Christopher Nolan | Counter-Currents

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I finally went to see Inception. I wish I had gone on its opening night. It is one of the best movies I have ever seen. Inception is one of the most imaginative and brilliantly plotted movies ever, and it is also one of the most thrilling and emotionally powerful. Think Vertigo meets The Matrix—but that only just begins to describe it. You have to see Inception on the big screen. So stop reading now, and go see this movie before it leaves the theaters.

Inception was directed by Christopher Nolan, who is also the director of a series of increasingly impressive movies: Following (1998), Memento (2000), Insomnia (2002), Batman Begins (2005), The Prestige (2006), and The Dark Knight (2008). The Dark Knight is a work of genius—surely the greatest supervillain movie ever. (I say “supervillain” rather than “superhero,” since Heath Ledger’s Joker completely upstages Batman.) But not even The Dark Knight prepared me for Inception. Indeed, one reason I hesitated to see Inception for so long was the conviction that Nolan could never top The Dark Knight. But he has.

The premise of Inception is that a technology has been invented that allows people to share dreams. The active dreamer is called the “architect.” He is the one who constructs the dream space into which the other dreams knowingly or unknowingly enter. (Real architects seem most suited for the job, since their visual-spatial imaginations are so powerful, and dream spaces have to be constructed as labyrinths and Escher-like topological paradoxes.)

This technology, of course, has great potential for abuse, and this is precisely what the protagonist, Dom Cobb (played by Leonardo Di Caprio), and his team are doing. By abducting people into shared dreams, Di Caprio and his team can effect the “extraction” of their most closely-guarded secrets.

Di Caprio’s character is, however, no mere loathsome crook. He is a man haunted by the death of his wife, a former partner in crime, and the loss of his two children. Unable to return to the US because of a warrant for his arrest, he wanders the world extracting the secrets of the rich and powerful for their rich and powerful rivals, until he is offered a job that, if completed successfully, will allow him to return home to his family. He has to perform an “inception.”

One step beyond the extraction of existing ideas is the “inception” of new ideas. How does one put an idea in another person’s mind so that he thinks it is his own? It has apparently never been done before, but Di Caprio promises to do it. He assembles a team and creates a three level dream: a dream within a dream within a dream. With every new level of dreaming, the experienced dream time becomes longer. In the third level, ten years can pass while one sleeps only ten hours in the real world. Below the third level is “limbo”: unstructured unconsciousness where a lifetime can pass in the blink of a terrestrial eye. If a dreamer is killed in his dream, he will fall into limbo.

All this is more than mere science fiction, for Nolan uses it to generate a powerful dramatic conflict. To reclaim his life, Di Caprio must go deeper and deeper in the dream realm, yet with every level he enters, the figure of his dead wife, who is a projection of his own guilty conscience, becomes a stronger and stronger adversary.

The conflict becomes even more exquisite when we learn that the inception that will bring him home is not the first one. He has done it before, and it was ultimately the cause of his downfall and exile.

This storyline gives Inception a tragic dimension and an emotional power that superficially similar movies like The Matrix just cannot touch. Vertigo is the comparison that comes to mind first, and in my book, that is the highest possible praise. I will say no more about the plot, save that the ending is poetic and deeply satisfying.

There is nothing racially, culturally, or politically offensive about Inception. The movie takes place all over the world, so it is natural that the cast contains an Asian and an Indian, but most of the cast is White, and Nordic at that. (The actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt looks Asian, but he is actually Jewish. Maybe the Khazar hypothesis is not dead.) There is no Hollywood monkey business of racial and ethnic casting against type.

Inception is a movie for smart people. The plot is complex and imaginative, but unlike Memento, it is perfectly coherent and consistent. You have to be clever and focused to follow the story, but if your mind wanders a bit, there are plenty of thrills and stunning images to keep you entertained.

Inception cements Christopher Nolan, at the age of 40, as one of the cinema’s great directors. I know for sure that I will not miss the opening night of his next movie. But why are you still here? See Inception. See it now.

1,222 words

French translation here

After being blown away by director Christopher Nolan’s Inception, I decided to give his Batman Begins (2005) another chance. The first time I saw this film, I did not like it. Not one bit. I must have been distracted, because this time I loved it. Nolan breaks with the campy style of earlier Batman films, focusing on character development and motivations, which makes Batman Begins and its sequel The Dark Knight both psychologically dark and intellectually and emotionally compelling.

Nolan’s casts are superb. Although I was disappointed to learn that David Boreanaz—the perfect look, in my opinion—had been cast as Batman right up until the part was given to Christian Bale, it is hard to fault Bale’s Batman. He may be too pretty. But he has the intelligence, emotional complexity, and heroic physique needed to bring Batman to life. (Adam West, Michael Keaton, and George Clooney were jokes, but Val Kilmer was an intriguing choice.)

Batman Begins also stars Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, Liam Neeson, Cillian Murphy, Ken Watanabe, Rutger Hauer, and Morgan Freeman as one of those brilliant black inventors and mentors for confused whites so common in science fiction. In The Dark Knight, Bale, Caine, Oldman, Murphy, and Freeman return, and the immortal Heath Ledger is The Joker.

Batman Begins falls into three parts. In the first part we cut between Bruce Wayne in China and flashbacks of the course that brought him there. I despise the cliché that passes for psychology in popular culture today, namely that a warped psyche can be traced back to a primal trauma. So I was annoyed to learn that young Bruce Wayne became obsessed with bats when he fell down a well and was swarmed by them, and that he became a crime-fighter because his wealthy parents were gunned down in front of him by a mugger. Haunted by these traumas, billionaire Bruce Wayne ended up dropping out of Princeton to immerse himself in the criminal underworld, eventually ending up in a brutal Chinese prison.

Wayne is released by the mysterious Mr. Ducat—played by the imposing and charismatic Liam Neeson—who oversees his training in a mysterious Himalayan fortress run by “The League of Shadows,” an ancient order of warrior-ascetics led by Ra’s al Ghul (Ken Watanabe). The League follows the Traditional teaching that history moves in circles, beginning with a Golden Age and declining into a Dark Age, which then collapses and gives place to a new Golden Age. The mission of the League of Shadows is to appear when a civilization has reached the nadir of decadence and is about to fall—and then give it a push. (Needless to say, they do not have a website or a Facebook page. Nor can one join them by sending in a check.)

The League’s training is both physical and spiritual. The core of the spiritual path is to confront and overcome one’s deepest fears using a hallucinogen derived from a Himalayan flower. In a powerful and poetic scene of triumph, Bruce Wayne stands unafraid in the midst of a vast swarm of bats. The first time I watched this, I missed the significance of this transformation, which is an implicit critique of “trauma” psychology, for traumas are shown to be ultimately superficial compared with the heroic strength to stand in the face of the storm. It is, moreover, perfectly consistent with the conviction that nature is ultimately more powerful than nurture.

Bruce Wayne accepts the League’s training but in the end rejects its mission. He thinks that decadence can be reversed. He believes in progress. He and Ducat fight. Ra’s al Ghul is killed. The fortress explodes. Wayne escapes, saving Ducat’s life. Then he calls for his private jet and returns to Gotham City.

In act two, Bruce Wayne becomes Batman. Interestingly enough, Batman is much closer to Nietzsche’s idea of the “Superman” than the Superman character is. Superman isn’t really a man to begin with. He just looks like us. His powers are just “given.” But a Nietzschean superman is a man who makes himself more than a mere man. Bruce Wayne conquers nature, both his own nature and the world around him. As a man, he makes himself more than a man.

But morally speaking, Batman is no Übermensch, for he remains enslaved by the sentimental notion that every human life has some sort of innate value. He does not see that this morality negates the worth of his own achievement. A Batman can only be suffered if he serves his inferiors. Universal human rights—equality—innate dignity—the sanctity of every sperm: these ideas license the subordination and ultimately the destruction of everything below—or above—humanity. They are more than just a death sentence for nature, as Pentti Linkola claims. They are a death sentence for human excellence, high culture, anything in man that points above man.

Of course Batman’s humanistic ethics has limits, particularly when he makes a getaway in the Batmobile, crushing and crashing police cars, blasting through walls, tearing over rooftops. Does Bruce Wayne plan to reimburse the good citizens of Gotham, or is there a higher morality at work here after all?

In act two, Batman begins to clean up Gotham City and uncovers and unravels a complex plot. In act three, we learn who is behind it: The League of Shadows. We learn that Neeson’s character Ducat is the real Ra’s al Ghul, and he and the League have come to a Gotham City tottering on the brink of chaos—to send it over the edge. Of course Batman saves the day, and Gotham is allowed to limp on, sliding deeper into decadence as its people lift their eyes toward the shining mirages of hope and eternal progress that seduce and enthrall their champion as well.

Batman Begins is a dark and serious movie, livened with light humor. It is dazzling to the eye. The script was co-authored by Christopher Nolan and Jewish writer-director David Goyer. There are a few politically correct touches, such as Morgan Freeman (although I find it impossible to dislike Morgan Freeman) and the little fact that one of Wayne’s ancestors was an abolitionist, but nothing that really stinks.

Batman Begins touches on many of the themes that I discerned in my reviews of Guillermo del Toro’s Hellboy and Hellboy II. Again, the villains seem to subscribe to the Traditionalist, cyclical view of history; they hold that the trajectory of history is decline; they believe that we inhabit a Dark Age and that a Golden Age will dawn only when the Dark Age is destroyed; and they wish to lend their shoulders to the wheel of time. That which is falling, should be pushed.

The heroes, by contrast, believe in progress. Thus they hold that a better world can be attained by building on the present one.

This is a rather elegant and absolutely radical opposition, which can be exploited to create high stakes dramatic conflict. What fight can be more compelling than the people who want to destroy the world versus the people who want to save it?

This raises the obvious question: Who in Hollywood has been reading René Guénon and Julius Evola—or, in the case of Hellboy, Savitri Devi and Miguel Serrano? For somebody inside the beast clearly understands that a weaponized Traditionalism is the ultimate revolt against the modern world.

3,650 words

French translation here

In my review of Christoper Nolan’s Batman Begins, I argued that the movie generates a dramatic conflict around the highest of stakes: the destruction of the modern world (epitomized by Gotham City) by the Traditionalist “League of Shadows” versus its preservation and “progressive” improvement by Batman.

I also argued that Batman’s transformation into a Nietzschean Übermensch was incomplete, for he still accepted the reigning egalitarian-humanistic ethics that devalued his superhuman striving and achievements even as he placed them in the service of the little people of Gotham.

This latent conflict between an aristocratic and an egalitarian ethic becomes explicit in Nolan’s breath-taking sequel The Dark Knight (2008), which is surely the greatest supervillain movie ever. (The greatest superhero movie has to be Zack Snyder’s Watchmen [2009].)

Spoiler alert: If you haven’t seen the movie yet, stop now.

Philosophizing with Dynamite

The true star of The Dark Knight is Heath Ledger as the Joker. The Joker is a Nietzschean philosopher. In the opening scene, he borrows Nietzsche’s aphorism, “Whatever doesn’t kill me, makes me stronger,” giving it a twist: “I believe whatever doesn’t kill you, simply makes you . . . stranger.” Following Nietzsche, who philosophized with a hammer, the Joker philosophizes with knives as well as “dynamite, gunpowder, and . . . . gasoline!”

Yes, he is a criminal. A ruthless and casual mass murderer, in fact. But he believes that “Gotham deserves a better class of criminal, and I’m going to give it to them. . . . It’s not about money. It’s about sending a message. Everything burns.” In this, the Joker is not unlike another Nietzschean philosopher, the Unabomber, who philosophized with bombs because he too wanted to send a message.

The Joker’s message is the emptiness of the reigning values. His goal is the transvaluation of values. Although he initially wants to kill Batman, he comes to see him as a kindred spirit, an alter ego: a fellow superhuman, a fellow freak, who is still tragically tied to a humanistic morality. Consider this dialogue:

Batman: Then why do you want to kill me?

The Joker: I don’t want to kill you! What would I do without you? Go back to ripping off mob dealers? No, no, NO! No. You . . . you . . . complete me.

Batman: You’re garbage who kills for money.

The Joker: Don’t talk like one of them. You’re not! Even if you’d like to be. To them, you’re just a freak, like me! They need you right now, but when they don’t, they’ll cast you out, like a leper! You see, their morals, their code, it’s a bad joke. Dropped at the first sign of trouble. They’re only as good as the world allows them to be. I’ll show you. When the chips are down, these . . . these civilized people, they’ll eat each other. See, I’m not a monster. I’m just ahead of the curve.

The Joker may want to free Batman, but he is a practitioner of tough love. His therapy involves killing random innocents, then targeting somebody Batman loves.

Death, Authenticity, and Freedom

The basis of the kinship the Joker perceives between himself and Batman is not merely a matter of eccentric garb. It is their relationship to death. The Joker is a bit of an existentialist when it comes to death: “in their last moments, people show you who they really are.” Most people fear death more than anything. Thus they flee from it by picturing their death as somewhere “out there,” in the future, waiting for them. But if you only have one death, and it is somewhere in the future, then right now, one is immortal. And immortal beings can afford to live foolishly and inauthentically. People only become real when they face death, and they usually put that off to the very last minute.

The Joker realizes that there is something scarier than death, and that is a life without freedom or authenticity.

The Joker realizes that mortality is not something waiting for him out there in the future. It is something that he carries around inside him at all times. He does not need a memento mori. He feels his own heart beating.

Because he knows he can die at any moment, he lives every moment.

He is ready to die at any moment. He accepts Harvey Dent’s proposal to kill him based on a coin toss. He indicates he is willing to blow himself up to deter the black gangster Gambol—and everybody believes him. He challenges Batman to run him down just to teach him a lesson.

In his mind, the Joker’s readiness to die at any moment may be his license to kill at any moment.

The Joker can face his mortality, because he has learned not to fear it. Indeed, he has come to love it, for it is the basis of his inner freedom. When Batman tries to beat information out of the Joker, he simply laughs: “You have nothing, nothing to threaten me with. Nothing to do with all your strength.” Batman is powerless against him, because the Joker is prepared to die.

The Joker senses, perhaps mistakenly, that Batman could attain a similar freedom.

What might be holding Batman back? Could it be his conviction of the sanctity of life? In Batman Begins, Bruce Wayne breaks with the League of Shadows because he refuses the final initiation: taking another man’s life. Later in the movie, he refuses to kill Ra’s al Ghul (although he hypocritically lets him die). In The Dark Knight, Batman refuses to kill the Joker. If that is Batman’s hangup, the Joker will teach him that one can only live a more-than-human life if one replaces the love of mere life with the love of liberating death.

Lessons in Transvaluation

Many of the Joker’s crimes can be understood as moral experiments and lessons.

1. When the Joker breaks a pool cue and tosses it to Gambol’s three surviving henchmen, telling them that he is having “tryouts” and that only one of them (meaning the survivor) can “join our team,” he is opposing their moral scruples to their survival instincts. The one with the fewest scruples or the strongest will to survive has the advantage.

2. The joker rigs two boats to explode, one filled with criminals and the other with the good little people of Gotham. He gives each boat the detonator switch to the other one, and tells them that unless one group chooses to blow up the other by midnight, he will blow up both boats. Again, he is opposing moral scruples to survival instincts.

The results are disappointing. The good people cannot act without a vote, and when they vote to blow up the other ship, not one of them has the guts to follow through. They would rather die than take the lives of others, and it is clearly not because they have conquered their fear of death, but simply from a lack of sheer animal vitality, of will to power. Their morality has made them sick. They don’t think they have the right to live at the expense of others. Or, worse still, they all live at the expense of others. This whole System is about eating one another. But none of them will own up to that fact in front of others.

Batman interprets this as a sign that people “are ready to believe in goodness,” i.e., that the Joker was wrong to claim that, “When the chips are down, these . . . these civilized people, they’ll eat each other.” The Joker hoped to put oversocialized people back in touch with animal vitality, and he failed. From a biological point of view, eating one another is surely healthier than going passively to one’s death en masse.

3. The Joker goes on a killing spree to force Batman to take off his mask and turn himself in. Thus Batman must choose between giving up his mission or carrying on at the cost of individual lives. If he chooses to continue, he has to regard the Joker’s victims as necessary sacrifices to serve the greater good, which means that humans don’t have absolute rights that trump their sacrifice for society.

4. The Joker forces Batman to choose between saving the life of Rachel Dawes, the woman he loves, or Harvey Dent, an idealistic public servant. If Batman’s true aim is to serve the common good, then he should choose Dent. But he chooses Dawes because he loves her. But the joke is on him. The Joker told him that Dawes was at Dent’s location, so Batman ends up saving Dent anyway. When Batman tells the Joker he has “one rule” (presumably not to kill) the Joker responds that he is going to have to break that one rule if he is going to save one of them, because he can save one only by letting the other die.

5. As Batman races toward the Joker on the Batcycle, the Joker taunts him: “Hit me, hit me, come on, I want you to hit me.” The Joker is free and ready to die at that very moment. Batman, however, cannot bring himself to kill him. He veers off and crashes. The Joker is willing to die to teach Batman simply to kill out of healthy animal anger, without any cant about rights or due process and other moralistic claptrap.

6. Later in the film, Batman saves the Joker from falling to his death. He could have just let him die, as he did Ra’s al Ghul. The Joker says: “Oh, you. You just couldn’t let me go, could you? This is what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object. You are truly incorruptible, aren’t you? . . . You won’t kill me out of some misplaced sense of self-righteousness. And I won’t kill you because you’re just too much fun. I think you and I are destined to do this forever.” Again, one has the sense that the Joker would have been glad to die simply to shake Batman out of his “misplaced sense of self-righteousness.”

At the risk of sounding like The Riddler:

Q: What do you call a man who is willing to die to make a philosophical point?

A: A philosopher.

Materialistic versus Aristocratic Morals

Modern materialistic society is based on two basic principles: that nothing is worse than death and nothing is better than wealth. Aristocratic society is based on the principles that there are things worse than death and better than wealth. Dishonor and slavery are worse than death. And honor and freedom are better than wealth.

We have already seen that the Joker fears death less than an inauthentic and unfree life. In one of the movie’s most memorable scenes, he shows his view of wealth. The setting is the hold of a ship. A vast mountain of money is piled up. The Joker has just recovered a trove of the mob’s money—for which he will receive half. Tied up on top of the pile is Mr. Lau, the money launderer who tried to abscond with it.

One of the gangsters asks the Joker what he will do with all his money. He replies: “I’m a man of simple tastes. I like dynamite, and gunpowder, and . . . gasoline.” At which point his henchmen douse the money with gasoline. The Joker continues: “And you know what they all have in common? They’re cheap.” He then lights the pyre and addresses the gangster: “All you care about is money. Gotham deserves a better class of criminal, and I’m going to give it to them.”

Aristocratic morality makes a virtue of transforming wealth into something spiritual: into honor, prestige, or beautiful and useless things. Trading wealth for spiritual goods demonstrates one’s freedom from material necessity. But the ultimate demonstration of one’s freedom from material goods is the simple destruction of them.

The Indians of the Pacific Northwest practice a ceremony called the “Potlatch.” In a Potlatch, tribal leaders gain prestige by giving away material wealth. However, when there was intense rivalry between individuals, they would vie for honor not by giving away wealth but by destroying it.

The Joker is practicing Potlatch. Perhaps the ultimate put down, though, is when he mentions that he is only burning his share of the money.

The Man with the Plan

Gotham’s District Attorney Harvey Dent (played by Nordic archetype Aaron Eckhart) is a genuinely noble man. He is also a man with a plan. He leaves nothing up to chance, although he pretends to. He makes decisions by flipping a coin, but the coin is rigged. It has two heads.

The Joker kidnaps Harvey Dent and Rachel Dawes and rigs them to blow up. He gives Batman the choice of saving one. He races off to save Dawes but finds Dent instead. Dawes is killed, and Dent is horribly burned. Half his face is disfigured, and one side of his coin (which was in Rachel’s possession) is blackened as well. Harvey Dent has become “Two Face.”

The Joker, of course, is a man with a plan too. Truth be told, he is a criminal mastermind, the ultimate schemer. (Indeed, one of the few faults of this movie is that his elaborate schemes seem to spring up without any time for preparation.) When the Joker visits Dent in the hospital, however, he makes the following speech in answer to Dent’s accusation that Rachel’s death was part of the Joker’s plan.

Do I really look like a guy with a plan? You know what I am? I’m a dog chasing cars. I wouldn’t know what to do with one if I caught it. You know, I just . . . do things.

The mob has plans, the cops have plans . . . . You know, they’re schemers. Schemers trying to control their little worlds. I’m not a schemer. I try to show the schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are. . . . It’s the schemers that put you where you are. You were a schemer, you had plans, and look where that got you. I just did what I do best. I took your little plan and I turned it on itself. Look what I did to this city with a few drums of gas and a couple of bullets. Hmmm?

You know . . . You know what I’ve noticed? Nobody panics when things go “according to plan.” Even if the plan is horrifying! If, tomorrow, I tell the press that, like, a gang banger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics, because it’s all “part of the plan.” But when I say that one little old mayor will die, well then everyone loses their minds!

Introduce a little anarchy. Upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos. I’m an agent of chaos. Oh, and you know the thing about chaos? It’s fair!

The Joker’s immediate agenda is to gaslight Harvey Dent, to turn Gotham’s White Knight into a crazed killer. “Madness,” he says, “is like gravity. All you need is a little push.” This speech is his push, and what he says has to be interpreted with this specific aim in mind. For instance, the claim that chaos is “fair” is clearly apropos of Dent’s use of a two-headed coin because he refuses to leave anything up to chance. (Chaos here is equivalent to chance.) Dent’s reply is to propose to decide whether the Joker lives or dies based on a coin toss. The Joker agrees, and the coin comes up in the Joker’s favor. We do not see what happens, but the Joker emerges unscathed and Harvey Dent is transformed into Two Face.

The Contingency Plan

But the Joker’s speech is not merely a lie to send Dent over the edge. In the end, the Joker really isn’t a man with a plan, and the clearest proof of that is that he stakes his life on a coin toss. Yes, the Joker plans for all sorts of contingencies, but he knows that the best laid plans cannot eliminate contingency as such. But that’s all right, for the Joker embraces contingency as he embraces death: it is a principle of freedom.

The Joker is in revolt not only against the morals of modernity, but also its metaphysics, the reigning interpretation of Being, namely that the world is ultimately transparent to reason and susceptible to planning and control. Heidegger called this interpretation of Being the “Gestell,” a term which connotes classification and arrangement to maximize availability, like a book in a well-ordered library, numbered and shelved so it can be located and retrieved at will. For modern man, “to be” is to be susceptible to being classified, labeled, shelved, and available in this fashion.

