to bring down the “freedoms” in Gotham.
Yes, the smoking gun will be a mushroom cloud.
According to the source that I found, the movie ends with Batman dragging the trite nuclear weapon out of Gotham with his “Bat” (flying bat-mobile) and it detonates over the water supposedly killing the Batman himself. But of course it doesn’t and we later see Bruce Wayne and the Cat-woman enjoying their wealth and new-found romance in an Italian cafe. Wayne gives a gratuitous nod to Alfred, his man-servant, sitting at another table.
What happened: To save Gotham City from nuclear incineration, Batman (Christian Bale) jumped into his newest high-tech military grade vehicle – a flying machine dubbed The Bat – and towed an unstoppable ticking bomb into the sky and out to sea. KABOOM! The Bat went up in ‘shrooming smoke. In the aftermath, the caped crusader was declared deceased, as was his alter-ego, Bruce Wayne, who was believed to have been killed during Bane’s (Tom Hardy) riotous war on Gotham’s wealthy and elite. But that’s what Bruce wanted Gotham to think; in truth, he bailed out of The Bat before it went BOOM! We last saw Bruce at an outdoor café in Italy, enjoying the company of Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway), and quietly toasting Alfred from a nearby table, thus fulfilling his guardian’s happily-ever-after dream for him. Bruce was finally freed from the pain of the past, from the self-destructive enterprise of Batman, from the ghosts and ghouls of Gotham. Or, to paraphrase Sydney Carton from A Tale of Two Cities: It’s a far, far better thing than I do than I’ve ever done; it is a far, far better European vacation that I go to than I have ever l known.
Reaction: With Rises, we get a superhero story that ends with a superhero deciding that the life of a costumed vigilante – no matter how needed or noble – is really no kind of life at all.
There you have it: mushroom cloud smoking guns, Ayn Rand happily ever after endings, and Bane and his terrorist sponsored uprising stamped down for the good of all things holy and profitable and status quo.
Batman apparently donates his mansion for some kind of orphanage and Robin gets to investigate the Bat Cave, setting up still more Global War on Terror supporting movies in the future.
Here are a few comments from that site:
“Sadly…Bane was a HUGE let down for me…no venom, no super strength, just a regualr mercenary that didn’t feel pain and agony? NO. Collosal FAIL.”
That’s because Nolan had to make his super-villains into ordinary guys who just happened to be terrorists.
“Absolutely agree on the idea that Bane going from a philosophical and articulate villain to a puppet was incredibly disappointing.”
Over at the Telegraph, they seem to gleefully admit that Batman via the eyes of Chris Nolan, is nothing more than pro-Global War on Terror and anti-Occupy propaganda. It’s just fine as they conclude that this film is just establishment programing for the masses.
“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.” Telegraph
Filed under: Boycott Batman, propaganda, Scott Creighton
Message of th day: Help the globalists enslave and destroy the world for the impoverished masses and then you can retire to peace, prosperity, and beautiful women in a safe haven far away…
Again -
It is as if the American Media in all its forms is intentionally oppressive by design, so as to dissuade people from engaging in the political process.
………………………………………………………………………………………
(e.g.) – Why would Alex Jones and Webster Tarpley try to discredit Wikileaks for years on end in the Prison Planet website by saying its a CIA front. If it were a CIA front how woulh the govmnt benefit from
Wikileaks like these …?
Stratfor leaks: NATO commandos in illegal special ops in Syria
http://www.rt.com/news/stratfor-syria-secret-wikileaks-989/
Much in the same way, the script of Heath Ledger as the
mad bomber in Dark Knight (READ terrorist) seeks to delegitimize activists and leftist critics of the militarized policed state
(READ fatherland) by portraying overkill, excessive force, as well as Owrwellian survelliance as
necessary evils.
if you didn’t see the film why are you writing about it. the reference to bruce wayne in the italian cafe at the conclusion isn’t certain. alfred said he fantasied about seeing bruce in such a position when he was presumed dead during this global journeys in batman begins. you could read the ending two ways, one in which he dies saving the city and this encounter is a fantasy for the grief stricken alfred and one in which he lives and is in fact there. not to mention, bruce wayne loses his vast fortune in this film and is only allowed to keep the manor because of its historic significance.
in either situation he is the opposite of a Randian hero because the entire movie is an exploration of the downfall that occurs when heros fail to act.
It’s a pretty glib move to have opinions about the meaning of film you haven’t even seen.
He saw it. We all saw it. It sucks.
Capitalism sucks too.
“The Congress shall have the Power to lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States…”
How’s your general welfare these days? It would be a lot better if we simply confiscated the wealth of the insanely greedy, mentally deranged super-rich leets that are destroying everything. Some will say that the Supreme Court would never let it happen, but that is nonsense. Every single decision of law that the great judges make should require the consent of 3/4ths of a randomly selected jury of 100 American citizens. The lawyers will tell you that juries are only qualified to judge facts, but not issues of the law, but that is simply wrong. Just the fact that the lawyers have been saying that for centuries doesn’t make it correct.
The super-rich leets and their 1% cronies contribute NOTHING to our so-called “economy”! They have sold out 90% of our productional assets down the river to China, India, Japan, etc. All for pure Profit! They care about us about as much a they care about the Iraqi children they burned to death with white phosphorus!
