Judging from the trailers, it looks like the final installment of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy will engage in a time honored literary and artistic trope:
Why do we fantasize about blowing up New York so much? Andrew Potter writes in his The Authenticity Hoax:
One of the most enduring developments of declinism in popular culture is the ritualized destruction of the great cities of the world in film, literature, and art. Whether it is worries over economic dislocation, fears of urban alienation, or inchoate anxieties over moral and spiritual softness, we like to take it out on cities such as London, Tokyo, Washington, but, above all, New York. Historian of architecture Max Page wrote an entire book about the portrayals of New York’s destruction, on paper, film, or canvas over the past hundred-odd years, showing how each era uses the city’s death as a way of defining its social concerns and exorcizing its specific demons.
There’s a common thread that underlies it all, though: the deadening of experience in advanced society, the banality of everyday life mixed with the precariousness of the capitalist economy. And so we use our art to destroy New York, “to escape the sense of inevitable and incomprehensible economic transformations … to make our world more comprehensible than it has become.” Page goes on: “A disaster, even when mediated through images or words, still retains an authenticity that has been the quest of modern society for two centuries.”
But why New York? A clue is to be found in the way in which, in the years after 9/11, the attack on the Pentagon has almost completely faded from popular remembrance. Washington, D.C., may be the capital of the American empire, but New York is the capital of modernity, or as Oswald Spengler put it, the “monstrous symbol” of the modern world. Whether it is King Kong making his final stand atop the Empire State Building or the lizard in Cloverfield ripping the head off of the Statue of Liberty, it is something significantly more than a tourist attraction that is under assault from these monsters of nature. (70-71)
I would be surprised if this trilogy doesn’t wrap up with questions and themes related to Bruce Wayne as an ideal “one percent” in Gotham. There’s a polarity afoot in many cases. The city represents the Babylon that must fall but in many cases it also becomes the Jerusalem delivered from invaders. Gotham may be in ruins in The Dark Knight Rises but didn’t the Avengers just make their last stand for the world at a big American city?
I wonder how much of this is just that pop culture’s memes for a big city are largely New York-related. Even Coruscant has a New York tinge to it at times in Star Wars.
@Wenatchee: Peter Rollins has talked about Batman and class a bit, I’ll see if I can find the video or audio.
Dan, that sounds interesting. I haven’t been writing nearly as much as I thought I would but I have partial work to account for that, which is a good reason to not always find time to write these days.
I’m rereading the first hundred pages of Schlatter and am thus no further than page 67 or so. I do still mean to blog more about SChlatter’s commentary on Romans in the future.
Wenatchee: Yeah, I’d be very surprised if Nolan agreed with Ra’s al Guhl’s perspective on modernity-as-expressed-in-NYC. Even in TDK he had the people of Gotham decide to act altruistically (though he also ended the movie with the suggestion that they weren’t strong enough to handle the truth about Dent…).
Here’s a link to the Rollins thing I was talking about: http://hackingchristianity.net/2012/02/we-need-heroes-like-thomas-wayne-not-bruce-wayne.html
This misses that Bruce, at least in the more expansive comics universe, does in fact give a lot of money to the social programs that Rollins, etc., are talking about. This should not come as a surprise, given that most comics nowadays are written by progressives, and Batman is supposed to be both a genius and a hero.
However, the post does overlook the possibility that, as Alfred said in TDK, “some people just want to watch the world burn.” It assumes that there would be no need for an agent of vengeance if we just had the correct economic policy, which I think unlikely. It also doesn’t really consider that Batman arose because of a pressing immediate need (the already existing overwhelming criminal element both outside and within the power structures of Gotham), and that can’t be vanished away with government policy (and who would be implementing it, exactly?). This could also have real-world parallels.
Rollins does not, from what I can tell, regard government involvement as the needed ingredient in some kind of change.
Fair enough, but the point would remain even if we compared directly to the kinds of things Thomas Wayne did (philanthropy), as the article explicitly does.
Nolan’s central characters (so far) all eventually are put in a position to confront or affirm delusions they have embraced. It remains to be seen whether Bruce Wayne’s deception to preserve Dent’s reputation and giant surveillance system made Gotham better. It’s possible that Batman taking hte blame and then hiding may lead to a peace but a kind of false peace that must, per the genre, inevitably get blown up.
In many cases the central character can’t or won’t confront the delusion or deception within his heart (Memento, The Prestige). In other cases the lie can be acknowledged but its damage is impossible to be undone (Insomnia, if memory serves). It’s only been with Inception that I can recall a Nolan film in which seems to face down his level of denial and make a decision to reconnect with others (I don’t think Cobb was ever really in the real world until the end of the film, and that’s presupposing a happy ending, which I don’t necessarily do).
The question and answer of “Why do we fall?” with “So we can get up again.” may invite a popcorn ending but Nolan’s protagonists don’t usually roll that way. They’re usually more of the mold of “Why do we rise?” that is answered with “So we can fall.”
Granted but I think Rollins is focused on Nolan’s Batman in particular and not an aggregate of various versions of the caped crusader.
Interestingly, The Dark Knight Rises was significantly inspired by A Tale of Two Cities.
http://screencrave.com/2012-07-09/the-dark-knight-rises-script-influenced-a-tale-cities/
Also, the new film directly touches on the theme of Batman’s tactics versus his father’s type of efforts.