Heidegger regarded such a world as an inhuman hell, and the Joker agrees. When the Joker is arrested, we find that he has no DNA or fingerprints or dental records on file. He has no name, no address, no identification of any kind. His clothes are custom made, with no labels. As Commissioner Gordon says, there’s “nothing in his pockets but knives and lint.” Yes, the system has him, but it knows nothing about him. When he escapes, they have no idea where to look. He is a book without a barcode: unclassified, unshelved, unavailable . . . free.

For Heidegger, the way to freedom is to meditate on the origins of the Gestell, which he claims are ultimately mysterious. Why did people start thinking that everything can be understood and controlled? Was the idea cooked up by a few individuals and then propagated according to a plan? Heidegger thinks not. The Gestell is a transformation of the Zeitgeist that cannot be traced back to individual thoughts and actions, but instead conditions and leads them. Its origins and power thus remain inscrutable. The Gestell is an “Ereignis,” an event, a contingency.

Heidegger suggests that etymologically “Ereignis” also has the sense of “taking hold” and “captivating.” Some translators render it “appropriation” or “enowning.” I like to render it “enthrallment”: The modern interpretation of Being happened, we know not why. It is a dumb contingency. It just emerged. Now it enthralls us. We can’t understand it. We can’t control it. How do we break free?

The spell is broken as soon as we realize that the idea of the Gestell–the idea that we can understand and control everything–cannot itself be understood or controlled. The origin of idea that all things can be understood cannot be understood. The sway of the idea that all things can be planned and controlled cannot be planned or controlled. The reign of the idea that everything is necessary, that everything has a reason, came about as sheer, irrational contingency.

The Joker seeks to break the power of the Gestell not merely by meditating on contingency, but by acting from it, i.e., by being an irrational contingency, by being an agent of chaos.

He introduces chaos into his own life by acting on whim, by just “doing things” that don’t make sense, like “a dog chasing cars”: staking his life on a coin toss, playing chicken with Batman, etc. When Batman tries to beat information out of the Joker, he tells him that “The only sensible way to live in this world is without rules.”

Alfred the butler understands the Joker’s freedom: “Some men aren’t looking for anything logical, like money. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.”

The Joker introduces chaos into society by breaking the grip of the System and its plans.

He is capable of being an agent of chaos because of his relationship to death. He does not fear it. He embraces it as a permanent possibility. He is, therefore, free. His freedom raises him above the Gestell, allowing him to look down on it . . . and laugh. That’s why they call him the Joker.

In All Seriousness

I like the Joker’s philosophy. I think he is right. “But wait,” some of you might say, “the Joker is a monster!” Heath Ledger claimed that the Joker was ‘a psychopathic, mass murdering, schizophrenic clown with zero empathy.’ Surely you don’t like someone like that!”

But remember, we are dealing with Hollywood here. In a “free” society we can’t suppress dangerous truths altogether. So we have to be immunized against them. That’s why Hollywood lets dangerous truths appear on screen, but only in the mouths of monsters: Derek Vinyard in American History X, Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New York, Ra’s al Ghul in Batman Begins, the Joker in The Dark Knight, etc.

We need to learn to separate the message from the messenger, and we need to teach the millions of people who have seen this movie (the seventh biggest film of all time) to do so as well. Once we do that, the film ceases to reinforce the system’s message and reinforces ours instead. That’s what I do best. I take their propaganda and turn it on itself.

What lessons can we learn from The Dark Knight?

Batman Begins reveals a deep understanding of the fundamental opposition between the Traditional cyclical view of history and modern progressivism, envisioning a weaponized Traditionalism (The League of Shadows) as the ultimate enemy of Batman and the forces of progress.

The Dark Knight reveals a deep understanding of the moral and metaphysical antipodes of the modern world: the Nietzschean concept of master morality and critique of egalitarian slave morality, allied with the Heideggerian concept of the Gestell and the power of sheer irrational contingency to break it.

The Joker weaponizes these ideas, and he exploits Batman’s latent moral conflict between Nietzschean self-overcoming and his devotion to human rights and equality.

In short, somebody in Hollywood understands who the System’s most radical and fundamental enemy is. They know what ideas can destroy their world. It is time we learn them too.

Let’s show these schemers how pathetic their attempts to control us really are.

Jim Caviezel

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Recently, while staying with a friend who had just gotten out of the hospital, I was exposed to a good deal of TV. Two shows caught my attention: Downton Abbey (more on that later) and Person of Interest, which runs on CBS on Thursday nights. At first, I thought Person of Interest might merely serve to tide me over until the next seasons of Burn Notice and Breaking Bad.

Like Burn Notice, the main character of Person of Interest is an ex-spy who uses his craft to help ordinary people in need. Like Burn Notice, there are also longer storylines that arch over multiple episodes.

But now, having watched the first 15 episodes of Person of Interest, I have to say that I like Person of Interest even better than Burn Notice, which is high praise indeed.

The premise of Person of Interest is that after 9/11, the US government created a computer network, “the machine,” which reads all of our emails, tracks our transactions, listens to our phone calls, and analyzes all video feeds in order to predict acts of terrorism, or as they say now, in honor of George W. Bush, “terror” (pronounced with one syllable). The machine can also predict acts of violence against ordinary citizens. But the government does nothing to stop those.

The creator of the machine is a reclusive billionaire, Mr. Finch, is played by Michael Emerson (Ben in Lost, i.e., the most interesting character in the longest-running, most obnoxious cheat in television history). Finch is haunted by the fates of the random innocents the government does nothing to protect. Surely, he also feels a bit guilty for having turned Uncle Sam into Big Brother—although we learn that he tried to build in protections against that.

Finch decides he wants to try to make the world a better place by preventing the crimes the government will do nothing to stop. But he is a geek with a gimp, so he has to hire a tough guy, John Reese, a former US Army Special Forces soldier and CIA operative who is haunted by the evils he did for Uncle Sam. Reese is played by Jim Caviezel, who played Jesus in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. Together Finch and Reese seek to prevent crimes while being hunted as criminal vigilantes by the CIA and the New York City police (where the show is set).

Jim Caviezel is immensely impressive as John Reese. The only other role I had seen him in was Jesus in The Passion of the Christ, and it was not really a good gauge of his talents, given that he spent the movie speaking Aramaic and getting the bejeezus beaten out of him.

Caviezel is a tall, slim, blue-eyed man in his 40s with graying brown hair. But his most arresting features are his soft voice and astonishingly mobile face. Both are remarkably subtle and expressive. His face is handsome in repose, but when he acts, it is a play of light and shadow, in which every line, wrinkle, and crag communicates a deep and complex character. One has the impression that as age etches more lines in Caviezel’s face, he will only grow more charismatic and expressive.

But Caviezel’s John Reese is more than just soulful. He is also a man of action who is extremely handy with every known weapon, including his bare hands. He is definitely a man you want on your side. Reese is a classic Nordic hero: laconic, intelligent, self-aware, noble, and courageous. He does his duty without concern for the consequences to himself or others. (He leaves those for the gods to sort out.) He is deadly serious about serious things, but he also has an ironic touch when dealing with the petty and absurd.

Like Michael Westen in Burn Notice, John Reese exemplifies what Julius Evola calls Uranian masculinity. He is not a playboy or skirt chaser. He is focused on his mission and his ideals, which creates an aloof and emotionally self-contained quality — not unlike the Taoist sage-emperor or Aristotle’s unmoved mover — that is enormously attractive to higher types of women.

If Caviezel had been born a few decades earlier, he could have given Clint Eastwood serious competition for his iconic gunslinger and detective roles — and in fair auditions, he would have beaten Eastwood every time. Imagine a Dirty Harry who actually felt he was dirty.

As the series unfolds, we learn that Reese came to hate himself for the things he did in the service of America. He has lost all fear of death and attachment to life. He feels that he has lost his soul. Hence his willingness to put his life on the line day after day, and his cold-blooded calm in the face of danger. But of course Reese still has his soul, or a smoldering ember of one, because he risks death only for what is right. He is really fighting for redemption. (This is a far nobler quest — and one with far greater dramatic potential — than Michael Westen’s desire in Burn Notice to get his soul-killing job back and find out who burned him.)

Person of Interest is one of the best written shows on television. It is on par with Breaking Bad, one of the finest television shows of all time, in my opinion. It is written and produced by one of the best writers around: Jonathan Nolan, the brother of Christopher Nolan, director of Memento, The Prestige, The Dark Knight, Inception, etc. Jonathan Nolan co-authored the scripts to The Prestige, The Dark Knight, and its sequel The Dark Knight Rises, which is now in production.

Person of Interest is mercifully free of political correctness. Yes, one of the admirable characters is a black female police officer, yet she is wholly believable. But there is no egregious casting against stereotype.

The portrayal of the US government is entirely negative. The CIA are portrayed as treacherous and callous killers who obviously have no sense of allegiance to the United States. They sell drugs to Americans to finance the war on “terror,” that is to say, the war against the enemies of Israel and Jews around the world. They refer to operations in the US as being “behind enemy lines” or “in country.” (One wonders if they speak of Israel that way.) The NYC police are portrayed as riddled with corruption and cynicism.

“The machine” is Orwell’s nightmare made real. (It is prefigured in The Dark Knight.) But the true obscenity is that it is not even used to fight crime. It is the perfect illustration of Sam Francis’ concept of “anarcho-tyranny”: the government violates the privacy of every decent, law-abiding citizen while allowing crime and corruption to run unchecked.

Jim Caviezel is a devout Roman Catholic. He is married with three children. His mother was Irish-American. His father is of Slovak and Swiss descent. The name Caviezel is Romansh, the language indigenous to Switzerland. Caviezel is also politically conservative. He has donated to Rick Santorum. He also made a commercial opposing embryonic stem cell research. From a white racialist point of view, these are not issues that matter, but I admire Caviezel’s courage for taking politically incorrect stands.

Despite his evident talent, Caviezel has suffered career discrimination for playing Jesus in The Passion of the Christ, since Jews in Hollywood (and everywhere else) do not forgive or forget. Frankly, Person of Interest may well be his last chance before doing dinner theater. For that reason alone, I would be inclined to root for this show. But Person of Interest is good enough to recommend on its own merits. If you must watch television, then by all means, watch Person of Interest.

Christopher Nolan

4,936 words

Editor’s Note:

Unless you’re living in Tora Bora, you probably know that Christopher Nolan’s third Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises, is coming out this week.

Thus we are posting Trevor Lynch’s reviews of Nolan’s Batman Begins and The Dark Knight as they were reprinted in the first volume of North American New Right.

Trevor promises to review The Dark Knight Rises as soon as he can get to a town with a movie theater.

Batman Begins

In Batman Begins (2005) and its sequel The Dark Knight (2008), director Christopher Nolan breaks with the campy style of earlier Batman films, focusing instead on character development and motivations. This makes both films psychologically dark and intellectually and emotionally compelling.

Nolan’s casts are superb. Although I was disappointed to learn that David Boreanaz—the perfect look, in my opinion—had been cast as Batman right up until the part was given to Christian Bale, it is hard to fault Bale’s Batman. He may be too pretty. But he has the intelligence, emotional complexity, and heroic physique needed to bring Batman to life. (Past Batmans Adam West, Michael Keaton, and George Clooney were jokes, but Val Kilmer was an intriguing choice.)

Wayne is released by the mysterious Mr. Ducard—played by the imposing and charismatic Liam Neeson—who oversees his training in a mysterious Himalayan fortress run by “The League of Shadows,” an ancient order of warrior-ascetics led by Ra’s al Ghul (Ken Watanabe). The League follows the Traditional teaching that history moves in circles, beginning with a Golden Age and declining into a Dark Age, which then collapses and gives place to a new Golden Age. The mission of the League of Shadows is to appear when a civilization has reached the nadir of decadence and is about to fall—and then give it a push. (Needless to say, they do not have a website or a Facebook page. Nor can one join them by sending in a check.)

Bruce Wayne accepts the League’s training but in the end rejects its mission. He thinks that decadence can be reversed. He believes in progress. He and Ducat fight. Ra’s al Ghul is killed. The fortress explodes. Wayne escapes, saving Ducard’s life. Then he calls for his private jet and returns to Gotham City.

Of course Batman’s humanistic ethic has limits, particularly when he makes a getaway in the Batmobile, crushing and crashing police cars, blasting through walls, tearing over rooftops. Does Bruce Wayne plan to reimburse the good citizens of Gotham, or is there a higher morality at work here after all?

In act two, Batman begins to clean up Gotham City and uncovers and unravels a complex plot. In act three, we learn who is behind it: The League of Shadows. We learn that Neeson’s character Ducat is the real Ra’s al Ghul, and he and the League have come to a Gotham City tottering on the brink of chaos—to send it over the edge. Of course Batman saves the day, and Gotham is allowed to limp on, sliding deeper into decadence as its people lift their eyes towards the shining mirages of hope and eternal progress that seduce and enthrall their champion as well.

Counter-Currents/North American New Right, September 23, 2010

The Dark Knight

This latent conflict between an aristocratic and an egalitarian ethic becomes explicit in Nolan’s breathtaking sequel The Dark Knight, which is surely the greatest supervillain movie ever. (The greatest superhero movie has to be Zack Snyder’s Watchmen [2009].)

Philosophizing with Dynamite

Batman: Then why do you want to kill me?

The Joker: I don’t want to kill you! What would I do without you? Go back to ripping off mob dealers? No, no, NO! No. You . . . you . . . complete me.

Batman: You’re garbage who kills for money.

The Joker may want to free Batman, but he is a practitioner of tough love. His therapy involves killing random innocents, then targeting somebody Batman loves.

Death, Authenticity, & Freedom

The Joker realizes that there is something scarier than death, and that is a life without freedom or authenticity.

Because he knows he can die at any moment, he lives every moment.

In his mind, the Joker’s readiness to die at any moment may be his license to kill at any moment.

The Joker senses, perhaps mistakenly, that Batman could attain a similar freedom.

Lessons in Transvaluation

Many of the Joker’s crimes can be understood as moral experiments and lessons.

2. The Joker rigs two boats to explode, one filled with criminals and the other with the good little people of Gotham. He gives each boat the detonator switch to the other one, and tells them that unless one group chooses to blow up the other by midnight, he will blow up both boats. Again, he is opposing moral scruples to survival instincts.

5. As Batman races towards the Joker on the Batcycle, the Joker taunts him: “Hit me, hit me, come on, I want you to hit me.” The Joker is free and ready to die at that very moment. Batman, however, cannot bring himself to kill him. He veers off and crashes. The Joker is willing to die to teach Batman simply to kill out of healthy animal anger, without any cant about rights or due process and other moralistic claptrap.

6. Later in the film, Batman saves the Joker from falling to his death. He could have just let him die, as he did Ra’s al Ghul. The Joker says:

Oh, you. You just couldn’t let me go, could you? This is what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object. You are truly incorruptible, aren’t you? . . . You won’t kill me out of some misplaced sense of self-righteousness. And I won’t kill you because you’re just too much fun. I think you and I are destined to do this forever.

Again, one has the sense that the Joker would have been glad to die simply to shake Batman out of his “misplaced sense of self-righteousness.”

At the risk of sounding like the Riddler:

Q: What do you call a man who is willing to die to make a philosophical point?

A: A philosopher.

Materialistic versus Aristocratic Morals

We have already seen that the Joker fears death less than an inauthentic and unfree life. In one of the movie’s most memorable scenes, he shows his view of wealth. The setting is the hold of a ship. A veritable mountain of money is piled up. The Joker has just recovered a trove of the mob’s money—for which he will receive half. Tied up on top of the pile is Mr. Lau, the money launderer who tried to abscond with it.

The Joker is practicing Potlatch. Perhaps the ultimate put- down, though, is when he mentions that he is only burning his share of the money.

The Man with the Plan

The Joker kidnaps Harvey Dent and Rachel Dawes and rigs them to blow up. He gives Batman the choice of saving one. Batman races off to save Dawes but finds Dent instead. Dawes is killed, and Dent is horribly burned. Half his face is disfigured, and one side of his coin (which was in Rachel’s possession) is blackened as well. Harvey Dent has become “Two-Face.”

Do I really look like a guy with a plan? You know what I am? I’m a dog chasing cars. I wouldn’t know what to do with one if I caught it. You know, I just . . . do things.

The mob has plans, the cops have plans. . . . You know, they’re schemers. Schemers trying to control their little worlds. I’m not a schemer. I try to show the schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are. . . . It’s the schemers that put you where you are. You were a schemer, you had plans, and look where that got you. I just did what I do best. I took your little plan and I turned it on itself. Look what I did to this city with a few drums of gas and a couple of bullets. Hmmm?

Introduce a little anarchy. Upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos. I’m an agent of chaos. Oh, and you know the thing about chaos? It’s fair!

The Joker’s immediate agenda is to gaslight Harvey Dent, to turn Gotham’s White Knight into a crazed killer. “Madness,” he says, “is like gravity. All you need is a little push.” This speech is his push, and what he says has to be interpreted with this specific aim in mind. For instance, the claim that chaos is “fair” is clearly a propos of Dent’s use of a two-headed coin because he refuses to leave anything up to chance. (Chaos here is equivalent to chance.) Dent’s reply is to propose to decide whether the Joker lives or dies based on a coin toss. The Joker agrees, and the coin comes up in the Joker’s favor. We do not see what happens, but the Joker emerges unscathed and Harvey Dent is transformed into Two-Face.

The Contingency Plan

Heidegger regarded such a world as an inhuman hell, and the Joker agrees. When the Joker is arrested, we find that he has no DNA or fingerprints or dental records on file. He has no name, no address, no identification of any kind. His clothes are custom made, with no labels. As Commissioner Gordon says, there’s “nothing in his pockets but knives and lint.” Yes, the system has him, but has nothing on him. It knows nothing about him. When he escapes, they have no idea where to look. He is a book without a barcode: unclassified, unshelved, unavailable . . . free.

The spell is broken as soon as we realize that the idea of the Gestell—the idea that we can understand and control everything—cannot itself be understood or controlled. The origin of the idea that all things can be understood cannot be understood. The sway of the idea that all things can be planned and controlled cannot be planned or controlled. The reign of the idea that everything is necessary, that everything has a reason, came about as sheer, irrational contingency.

The Joker seeks to break the power of the Gestell not merely by meditating on contingency, but by acting from it, i.e., by being an irrational contingency, by being an agent of chaos.

The Joker introduces chaos into society by breaking the grip of the System and its plans.

In All Seriousness

I like the Joker’s philosophy. I think he is right. “But wait,” some of you might say, “the Joker is a monster! Heath Ledger claimed that the Joker was ‘a psychopathic, mass murdering, schizophrenic clown with zero empathy.’ Surely you don’t like someone like that!”

We need to learn to separate the message from the messenger, and we need to teach the millions of people who have seen this movie (at this writing, the seventh biggest film of all time) to do so as well. Once we do that, the film ceases to reinforce the system’s message and reinforces ours instead. That’s what I do best. I take their propaganda and turn it on itself.

What lessons can we learn from The Dark Knight?

The Joker weaponizes these ideas, and he exploits Batman’s latent moral conflict between Nietzschean self-overcoming and his devotion to human rights and equality.

In short, somebody in Hollywood understands who the System’s most radical and fundamental enemy is. They know what ideas can destroy their world. It is time we learn them too.

Let’s show these schemers how pathetic their attempts to control us really are.

Counter-Currents/North American New Right, September 27, 2010

3,374 words

MAJOR SPOILERS BELOW. DO NOT READ THIS BEFORE SEEING THE MOVIE.

The Dark Knight Rises is beyond Left and Right, beyond good and evil, beyond any frame of reference that this society can understand. Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy closes with a vision of weaponized Traditionalism certain to be misunderstood by movie reviewers and talking heads who think in terms of Republicans versus Democrats. It’s similarly beyond the grasp of fanboys playing compare and contrast with The Avengers or Superman.

That said, it’s a comic book movie, it’s a blockbuster, and the demands of the medium necessitate that Nolan cannot go all the way. The most interesting characters are, as always, the villains.

That said, there is something deeply unsettling at the heart of this film, a strange uneasiness that cannot be shaken even after applause fades, the credits roll, and the costumed audience tromps happily into the early morning after a midnight showing. The murder of 12 people at a premiere in Colorado throws a glare on the sickness at the heart of our own society, begs a comparison between the corruption of Gotham and the rot of our own post-America, and forces us to ask, “Is the fire rising?”

The film is utterly unintelligible without the other films in the trilogy. It begins with Gotham paying tribute to its fallen white knight Harvey Dent, who is remembered as an incorruptible crusader against injustice. The symbol also serves as the justification for Dent Act, which keeps the soldiers of organized crime behind bars without hope for parole. However, the fragile peace of Gotham is based on a lie: Batman accepted the blame for Harvey Dent/Two Face’s killing spree at the end of The Dark Knight. Gotham has stability, but it is the stability of a static and lifeless society, a soft but pervasive repression reminiscent of Brezhnev’s Russia, with an explosion just below the surface.

The lie has taken its toll on both Commissioner Gordon and Bruce Wayne. Gordon is weary, tired, almost broken by the burden of having to live out the necessary falsehood. His victory over crime is hollow, his usefulness exhausted, and his civilian superiors already planning his replacement. In The Dark Knight, there is an agonizing moment when his wife Barbara is told that he has been killed, followed by a tearful reunion when his necessary deceit is revealed. By the beginning of this film, Barbara has embraced the noble equality offered the gentler sex in our enlightened time and abandoned him, of course taking the children with her. “Manning up” and doing what is necessary to save one’s city and loved ones is ruthlessly punished by modernity, as it always is.

Wayne, meanwhile, has become a recluse, obsessing over his lost love Rachel Dawes, whom he still believes was waiting for him. His great task of saving Gotham accomplished, Wayne is physically and emotionally crippled. Wayne’s only project is the predictable endeavor of any good Hollywood superhero/tycoon: the pursuit of clean energy. He is assisted by Miranda Tate, a (seemingly) typical liberal do-gooder philanthropist, dreaming of sustainable development, and no doubt, helping the underprivileged, uplifting the oppressed, and doing it all from her drawing room. Unfortunately, Wayne learns that the fusion reactor they were developing could be turned into a weapon, so he shuts the project down, costing Wayne Enterprises millions. As the Joker points out in The Dark Knight, Wayne and Gordon are both “schemers,” trying to “control their little worlds.” As a result, they are trapped by their lies, their fears, and their insecurities.