No one should be allowed to own more that 20 times what they need to make a living and live comfortably. People should be required to register their substantial holdings, and if they exceed the 20 times limit, a random jury should force them to sell off the excess, and reduce their holdings to 15 times what they need. The proceeds should go to the commonwealth. Anything they fail to register should be confiscated, and those who willfully avoid registering assets should be punished. That is the only way to control economic royalism and protect freedom and human rights. Otherwise the 99% will inexorably be reduced to slavery.
Do you have to see a snuff film to know you don’t want to watch it? How about a “how-to” video on shower etiquette made by Jerry Sandusky?
I did a review of the first two of his series of three films and judging from that information combined with the clips he released and the posters they used for advertising, I made a calculated assessment of the quality and the PURPOSE of his last film in the series. That was the first in my series of writings on the subject. Since then, I have been proven right, his work is nothing more than ham-handed pro-neocon war on terror propaganda and I suggest people don’t go see it.
Forbes has written about Nolan’s particular political slant as have many other “reputable” periodicals and websites.
I think what is “glib” is having to come here and make far fetched assumptions about the meaning of the end of the film in order to justify defending this ass and the “artistic merit” of his work. Especially given the fact that my guess is, you aren’t one of the 1% like Nolan is. To me, that’s glib like a beggar is to his own demise.
I am always slightly amazed that my “No one should be allowed to own more that 20 times what they need to make a living and live comfortably” messages are completely ignored. As long as the rich continue to exist they will be the biggest leets. They will be just the same as Tyrannosaurus rex dinosaurs trampling upon the 99% field mice. How else could it be? So I describe the only actual solution. But no one either supports it or debates it; they just go on wringing their hands. The solution sounds hopeless; but it may nonetheless provide a sense of direction, and that’s important.
Perhaps some amusement would help now. Here is an important announcement from the Rev. Ivan Stang of the Church of the Subgenious (video — 1 minute long):
If you require further amusement (and time wastage) there is this page by the great dead Lord NENSLO:
http://www.subgenius.com/bigfist/answers/rants/X0022_Nenslo_HATEWORD.html
Well, at least I try…
Do most Americans still get their worldview partly or wholly from movies? Not being an American and not having ever visited the Empire (I’d almost certainly be debarred from getting a visa if I were stupid enough to try) I don’t know what the average American’s like at home. I can only go by the national actions, and those aren’t exactly inspirational.
Propaganda here or anywhere else, is a cumulative effect. One meme supports another which supports another. It’s common knowledge that the far right and even some “progressive” news agencies have been flirting with the notion that the Occupy crowd is made up of malcontents who just won’t get out there and “find a job”. Remember that guy who supposedly went out to one of the protests with job applications? Claims no one wanted to work? And then of course we have the recent staged FBI “sting” (entrapment exercise) which involved 3 Occupy protesters?
Gradually, the propaganda reinforces previous assumptions made over time… it’s like when you have someone from the supposed antiwar movement continually saying… “yes, but Assad IS a MONSTER” or “Yes, but Gadhafi DID kill THOUSANDS”…
No. We don’t go to movies to get our news or formulate our world opinion, we have Fox News and CNN for that (
), but the PR (propaganda) industry learned long ago that films are a powerful tool to reinforce societal constructs… such as the viability of the global war on terror or the notion that “the terrorists” aren’t just Muslims anymore. Film, TV, video games… all powerful tools for the E. Bernays types of the world. And not just here in the home of the empire
Seriously, if I have to hear about the ONE fucking guy who shit on a cop car one more time I’m going to lose it. Its obvious what the media agenda is here. I’m still waiting for them to tie the shooter to Occupy…
Bane sounds a lot like an exaggeration of Black Bloc.
It seems rather intentional our Dark Knight has no charisma, I’d like to see Adam West kick ths guys ass. Even the supposed good guys have no admirable dynamic. The Joker is certainly more colourful than anyone elses persona. Batman is a mechanized destructor, whollly bereft of altruism, heart, feeling or any of the usual characteristics of a hero. Soulless whoring it up with starlets at the club. Certainly he appears allied in spirit with the corrupt, self absorbed, and vapid, the police or his trainer Neeson. So too are our leaders who fight “terror” Bush/Obama/Clinton. Their enforcement of “justice” is merely an exercise, symbolizing nothing, perhaps an orgy of fire and death.
Satan. Power for its own sake.
That is the conditioning thru violence the audience is taught. Not to feel.
A cacophony of sensory overload to block out reason. The physical illness that is ultra violence, solidifying fight over flight. Destruction by any means necessary, even if it means destroying ourselves as well.
Did anyone see Nolan’s film “Following”?
What did you think of it?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0154506/
no I didn’t see that. I didn’t like inception.
have you seen this short film? It’s called Le Mirror I think.
http://vimeo.com/45135870
Hey, that was interesting and fun to watch! Done well ….
Its quite auspicious. I can see why the studios paired Nolan and Bale who had his spooky, masterful performance in American Psycho.
The young masses in sheer stupefaction, and numbness and 2 1/2 hours of psychic assault will see Batman part 2′s Ledger and their collective lizard brain unconscious fears will create shadows on the cave walls of their perception …
“Save me from fear and terror Daddy War-bucks!”
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