Another reader’s response to The Dark Knight Rises

Randy B. writes:

I saw an entirely different Batman than the movie some of your commenters saw. There was nothing that gave me any feeling that it was a conservative movie. As a matter of fact I saw it as very anti-capitalist and pro-Occupy, with only the weakest attempts to cover its actual agenda.

My family was otherwise occupied that day, so I went alone. (My children are adults at 24, 21, and 19 years of age, so no fear of taking my four month old to a midnight showing.)

The first glimpse the path the movie was going to take was when Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) and Selina / Cat Woman (Anne Hathaway) are dancing at a black tie charity event. For the entire dance Selina rakes Wayne over the coals about the evils of capitalism, wealth, success, and the associated lifestyle. I actually considered getting up and walking out, but I decided to suffer that scene hoping for a change. At one point, after Wayne is rendered penniless but gets to keep his mansion, Selina says, “The rich don’t even go broke like the rest of us.”

That was not enough for Christopher Nolan and his ilk. Nope, once the villain Bane was on screen his message was soundly that of the Occupier, but not the evil occupier, rather the one that was forced to this position because of evil authority and government officials. He is only bad because the system is evil, and he has to fight evil with evil to win. While I completely agree that our government and many authority figures are both corrupt and thereby evil, blowing up Manhattan might not turn the tide or garner the desired results.

In my humble opinion the message of this movie is that evil or oppressed people are forced to lawlessness because of the lawlessness and selfishness of others.

SPOILER ALERT—Do not read on if you plan on wasting your hard earned dollars on this bucket of crap.

In the end the evil capitalist does in fact save the day, but not in a manner one might expect from today’s Hollywood. Batman flies the nuke 30 miles east of NJ into the ocean and sacrifices himself for the rest of the north central East Coast. With the conflicts as presented through this painfully long, agenda-based movie, I was left with the belief that the only good capitalist is a dead capitalist, and we should kill ourselves for the good of humanity.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 23, 2012 03:16 PM | Send