One of the first signs that the peace is breaking is the emergence of Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway’s Catwoman), a cat burglar seething with resentment against the privileged. Contemptuous of Bruce Wayne and other limousine liberals flattering themselves with their own altruism, Kyle seduces and steals from high society as an act of vengeance, but she is actually seeking an escape from her past. She removes a necklace from Bruce Wayne’s safe, but more importantly, steals his fingerprints for an unknown use. While she thinks she is striking back at the decadent rich, she is actually being used as a pawn by a more dangerous and dedicated group with a higher end in mind than class warfare.

Their leader is Bane, a hulking but brilliant mercenary who was supposedly “excommunicated” from the League of Shadows. Having (literally) built an underground army, Bane’s plans are disrupted when Commissioner Gordon discovers their existence, ending up hospitalized. From his bedside, Gordon pleads for Batman to return. The League of Shadows, which trained Bruce Wayne and in many ways “made” Batman, is the Traditionalist Order headed formerly headed by Ra’s al Ghul. Batman turned on the Order in spectacularly unconvincing fashion in the first film. Why Batman turned on his erstwhile creators remains unanswered in The Dark Knight Rises. Batman merely states that they were a bunch of “psychopaths,” a strange claim coming from a man dominated alternately by childhood fears and long vanished pseudo-girlfriends.

Recognizing that Bruce is trapped by the past, Alfred reveals that Rachel had chosen Harvey Dent over him and that he had concealed it to spare Bruce pain. Alfred also pleads for Bruce to leave everything behind, pointing out Bane’s obvious skill, strength, and training. Bruce refuses, seemingly hoping for death. Alfred confesses that he never wanted Bruce to come back to Gotham, as there was nothing for him there but pain, and confesses a fantasy of him living abroad, somehow having gotten beyond Gotham City. Alfred tearfully leaves Bruce Wayne’s service, leaving Batman truly alone for the first time.

After a brief liaison with Miranda Tate, Bruce Wayne uses Selina Kyle to reach Bane, counting on Kyle being more than a mere criminal. He’s wrong. He is betrayed and forced into a confrontation with Bane, who calls him “Mr. Wayne” (to Kyle’s shock). Bane breaks him, defeating him in physical combat and snapping his spine, before throwing him into an open air prison below the earth. Crippled, Bruce Wayne will be forced to watch the suffering of Gotham while being taunted by the promise of freedom above.

With Batman removed, the League moves with startling swiftness to take over Gotham. A police raid into the sewers to capture Bane’s forces backfires, and the police are trapped en masse below the earth. Bane uses his more materialistic pawns to capture Wayne Enterprises and seize the nuclear device Bruce inadvertently provided, as well as Batman’s arsenal. Bane reveals the bomb’s existence after an attack at a football game. He exposes Batman and Gordon’s lies about Harvey Dent and gives Gotham to “the people,” by freeing the “oppressed” criminals imprisoned by the Dent Act. The result is that Gotham becomes a kind of Paris Commune, with the possessions of the wealthy seized outright and dissidents condemned to death by Dr. Sebastian Crane (Scarecrow), the only villain who appears in all three movies, who returns as a revolutionary hanging judge.

Commissioner Gordon, fresh from the hospital, tries to rally what resistance he can. He is assisted by John Blake, an officer who has discovered the true secret of Batman’s identity and wants him to return. The few above-ground police fail to win back the city, as an effort to smuggle in Special Forces from outside fails miserably.

Meanwhile, Batman recovers slowly underground. He learns about the origins of Bane and his connection to the League of Shadows and Ra’s al Ghul. To escape the prison, which only one other person (Bane) has done, he must climb out of the darkness and into the light, as the other trapped prisoners chant “Deshi Basara” (he rises). After several failures, Wayne is told that he can only escape if he climbs without a safety rope – meaning that another mistake will mean certain death. Wayne climbs and escapes, reborn as Batman. After saving Gordon, his fiery emblem announces his return to Gotham. He frees the police, and together Batman and his new army assault Bane’s base of power at City Hall.

Batman manages to defeat Bane in their rematch, knocking off part of Bane’s mask which delivers a gas that eases his chronic pain. At the moment of Batman’s triumph, Miranda Tate plunges a dagger into him, revealing herself as Ra’s al Ghul’s daughter Talia and the real escapee of the prison. Bane was merely her guardian, who was injured defending her and expelled from the League because of his love for her. Talia attempts to trigger the bomb, but the mechanism has been disabled by Gordon, buying a few moments. She flees in one of the Tumblers (Batmobiles) to guard the bomb. Kyle appears and kills Bane with firepower from the Batpod, and together Batman, Kyle, and Gordon chase down the bomb. Talia is killed, but there is no way to disable the bomb. Thus Batman heroically flies the bomb over the ocean, where it detonates, apparently killing him but saving the city.

In the aftermath, Gotham memorializes Batman as its true hero. Bruce Wayne is remembered simply as a victim of the class violence. His true identity remains a secret, and most of his assets go to help underprivileged children. John Blake (whose real first name is revealed to be Robin) is given the coordinates of the Batcave in Wayne’s will. Gordon, still Commissioner, finds a new Batsignal on the roof of the police station, suggesting Blake has taken up the mantle of the Batman. A heartbroken Alfred travels overseas. At a café, he suddenly looks up and nods, and the camera reveals Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle. Bruce Wayne is no longer Batman, but he is still alive.

From the perspective of Bruce Wayne, the film has to end as it did. While there were rumors that Batman would be killed off, this “darker” ending would actually have been a cop out. Bruce Wayne’s obsession with the Batman, with Rachel, and his own death wish show that he never learned to put suffering behind him. As Alfred points out, “You see only one end to your journey.” Wayne has the characteristically American attitude that bad things cannot happen to good people, and that suffering is a vast departure from the way things ought to be. As a result, when something bad does happen, he can never move beyond it and becomes brooding and obsessive. The ability of Bruce Wayne to put down the mask and move beyond that Bat is necessary for his character to show growth, in some ways, the first real growth since the death of his parents.

What Wayne never goes beyond, and the movie never explains, are his continued sacrifices on behalf of Gotham. When Selina Kyle begs him to leave the city, pointing out that he’s “given these people everything,” Batman says, “not everything. Not yet.” But who are these people? At the beginning of the film, when Bruce Wayne is brooding in his lair, he says to Alfred, “There’s nothing for me out there.” Instead of living, he is, in Alfred’s words, “waiting for something bad to happen.” Wayne is so disgusted with Gotham that he can’t even bear to experience the peace he created at such a terrible price. Even his grand victory at the end of the trilogy is moving beyond Gotham, putting down the mantle of the Bat, and abandoning his own identity or anything that could tie him to a place that only brings him tragedy and pain.

The motives of the so-called villains are more substantial but would seem incomprehensible to anyone who hasn’t seen Batman Begins. The most important role of the League of Shadows is to bring “balance” to civilization by destroying the centers of degeneracy when the rot has become too great. Like Constantinople or Rome before it, Gotham’s time has come. While Batman managed to stop Ra’s al Ghul, Bane and Talia have come to finish the job.

The Dark Knight Rises thus gives us a portrait of an Order in action. In the first scene, when Bane and his comrades seize a nuclear scientist from a CIA flight, Bane orders one of his men to stay behind. Addressing him as “brother,” he explains that the enemy will expect to find at least one of their bodies in the wreckage. Seemingly unaffected, with a beatific smile, the League member asks, “Have we started the fire?” Bane nods and responds, “The fire rises” (0:28). Bane habitually executes members who fail and demands (and receives) complete willingness to die from his comrades. “Where do they find such people?” asks one awed observer.

The first two targets Bane attacks in Gotham are heavy with meaning.

The first is the stock exchange. As Bane takes control of the trading floor, a stockbroker pleads “There’s no money here, there’s nothing to rob!” Heavy with contempt, Bane responds, “Then why are you here?” After completing the financial takeover of Wayne Enterprises, a non-League member accuses Bane of taking his money but not doing what he wants. Bane responds, “And this means you have power over me?” Realizing for the first time that he is confronting someone who has a higher end than money, the criminal asks “What are you?” prompting the response, “I’m Gotham’s reckoning.” Bane is not in it for money, and the League of Shadows looks with contempt at the vulgar traders and materialistic grubbers that constitute the supposed elite of the city. The League of Shadows is going to pull down the Kali Yuga in Gotham, whatever it takes.

At the same time, this is no egalitarian rant against “the rich.” The Dark Knight Rises may be the most contemptuous treatment of egalitarianism ever produced on film. Needless to say, what passes for the American Right is not intellectually capable of understanding it, alternately complaining that Bane was created in order to attack Mitt Romney’s finance capital firm or thinking it is a partisan attack on Occupy Wall Street in the name of millionaires like Romney and Bruce Wayne. Instead, The Dark Knight Rises is a direct attack on the idea that people can manage themselves.

Bane’s second target is a football stadium hosting a pointless spectacle where a mostly white audience lives vicariously by watching mostly non-white players throw and chase a ball. The game begins with the singing of the national anthem, as if Nolan is telling us that pointless distractions are what America is all about today. If the stock exchange was the “bread” of this degenerate society, sports are the “circuses,” and it is significant that Bane decapitates the political leadership of the city by blowing up the mayor’s skybox at a sporting event. Bane takes away the diversions and forces the people to re-engage with History.

When Bane seizes control of Gotham, he claims that he is coming to “liberate” Gotham and tells the masses to “take control” of their city. He also frees the prisoners on the grounds that they are “oppressed,” all de rigueur left-wing talking points. The result is a complete breakdown of the city, with a criminal lunatic (Crane) serving as the focal point of power. The upper classes are destroyed, and the “people” instantly give themselves over to pointless consumption in a manner more degrading than the most spoiled trust fund baby. When one of Selina Kyle’s erstwhile comrades celebrates that Wayne Manor now belongs to “everyone,” Kyle is disgusted.

It turns out that Bane and Talia are planning on eventually destroying the entire city with a nuclear bomb anyway. While many conservative commentators claim that this is evidence that Bane (and thus Occupy Wall Street) is motivated by pure evil, the real message is far more subversive. Bane allows the city to live for a few months to show the world what Gotham’s citizens are capable of. Libertarian ideologues and socialist revolutionaries get their chance, as the boot of the state is taken off, and the police are trapped underground. The result is an ugly, starving society ruled by the insane.

Bane delays destroying Gotham because he wants the world to watch how freedom failed. He gives the city a false hope by letting the people govern themselves, knowing they are not capable of it. This isn’t the conquest of a healthy society – it’s a laboratory experiment where the League of Shadows knows the outcome. A simple killing would be too merciful. The punishment “must be more severe.” Only when the consequences are unmistakable and the corruption has been ripped out by the root will Bane give Gotham permission to die. Liberalism, classical or otherwise, is so self-evidently stupid that Bane gives it free reign knowing that it will fail spectacularly. Even more impressively, Bane and the other members of the League are willing to remain in the city when the bomb detonates, dying so that the corrupt world can be reborn. This is a creed of iron that demands the whole man in order to make him something more.

Batman is a more severe problem for the League because he is a product of the same Order as Bane, thus he is capable of withstanding his attack. Batman harnesses Traditionalism and the aristocratic (or even fascist) principle to save society from itself. Bane explicitly recognizes this. When Batman fights Bane the first time and uses his usual tricks, Bane comments, “Theatricality and deception are powerful weapons to the uninitiated . . . but we are initiated.” When Batman is broken and left in the darkness, he is symbolically “killed,” only to be reborn after he remakes himself and climbs into the light, a motif familiar to the ceremonies of many fraternal and religious orders. The use of ritualistic incantation is another indication that we are not watching a superhero with magical powers but the product of initiation.

But to what end? When Batman is recovering from his injuries in the darkness, he has a vision of Ra’s al Ghul who taunts him that after years of complete sacrifice, the most that Bruce Wayne could achieve is a lie. At the end of the movie, once again, this is all that is achieved. Bruce Wayne did not die either as a victim of class warfare or as a hero of Gotham. He fled the city to pal around with Selina Kyle in Florence, enjoying lunches at fashionable restaurants. He cannot bear to live among the people he saved.

Wayne Manor is turned into a shelter for the children of the slums, postponing the inevitable end that the League was founded to hasten. Batman lives on through Robin John Blake, but the whole point of the trilogy was that Batman was supposed to be a temporary measure until the city could be returned to health and the “normal” system could govern without recourse to masked vigilantes.

Of course, this is the essential problem with Bruce Wayne’s worldview. The return of the bat signal suggests that the extraordinary will always need to sacrifice themselves for the ordinary. Bane showed the true face of Gotham, but it was saved regardless, and it will continue to be saved by heroes that have to emerge from outside of society. Good men like Gordon are destroyed by the society that produces them, stripped of family and honor. Darker heroes like Batman find they can no longer even live in it. The best solution that can be offered is more charity from the rich, as if a Band-Aid can stanch a sucking chest wound. Batman’s plea to save the city because there are “good” people is a pointless banality reminiscent of Judge Smails from Caddyshack. The League of Shadows presents a radical critique of society, and all Batman tells us is that we have to stand for “goodness” and not “badness.”

The Batman trilogy poses deep questions about the nature of society, the importance of Radical Traditionalism, and the meaning of heroism. However, ultimately, it can only give the same answer as The Avengers: heroes are heroes precisely because they use their gifts and dedication to safeguard a world that is unworthy of them, preventing any attempts to turn it into something greater. The Kali Yuga rolls on, the corrupt look up and shout “save us!,” and heroes hasten to the call. But the sparks are there, and the conflagration is being prepared.

“Please allow me to introduce myself . . .” Heath Ledger as the Joker

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Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy has proven to be a death-stalked series. Heath Ledger died under mysterious circumstances mere months before the release of The Dark Knight in 2008, lending his now-legendary performance as The Joker both a transcendent sense of menace and a certain ghostly (and ghastly) allure.

As frightful a character as Ledger’s villain was, the fact that audiences were in effect witnessing the performance of a dead man rendered the experience of watching this disfigured, obscenely-painted clown wreak murderous havoc all the more captivating. Indeed, The Joker’s power seemed to originate from some preternatural source that death itself could not kill.

Fast forward to July 2012. In a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, on the opening night of The Dark Knight Rises, the long-awaited final film of the series, it seems that the anarchic and infernally terrifying spirit of The Joker strikes yet again from beyond the grave, this time in the shape of an altogether nondescript and unprepossessing twenty-four year old neurobiology grad school dropout named James Holmes.

Just before midnight, Holmes drives to the theater alone, stands in line, buys a ticket, takes a seat and waits through the previews, before abruptly leaving through the emergency exit when the movie begins. He props the door open (a blatant breach of moviegoing protocol that no one seems to notice, so caught up are they in the cinematic excitement of the film’s opening moments) and returns moments later wearing combat gear and a gas mask, automatic rifle in hand.

After tossing a gas canister to the floor, producing billowing fumes of smoke, Holmes begins firing with promiscuous randomness into the packed theater, charging up and down the aisles, scattering terrified patrons even as the movie continues to play on the screen, its soundtrack punctuating the real-life gunshots and the screams of horror in a confusing, frenetic miscegenation of fact and fiction. Twelve people are killed instantly, and some 50 or more are injured, many critically, by the hellish hail of gunfire unleashed by this masked man.

Shortly afterwards, local cops called to the scene find Holmes at his car, and he gives himself up peacefully, offering no resistance. Smirkingly, he tells them that he’s The Joker.

* * *

Holmes has since clammed up, apparently, since reports are that he has been “uncooperative” with the Aurora police. He did, however, announce that his apartment was booby-trapped with tripwires and explosives, which led to the building’s evacuation and the televised spectacle on 24-hour news channels of a bomb squad attempting to defuse some homemade device or other while perched on a crane outside of the third floor window of Holmes’s flat. Within, police have reportedly discovered oodles of Batman paraphernalia, suggesting the locus of this man’s obsessiveness does indeed pertain to the caped comic book character whose cinematic party he crashed in such spectacularly gruesome fashion early Friday morning.

Very little else is known about Holmes at this point. He has produced a very light cyber-footprint, which is unusual for someone his age, living in these times. Reporters have, however, discovered his name and face on a certain dating site (since taken down), on which he tagged himself “Classic Jimbo” and posed with dyed-orange hair and his characteristic Joker-like smirk, along with an ominous tag line, “Will you visit me in prison?”

Friends, classmates, and neighbors have described Holmes as generally quiet, smart, and well-mannered; all have expressed shock at his murderous opening-night depredations. His mother, Arlene Holmes, flew out to Colorado from her San Diego home to accompany her son–his hair still dyed but his smirk now gone–to his court hearing on Monday. Mrs. Holmes is also declining comment, but a family lawyer has said that she and the rest of the family “stand by” Holmes, while also expressing sorrow for the victims and their families.

Other than rather bland and general details about being a science scholar and a computer game enthusiast, not much has been revealed yet about young James’s personality, character, or interests. A video taken of speech he delivered six years ago at a science fair reveals a serious, shy, self-conscious, but completely harmless-seeming teenage boy discoursing nerdily on “temporal illusions.”

The fact that his rampage came out of the blue with no prior violent or criminal behavior has caused many to somewhat predictably allege that here must be a Manchurian Candidate, or an MK-Ultra mind-control victim of whose preprogrammed spasm of gun violence was designed by the ZOG-ish powers-that-be to make it easier to institute sweeping weapon-grabbing edicts across America, install martial law, and generally escalate the momentum of the ongoing genocide of the White man. Some hay has even been made over the fact that Holmes once worked as a counselor at a Jewish summer camp in Los Angeles. (Holmes in fact is not a Jew.) Commenters have maintained that the fact that Holmes has kept so light a presence on the interwebs (no Twitter, Facebook, or Myspace page; no videos on Youtube.; no online journal or manifesto à la Anders Behring Brievik or George Sodini) means he must be some “Bourne Identity” type of plant, unleashed to further the nefarious agenda of our sinister Illuminati rulers. And on it goes.

As is no doubt clear from my snarky tone in the above paragraph, I don’t hold much brief for such theories. What strikes me as more likely is that James Holmes is a mentally unstable individual who at some point came to gravitate towards Heath Ledger’s Joker as his authentic alter-ego and inner liberator. As with Jared Lee Loughner, Holmes’s derangement probably struck slowly (there is every evidence that both Holmes and Loughner were exceedingly “normal” as boys before their respective illnesses set in during late adolescence) and metastasized over time.

While speculations regarding specifics are probably not advisable, I will hazard a guess that, as this young man grew to feel more and more helpless under the oppressive weight of his growing legion of inner demons, and became ever more overwhelmed by his own sense of puny insignificance in a fierce and hostile world, he began to hunger insatiably for psychic security; this need, in turn, drew him to relate to an appealing character who possessed undeniable strength of mind and true self-possession. Holmes no doubt watched The Dark Knight repeatedly, and grew more and more bedazzled by the wiles of the late Mr. Ledger’s malevolent, supremely powerful clown who craftily and determinedly puts Gotham City at his utter mercy.

After all, part of what makes The Joker so attractive is—as Trevor Lynch so aptly points out—the fact that he is truly free. Like the Devil himself, this Satanic jester simply will not serve. What makes his performance so disturbingly entrancing is that he makes us enjoy watching him breed chaos, even as the better part of us wants—or at least knows that we ought to want–to see his designs foiled. The viewer knows that The Joker is a wicked, repellant, and loathsome monster, yet the beast still manages to seduce us into liking him. Even trivial acts of nastiness like his “disappearing pencil trick” cause us to grin while we gasp.

In truth, we would all like to be The Joker at times—it really feels good to cease giving a flying fuck, to say and do what we please, and to laugh in the faces of those authority figures when they try to shame us into submission or conformity. There is a primordial appeal to such behavior which resonates with all men who have a trace of that fighting, flailing, snarling spirit, the sort of spirit which in truth is best kept under wraps most of the time, but which, conversely, is sorely needed when the chips are down. In this sense, Holmes really isn’t that different from us “normals.” What sets him apart—that is to say, what makes him insane—is his inability to keep such fantasies firmly in check.

Art is an inherently dangerous proposition. It will influence people in ways the artist himself may never expect, or hope, or wish to do. The most compelling portraits of unhinged evil are sometimes the most risky, since they invite imitation. One stares into the abyss, and the abyss stares back. Sometimes the aesthetic chaos meant to stay contained on a given canvas spills over and intrudes into the real world. Cinematic villains take actual form, and fake blood turns real.

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I finally got to a town with a movie theater and saw The Dark Knight Rises, the third and final film of Christopher Nolan’s epic Batman trilogy.

The Dark Knight Rises does not equal The Dark Knight — which was scarcely possible anyway — but it is a superb piece of film-making. It is a better film than Batman Begins and develops the characters and themes of both previous films into a tremendously satisfying and even moving conclusion.

Christian Bale, Gary Oldman, Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, and Cillian Murphy reprise their roles from the earlier films. Michael Caine steals the scene whenever he appears on screen. New cast members include ravishing minx Anne Hathaway as the Cat Woman, the hulking, charismatic Tom Hardy as Batman’s nemesis Bane, Marion Cotillard as Miranda Tate/Talia, and Joseph Gordon-Leavitt (the least Jewish-looking Jew since William Shatner) as (Robin) John Blake.

Aside from Hans Zimmer’s insipid and forgettable score, this is a superbly made film, artistically and technically. It would be a shame if people did not see The Dark Knight Rises in theaters because of a madman’s shooting rampage on opening night in Aurora, Colorado. (Many of the audience members in Aurora demonstrated, by the way, that heroism is not just for the movies.) You need to see this film on the big screen. Lightning doesn’t strike twice, right?

Although I will discuss isolated elements of the plot, including the epilogue, I will say only this about the plot as a whole: The League of Shadows returns to destroy Gotham and Batman returns to stop them. What I wish to focus upon are the larger themes of the movie, particularly those that run through the whole trilogy. The continuities between Batman Begins and The Dark Knight Rises are easy to see, since the League of Shadows is Batman’s opponent in both movies. The continuities between The Dark Knight and the rest of the series are not so obvious, but they are deep and important.

1. Traditionalism

In Batman Begins, the young Bruce Wayne is rescued from a brutal prison in the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan by Henri Ducard a.k.a. Ra’s al Ghul (Arabic for head of the demon, played by Liam Neeson), a member of the League of Shadows, a secret brotherhood of warrior-initiates whose headquarters is somewhere high in the Himalayas.

The League of Shadows believes in the Traditional view of history. History moves in cycles, and its trajectory is decline. A historical cycle begins with a Golden Age or Age of Truth (Satya Yuga) in which mankind lives in harmony with the cosmic order. As mankind falls away from truth, however, society declines through Silver and Bronze Ages to the fourth and final age: the Iron or Dark Age (Kali Yuga), which dissolves of its own corruptions, after which a new Golden Age will arise.

The purpose of the League of Shadows is to hasten the end of the Dark Age and the dawn of the next Golden Age. Thus when a civilization is falling, they appear to give it a final push into the void: Rome, Constantinople, and now Gotham. And in every case, these are not mere cities, but cities that stand for entire civilizations. Thus the League of Shadows is here to destroy nothing less than the whole modern world.

In Batman Begins, the League of Shadows trains Bruce Wayne as an initiate, but he rebels before his final test and flees back to Gotham, where he reinvents himself as Batman. The League, however, follows him to Gotham to destroy the city, which is ripe with corruption and decadence. Batman defeats them and kills Ra’s al Ghul, but in The Dark Knight Rises, the League of Shadows returns under new leadership to finish the job.

2. “Do you wanna know how I got these scars?”

When the League of Shadows finds Bruce Wayne, he is a young man almost at the end of a road to self-destruction. Wayne is destroying himself due to his inability to deal with the scars of his past. His primal traumas include seeing his parents murdered by a mugger, as well as an inordinate fear of bats.

In addition to rigorous physical training, the League of Shadows also involves spiritual initiation. One such exercise involves the use of a hallucinogen derived from a Himalayan flower to confront and overcome one’s deepest fears.

Another exercise is to transcend the world’s ruling morality — the egalitarian notion that all human beings have some sort of intrinsic value — by killing a man. We are told he is a murderer and deserving of death. But Wayne thinks that even a murderer has value and thus deserves more than mere summary justice. He has rights to due process. So Wayne balks at this test and ends up killing quite a few members of the League of Shadows in the process. But he has no trouble with that, because they are “bad” people who don’t believe in due process and the American way.

When Bruce Wayne returns to Gotham, he is an incomplete initiate. He has overcome the traumas of his past, giving him superhuman courage. His training in martial arts has given him superhuman abilities. But he has not rejected egalitarian humanism. He still subjects himself to the conventional morality. He is, in short, a superhero: a superhuman being who lives to serve his inferiors out of a sentimental sense of humanity.

Now this might not be such a bad thing, if the people he served actually looked up to him and honored him as their superior. But they are egalitarians too, thus they resent their superiors, even if they are their benefactors.

In The Dark Knight, the Joker is a portrait of a fully achieved Übermensch. (Remember that Hollywood only allows superior men to appear as monsters, because to people today, they are monsters.) Like Batman, the Joker has overcome the scars of his past — literal scars, in the case of the Joker. When the Joker tells people how he got his hideous facial scars, he spins a new story each time. As James O’Meara brilliantly suggested, this shows that the Joker has overcome his past. He tells different stories because, to him, it does not matter how he got his scars. He has transcended them — and, as we shall see, everything else in his past.

Unlike Batman, however, the Joker has also gone beyond egalitarian humanism. He is psychologically free from his past and morally free from the yoke of serving his inferiors. As I argued in my essay on The Dark Knight, the Joker’s crimes need to be seen as moral experiments to break down Batman’s commitment to egalitarian humanism.

The Joker has all the traits of a fully realized initiate, but he doesn’t exactly seem to be a team player. But of course we don’t know how the Joker came to be the way he is, because that is part of the past he has transcended.

In The Dark Knight Rises, eight years have passed since the death of Harvey Dent/Two-Face. Batman’s final act of self-sacrifice for the city of Gotham was to accept responsibility for Two-Face’s crimes in order to preserve Harvey Dent as a symbol of incorruptible commitment to justice. Batman has disappeared, but Gotham’s organized crime problem has been solved by the Dent Act, which provides for indefinite detention of criminals.

The lie has, however, taken its toll on its architects: Bruce Wayne and Commissioner Gordon. Commissioner Gordon has lost his wife and family and dreams of exposing Dent and retiring. Bruce Wayne has hung up his Batman costume and lives in seclusion in Wayne Manor, in mourning for Rachel Dawes, who he thought was waiting for him even though she had chosen to marry Harvey Dent. Wayne Enterprises is in a shambles, defaulting on its obligations to its shareholders and the public at large.

In short, Bruce Wayne has returned to his state at the beginning of Batman Begins: he is destroying himself because he cannot deal with the traumas of his past, and he is dragging everyone else down with him. Wayne is not just psychologically crippled; he is also physically crippled, walking with a cane.

When the League of Shadows returns, however, Wayne gets a leg brace, dusts off his Batman costume, and goes out to fight them. But Alfred warns him that despite his technological crutches, he is spiritually and physically incapable of beating Bane, who fights with the strength of belief, the strength of an initiate in the League of Shadows. And Bruce Wayne is no longer an initiate.

Alfred is right. When Bane and Batman finally clash, Bane trounces Batman, twisting his spine and then casting him into a vast pit in some god-forsaken place in Central Asia. The pit is a prison. It is open to the surface, which adds to the torment of the prisoners, who can see the world above but cannot reach it. Only one person has ever managed to climb out. Many others have died trying.

In the darkness, Wayne has to physically and spiritually rebuild himself. It is a recapitulation of his original initiation with the League of Shadows. It also recapitulates the initiation of one of his opponents, who was born in the pit and eventually climbed out as a child. Wayne masters his fear again and escapes, rising from darkness to light, the cave to the real world: perennial symbols of spiritual initiation. In this case, however, Wayne masters fear not by suppressing it but by using it. By dispensing with the safety of the rope, he reactivates his fear and uses it as motive power to make the final leap.

Having been effectively re-initiated by the League of Shadows, Wayne is now able to fight and defeat them. The message could not be clearer: technology cannot make us superhuman without the underlying spiritual preparation of initiation.

3. Initiation and Superhumanism

What is the connection between Nietzschean superhumanism, which is emphasized in The Dark Knight, and Traditionalist initiation, which is emphasized in the other two films?

I understand Traditionalism ultimately in terms of the nondualistic interpretation of Vedanta: the height of initiation is the mystical experience of the individual soul’s identity with Being, the active principle of the universe. In our ordinary human consciousness, we experience ourselves as finite beings conditioned by other finite beings, including our traumas; these are our scars. When we experience our identity with Being, however, our finite bodies are infused with its active, creative, infinite power: the source of all things. This gives the initiate the power to overcome his merely finite, conditioned self, as well as other finite beings. Thus Traditionalists have their own supermen: the yogic adepts who attain magical powers (siddhis) through consciously experiencing their identity with Being.

Being is one, thus it is beyond all dualities, including the duality of good and evil. Thus the initiate who achieves mystical unity with Being rises beyond good and evil. He also rises beyond egalitarianism, since there is a fundamental difference between the initiated and the uninitiated. Finally, he rises above humanism, since he realizes that individual humans have no intrinsic worth or being. We are merely roles that Being plays for a while, masks that Being assumes and then discards. And if the initiate’s role in the cosmic play is to nix millions of these nullities, what’s the harm in that? Being itself cannot die, and its creative power is infinite, so there’s always more where they came from.

In sum, on the nondualist Vedantic model, the culmination of initiation in a mystical experience of the identity of the self with Being leads to: (1) the infusion of superhuman powers, (2) the overcoming of external conditions, including one’s past, (3) a view of the world beyond all dualities, including good and evil, and (4) the overcoming of egalitarian humanism.

Batman and the Joker display some of these traits, although nothing close to the essentially magical powers ascribed to yogic adepts. Batman, of course, never goes beyond good and evil, beyond egalitarian humanism. And the Joker, who has achieved moral liberation, does not display any superpowers, although he is remarkably accomplished.

4. “Nothing in his pockets but knives and lint.”

When the Joker is arrested in The Dark Knight, Commissioner Gordon is flummoxed: they don’t know who he is. They can find no DNA, fingerprint, or dental records. They don’t know his name or date of birth. His clothes are custom made, with no labels. As Gordon says, “There’s nothing in his pockets but knives and lint.”

If the would-be superman sometimes strives to overcome and forget his past, modern society means to keep us all tied to our pasts by compiling records. Of course mere bookkeeping cannot stop the inner spiritual transformation by which man becomes superman, rising above the conditioning of his past. But we are dealing with materialists here. Your karmic records are meaningless to them. But your tax returns and internet traffic are not.

In The Dark Knight Rises, Selina Kyle (Cat Woman) is searching for a computer program called Clean Slate that will delete her from all existing computer records, allowing her to completely escape from her past. She craves the Joker’s freedom. Batman offers to give her the program in exchange for her help. In the end, both she and Bruce Wayne seem to have used it to escape their pasts and start a new life together in Italy.

Of course, deleting all records of one’s past is not the same thing as overcoming the past psychologically and existentially. That is possible only through a fundamental transformation of one’s being. But once that transformation is in place, the technology sure can be useful.

5. “All you care about is money.”

Contempt for money is another theme common to The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises. In The Dark Knight, the Joker demonstrates his contempt for money by burning his share of a vast fortune.

In The Dark Knight Rises, some of Bane’s best lines deal with money. His two most spectacular public attacks are on the stock exchange and a football game (as Gregory Hood put it so memorably: the bread and circuses of the decadent American empire).

In the stock exchange, one of the traders speaks to Bane as if he were a common criminal, and a moronic one at that: “We have no money here to steal.” To which Bane replies, “Then why are you here?”

When Bane breaks a deal with a businessman who has outlived his usefulness, the businessman protests that he has paid Bane a small fortune. “And that gives you power over me?” Bane asks.

Most commentators are somewhat confused about Bane’s attitude toward money, because he leads a Communist-style insurrection against the rich. But there are two critical perspectives one can take on money. Figuratively speaking, one can view it from above or from below.

Those who criticize money from below are those who lack it and want it. Their primary motive is envy, which is not necessarily wrong. A hungry man has good reason to envy your bread. And he has good reason to hate you if you prefer to waste it rather than to share it. The people who criticize money from below actually have a lot in common with the people they envy: all they care about is money, either getting it or keeping it.

Bane, however, criticizes money from above. His perspective is aristocratic, not egalitarian. He is an initiate, a spiritual warrior against decadence. He realizes there is something higher than money, and he feels contempt for those who are ruled by it, for those who think that money is the highest power in this world. He is, to use the Joker’s phrase, “a better class of criminal.”

Like the Joker, Bane is free of material concerns even as he masterfully manipulates the base, material world to fight for higher, spiritual aims. Like the Joker, Bane is not above using people who are only interested in money to further his spiritual aims. Thus Bane both makes deals with the rich and incites the envious mob to rise against them, all to hasten the destruction of Gotham.

6. The Good Little People of Gotham

In The Dark Knight, the Joker argues that the people of Gotham are only as good as the world allows them to be, and when the chips are down, “they’ll eat each other.” This sounds like a terrible insult, but from the Joker’s perspective it is actually a form of optimism. Being willing to eat one another is a sign of animal vitality unrestrained by egalitarian humanist slave morality. The Joker claims that he is not a monster; he is just “ahead of the curve”: meaning that he is already what the rest of Gotham would be if only they were “allowed” by society (or courageous enough to go there without society’s permission).

The Joker rigs two boats to explode and gives the detonators to the people in the other boats. He tells them that if they blow up the other boat, he will let them live. If neither boat is destroyed by midnight, he will blow up both of them. One boat is filled with criminals and cops. The other is filled with the good little people of Gotham. In the end, however, neither group manages to blow up the other, and Batman prevents the Joker from destroying both.

Batman draws the false conclusion that the boats were filled with people who believe in goodness, whereas in fact they were merely too craven, decadent, and devitalized to do anything “bad,” even to save their own lives. The Joker, it turns out, was a lot farther ahead of the curve than he thought.

In The Dark Knight Rises, Bane proves the Joker’s point, but he shows that it will take nothing less than a revolutionary mob before the people of Gotham find the courage to eat each other, beginning with the rich. The revolutionary mob gives people permission to act atavistically. But beyond that, they have moral permission as well because, in the end, egalitarian altruism really is a kind of cannibal ethics.

The least convincing part of The Dark Knight Rises is the portrayal of the police as improbably idealistic and self-sacrificing. In The Dark Knight, the police force consists almost entirely of corrupt, gun-toting bureaucrats counting the days until their pensions kick in. In The Dark Knight Rises, Bane lures 3000 police into the tunnels under Gotham and traps them there. When they finally break out, they charge en masse into battle armed only with their side arms against Bane’s heavily-armed fighters. I don’t deny that it is possible to awaken such idealism, even in the most cynical public servant. But I needed to see some reason for such a dramatic transformation, perhaps something analogous to Bruce Wayne’s transformation in his own underground prison.

Cat Woman is motivated primarily by envy of the rich, but the revolution in Gotham has left her thoroughly disgusted. She tells Batman that as soon as she finds a way out, she is leaving. She does, however, linger for personal reasons: she wants to save Batman too. She urges him to follow, telling him that he has given everything for these people. He replies “Not everything, not yet.” Then he apparently commits suicide to save the city. But in the end, we learn that Bruce Wayne was not willing to give his life for Gotham. But he was willing to give up Gotham and Batman for a life of his own.

The ending is enigmatic, but as I read it, Bruce Wayne has finally arrived at a higher level of initiation. Again, he has triumphed over his past, this time entirely, and he has used Clean Slate to erase all traces of his life and Cat Woman’s. He has also risen above egalitarian humanism. He no longer lives for his inferiors. He lives for himself, and he has found happiness with Cat Woman, which is an interesting change, since it means he has decided to put his happiness above the mere fact that she is a wanted criminal.

Of course, in my eyes, the fact that Bruce Wayne has apparently chosen a private life makes him inferior to Bane. Yes, Wayne has ceased to serve those who are beneath him, but merely serving oneself is inferior to serving a cause that is greater than oneself, which is what Bane did.

7. Truth or Consequences

One of the most important new themes introduced in The Dark Knight Rises is the destructiveness of lies. Gordon and Wayne are both debilitated by the burden of the lies they told to protect the reputation of Harvey Dent. Wayne is also crushed by the loss of Rachel Dawes, which is made all the more painful because Alfred chose to conceal the fact that she had chosen to leave Bruce Wayne for Harvey Dent. Finally, near the end of the movie, Robin Blake lies to a group of orphans to give them hope, even though there really wasn’t any. The common denominator is that all these lies are told altruistically, to protect people, and particularly “the people,” from the truth. Lies are particularly necessary in statecraft, even at its highest and most disinterested. Lies are, of course, a form of bondage to society and the past. Thus they must be rejected by those who would be free, although the initiates seem quite willing to employ deception and violence for a higher cause.

8. The Left as the Vanguard of Nihilism

The Dark Knight Rises is an extremely Right wing, authoritarian, fascistic movie.

First of all, in this movie, both the good guys (Wayne, Gordon) and the bad guys (the League of Shadows) are united in their belief that Gotham is corrupt and decadent. In the earlier films, the good guys clearly believed that progress was possible. Now they are just looking for excuses to retire, because society no longer has anything to offer them. They have given without reward until their idealism has been extinguished and their souls have been completely emptied. They have become burned out shells in thankless service to their inferiors.

Second, Nolan’s portrayal of the Left is utterly unsympathetic: Leftist values are shown to be nihilistic. Thus promoting Leftism is a perfect tool for those who would destroy a society. That’s not just true in the movies.

Third, and most trivially, the uncritical portrayal of the police would surely score high on the authoritarian personality inventory, although White Nationalists are not so naïve.

* * *

The Dark Knight Rises is a remarkable movie, a fitting conclusion to a highly entertaining and deeply serious and thought-provoking trilogy. As unlikely as it may seem, these films touch upon — and vividly illustrate — issues that are at the heart of the New Right/Radical Traditionalist critique of modernity. Tens of millions of young whites are eagerly watching and analyzing these films. Thus it is important for us to use these films to communicate our ideas.

Yes, Hollywood always puts our ideas in the mouths of psychotics in order to immunize people against them. But these ideas are one reason why the villains are always more interesting than Batman, who merely comes off as a tool.

I have suggested that these movies incorporate elements from Radical Traditionalism and Nietzschean superhumanism to generate maximum dramatic tension. What conflict could be more fundamental than the one between those who wish to destroy the world and those who wish to save it? That said, I cannot help wondering if Christopher and Jonathan Nolan also feel some sympathy for these ideas, although of course they would deny it. Whatever their ultimately sympathies, though, there is no question that somebody in Hollywood knows which ideas offer the most fundamental critique of the modern world. Isn’t it time for White Nationalists to learn them as well?

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Conservatism’s League of Stupidity

The egalitarian Left isn’t just evil – it’s boring. Unfortunately, the conservative “Right” doesn’t have anything else to offer. It’s not just true of politics – it’s even true of their movie reviews.

The endless reinforcement of egalitarianism throughout the controlled culture means that to a great extent, every “superhero” film has the same plot. An extraordinary character is introduced, a challenge emerges to the liberal assumptions of modernity, and the hero, by humbling himself and accepting his responsibility to his inferiors, saves the day, and preserves the sacred illusion of equality. The unintended result of this kind of culture is that the most interesting, intelligent, and genuinely substantive characters and ideas come from a film’s supposed villains. Leftist commentators often recognize this and have genuinely insightful (or at least accurate) observations to make about a film’s ideological content.

Perhaps the most subversive and overtly right wing movie to be made in many years was The Dark Knight Rises, the triumphant finale to director Christopher Nolan’s epic Batman trilogy. The Left most recognized it for what it was. Noted Lefty policy wonk Matt Yglesias tweeted: “Had a lot of problems with Dark Knight Rises but it was sort of refreshing to see a balls-out insanely rightwing movie.” Andrew O’Hehir at Salon noted:

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.

They may not necessarily like fascism, or for that matter, anything that alludes to heroism or greatness, but at least we are talking about the same thing.

Of course, many “movement conservatives” miss the point of the movie entirely, seeing each new cultural phenomenon as another opportunity to bash the “Democrat Party” or give a eulogy about the glories of various purveyors of high fructose corn syrup and why they pay too much in taxes.

Thus, if we didn’t have John Nolte and Ben Shapiro we’d have to make them up. The two writers at the late Andrew Breitbart’s Big Hollywood somehow managed to view Nolan’s climactic film as some sort of love letter to Goldman Sachs. Batman is pictured a capitalist hero presumably sent by the Cato Institute to protect the prosperous citizens of Gotham from the moral relativists of Occupy Wall Street. Comrade Bane is seen as the leader of evil Leftists, who probably also support Islamism, and is nothing but a jealous nihilist who wants to bring about equality.

Shapiro gushes, “The entire film is an ode to traditional capitalism.” He condemns Bane’s “communist-fascist” (?) regime and worries that Bane’s evil “Leftist populism” sounds like Barack Obama. While this is idiotic, it’s about par for the movement, and is still a trite more intelligent than Rush Limbaugh’s charge that Bane was deliberately named to create sinister associations with Mitt Romney’s “Bain Capital.” Just as Barack Obama can simultaneously be a Communist and a Nazi, Bane can be a liberal attack on Republicans and an obvious stand in for President Obama.

Where Ben Shapiro actually achieves a kind of conservative movement perfection is in celebrating that The Dark Knight Rises supposedly condemns green energy for being unprofitable, rips public-private partnerships for furthering Bane’s plan, and is somehow pro-gun. (In a sentence, the “green energy” program works but Bruce Wayne doesn’t want it weaponized and so halts it, the villain achieves his ends through totally private stock market manipulation, and Batman doesn’t let Selina Kyle use guns.) It’s so precisely wrong, reaching Bill Kristol and Dick Morris levels of factual absurdity, that it’s beautiful. It’s this kind of logic that gives us intellectuals who build entire careers explaining how Barack Obama’s Democratic Party is racist against blacks and too pro-white, that Detroit, Camden, East Saint Louis, and Rochester were destroyed by white liberals, and that the problem with academia and the media is that they’re anti-Semitic. You almost have to admire it.

Nolte meanwhile is so far off the mark with his review and his responses that it’s difficult to believe he saw the movie. He charges that Bane is simply motivated by jealous nihilism simply because he’s miserable. Also, all of his followers are losers – just like Occupy Wall Street, LOL!

Nolte writes:

“Rises” is a love letter to an imperfect America that in the end always does the right thing. . . . Nolan loves the American people — the wealthy producers who more often than not trickle down their hard-earned winnings, the workaday folks who keep our world turning, a financial system worth saving because it benefits us all, and those everyday warriors who offer their lives for a greater good with every punch of the clock.

And of course, the whole movie was just an excuse by Christopher Nolan to “slap Obama.” Press releases from the Southern Poverty Law Center contain more intellectual subtlety and analytical depth.

Nolte’s review is exhibit A for the case that the Republican id is driven by the feeling of being right, rich, successful, and in charge regardless of what is actually happening. As Bane said before snapping a capitalist pencil neck, “Do you feel in charge?” Nolte and Shapiro, clueless, would say yes.

New York Times token faux-conservative Ross Douthat objected to this reading in a fairly accurate but incomplete analysis. Douthat noted there might be a bit more subtlety to the question of Gotham’s underclass than they are just jerks, but Nolte fired back, doubling down on his, uh, thesis. The bad guys are just “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.”

“Tell me about Bane! Why does he wear the mask?”

Where to begin. Perhaps it is best to find some common ground with our misguided and lovably dopey kosher conservative friends. Let’s advance the theory that if we both accept the idea of liberal media bias, it is mildy suspicious that biggest blockbuster of the year would be an “ode to traditional capitalism” and a partisan attack on Barack Obama. While contemporary American conservatism’s conception of the “Right” has devolved into support of charter schools for blacks and opposing evolution because it’s racist, in theory, the Right by definition involves the principled defense of hierarchy. Movie villains that attack egalitarianism, attempt to set themselves up as an authority, or generally have some higher aim besides “chaos” are on the Right, like most of James Bond’s super-villains, Loki from The Avengers, or the Empire in Star Wars.

Therefore, rather than just quoting Republican talking points, it’s useful to look at the character of Bane and see how Big Hollywood’s charges hold up.

Bane the Nihilist

Bane behind the mask: actor Tom Hardy

First is the idea that Bane is some sort of nihilist. A nihilist is an individual who doesn’t think human existence has objective value or meaning. While Bane could certainly be described as a rather brutal anarcho-primitivist, he certainly does have a belief in actual life versus mere existence. Bane strives for an order worth living in, and ultimately wants justice for all those responsible for the state of society as represented by Gotham.

Bane is motivated to restore the natural balance to the world by putting an end to a decadent society which will inevitably fall. In a sentence: that which is falling must also be pushed. He views Batman as someone who makes things worse by drawing out Gotham’s decline and suffering, which is why he must be eliminated. Many of Bane’s minions lay down their lives on command to accomplish this ideal, indicative that they believe in something beyond their own personal interests. Their lives are forfeited towards a higher goal, not in a wanton manner à la the Joker.

The dialogue spells it out fairly clearly. Bane addresses a henchman as “brother” when he asks him to lay down his life for the mission. “Have we started the fire?” the initiate asks. “Yes,” replies Bane. “The fire rises.” Unlike the capitalists that Bane exploits to acquire the weapons and equipment he needs to take over the city, Bane is not in it for the money. Staring down at a gaping John Dagget, his former accomplice, Bane pronounces, “I’m Gotham’s reckoning, here to end the borrowed time you’ve all been living on. . . . I’m necessary evil.”

Does Bane have a vision of the good beyond just tearing down corruption? Actually he does. Bane possesses a certain reverence for the concept of innocence. In the course of the film it is revealed that Bane was willing to lay down his life to protect the defenseless child Talia. His actions ultimately lead to his own excommunication from the League of Shadows, and a permanent physical impairment. The mask feeds him a painkilling gas that keeps the injuries he sustained at bay. Some of the film’s deleted material shows a more primitive version of Bane’s apparatus and his training in the League of Shadows under Ra’s al Ghul, before he was expelled because Ra’s wanted him away from his daughter. Talia could not forgive her father, until Bruce Wayne murdered him. Only then could Talia and Bane join forces to complete his mission.

This is the heart of Bane’s identity, the transformation from a pain-wracked prisoner into an avatar of Justice. As he defeats Batman in single combat, Bane pronounces, “I am the League of Shadows. I am here to fulfill Ra’s al Ghul’s destiny!” Michael Caine’s Alfred intones, “His speed, his ferocity, his training! I see the power of belief. I see the League of Shadows resurgent.” Say what you will about the tenets of the League of Shadows, Nolte, but at least it’s an ethos.

As we recall from the first film, the League of Shadows is a Traditionalist Order dedicated to fighting crime without restrictions from society’s “indulgence.” Batman is trained by the League, but he turns on them when he is asked to execute a murderer. Incredulous, Ra’s al Ghul asks if Bruce Wayne would prefer a trial by “corrupt bureaucrats.” Wayne has no response. When Wayne is told that the League plans to destroy the festering rot that is Gotham, Wayne kills many of the League’s members and blows up its headquarters. Compared to the League, Wayne/Batman is a liberal.

Incredibly, but perhaps not astonishingly, neither Nolte nor Shapiro mention the League of Shadows. It’s like trying to explain the transformation of Bruce Wayne into Batman without mentioning the death of his parents. Most importantly, as we find out (spoilers!) at the end of the film, Bane is not the main villain. The main villain is Talia—Miranda Tate for most of the film—the daughter of Ra’s al Ghul who seeks to complete her father’s mission. The person who rose from the prison pit was not Bane, but Talia, and it is she who is leading the mission to destroy Gotham. In both the first and third films, Batman is not fighting against chaos, or communism, or high tariff rates, or some other bugaboo of the Beltway faux-Right – he’s fighting a Traditionalist Order that wants to destroy the city he loves.

The League’s justice decrees Gotham should die – Batman’s mercy says it should live. Both are fighting for their conception of the good, and willing to die for it. This isn’t nihilism, on either side.

Bane the Economic Socialist

Bane’s attack on the city of Gotham is twofold. First, he attacks the stock market, an action which brings Batman/Bruce Wayne out of retirement. He’s confronted by a stock broker who claims, “This is a stock market – there’s no money for you to steal.” Bane replies, “Really? Then why are you people here?” Bane doesn’t take the money – he uses a program to strip Bruce Wayne from control of Wayne Enterprises so he can seize the arsenal and the energy project to build an atomic bomb.

Of course, this is just a means to an end. When John Dagget protests that his company has not been able to absorb Wayne’s and claims “I’m in charge,” Bane replies calmly, “Do you feel in charge?” Laying his hand lightly on Dagget’s shoulder, Bane shows he knows where power comes from – force. When Dagget mutters that he’s paid Bane a small fortune, Bane replies, “And this gives you power over me?” “Your money, and infrastructure, have been important, until now.” Bane is in service to a cause greater than money – it’s not surprising that American conservatives literally cannot comprehend it as coming from the Traditionalist Right.

The real boss of the League, Talia, brings the message home in lines that are delivered early in the movie, but take on a whole new meaning after her true identity is revealed. Speaking to Dagget about a clean energy program, she says, “But you understand only money, and the power you think it buys.” We think this is just a champagne socialist looking down on the rich who don’t share enough with the poor or spend enough on trendy causes. Actually, the clean energy program is a way to develop a fusion bomb to take control of Gotham, and Talia (who already has control of a vast amount of money) could not care less about Lefty trends. She is also serving the purposes of her father’s Order.

The second main attack is against the football game, with Bane blowing up the field after the National Anthem. Nolte’s take is “Nolan’s love for this country is without qualifiers and symbolized in all its unqualified sincerity in a beautiful young child sweetly singing a complete version of “The Star Spangled Banner” — just before “Occupy” attempts to fulfill its horrific vision of what ‘equality’ really means.” Of course, knowing that Bane actually is part of the League of Shadows, we know there’s a larger agenda here.

Bane isn’t entirely immune to the idea of innocence, as we know how he saved Talia. He even comments while listening to the song, “That’s a lovely, lovely voice.” Then he says, “Let the games begin!” and pushes the button. The League regards the city of Gotham as hopelessly corrupt and evil, and it’s therefore significant that they announce their takeover at a football game – the circus part of bread and circuses. The football game isn’t some glorious manifestation of Americana – it’s a symbol of how pointless and worthless modern life has become. Bane then announces that Gotham is to rise up and “take back their city.” The next day, at Blackgate Prison, Bane destroys the myth of Harvey Dent and calls for revolution against the corrupt, who will be cast out “into the cold world that we know, and endure.” Gotham, says Bane, will be given “to you, the people.”

There’s a heavy tone of irony in that last pronouncement, which goes to the heart of Bane’s plan. Nolan said that much of the plot was based upon Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, which depicts the moral collapse of Revolutionary France. We know Bane is not a nihilist because of his own pronouncements, actions, and membership in the League. However, has he transformed the League into a vanguard fighter for a socialist commune?

While “Big Hollywood” says yes, there’s nothing to suggest that the League of Shadows and its relatively wealthy members and backers (like Talia) are socialists, and they speak consistently of fulfilling, rather than changing, Ra’s Al Ghul’s Traditionalist mission. It’s not that Bane is a socialist – it’s that he’s a Traditionalist who despises capitalism, Revolting Against the Modern World from the Right. American conservatives simply don’t get it, trapped into a simplistic worldview where there is Communism on the Left and Capitalism on the Right.

But how do we know this? How can we be sure that we aren’t, like “Big Hollywood,” just reading into the movie our own ideological prejudices? Well, it’s pretty easy. Bane directly tells us.

Bane the Egalitarian Revolutionary

After “breaking” Batman, Bane takes him to the prison where he lived for years. He tells Bruce Wayne that about “the truth about despair.” There can be no despair without hope, and just as the prison has an opening at the top to drive prisoners mad with the lust for freedom, so Bane will use hope to create greater despair.

Batman is to be punished because he betrayed the League of Shadows and the cause of true justice. Wayne believed that his “Batman” could be a symbol that lasts beyond him, that anyone could be Batman. As we learned at the end of The Dark Knight, Bruce Wayne believes that the people of Gotham are fundamentally good, and that given the choice, they will choose good. Therefore, no matter how bad things get in Gotham, no matter how decadent the elite may be, no matter how much he may personally despise them (even to the point of becoming a recluse), Wayne thinks that which is falling must be propped up. Bane considers this not just mistaken, but despicable. When Batman dismisses the League as a gang of psychopaths, Bane attacks with outraged fury.

Thus, in defeat, Bruce Wayne will be punished by watching Bane torture an entire city. Wayne, after all, lusts for death and release. Bane knows that Wayne’s punishment must be more severe, that he has to be forced to understand the depth of what he sees as Wayne’s evil. Bane will do this by “feeding them [the people of Gotham] hope to poison their souls.” Bruce Wayne will watch the people of the city climb over each other “so they can stay in the sun.” He will force Wayne to watch as the true nature of Gotham City is unleashed. And then, “when you have understood the depth of your failure, and Gotham is ashes, then you have my permission to die.”

Thus, Bane’s proto-Occupy speeches aren’t about propagating the ideology of the League – it’s spiritual poison. He even tells us it’s spiritual poison. His screed about giving Gotham back to the people is done to mock the idealism that Batman places in the populace of the city itself. Bane’s actions are an attempt to fulfill H. L. Mencken’s quip that, “The people get the government they deserve, and they deserve to get it good and hard.”

When left to their own devices, the people of Gotham fail miserably at governing themselves. Without the force of Gotham Police Department, the judicial fangs of the Dent Act, or the confining grip of Arkham Asylum, Gotham quickly falls into disarray. The people of Gotham illustrate that they are nothing more than a mob, who allow psychopaths like Dr. Crane/The Scarecrow judicial power to give people death sentences for pointless reasons. Bane is Gotham’s reckoning, not Gotham’s executioner. Only the people of Gotham can be the architects of their own destruction.

Bane has zero pretentions about the ability of the people to govern themselves. He gives them every opportunity, and they bring their fate on themselves. The ultimate collapse of Gotham is caused by giving the people the false hope that they are capable of governing themselves through his “revolution.” His previous monologue on the worst prison being one with perpetual hope is indicative of this sentiment. He also directly shows Bruce Wayne that his mission in life was a failure. Wayne himself suspects thus, in a dream sequence where the “immortal” Ra’s al Ghul tells him that after all of his sacrifices, the most he could accomplish was a lie and that even he must realize Gotham should be destroyed. Subconsciously, even the Batman knows his mission is futile.

There’s also one critically important fact that puts the beliefs of the League of Shadows and Bane beyond all doubt – this is a suicide mission. The nuclear bomb that Bane forced Dr. Pavel to build is going to go off after a certain time, regardless of what anyone else says about it. Bane will let Gotham destroy itself, force the rest of the world to see it, and then blow it all up anyway. He’ll even sacrifice his life and the life of his men in order to bring about a new beginning on a non-egalitarian foundation. Like Batman, the world will be forced to understand.

American “movement conservatism,” itself a product of the Enlightenment dogma of infinite human perfectibility, can’t cope with this kind of message. Thus, Big Hollywood has to ignore the League of Shadows, ignore Talia, ignore the previous films, and even ignore Bane’s speech telling the audience exactly what he is doing so they can keep on believing “an imperfect America that in the end always does the right thing.” At the Fox News level of cultural analysis, Bane and the League of Shadows develop an intricate, years-long strategy that ends with their own deaths for no other reason than shits and giggles.

The Hero Liberal America Deserves?

Needless to say, Batman/Bruce Wayne does save the day. In a sequence heavy with Traditionalist overtones, Wayne climbs out of the pit, is “reborn” as Batman, and defeats the League of Shadows. However, he can’t go back. Fulfilling Alfred’s wishes for him, he avoids both defeat and death and chooses an anonymous life away from Gotham, away from the society he sacrificed so much to save.

One bit of credit is due the reviewers for comprehending the character arc of Selina Kyle/Catman. At the beginning of the film, she claims that she is somehow doing more for the poor than rich philanthropists. She looks forward to the day when “a storm is coming . . . because you’re all going to wonder how you thought you could live so well and leave so little for the rest of us.” When she actually sees the revolution unleashed, she’s disgusted to see how a wealthy family’s home has been transformed into squalor. Kyle understands that egalitarianism does not lead to paradise, but horror.

However, ultimately Kyle’s actions are motivated by her need to escape. Just like Bruce Wayne, she cannot bring herself to live even in a restored Gotham City. At the end of the film, she’s not some happy mama grizzly taking the kids to Mickey D’s after a hockey game – she’s chosen a wealthy exile with Bruce Wayne. Kyle too is an outsider. Unlike Talia, she chose selfish escape over sacrifice for an ideal.

This the price of heroism – the hero cannot be part of the society that he saves. That is why the idea of a superhero can be inherently “fascist” — a superhero is a being of pure will and great power who is held to a different standard so he can impose that will on the larger society. A superhero saves society from itself.

Bruce Wayne comes to this realization reluctantly. After all, the whole point of Batman was that he was supposed to temporary and that the police and government could take over and function normally once things got to a certain point. This doesn’t happen – Robin John Blake is the heir to the title of Batman, having thrown away his own policeman’s badge and faith in the sytem. Like a meat grinder, Gotham will demand more extraordinary men to sacrifice themselves in order to keep functioning. To save the kind of society where everyone is equal, the higher man must allow himself to be consumed as the price of democratic heroism. Democracy can only be saved by people who don’t really believe in democracy.

“Do you finally have the courage to do what is necessary?”

Despite the happy ending of Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle palling around in Florence, the ultimate message of the film, and the trilogy, is far too dark for ever-optimistic American conservatives to internalize. Gotham only functions when it is built on lies. Lacking both an aristocracy capable of leading, and a populace capable of being lead, Gotham reverts to brutal authoritarianism in order to bring about order. This is buttressed by noble lies that would make Strauss blush, and the constant sacrifice of higher men.

The nature of the people themselves ultimately never changes. When left to their own devices, the people allow radical psychopaths to run the roost, a reflection of their own fractured existence. At the end Gotham is saved from total destruction, but once again needs the false lie of a higher man’s sacrifice in order to make sense. Bruce Wayne escapes, turns his back on the city, and moves on with his life in a foreign country. Maybe Nolte’s charge of nihilism would more accurately apply to the man in the cowl, as opposed to the one in the mask.

Much like modern America though, Gotham can only make sense for so long before the wheels come undone. What is Nolan really saying then? Is it possible he’s challenging our notions of what we actually are conserving? Gotham is reminiscent of modern America, decadent, soulless, and lacking any social capital. Is there a Gotham still worth saving? An America? That’s Nolan’s real question, and something Batman, like conservatives, omit themselves from ever having to answer.

While it is not surprising that Big Hollywood and movement conservatism don’t “get” the movie, or much of anything else, the reaction speaks volumes about how the Left understands the Right better than the Right understands itself. Conservatives misinterpret the movie because they lack the ability to comprehend anything deeper than corporate profiteering dressed up in platitudes like “free markets” or a “shining city on the hill.” Higher ideas like Traditioanlism or the nature of man, society, and power might as well be a foreign language to the last men pining for the second coming of Ronald Reagan.

Christopher Nolan created a Right-wing film that conservatives are attracted to, but will never truly understand. They can’t explain why they like the movie because that requires a new vocabulary drawn from Tradition and the European New Right. Lacking that, we get paeans to the Caped Crusader’s fight against clean energy. Still, American conservatives instinctually claim anything with sublimated Right-wing tendencies as their own. All politics is downstream of culture, and unfortunately for conservatives, they lost that battle quite some time ago. However, the impulse for an authentic Right is still there, and the real culture war never truly ends.

Nolan films with a hammer. The Dark Knight Rises is a radical traditionalist puncture wound against modernity: not the film we want, but the film we need. Unfortunately, much like Gotham City, the conservative movement and its intellectuals are already too far gone to understand it.

3,987 mots

English original here

Dans ma critique du Batman Begins de Christopher Nolan, j’ai affirmé que le film génère un conflit spectaculaire autour des enjeux les plus élevés qui soient : la destruction du monde moderne (symbolisé par Gotham City) par la “Ligue des Ombres” Traditionaliste contre sa préservation et son amélioration “progressive” par Batman.

J’ai aussi affirmé que la transformation de Batman en un Übermensch Nietzchéen était incomplète, puisqu’il acceptait toujours l’éthique régnante égalitaire-humaniste qui a dévalué son effort et ses réalisations surhumaines même, puisqu’ils les plaçaient au service des petites gens de Gotham.

Ce conflit latent entre une éthique aristocratique et égalitaire devient explicite dans la suite à couper le souffle The Dark Knight (2008), qui est certainement le plus grand film de superméchant jamais tourné. (Le plus grand film de superhéros doit être le film de Zack Snyder, Watchmen [2009].)

Alerte spoiler : Si vous n’avez pas encore vu le film, stoppez maintenant.

Philosopher avec de la Dynamite

La vrai star de The Dark Knight est Heath Ledger sous les traits du Joker. Le Joker est un philosophe Nietzschéen. Dans la scène d’ouverture, il emprunte l’aphorisme de Nietzsche, “Ce qui ne me tue pas, me rend plus fort,” en le bouleversant : “Je crois que ce qui ne te tue pas, te rends plus… étrange.” Suivant Nietzsche, qui philosophait avec un marteau, le Joker philosophe avec des couteaux aussi bien qu’avec “de la dynamite, de la poudre, et. . . . de l’essence!”

Oui, c’est un criminel. Un meurtrier de masse sans pitié et désinvolte, en fait. Mais il croit que “Gotham mérite une meilleure classe de criminel, et je vais leur en donner… Il ne s’agit pas d’argent. Il s’agit d’envoyer un message. Tout brûle.” En cela, le joker n’est pas différent d’un autre philosophe Nietzschéen, Unabomber, qui philosophait avec les bombes, parce qu’il voulait aussi envoyer un message.

Le message du Joker est la vacuité des valeurs régnantes. Son but est la transvaluation des valeurs (destruction des valeurs qui ont eu cours jusqu’ici parmi les hommes). Bien qu’il veuille initialement tuer Batman, il en vient à le voir comme un esprit de la même famille, un alter ego : un collègue surhomme, un collègue monstre de foire, qui est toujours tragiquement lié à une moralité humaniste. Considérez ce dialogue :

Batman: Alors pourquoi veux-tu me tuer ?
Le Joker: Je ne veux pas te tuer! Qu’est ce que je ferais sans toi? Retourner arnaquer des dealers banals ? Non, non, NON ! Non. Tu……..tu……. me complètes.
Batman: Tu es une ordure qui tue pour de l’argent.
Le Joker: Ne parle pas comme l’un d’entre eux. Tu ne l’es pas! Même si tu aimerais bien l’être. Pour eux, tu es juste une bête de foire, comme moi! Ils ont besoin de toi maintenant, mais quand ils n’auront plus besoin de toi, ils te jetteront dehors, comme un lépreux! Tu vois, leurs morales, leur code, c’est une vaste blague. Balancés au premier signe de danger. Ils ne sont seulement bon que selon ce que leur permet le monde. Je te montrerai. Quand les jeux sont faits, ces… ces gens civilisés, ils s’entre-dévoreront. Tu vois, je ne suis pas un monstre. Je suis juste au sommet de la courbe.

Il se peut que le Joker veuille libérer Batman, mais c’est un praticien du qui aime bien châtie bien. Sa thérapie implique de tuer des innocents au hasard, et de cibler ensuite quelqu’un que Batman aime.

La Mort, l’Authenticité, et la liberté

La base de la ressemblance que le Joker perçoit entre Batman et lui n’est pas simplement une question de vêtement excentrique. C’est leur relation à la mort. Le Joker est un peu un existentialiste quand il s’agit de la mort : “dans leurs derniers instants, les gens vous montrent qui ils sont réellement.” La plupart des gens craignent la mort plus que tout. Ainsi, ils la fuient en imaginant leur mort comme quelque part “là-bas,” dans le futur, les attendant. Mais si vous avez seulement une mort, et elle est quelque part dans le futur, alors maintenant, on est immortel. Et les êtres immortels peuvent se permettre de vivre bêtement et sans authenticité. Les gens ne deviennent réels que quand ils font face à la mort, et ils remettent cela habituellement à la toute dernière minute.

Le Joker réaliser qu’il y a quelque chose de plus effrayant que la mort, et qui est une vie sans liberté ou d’authenticité.

Le Joker réalise que le mortalité n’est pas quelque chose l’attendant là-bas dans le futur. C’est quelque chose qu’il transporte en lui tout le temps. Il n’a pas besoin d’un memento mori (locution latine signifiant souviens toi que tu mourras). Il sent son propre cœur battre.

Parce qu’il sait qu’il peut mourir à n’importe quel moment, il vit chaque instant.

Il est prêt à mourir à n’importe quel instant. Il accepte la proposition d’Harvey Dent de le tuer basé sur un lancer de pièce. Il indique qu’il est prêt à se faire sauter lui-même pour dissuader le gangster noir Gambol – et tout le monde le croit. Il défie Batman de le laisser tomber juste pour lui enseigner une leçon.

Dans son esprit, l’inclination du Joker à mourir à tout instant peut être son autorisation de tuer à tout instant.

Le joker peut faire face à sa mort, car il a appris à ne pas la craindre. Certes, il en est venu à l’aimer, puisque c’est la base de sa liberté intérieure. Quand Batman essaye de faire cracher des informations au Joker, il rigole simplement : “Tu n’as rien, rien pour me menacer. Rien à faire avec toute ta force.” Batman est démuni contre lui, car le Joker s’est préparé à mourir.

Le Joker sent, peut être avec méprise, que Batman pourrait atteindre une liberté semblable.

Qu’est ce qui pourrait retenir Batman. Pourrait ce être sa conviction de l’inviolabilité de la vie ? Dans Batman Begins, Bruce Wayne rompt avec la Ligue des Ombres car il refuse l’initiation finale : prendre la vie d’un autre homme. Plus tard dans le film, il refuse de tuer Ra’s al Ghul (bien qu’il le laisse hypocritement mourir). Dans The Dark Knight, Batman refuse de tuer le Joker. Si c’est le raccrochage fait par Batman, le Joker lui enseignera que l’on ne peut seulement vivre une vie plus-qu’humaine si l’on remplace l’amour de la simple vie par l’amour de la mort libératrice.

Les Leçons de la Transvaluation (destruction des valeurs qui ont eu cours jusqu’ici parmi les hommes)

Beaucoup des crimes du Joker peuvent être compris comme des expériences et des leçons morales.

1. Quand le Joker brise la queue de billard et la jette aux trois hommes de main survivants de Gambol, leurs disant qu’il fait des “auditions” et que seul un d’entre eux (ce qui veut dire le survivant) peut “rejoindre notre équipe,” il oppose leurs scrupules moraux à leurs instincts de survie. Celui avec le moins de scrupules ou la plus forte volonté de survie a l’avantage.

2. Le Joker remplit deux bateaux d’explosifs, l’un rempli de criminels et l’autre du bon petit peuple de Gotham. Il leur donne à chacun le bouton du détonateur de l’autre, et leur dit qu’a moins qu’un groupe choisisse de faire exploser l’autre avant minuit, il fera exploser les deux bateaux. Là encore, il oppose les scrupules moraux aux instincts de survie.

Les résultats sont décevants. Les honnêtes gens ne peuvent pas agir sans un vote, et quand ils votent pour faire exploser l’autre bateau, aucun d’entre eux n’a le cran d’aller jusqu’au bout. Ils préféreraient mourir que de prendre la vie des autres, et ce n’est clairement pas parce qu’ils ont surmonté leur peur de la mort, mais simplement par manque de pure vitalité animale, de volonté de puissance. Leur moralité les a rendu malade. Ils ne pensent pas qu’ils ont le droit de vivre au dépens des autres. Ou, encore pire, ils vivent tous au dépens des autres. Il s’agit dans ce Système entier de se manger l’un l’autre. Mais aucun d’entre eux n’assumera ce fait devant les autres.

Batman interprète ceci comme un signe que les gens “sont prêts à croire dans le bien,” c’est à dire, que le Joker avait tort d’affirmer que, “Quand les jeux seront faits, ces . . . ces gens civilisés, ils s’entre-dévoreront.” Le Joker espérait remettre les gens sur-socialisés en lien avec la vitalité animale, et il a échoué. D’un point de vue biologique, se dévorer l’un l’autre est sûrement plus sain que d’aller passivement à la mort en masse.

3. Le Joker rentre dans une frénésie de meurtre pour forcer Batman à enlever son masque et le pousser à se rendre. Ainsi, Batman doit choisir entre abandonner sa mission ou à continuer au dépens de vies individuelles. Si il choisit de continuer, il doit considérer les victimes du Joker comme des sacrifices nécessaires pour servir le bien commun, ce qui signifie que les humains n’ont pas des droits absolus, ce qui fait de leur un atout pour la société.

4. Le Joker force Batman à choisir entre sauver la vie de Rachel Dawes, la femme qu’il aime, ou Harvey Dent, un fonctionnaire idéaliste. Si le vrai but de Batman est de servir le bien commun, alors il devrait choisir Dent. Mais il choisit Dawes, parce qu’il l’aime. Mais la blague est sur lui. Le Joker lui a dit que Dawes était à la localisation de Dent, donc Batman a fini par sauver Dent de toute manière ? Quand Batman dit au Joker qu’il n’a “qu’une seule règle” (on imagine ne pas tuer) le Joker répond qu’il va devoir briser cette règle si il veut sauver l’un d’entre eux, car il peut en sauver qu’un seulement en laissant l’autre mourir.

5. Comme Batman se dirige vers le Joker sur sa Batcycle, le Joker le raille : “Frappe moi, frappe moi, vas-y, je veux que tu me frappes.” Le Joker est libre et prêt à mourir à ce moment même. Batman, cependant, ne peut pas se résoudre à le tuer. Il vire de bord et s’écrase. Le Joker est prêt à mourir pour enseigner à Batman à tuer simplement par colère animale, sans paroles hypocrites sur les droits ou un procès juste et autres boniments moralistes.

6. Plus tard dans le film, Batman sauve le Joker de la chute à mort. Il aurait pu le laisser mourir, comme il l’a fait pour Ra’s al Ghul. Le Joker dit : “Oh, toi. Tu ne pouvais pas me laisser tomber, n’est-ce pas ? C’est ce qui arrive quand une force inarrêtable rencontre un objet inamovible. Tu es vraiment incorruptible, n’est ce pas ?. . . Tu ne veux pas me tuer pas par un sens mal placé d’estime de soi. Et je ne veux pas te tuer, car tu es bien trop marrant. Je pense que toi et moi sommes destinés à faire cela pour toujours.” Là encore, on a le sentiment que le Joker aurait été heureux de mourir simplement pour faire vaciller en Batman hors de son “sentiment mal placé d’estime de soi.”

Au risque de paraître comme le Riddler :

Q: Comment appelle tu un homme qui est prêt à mourir pour faire une remarque philosophique intéressante ?

A: Un philosophe

Les morales matérialistes contre les morales aristocratiques

La société moderne matérialiste est basée sur deux principes de base : que rien n’est pire que la mort et rien n’est mieux que la richesse. La société aristocratique est basée sur les principes qui il y a des choses pires que la mort et meilleures que la richesse. Le déshonneur et l’esclavage sont pires que la mort. Et l’honneur et la liberté sont meilleurs que la richesse.

Nous avons déjà vu que le Joker craint la mort moins qu’une vie inauthentique et esclave. Dans une des scènes les plus mémorables du film, il montre sa vision de la richesse. La scène se passe dans un bateau. Une énorme montagne d’argent est empilée. Le Joker a simplement reconquit le trésor de l’argent de la mafia _ pour lequel il recevra la moitié. Ligoté au sommet de la pile se trouve Mr. Lau, le blanchisseur de l’argent qui a essayé de fuir avec elle.

L’un des gangsters demande au joker ce qu’il fera avec tout cet argent. Il répond : “Je suis un homme avec des goûts simples. J’aime la dynamite, et la poudre, et . . . l’essence.” Moment où ses hommes de main arrosent l’argent d’essence. Le Joker continue : “Et tu sais ce qu’ils ont en commun ? Ils ne sont pas cher.” Il allume ensuite le bûcher et s’adresse au gangster : “Tout se dont vous vous souciez, c’est l’argent. Gotham mérite un meilleure classe de criminel, et je vais le leur donner.”

La moralité aristocratique fait une vertu de transformer la richesse en quelque chose de spirituel : en de l’honneur, du prestige, ou des choses belles et utiles. Échanger la richesse pour des biens spirituels démontre une liberté de la nécessité matérielle. Mais la démonstration ultime de la liberté de quelqu’un des biens matériaux est leur simple destruction.

Les Indiens du Nord Ouest du Pacifique pratiquent une cérémonie appelée le “Potlatch.” Dans une Potlatch, les chefs de la tribu gagnent le prestige en abandonnant la richesse matérielle . Cependant, quand il y a une intense rivalité entre les individus, ils rivaliseraient pour l’honneur non en abandonnant la richesse mais en la détruisant.

Le Joker pratique le Potlatch. Peut-être la note ultime cependant, est quand il mentionne qu’il ne brûle seulement que sa part de l’argent.

L’homme avec le plan

Harvey Dent le District Attornet de Gotham (joué par l’archétype nordique Aaron Eckhart) est un homme authentiquement noble. Il est aussi un homme avec un plan. Il ne laisse rien à la chance, bien qu’il prétende le faire. Il prend des décisions en faisant tourner une pièce, mais la pièce est pipée. Elle a deux faces.

Le Joker kidnappe Harvey Dent et Rachel Dawes et les installe en vue de les faire sauter. Il donne au Batman le choix d’en sauver un. Il se rua pour sauver Dawes, mais trouve Dent à la place. Dawes est tuée, et Dent est horriblement défiguré. La moitié de son visage est horriblement brûlée. La moitié de son visage est défigurée, et une face de sa pièce (qui était dans la possession de Rachel) est également noircie. Harvey Dent est devenu “Double Face.”

Le Joker, bien sûr, est aussi un homme avec un plan. Pour dire la vérité, il est un génie du crime, le comploteur ultime. (Certes, l’une des quelques fautes de ce film est que ses plans élaborés semblent venir sans temps de préparation.) Quand le Joker visite Dent à l’hôpital, cependant, il tient le discours suivant à l’accusation de Dent que la mort de Rachel était une partie du plan du Joker.

Est-ce que j’ai la tête d’un mec avec un plan ? Tu sais ce que je suis ? Je suis en chien chassant les voitures. Je ne saurais pas quoi faire avec, si j’en attrapais une. Tu sais, je . . . fais juste les choses.

La mafia a des plans, les flics ont des plans . . . Tu sais, ils ne sont que des comploteurs. Les comploteurs essayant de contrôler leurs petits mondes. Je ne suis pas un comploteur. J’essaie de montrer aux comploteurs combien pathétiques sont réellement leurs tentatives de contrôler les choses. . . . Ce sont les comploteurs qui t’ont mis là où tu est. Tu étais un comploteur, tu avais des plans, et regarde où cela t’as mené. J’ai simplement fait ce que je fais de mieux. J’ai pris votre petit plan et je l’ai retourné sur lui-même. Regarde ce que j’ai fait à cette ville avec quelques barils d’essence et quelques balles. Hmmm?

Tu sais . . . Tu sais ce que j’ai remarqué ? Personne ne panique quand les choses vont “selon le plan.” Même si le plan est terrifiant ! Si demain, je dis à la presse que, imaginons, qu’on va tirer sur une vieille bagnole de gang, ou qu’un chargement de soldats va se faire dynamiter, personne ne panique, parce que c’est “une partie du plan.” Mais quand je dit qu’un petit vieux de maire va mourir, et bien tout le monde perd ses esprits !

Introduit un peu d’anarchie. Bouleverse l’ordre établi, et tout devient chaos. Je suis un agent du chaos. Oh, tu sais le truc sur le chaos ? C’est juste !

Le plan immédiat du Joker est de mener en bateau Harvey Dent, de transformer le Chevalier Blanc de Gotham en un tueur fou. “La folie,” “c’est comme la gravité. Tout ce dont tu as besoin est d’une pichenette.” Ce discours est sa pichenette, et ce qu’il dit doit être interprété avec ce but à l’esprit. Par exemple, l’affirmation que le chaos est “juste,” est clairement à propos de l’utilisation de Dent de la pièce à deux face, car il refuse de laisser quelque chance au hasard. (Le chaos ici est l’équivalent de la chance.) La réplique de Dent est de proposer de décider de la vie ou de la mort du Joker sur un lancer de pièce. Le Joker est d’accord, et la pièce sort en la faveur du Joker ? Nous ne voyons pas ce qu’il se passe, mais le Joker émerge indemne et Harvey Dent est transformé en Double Face.

Le Plan B

Mais le discours du Joker n’est pas simplement un mensonge pour envoyer Dent du côté obscur. À la fin, le Joker n’est pas vraiment un homme avec un plan, et la preuve la plus éclatante est qu’il parie sa vie sur un lancer de pièce. Oui, Joker planifie toutes sortes de contingences, mais il sait que les meilleurs plans bien établis ne peuvent éliminer la contingence en tant que telle. Mais tout va bien, puisque le Joker adhère à la contingence comme il adhère à la mort : c’est un principe de liberté.

Le Joker est en révolte non seulement contre la morale de la modernité, mais aussi sa métaphysique, l’interprétation régnante de l’Être, c’est à dire que le monde est complètement transparent à la raison et susceptible à la planification et au contrôle. Heidegger appelait cette interprétation de l’Être le “Gestell,” un terme qui connote la classification et l’arrangement pour maximiser la disponibilité, comme un livre dans une bibliothèque bien ordonnée, chiffré et mis en rayon, afin d’être situé et récupéré à volonté. Pour l’homme moderne, “être” est être susceptible d’être classé, étiqueté, mis en rayon, et disponible sur ce modèle.

Heidegger considérait un tel monde comme un enfer inhumain, et le Joker est d’accord. Quand le Joker est arrêté, nous découvrons qu’ils pas d’ADN ou d’empreintes digitales ou de données dentaires sur le fichier. Il n’a pas de nom, pas d’adresse, pas d’identification d’aucunes sortes. Ses habits sont faits sur mesure, avec aucunes étiquettes. Comme le Commissaire Gordon le dit, il n’y a “rien dans ses poches, sauf des couteaux et du lin.” Oui, le système l’a attrapé, mais il ne sait rien sur lui. Quand il s’échappe, ils n’ont aucune idée de par ou chercher. Il est un livre sans code barre : déclassifié, non mis en rayon, indisponible . . . libre.

Pour Heidegger, le chemin vers la liberté est de méditer sur les origines du Gestell, qui affirme il sont énormément mystérieuses. Pourquoi les gens commencent à penser que tout peut être compris et contrôlé ? Est ce que l’idée a été mitonnée par quelques individus et qui l’ont ensuite propagé selon un plan ? Heidegger pense que non ? Le Gestell est une transformation du Zeitgeist qui ne peut pas être retracé à des pensées et des actions individuelles, mais à la place aux conditions et les dominent. Ses origines et son pouvoir restent ainsi impénétrables. Le Gestell est un “Ereignis,” un événement, une contingence.

Heidegger suggère qu’étymologiquement, “Ereignis” a aussi le sens de “prendre prise” et “de capture.” Certains traducteurs le rendent comme “appropriation” ou “enowning.” Je préfère le traduire comme “captivation” : L’interprétation moderne de l’Être passe, nous ne savons pas pourquoi. C’est simplement une contingence stupide. Elle a juste émergé. Maintenant elle nous captive. Nous ne pouvons pas la comprendre. Nous ne pouvons pas la contrôler. Comment nous libérons nous ?

Le sortilège est brisé dès que nous réalisons que l’idée du Gestell – l’idée que nous pouvons comprendre et contrôler tout – ne peut pas elle-même être comprise ou contrôlée. L’influence de l’idée que toutes choses peuvent être planifiées ou contrôlées. Le règne de l’idée que tout est nécessaire, que tout à une raison, est venu d’une pure et irrationnelle contingence.

Le Joker cherche à briser le pouvoir du Gestell pas simplement en méditant sur la contingence, mais en agissant à partir d’elle, c’est à dire, en étant une contingence irrationnelle, en étant un agent du chaos.

Il introduit le chaos dans la propre vie en agissant par caprice, en “faisant simplement des choses” qui n’ont aucun sens, comme “un chien courant derrière les voitures” : de parier sa vie sur un lancer de pièce, jouer au poulet avec Batman, etc. Quand Batman essaye de soutirer des informations du Jocker en le torturant, il lui dit que “La seule manière sensée de vivre en ce monde est de vivre sans règles.”

Alfred, le maître d’hôtel comprend la liberté du Joker : “Certains hommes ne recherchent rien de logiques, comme de l’argent. Ils ne peuvent pas être achetés, torturés, raisonnés, ou on ne peut pas négocier avec eux. Certains hommes souhaitent simplement voir le monde brûler.”

Le Joker introduit du chaos dans la société en brisant l’étreinte du système et de ses plans.

Il est capable d’être un agent du chaos à cause de sa relation avec la mort. Il ne la craint pas. Il la voit comme une possibilité permanente. Il est, donc, libre. Sa liberté l’élève au dessus du Gestell, lui permettant de regarder en bas . . . et de rire. Voilà pourquoi, on l’appelle le Joker.

En tout sérieux

J’aime la philosophie du Joker. Je pense qu’il a raison. “Mais attendez,” certains d’entre vous pourraient le dire, “le Joker est un monstre!” Heath Ledger affirmait que le Joker était ‘un psychopathe, tueur de masse, un clown schizophrène avec aucune empathie.’ Vous n’aimez certainement pas quelqu’un comme çà !”

Mais souvenez vous, nous parlons d’Hollywood ici. Dans une société “libre,” nous ne pouvons pas supprimer totalement les dangereuses vérités. Donc nous devons être immunisés contre elles. Voilà pourquoi Hollywood laisse de dangereuses vérités apparaître à l’écran, mais seulement dans les bouches des monstres : Derek Vinyard dans American History X, Bill le Boucher dans Gangs of New York, Ra’s al Ghul dans Batman Begins, le Joker dans The Dark Knight, etc.

Nous avons besoin d’apprendre à séparer le message du messager, et nous avons besoin de l’enseigner aux millions de gens qui ont vu ce film (le 7ème plus gros film de tous les temps) pour qu’ils le fassent eux-même. Une fois que l’on fait çà, le film cesse de renforcer le message du système et renforce le nôtre à la place. C’est ce que je fais de mieux, je prends leur propagande et je la leur retourne au visage.

Quelles leçons peut on tirer de The Dark Knight?

Batman Begins révèle une profonde compréhension de l’opposition fondamentale entre l’opinion cyclique traditionnelle de l’histoire et celle du progressisme moderne, envisageant un Traditionnalisme guerrier ( La Ligue des Ombres) comme l’ennemi ultime de Batman et des forces du progrès.

The Dark Knight révèle une profonde compréhension des antipodes moraux et métaphysiques du monde moderne : le concept Nietzschéen de la moralité du maître et la critique de la moralité de l’esclave égalitaire, couplés avec le concept Heideggerien du Gestell et du pouvoir de la pure contingence irrationnelle pour le briser.

Le Joker se sert de ces idées comme des armes, et il exploite le conflit moral latent de Batman entre le dépassement de soi Nietzschéen et sa dévotion aux droits de l’homme et à l’égalité.

En résumé, quelqu’un à Hollywood comprend qui est l’ennemi le plus radical et le plus fondamental du Système. Ils savent quelles idées peuvent détruire leur monde. Il est temps que nous les apprenions aussi.

Montrons à ses comploteurs combien pathétiques sont leurs tentatives de nous contrôler.

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English original here

Après avoir été bluffé par l’Inception de Christopher Nolan, j’ai décidé de donner à son Batman Begins (2005) une nouvelle chance. La première fois que j’ai vu ce film, je ne l’ai pas aimé. Pas un seul instant. J’ai dû être distrait, car cette fois je l’ai apprécié. Nolan rompt avec le style kitsch des premiers films de Batman, se concentrant sur l’évolution et les motivations du personnage, ce qui fait de Batman Begins et sa suite The Dark Knight, des films à la fois sombres psychologiquement et intellectuellement et émotionnellement obligatoires.

Les acteurs de Nolan sont superbes. Bien que j’ai été déçu d’apprendre que David Boreanaz – le look parfait, selon moi – avait été choisi pour le rôle de Batman jusqu’à ce que le rôle soit donné à Christian Bale, il est difficile de trouver des défauts au Batman de Bale. Il est peut être trop mignon. Mais il a l’intelligence, la complexité émotionnelle, et le physique héroïque nécessaire pour amener Batman à la vie. (Adam West, Michael Keaton, et George Clooney étaient des blagues, mais Val Kilmer fut un choix intriguant.)

Batman Begins a aussi pour vedette Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, Liam Neeson, Cillian Murphy, Ken Watanabe, Rutger Hauer, et Morgan Freeman dans le rôle de l’un de ces brillants inventeurs noirs et mentors pour les Blancs désorientés si communs dans la science fiction. Dans The Dark Knight, Bale, Caine, Oldman, Murphy, et Freeman reviennent, et l’immortel Heath Ledger est le Joker.

Batman Begins se compose en trois parties. Dans la première partie, nous alternons entre Bruce Wayne en Chine et les flashbacks du cours des événements qui l’ont amené ici. Je méprise le cliché qui passe pour de la psychologie dans la culture populaire d’aujourd’hui, à savoir qu’un psychisme déformé peut être issu d’un traumatisme primal. Donc, j’ai été ennuyé d’apprendre que le jeune Bruce Wayne est devenu obsédé par les chauve-souris, quand il est tombé dans un puits et a été assailli par elles, et qu’il est devenu un combattant contre le crime, parce que ses riches parents ont été abattus devant lui par un agresseur. Hanté par ses traumatismes, le milliardaire Bruce Wayne finit par décrocher de Princeton pour s’immerger de lui-même dans la pègre, pour finalement se retrouver dans une prison chinoise brutale.

Wayne est relâché par le mystérieux Mr. Ducat – joué par l’imposant et charismatique Liam Neeson – qui supervise sa formation dans une mystérieuse forteresse himalayenne dirigée par “La Ligue des Ombres,” un ordre ancien d’ascètes guerrier dirigé par Ra’s al Ghul (Ken Watanabe). La Ligue suit l’enseignement Traditionnel que l’histoire bouge en cercles, commençant par un Âge d’Or et déclinant dans un Âge Obscur, qui ensuite s’effondre et donne place à un nouvel Âge d’Or. La mission de la Ligue des Ombres est d’apparaître quand une civilisation a atteint le point le plus bas de la décadence et est sur le point de tomber – et de donner alors l’impulsion. (Inutile de dire, qu’ils n’ont pas de site Internet ou de page Facebook. Ou qu’on ne peut pas les joindre pour leur envoyer un chèque.)

L’entraînement de la Ligue est à la fois physique et spirituel. L’essentiel du chemin spirituel est de se confronter et de surmonter ses peurs les plus profondes en utilisant un hallucinogène issu d’une fleur himalayenne. Dans une scène puissante et poétique de triomphe, Bruce Wayne se tient sans peur au milieu d’une énorme nuée de chauve-souris. La première fois que je l’ai vu, j’ai manqué la signification de cette transformation, qui est une critique implicite de la psychologie du “traumatisme,” puisque qu’on montre que les traumatismes sont au final extrêmement superficiels comparés à la force héroïque de se tenir face à la tempête. C’est, de plus, parfaitement cohérent avec la conviction que la nature est au final plus puissante que l’éducation.

Bruce Wayne accepte l’entraînement de la Ligue, mais à la fin rejette sa mission. Il pense que la décadence peut être inversée. Il croit au progrès. Lui et Ducat se battent. Ra’s al Ghul est tué. La forteresse explose. Wayne s’échappe, en sauvant la vie de Ducat. Il appelle ensuite son jet privé et retourne à Gotham City.

Dans l’acte deux, Bruce Wayne devient Batman. De façon intéressante, Batman est plus proche de l’idée de Nietzsche du “Surhomme” que ne l’est le personnage de Superman. Superman n’est pas vraiment un homme pour commencer. Il nous ressemble c’est tout. Ses pouvoirs sont juste “donnés.” Mais un surhomme Nietzschéen est un homme qui fait de lui plus qu’un simple homme. Bruce Wayne conquiert la nature, à la fois sa propre nature et le monde autour de lui. En tant qu’homme, il a fait de lui-même plus qu’un homme.

Mais moralement parlant, Batman n’est pas un Übermensch (Surhomme Nietzschéen), puisqu’il reste asservi à la notion sentimentale que chaque vie humaine a une valeur intrinsèque. Il ne voit pas que cette moralité nie la valeur de son propre achèvement. Un Batman ne peut être toléré que si il sert ses inférieurs. Les droits de l’homme universels – l’égalité – la dignité intrinsèque – l’inviolabilité de chaque spermatozoïde : ces idées permettent la subordination et finalement la destruction de tout ce qui est en dessous – ou au dessus – de l’humanité. Elles sont plus qu’une peine de mort pour la nature, comme Pennti Linkola l’affirme. Elles sont la peine de mort de l’excellence humaine, la haute culture, tout ce qui dans l’homme mène à l’homme du dessus.

Bien sûr, l’éthique humaniste de Batman a des limites, particulièrement quand il fait un tours dans sa Batmobile, en détruisant et écrasant les voitures de police, en dynamitant les murs, en déchirant les toits. Est ce que Bruce Wayne a l’intention de rembourser les bons citoyens de Gotham, ou y a t’il une moralité plus élevée en marche ici après tout ?

Dans l’acte deux, Batman commence à nettoyer Gotham City et découvre et fait échouer une complexe machination. Dans l’acte trois, nous apprenons qui est derrière tout çà : La Ligue des Ombres. Nous apprenons que le personnage de Liam Neeson, Ducat est le vrai Ra’s al Ghul, et que lui et la Ligue sont venus dans une Gotham City chancelante au bord du chaos – pour l’envoyer par dessus bord. Bien sûr, Batman sauve les choses, et il permet à Gotham de clopiner, de glisser encore plus profondément dans la décadence puisque son peuple lève ses yeux vers les mirages brillants de l’espoir et du progrès éternel qui séduisent et ensorcellent également leur champion.

Batman Begins est un film sombre et sérieux, animé par un humour léger. Il est éblouissant à l’oeil. Le scénario a été coécrit par Christopher Nolan et le réalisateur-écrivain juif David Goyer. Il y a quelques touches de politiquement correct, telles que Morgan Freeman (bien que je pense qu’il est impossible de ne pas aimer Morgan Freeman) et le petit fait qu’un des ancêtres de Wayne ait été abolitionniste, mais rien qui ne craigne vraiment.

Batman Begins touche à beaucoup des thèmes que j’ai discerné dans mes critiques des deux films de Guillermo del Toto Hellboy et Hellboy II. Là encore, les méchants semblent adhérer à la vision traditionaliste cyclique de l’histoire ; ils adhéraient au fait que la trajectoire de l’histoire est le déclin ; ils croient que nous vivons dans un Âge Sombre et qu’un Âge d’Or adviendra seulement quand l’Âge Sombre sera détruit ; et ils souhaitent prêter leur concours à la roue du temps. Que ce qui tombe, doit être annihilé.

Les héros, par contraste, croient au progrès. Ainsi, ils pensent qu’un monde meilleur peut être atteint en construisant sur le monde actuel.

C’est une opposition plutôt élégante et absolument radicale, qui peut être exploitée pour créer un conflit à enjeux spectaculaires. Quel combat peut être plus éblouissant que les gens qui veulent détruire le monde contre les gens qui veulent le sauver ?

Cela soulève la question évidente : Qui à Hollywood a lu René Guénon et Julius Evola – ou, dans le cas de Hellboy, Savitri Devi et Miguel Serrano? Pour que quelqu’un à l’intérieur de la bête comprenne clairement qu’un Traditionalisme armé est la révolte ultime contre le monde moderne.

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I have never liked the character of Superman. He is not a man who has transcended humanity toward something higher. He is simply an alien, who looks like one of us, and who comes equipped with a whole array of superpowers. From a Nietzschean and Faustian standpoint, that translates to zero appeal. I am not interested in being rescued by a superior being. I am interested in becoming a superior being. Furthermore, none of the Superman movies or TV shows ever managed to make this character compelling to me (although I love the John Williams score for Richard Donner’s 1978 film).

But when I went to see Man of Steel, I was prepared to be sold, for this movie is a team-up of two of Hollywood’s leading young goy geniuses: director Zack Snyder (Watchmen) and Christopher Nolan, director of the Dark Knight Trilogy and Inception, who co-wrote the script with long-time Jewish collaborator David Goyer.

But Man of Steel is a deeply disappointing movie. Compared to Watchmen and the Dark Knight Trilogy, which are intellectually and emotionally deep, complex, and involving, Man of Steel is pretty much a brainless, soulless spectacle.

The underlying problem seems to be that Snyder and Nolan just aren’t that crazy about the character of Superman either. Hence they have delivered an uninspired, by-the-numbers, would-be “Summer Blockbuster.” (Aren’t blockbusters also a kind of bomb?) Man of Steel even stoops to the last refuge of bad scripts: the movie is swarming with cameos. (“Look, it’s Kevin Costner!” “Look, it’s Morpheus!” “Look, it’s that wog from Battlestar Galactica!”) After this film and Sucker Punch, it is time to put Zack Snyder on artistic probation. Watchmen may have been just a fluke. This whole movie reeks of cynicism and greed.

But there is also a deeper, older stench underneath. As I have argued in my reviews of Hellboy and Hellboy II: The Golden Army, comic-book superheroes largely function as symbolic proxies for Jews, who virtually created the genre. Superheroes, like Jews, are always outsiders and “freaks.” They are, moreover, immensely powerful outsiders who must engage in crypsis to blend in, lest they incite the fear and ire of their host populations.

The superhero genre also plays an indispensible apologetic role for Jewry. For in the case of superheroes, these immensely powerful and secretive aliens are benevolently disposed to their host populations, magnanimously enduring the fears and suspicions of their narrow-minded and xenophobic inferiors whose interests they serve out of a commitment to the morality of egalitarian humanism.

Jews, of course, use their superpowers and knack for crypsis to rather different ends, ceaselessly scourging the goyim with plagues like Bolshevism, free market capitalism, feminism, multiculturalism, pornography, psychoanalysis, non-white immigration, Zionism, endless wars, and, to top it all off, the ongoing genocide of the white race.

This, of course, is supervillain behavior, but the superhero genre inoculates us from drawing that conclusion by making supervillains into perpetual Nazis, or symbolic proxies for Nazis and other nationalistic, anti-egalitarian, xenophobic, and traditional-minded whites (but never nationalistic, anti-egalitarian, xenophobic, traditional-minded Jews).

Superman is, of course, one of the most explicitly Jewish superheroes. Superman was created in 1933 by two Ashkenazic Jews, Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster, and from the beginning he was cast as an “American” antipode to the German “supermen” who rose to power in 1933. Like Moses, Superman was set adrift in an ark and found and adopted by an alien family. Superman’s original name is Kal-El, and his father was named Jor-El, “El” being a Hebrew word for “God” and a root of such names as Israel and Elizabeth.

In Man of Steel, the supervillain is General Zod. We learn that Krypton is a planet that practices eugenics, has a caste system, and has engaged in colonization of the cosmos, creating giant machines that transform other planets into environments like Krypton, obliterating whatever creatures lived there before them.

After a 100,000 year Reich, however, Krypton is in deep decline. Its colonies have failed, and the planet itself is in danger of implosion due to mining its core for energy. Two men, Jor-El and General Zod, wish to save Krypton.

Jor-El is the far-sighted scientist who warned the Kryptonians of the folly of mining their planet’s core (how enlightened). Jor-El and his wife Lara have created a natural child, Kal-El, a child of choice and chance (how liberal). Jor-El then somehow hides in the genetic codes of other, as yet unborn Kryptonians (whatever that means) in the body of Kal-El. Then Jor-El launches the child into space in a tiny capsule. This, somehow, will save the Kryptonian race. Sounds like a plan!

General Zod, the leader of the warrior caste, attempts to restore Krypton by launching a military coup. He wishes to extinguish the bloodlines of the rulers who have brought Krypton to its sorry state. But he is captured and exiled with his followers. But when Krypton finally implodes, they are freed. They then search the universe for Jor-El’s child to recover their genetic database. They track him to Earth, which they wish to seize and “terraform” into another Krypton, so they can begin their race anew. Humanity, needless to say, will be exterminated. (Inequality + eugenics + Lebensraum + genocide = “Nazis.”)

Superman rejects Zod’s proposal in the name of egalitarian humanism. A believer in diversity and open borders, he suggests that the Kryptonians share the planet. One Kryptonian tells Superman that his morality is an evolutionary disadvantage. Kryptonians have no morality and believe only in evolution. Of course Superman’s egalitarianism is not the same as “morality” as such. The Kryptonians also have a moral code, namely a kind of social Darwinism, which means that they feel no obligation to any weaker species, particularly when the very survival of their race is in peril.

Well you can’t bargain with Nazis. Remember Munich, 1938? So rayguns and bullets are discharged, blows are traded, spaceships and airplanes and Kryptonians whoosh around, and Metropolis is pretty much reduced to rubble, all to another thundering, tuneless, dreary Hans Zimmer score. In the end, General Zod is killed and his followers are poofed into another dimension where they will be held in suspended animation until Alan Smithee’s Man of Steel II comes out next summer.

The lesson of Man of Steel is the same lesson as practically any other superhero movie: white Americans must never dream of controlling our own destiny. Instead, we must trust in the benevolent hegemony of superheroes: a tiny, hidden minority of powerful aliens and freaks. Superheroes are the only thing that can save us from supervillains and all the evils for which they stand: inequality, eugenics, hierarchy, xenophobia, etc. In short, everything practiced by Jews to preserve their race, and everything which, if practiced by whites, would secure us against Jewish subversion, domination, and ultimately genocide.

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Transcendence marks the directorial debut of Wally Pfister, Christopher Nolan’s cinematographer. Nolan is also the executive producer so the expectation is that this sci-fi project could aspire to the heights reached by Nolan’s Inception. Sadly, it fails to live up to the comparison.

Johnny Depp stars as Dr. Will Caster, a leading researcher in artificial intelligence (AI). His work is opposed by a terrorist group known as RIFT (Revolutionary Independence From Technology) who argue that the creation of self-aware computers will lead to the destruction of humanity, as the newly autonomous machines will choose to subordinate or wipe out their human creators. This point at which AI supersedes humanity is referred to as the singularity, or in Caster’s own religiously inflected term, transcendence. When Caster is shot early on in the film by a member of RIFT it transpires that the bullet contains radioactive material that will shortly kill him. With Caster’s death imminent, his wife, Evelyn, uploads his consciousness to a computer. Once this is done, he immediately asks to be connected to the internet. Ignoring the possibility that this might be the very thing that RIFT have been sensibly warning everyone about, she unwisely complies.

Initially, her faith in her husband (if that is what he still is) is repaid, as Caster is able to quickly create new bio-technologies that can heal the sick. More than this, his patients are not just cured but super-powered so that they can perform feats of great strength. Unfortunately, he also implants something or other into the bodies of those he cures so that they become networked with the virtual doctor and operate as a hive mind. With this super-empowered army at his disposal it appears that Castor is about to achieve world dominance. Belatedly sensing that this might all be going awry, Evelyn agrees to help defeat Caster. She consents to being infected with a computer virus, and persuades him to upload her consciousness so that it can spread throughout the WWW and shut down everything connected to the internet. Thus humanity is saved but only at the expense of reverting to a pre-technological state.

Transcendence contains some interesting ideas, but it never manages to achieve anything greater than the sum of its parts. To a great extent, this is due to the way that Depp’s character manifests his presence after being uploaded. He simply appears on various screens talking to his wife. Depp’s performance is not particularly engaging to begin with, but when he recedes to an image on a screen within the big screen itself it becomes impossible not to describe his performance as flat. Additionally, his wife is a teary and dull character who can’t even be redeemed by the excellent Rebecca Hall who excelled in Nolan’s The Prestige.

But even more of a problem is the difficulty with attempting to parse the concept of an uploaded consciousness. Needless to say, the specific means of uploading a person to a computer are rather skirted over (because it can’t be done). But this wouldn’t necessarily hamper the film if it was presented better. Recall HAL from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Kubrick recruited Marvin Minsky, a leading researcher on AI in the 1960s, as an advisor on 2001. Kubrick’s depiction of HAL in the movie in 1969 represents the best bet of where AI would be at the turn of the millennium, based on the knowledge of the time. As such, HAL is a super-computer. His intelligence has been achieved through progressions in computer technology based on faster processing power and increased data capacity. As is evident, such AI computers did not come to pass in 2001, but this is no impediment to enjoying the film. Kubrick treats HAL as intellectually proficient yet there is always a suspicion that his “personality” is a sort of autistic charade. He works as an analogue of the black monolith that appears at the beginning of the film: an inscrutable dark façade behind which who knows what sort of alien machinations are ticking over. He works artistically because he crosses a threshold of plausibility.

The 1960s approach to AI research has now been replaced with a focus on distributed intelligence, and this is reflected in the networked consciousness found in Transcendence. Rather than a computer becoming more and more developed to the point where it somehow magically achieves consciousness, the scenario in Transcendence concerns the replication of a human brain in computer hardware. Whereas in 2001 the development of the HAL 9000 series and its capabilities is discussed in some detail, the uploading of consciousness in Transcendence is simply taken as a given. Apparently, the audience will simply accept that this is a plausible concept. For an ideas sci-fi movie, this is the Achilles heel in Transcendence’s techno future. The oddness of Depp/Caster as the virtual brain in a vat, flickering to life on various screens as he stalks his still-fleshy wife stems from this flawed conceit. On this reckoning, an uploaded human is a less believable character than a super-powered computer.

What this points to at a deeper level is the nature of the hopes and expectations that lie behind the pop cultural evolution of AI ideas. In the late 1960s the AI project seemed to be about creating faster and cleverer machines that could somehow reach a certain tipping point that would allow consciousness to emerge. It was part of the self-confident future that the dawning space age seemed to herald. Now the ambition has become the transference of human consciousness to a network. The shift is significant. Rather than seeking to create a genuinely artificial consciousness, a thinking machine, Transcendence tells us that the real aim is the extension of our own consciousness, our sense of self, beyond death. This is a model of the future predicated on the uneasy fear and misgivings of secular late capitalism and the morbid worries it gives rise to. The real terror lying behind the story told in Transcendence is not that uploaded conscious beings might one day supersede humanity; it is that they might not. In the latter scenario we all die, like in real life.

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Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, the second movie in the rebooted Planet of the Apes series, establishes this as a superior franchise inviting comparisons with Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy.

The movie begins exactly where Rise of the Planet of the Apes left off, with a tracker plotting flights around the globe showing the spread of “simian flu.” An accompanying news montage informs us that ten years have passed since the outbreak began and that almost all humans have been wiped out. The apes, who at the end of Rise had crossed the Golden Gate Bridge and founded a new order in the forest, have now established a settled community.

On the other side of the bridge a group of human survivors, who appear to be immune to the virus, have created a makeshift but well-armed fortress. When a small group of these survivors unwittingly trespasses into the ape territory intending to restart a hydroelectric dam, the stage is set for a fascinating examination of how two neighboring, but utterly distinct communities, might relate to each other.

One interesting contrast between the two communities (leaving aside the fact that they are different species) is that the apes are a newly founded, tribal community, based on principles of in-group loyalty and highly hierarchical. The humans are the last remaining remnants, on the point of extinction, and desperately seeking a source of electricity without which they cannot survive. Thus the apes are strong and autonomous whilst the humans are desperate and dependent. Both groups, however, are small communities who cannot afford to sustain significant casualties. This means that both humans and apes are depicted in a defensive mode, and the movie explores different responses to the need for self-defense.

As the action develops, it becomes clear that the majority on both sides are rather belligerent and see attack as the best form of defense. But Caesar, the leader of the apes, develops a relationship of trust with Malcolm, a member of the original human scouting party, and he allows the humans access to the dam. Malcolm similarly advocates for restraint among the humans and it is his influence that convinces Dreyfus, the leader of the human survivors, not to use their considerable weaponry to immediately wipe out all of the apes. This tentative truce is shown to be extremely fragile, and the tension in the movie derives from the inevitable, but unbearable, inevitability of its unfolding.

Caesar’s rival is Koba, an ape whose experience as a subject of vivisection has given him a lifelong and justified antipathy towards humanity. Koba resents Caesar’s alliance with the humans and challenges his position as alpha male. When his challenge is unsuccessful he resorts to more nefarious means and introduces the apes to the humans’ arsenal of weapons. Apes had previously had an abhorrence of guns and living an isolated existence had not needed to consider how to defend themselves against armed outsiders. The irony is that Koba’s high sense of in-group belonging leads him to adopt the superior technology of the out-group humans; by trying to remain ape he becomes more like a human.

I read this as a subtle comment on the impossibility of retaining a separated, traditional community in an age of technology. The apes live a self-contained, balanced, and peaceful existence but unfortunately for them their land happens to contain a resource valued highly by invading Americans. There are many, many humans around the world who would look on the apes’ plight with a great deal of empathy.

In Rise the symbol of the fasces was used to demonstrate the maxim that a single ape is weak but apes together are strong. In Dawn the overt fascist/Roman Imperial imagery has been toned down and distilled into the apes’ central credo: ape not kill ape. This more sanitised message is also in keeping with the apparent moral of the movie, which seems to indicate the truth (platitude) that there are good people in out-groups and bad people in in-groups. But in many ways, this overt moralizing is undercut by the logic of the movie itself.

For one thing, it is not at all clear that the doves on both sides have actually acted to protect their respective communities in the most effective way. Dreyfus’ original impulse was to wipe out all of the apes using the humans’ extensive weaponry. He makes a speech to the survivors, whipping up their antipathy to the apes and appealing to the shared suffering the community has undergone over the preceding years; classic appeals to in-group loyalty. It is Malcolm’s influence that persuades Dreyfus to allow a more peaceful approach. By the end of the movie it’s clear that this approach has led to many human deaths, however inadvertently. Malcolm’s and Caesar’s humanitarian diplomacy might be foregrounded as the most reasonable position to take in the movie, being a more rational and intelligent response to a new threat, but the movie does not pretend that it brings about a peaceful solution. The movie ends with a larger war between ape and human imminent, and Malcolm and Caesar both have to retreat back to their own sides.

Because the movie is so concerned with issues around in-group loyalty it is tempting to read it in a racial context, and I’m sure that some will do so. For me this is not the most interesting way to think about it because the apes and humans mirror each other in so many ways, even to the extent that they can both be seen as multicultural, the humans in an obvious sense and the apes due to the different simian sub-species who have banded together.

For me the most interesting way to read the conflict between man and ape was to see one group as a dying, late civilization, utterly dependent on technology, and the other as a newly emerging culture, reliant on physical strength and hierarchy. Both sides have particular vulnerabilities but there is no doubt which side history favors.

In its depiction of a technologically dependent humanity, decimated by a lethal virus, and struggling to adapt to harsher conditions, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes seems to have taken inspiration from the 1970s British TV series, Survivors. Survivors (which really demands an essay of its own) showed in relentless detail just how much we take the functioning of the modern state and economy for granted. Much of the series showed people coming to terms with how inept they were when there were no shops full of food and other goods. None of us is well equipped to begin from scratch, and Survivors gave an unflattering portrait of our dependency on state and commercial functions. It also managed to question whether its characters’ need to re-establish communities and get society functioning again was actually a desirable goal, or whether, in contrast, the collapse of society was a liberation. Dawn echoes Survivors in many ways, even to the extent that the last series of Survivors ended with a hydroelectric dam being brought back into use.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes has taken the Christopher Nolan approach to blockbuster film making by embedding ambiguity and complexity into its otherwise very entertaining narrative. As the sickly, dying race of humans gives way to the new order of virile ape warriors I look forward to the next installment where, perhaps, the apes will discover their numen.

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Note: Contains spoilers

Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar is an epic, metaphysical poem addressing the question of ultimate human survival in both an individual and collective sense. Like Inception, it uses a strong science-fiction narrative as a means of thinking about time and reality, but unlike Inception it looks outwards to distant galaxies rather than inwards to manipulated dream states. Certainly, Interstellar is Nolan’s most visionary film to date and, if much attention has been paid to the quantum physics that underpins the film, it is ultimately a meditation on what, if anything, lies behind the mundane dimensions of reality.

At the beginning of the film we meet Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) who is an ex-astronaut turned farmer in the Midwest. The reason that he has turned to farming is a blight that is killing off food crops and causing dramatic food shortages. Scientific research and higher education have been shelved whilst everyone is pushed into farming to try to maximize the declining food supply. There is a residual technology; drones fly around to no purpose and we see one being hijacked by Cooper to salvage its technology. This is very much the sort of future envisioned by John Michael Greer in his book The Long Descent and his influential blog The Archdruid Report. Whereas Greer sees the end of the industrial age being caused by fossil fuel depletion, Interstellar less controversially puts it down to an act of nature. In both scenarios, technological development reaches a plateau and gradually fades into the past. Cooper’s young daughter, Murph, gets into trouble at school because she spreads a conspiracy theory that NASA once landed a man on the moon. What was once orthodoxy has become conspiracy theory, and vice versa, in a small but neat presentation of Spengler’s observation that strange, cultish religious imperatives arise at a time of civilizational death. In the world of Interstellar, the techno-Faustian drives of the 20th century have become a sinful heresy.

Murph believes that a ghost in her bedroom is trying to communicate with her by pushing books from her bookshelf. During one of the many severe dust storms that have become commonplace, she accidentally leaves a window open and she and Cooper notice that the dust falls to her bedroom floor in very particular, non-random ways. In fact, it lands as Morse code spelling out map coordinates. Cooper seeks to understand the anomalous incident and the “ghost” as gravitational phenomena of some sort. Upon tracking down the map coordinates they discover a secret NASA base. The space program has been forced to operate in complete secrecy because it is seen as a wasteful luxury that can no longer be afforded. Despite this, Professor Brand (Michael Caine) believes that interstellar colonization is the only hope for saving the human race from the blight. He reveals that a wormhole in space was discovered close to Saturn some years ago and that a number of manned missions were sent through it to investigate the suitability for colonization of planets on the other side. As Cooper is an ex-astronaut, and a heretic for believing in the desirability of space exploration despite the prevailing economic circumstances, he volunteers to pilot a new mission to follow up the data that has been sent back from those first pioneers.

The central bulk of the film follows the mission as it explores two of those worlds. The first is in close proximity to a black hole and the astronauts who explore its surface find it to be inhospitable. Due to the slowing down of time caused by the proximity of a black hole, the astronauts return after a couple of hours to find that 23 years have passed on the mother ship. Ultimately, Cooper decides that he needs to enter the black hole with one of the mission’s robots. This will enable the robot to send “quantum data” from the black hole’s singularity back to Earth to provide the missing piece of an equation that will solve the problem of gravity and allow for the mass emigration of humanity from Earth. Once inside the black hole, Cooper discovers a large projection, or light installation of some sort, representing his daughter’s childhood bedroom. Essentially, the projection is an embodiment of the bedroom’s instantiations in time when viewed from a higher dimension. By intersecting with this exteriorly manifested object of time, Cooper is able to distort space-time and cause the gravitational phenomena that Murph had originally attributed to the ghost at the beginning of the film. Cooper is thus causing the anomalous incidents that were responsible for him finding the NASA base and beginning his mission. It is also evident that the worm hole and the room within the black hole were created by a suprahumanity of the future who put them there to save the humanity of the past. Thus, Cooper’s personal temporal paradox is a small arc within a greater temporal paradox for all humanity.

All of this preoccupation with gravity and its effects inevitably brings to mind comparison with last year’s blockbuster space movie, Gravity. Gravity follows two astronauts who are left free floating in space after their shuttle is destroyed. Clooney and Bullock’s performances were highly rated and the film achieves a real frisson of terror as the characters are seen as lost, vulnerable specks against the immensity of space. But the interesting thing is how these characters are decontextualized, how they exist for us as severed from earthly concerns. True, Bullock’s character has a back story about her young daughter who died aged four, but this comes across as mere filler, a gestural procedure to humanize the character. Her biography is an anecdotal discourse. In essence, both of the characters are somehow less than human: rootless, single, atomized individuals. Surely we are meant to read them as angels, humanlike in form but strangely distant and ethereal? This reading is reinforced by the inclusion of the Hank Williams song “Angels are Hard to Find” in the soundtrack. The event that is responsible for destroying their shuttle, and leaving them hanging like Daliesque Christs in space, is a missile strike on a satellite which creates a chain reaction of debris orbiting through the satellite belt and taking out more satellites as it goes. This event is a quintessentially contemporary disaster. What could be worse than a devastating trail of destruction taking out communication satellites? As Clooney’s character remarks, “Half of North America just lost their Facebook.” This is the worst thing in the world and the true existential horror lying behind Gravity’s action. The lone astronaut spinning helplessly into infinite space is a metaphor for the contemporary experience of disorientation caused by internet downtime.

By contrast, Interstellar attempts to grapple with much bigger issues. The looming prospect of the death of all humanity is always present but, as already mentioned, this futuristic scenario plays out against a “lost futures” backdrop. It isn’t quite an archeofuturist vision because the technological advances that Faye anticipates have not come to fruition, so there is a sense of spiritual regression (accompanying the transition to an agrarian society), and a scavenging of extant technologies. In this context it is worth mentioning Kubrick’s 2001, which Interstellar has been compared to. Famously, HAL became the epitome of everything threatening about artificial intelligence. Due to his vastly superior intelligence and rationality he was given control of the spacecraft with consequences as bad for the crew as they were felicitous for cinema. The evil AI genius was also addressed more recently in the Nolan-produced Transcendence, where the notion of uploading a human’s consciousness to an online network was considered. In Interstellar, AI is shown to have become stuck in retro-looking robots who are basically very clever servants.

In place of the AI evil genius, Nolan instead has references to the mysterious intelligences who are responsible for the appearance of the worm hole: “they.” “They” are revealed to be a future form of humanity, one which has overcome the limitations of time (fifth-dimensional beings). It is surely worthy of note that, in this parable of the indomitability of the Faustian spirit, the higher beings are not aliens, gods or intelligent machines, but human beings. The messianic urge towards a savior figure, Nolan seems to be telling us, should be directed towards our own sense of self-overcoming, our own transcending of natural boundaries. But within all of this there is a very human story about a man who has to leave his daughter behind in pursuit of his ideals. Unlike the astronauts in Gravity we never forget that Cooper has made a real sacrifice in leaving his children behind to carry out this mission. When, at the end of the film, Cooper is reunited with Murph he has aged little, due to the slowing down of time in the area around the black hole where he has been exploring. She, however, is now an old lady on her death bed. When the two meet the father is decades younger than his dying daughter. Despite constituting the film’s emotional resolution the scene is uncomfortable to watch; it feels unnatural and a little creepy due to the age discrepancy. The effect is to make you wonder whether transcending time in this sense is really desirable. It is as though Nolan is subtly throwing in a warning about the consequences of exceeding natural boundaries to temper the Faustian message he sends elsewhere.

And the ambiguity doesn’t end there. This being Nolan, the consummate trickster, there has to be some doubt about the film’s ending. My understanding of physics is not at a very high level, but I believe that it is the case that nothing can escape from beyond the event horizon of a black hole. If this is so then when Cooper crosses the boundary that would be the last anyone would hear of him. Similarly, the “quantum data” would have no chance of being transmitted to Earth. In the film, we see Cooper reunited with his daughter on a space station in the Saturn region having been rescued from the black hole. One of the characters earlier in the film mentioned that the last thing you see before dying is your children. Perhaps we are meant to conclude that the end sequence is all psychological wish fulfillment on the part of a dying man. In which case humanity is stranded on a dying planet and we still don’t really know who “they” are. Perhaps it doesn’t matter; both scenarios are still concerned with man’s Gnostic quest for self-overcoming, and an ultimate resolution to such a quest will never be reached.

The genius of Christopher Nolan is in bringing so many interesting ideas to such entertaining films. With Interstellar he has demonstrated his competence as a metaphysical poet using scientific ideas as striking metaphors for human emotions and fears. It’s too ambitious to hang together perfectly but it is an extraordinary film that demands to be seen and seen again. Nolan’s eight previous films, spanning the period from 2000–2012, marked him out as the pre-eminent film director of the 21st century. Interstellar confirms this judgment.

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Conservatism’s League of Stupidity

The egalitarian Left isn’t just evil — it’s boring. Unfortunately, the conservative “Right” doesn’t have anything better to offer. It’s not just true of politics — it’s even true of their movie reviews.

The endless reinforcement of egalitarianism throughout the controlled culture means that to a great extent, every “superhero” film has the same plot. An extraordinary character is introduced, a challenge emerges to the liberal assumptions of modernity, and the hero, by humbling himself and accepting his responsibility to his inferiors, saves the day and preserves the sacred illusion of equality. The unintended result of this kind of culture is that the most interesting, intelligent, and genuinely substantive characters and ideas come from a film’s supposed villains. Leftist commentators often recognize this and have genuinely insightful (or at least accurate) observations to make about a film’s ideological content.

They may not necessarily like fascism, or for that matter, anything that alludes to heroism or greatness, but at least we are talking about the same thing.

Thus, if we didn’t have John Nolte and Ben Shapiro we’d have to make them up. The two writers at the late Andrew Breitbart’s Big Hollywood somehow managed to view Nolan’s climactic film as some sort of love letter to Goldman Sachs. Batman is pictured a capitalist hero presumably sent by the Cato Institute to protect the prosperous citizens of Gotham from the moral relativists of Occupy Wall Street. Comrade Bane is seen as the leader of evil Leftists, who probably also support Islamism, and is nothing but a jealous nihilist who wants to bring about equality.

Nolte writes:

“Tell me about Bane! Why does he wear the mask?”

Where to begin? Perhaps it is best to find some common ground with our misguided and lovably dopey kosher conservative friends. Let’s advance the theory that if we both accept the idea of liberal media bias, it is mildly suspicious that biggest blockbuster of the year would be an “ode to traditional capitalism” and a partisan attack on Barack Obama. While contemporary American conservatism’s conception of the “Right” has devolved into support of charter schools for blacks and opposing evolution because it’s racist, in theory, the Right by definition involves the principled defense of hierarchy. Movie villains that attack egalitarianism, attempt to set themselves up as an authority, or generally have some higher aim besides “chaos” are on the Right, like most of James Bond’s super-villains, Loki from The Avengers, or the Empire in Star Wars.

Therefore, rather than just quoting Republican talking points, it’s useful to look at the character of Bane and see how Big Hollywood’s charges hold up.

Bane the Nihilist

Incredibly, but perhaps not astonishingly, neither Nolte nor Shapiro mention the League of Shadows. It’s like trying to explain the transformation of Bruce Wayne into Batman without mentioning the death of his parents. Most importantly, as we find out (spoilers!) at the end of the film, Bane is not the main villain. The main villain is Talia — Miranda Tate for most of the film — the daughter of Ra’s al Ghul who seeks to complete her father’s mission. The person who rose from the prison pit was not Bane, but Talia, and it is she who is leading the mission to destroy Gotham. In both the first and third films, Batman is not fighting against chaos, or communism, or high tariff rates, or some other bugaboo of the Beltway faux-Right — he’s fighting a Traditionalist Order that wants to destroy the city he loves.

The League’s justice decrees Gotham should die — Batman’s mercy says it should live. Both are fighting for their conception of the good, and willing to die for it. This isn’t nihilism, on either side.

Bane the Economic Socialist

Bane’s attack on the city of Gotham is twofold. First, he attacks the stock market, an action which brings Batman/Bruce Wayne out of retirement. He’s confronted by a stock broker who claims, “This is a stock market — there’s no money for you to steal.” Bane replies, “Really? Then why are you people here?” Bane doesn’t take the money — he uses a program to strip Bruce Wayne from control of Wayne Enterprises so he can seize the arsenal and the energy project to build an atomic bomb.

Of course, this is just a means to an end. When John Dagget protests that his company has not been able to absorb Wayne’s and claims “I’m in charge,” Bane replies calmly, “Do you feel in charge?” Laying his hand lightly on Dagget’s shoulder, Bane shows he knows where power comes from — force. When Dagget mutters that he’s paid Bane a small fortune, Bane replies, “And this gives you power over me?” “Your money, and infrastructure, have been important, until now.” Bane is in service to a cause greater than money — it’s not surprising that American conservatives literally cannot comprehend it as coming from the Traditionalist Right.

The second main attack is against the football game, with Bane blowing up the field after the National Anthem. Nolte’s take is “Nolan’s love for this country is without qualifiers and symbolized in all its unqualified sincerity in a beautiful young child sweetly singing a complete version of ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ — just before ‘Occupy’ attempts to fulfill its horrific vision of what ‘equality’ really means.” Of course, knowing that Bane actually is part of the League of Shadows, we know there’s a larger agenda here.

Bane isn’t entirely immune to the idea of innocence, as we know how he saved Talia. He even comments while listening to the song, “That’s a lovely, lovely voice.” Then he says, “Let the games begin!” and pushes the button. The League regards the city of Gotham as hopelessly corrupt and evil, and it’s therefore significant that they announce their takeover at a football game — the circus part of bread and circuses. The football game isn’t some glorious manifestation of Americana — it’s a symbol of how pointless and worthless modern life has become. Bane then announces that Gotham is to rise up and “take back their city.” The next day, at Blackgate Prison, Bane destroys the myth of Harvey Dent and calls for revolution against the corrupt, who will be cast out “into the cold world that we know, and endure.” Gotham, says Bane, will be given “to you, the people.”

While Big Hollywood says yes, there’s nothing to suggest that the League of Shadows and its relatively wealthy members and backers (like Talia) are socialists, and they speak consistently of fulfilling, rather than changing, Ra’s Al Ghul’s Traditionalist mission. It’s not that Bane is a socialist — it’s that he’s a Traditionalist who despises capitalism, Revolting Against the Modern World from the Right. American conservatives simply don’t get it, trapped into a simplistic worldview where there is Communism on the Left and Capitalism on the Right.

But how do we know this? How can we be sure that we aren’t, like Big Hollywood, just reading into the movie our own ideological prejudices? Well, it’s pretty easy. Bane directly tells us.

Bane the Egalitarian Revolutionary

After “breaking” Batman, Bane takes him to the prison where he lived for years. He tells Bruce Wayne “the truth about despair.” There can be no despair without hope, and just as the prison has an opening at the top to drive prisoners mad with the lust for freedom, so Bane will use hope to create greater despair.

Batman is to be punished because he betrayed the League of Shadows and the cause of true justice. Wayne believed that his “Batman” could be a symbol that lasts beyond him, that anyone could be Batman. As we learned at the end of The Dark Knight, Bruce Wayne believes that the people of Gotham are fundamentally good, and that given the choice, they will choose good. Therefore, no matter how bad things get in Gotham, no matter how decadent the elite may be, no matter how much he may personally despise them (even to the point of becoming a recluse), Wayne thinks that which is falling must be propped up. Bane considers this not just mistaken, but despicable. When Batman dismisses the League as a gang of psychopaths, Bane attacks with outraged fury.

Thus, Bane’s proto-Occupy speeches aren’t about propagating the ideology of the League — it’s spiritual poison. He even tells us it’s spiritual poison. His screed about giving Gotham back to the people is done to mock the idealism that Batman places in the populace of the city itself. Bane’s actions are an attempt to fulfill H. L. Mencken’s quip that, “The people get the government they deserve, and they deserve to get it good and hard.”

There’s also one critically important fact that puts the beliefs of the League of Shadows and Bane beyond all doubt — this is a suicide mission. The nuclear bomb that Bane forced Dr. Pavel to build is going to go off after a certain time, regardless of what anyone else says about it. Bane will let Gotham destroy itself, force the rest of the world to see it, and then blow it all up anyway. He’ll even sacrifice his life and the life of his men in order to bring about a new beginning on a non-egalitarian foundation. Like Batman, the world will be forced to understand.

American “movement conservatism,” itself a product of the Enlightenment dogma of infinite human perfectibility, can’t cope with this kind of message. Thus, Big Hollywood has to ignore the League of Shadows, ignore Talia, ignore the previous films, and even ignore Bane’s speech telling the audience exactly what he is doing so they can keep on believing “an imperfect America that in the end always does the right thing.” At the Fox News level of cultural analysis, Bane and the League of Shadows develop an intricate, years-long strategy that ends with their own deaths for no other reason than shits and giggles.

The Hero Liberal America Deserves?

One bit of credit is due the reviewers for comprehending the character arc of Selina Kyle/Catwoman. At the beginning of the film, she claims that she is somehow doing more for the poor than rich philanthropists. She looks forward to the day when “a storm is coming . . . because you’re all going to wonder how you thought you could live so large and leave so little for the rest of us.” When she actually sees the revolution unleashed, she’s disgusted to see how a wealthy family’s home has been transformed into squalor. Kyle understands that egalitarianism does not lead to paradise, but horror.

However, ultimately Kyle’s actions are motivated by her need to escape. Just like Bruce Wayne, she cannot bring herself to live even in a restored Gotham City. At the end of the film, she’s not some happy mama grizzly taking the kids to Mickey D’s after a hockey game — she’s chosen a wealthy exile with Bruce Wayne. Kyle too is an outsider. Unlike Talia, she chose selfish escape over sacrifice for an ideal.

This the price of heroism — the hero cannot be part of the society that he saves. That is why the idea of a superhero can be inherently “fascist” — a superhero is a being of pure will and great power who is held to a different standard so he can impose that will on the larger society. A superhero saves society from itself.

Bruce Wayne comes to this realization reluctantly. After all, the whole point of Batman was that he was supposed to temporary and that the police and government could take over and function normally once things got to a certain point. This doesn’t happen — Robin John Blake is the heir to the title of Batman, having thrown away his own policeman’s badge and faith in the sytem. Like a meat grinder, Gotham will demand more extraordinary men to sacrifice themselves in order to keep functioning. To save the kind of society where everyone is equal, the higher man must allow himself to be consumed as the price of democratic heroism. Democracy can only be saved by people who don’t really believe in democracy.

“Do you finally have the courage to do what is necessary?”

Despite the happy ending of Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle palling around in Florence, the ultimate message of the film, and the trilogy, is far too dark for ever-optimistic American conservatives to internalize. Gotham only functions when it is built on lies. Lacking both an aristocracy capable of leading, and a populace capable of being lead, Gotham reverts to brutal authoritarianism in order to bring about order. This is buttressed by noble lies that would make Leo Strauss blush, and the constant sacrifice of higher men.

While it is not surprising that Big Hollywood and movement conservatism don’t “get” the movie, or much of anything else, the reaction speaks volumes about how the Left understands the Right better than the Right understands itself. Conservatives misinterpret the movie because they lack the ability to comprehend anything deeper than corporate profiteering dressed up in platitudes like “free markets” or a “shining city on the hill.” Higher ideas like Traditionalism or the nature of man, society, and power might as well be a foreign language to the last men pining for the second coming of Ronald Reagan.

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English original here

Ve své recenzi Nolanova Batman začíná (Batman Begins, 2005) jsem napsal, že film dosahuje dramatického konfliktu navýšením sázek až do krajnosti: zničení moderního světa (ztělesněného Gotham City) tradicionalistickou Ligou stínů vs. jeho zachování a „progresivní“ vylepšení, o něž usiluje Batman.

Také jsem dodal, že Batmanova proměna v Nietzscheho nadčlověka není dokonalá, jelikož dosud neodvrhl vládnoucí rovnostářsko-humanistickou etiku, která jeho nadlidské úsilí a počiny devalvuje a staví jej do služeb nižších lidí – obyvatel Gothamu.

Tento skrytý konflikt mezi aristokratickou a rovnostářskou etikou vychází jasně na povrch v Nolanově dechberoucím pokračování batmanovské trilogie Temný rytíř (2008), který se bez velkých pochyb stal nejlepším filmem o super-padouchovi vůbec. (Nejlepším filmem o superhrdinech pak jistě jsou Strážci/Watchmen, 2009/ Zacka Snydera.)

Varování: pokud jste film snad ještě neviděli, přestaňte číst.

Filozofování s dynamitem

Skutečnou hvězdou Temného rytíře je Heath Ledger coby Joker. Joker je nietzscheovský filozof. V úvodní scéně si vypůjčuje Nietzscheho aforismus „Co mě nezabije, to mě posílí,“ a upravuje si ho po svém: „Já věřím, že co tě nezabije, to tě udělá… divnějším.“ Po vzoru Nietzscheho, který filozofoval s kladivem, filozofuje Joker s noži – a také s „dynamitem, střelným prachem a… benzínem!“

Jistě, je to zločinec. Vraždí bez váhání a soucitu. Ale věří, že „tohle město si zaslouží lepší zločince a já mu je dodám… O prachy tu nejde, teď totiž hlavně jde o poselství. Všechno shoří.“ V tomto ohledu se Joker příliš neliší od dalšího nietzscheovského filozofa: Unabombera, který filozofoval s výbušninou, protože i on chtěl sdělit světu své poselství.

Jokerovo poselství odhaluje prázdnotu vládnoucích hodnot. Usiluje proto o jejich přehodnocení. Přestože chce zprvu Batmana zabít, postupně ho začíná vnímat jako spřízněného ducha, alter ego: spolu-nadčlověka a spřízněnou zrůdu, která však tragicky stále lpí na humanistické morálce. Vezměte si následující rozhovor:

Batman: Tak proč mě teda chceš zabít?

Joker: Já tě zabít nechci! Co bych si bez tebe počal? Zase bych škubal mafiány? Ne, ne, ne! Ne. Ty… jsi… můj smysl žití.

Batman: Jseš zmetek, co vraždí pro prachy.

Joker: Nemluv jako polda, ten nejseš! I když si přeješ opak. Pro ně jsi jenom zrůda, jako já! Teď tě potřebujou, ale potom tě vyženou, jako by si měl lepru. Že by měli zásady, mravní kodex – fakt špatnej vtip. Dají jim sbohem u první překážky. Jsou dobrý jen potud, pokud jim to svět dovolí. Uvidíš. Začne jim týct do bot a… tyhle civilizovaní lidi se sežerou navzájem. Víš, nejsem zrůda, jen trochu vidím za roh.

Joker sice možná chce Batmana vysvobodit, je ale zastáncem tvrdé lásky. Jeho terapie obnáší vraždění náhodných nevinných a následný útok na někoho z Batmanových milovaných.

Smrt, autenticita a svoboda

Jokerem vnímaná spřízněnost mezi ním a Batmanem nevychází jen ze společné lásky k extravagantnímu ustrojení. Když přijde na přetřes smrt, je Joker tak trochu existencialista: „těsně před smrtí se lidi ukážou, jací jsou.“ Většina lidí se smrti bojí víc než čehokoliv jiného, a proto před ní prchá tím, že si ji představuje někde „daleko“ v budoucnosti, kde na ně čeká. Jestliže ale člověk má jen jedinou smrt, která se nachází někde v budoucnosti, pak je právě teď nesmrtelný. Nesmrtelné bytosti si mohou dovolit pošetilý a neautentický život. Lidé ukazují své skutečné já teprve tváří tvář smrti, což zpravidla odkládají do úplně poslední chvíle.

Joker si je vědom děsivějšího osudu než smrti – života bez svobody a autenticity.

Uvědomuje si, že smrtelnost na něj nečeká někde tam v budoucnosti. Nese si ji uvnitř sebe v každém momentě. Nepotřebuje memento mori – cítí tlukot vlastního srdce.

Protože ví, že může v každém momentu zemřít, každý moment také žije.

Je kdykoliv připraven zemřít. Přijímá návrh Harveho Denta svěřit svůj život výsledku hodu mincí. Ukazuje svou ochotu vyhodit se do vzduchu, aby zastrašil černošského gangstera Gambola – a nikdo nepochybuje, že neblufuje. Vyzývá Batmana, aby ho přejel, jen aby prokázal své přesvědčení.

Jokerova připravenost kdykoliv zemřít mu zřejmě vnitřně dává právo také kdykoliv zabíjet.

Joker dokáže čelit své smrtelnosti, protože se jí naučil přestat bát. Vlastně se ji naučil milovat, protože z ní vychází jeho vnitřní svoboda. Když se z něj Batman pokouší vymlátit informace, jen se mu směje: „Nemáš nic, čím bys mi mohl vyhrožovat. Tvoje síla je ti totálně k ničemu.“ Batman proti němu stojí zcela bezmocný, protože Joker je připraven zemřít.

Joker se domnívá – možná mylně – že i Batman by mohl dosáhnout podobné svobody.

Co mu v tom brání? Možná jeho přesvědčení o posvátnosti života? V Batman začíná se Bruce Wayne vzbouří proti Lize stínů, protože odmítá poslední krok k zasvěcení: usmrtit člověka. Ke konci filmu odmítá zabít Ra’s al Ghula (i když jej pokrytecky nechává zemřít). V Temném rytíři Batman odmítá zabít i Jokera. Brání-li Batmanovi toto, Joker ho naučí, že nad-lidský život lze žít teprve tehdy, nahradí-li lásku k životu láskou k osvobozující smrti.

Lekce z přehodnocení

Chvilka filozofie s nožem

Mnohé z Jokerových zločinů lze chápat jako morální experimenty a lekce.

1. Když Joker rozlomí tágo a jeho kusy hodí směrem ke třem přeživším Gambolovým podřízeným se slovy, že pořádá „konkurz“ a že jen jeden z nich (tedy poslední živý) se „může přidat k naší skupině,“ staví jejich morální skrupule proti základnímu pudu každé bytosti – přežití. Ten s nejslabšími skrupulemi nebo nejsilnější vůlí přežít vyjde živý.

2. Joker umístí výbušniny na dvě lodě, jednu plnou zločinců a druhou spořádaných občanů Gothamu. Na každé z plavidel pošle detonátor k bombě na druhé lodi a vyhlásí, že pokud jedna ze skupin nevyhodí do půlnoci tu druhou do vzduchu, zničí obě. Znovu staví morální skrupule proti instinktu přežít.

Výsledky jej zklamou. Spořádaní občané nedokáží jednat bez hlasování, a když se konečně usnesou na tom zničit druhou loď, žádný z nich nemá odvahu to udělat. Raději by zemřeli, než aby vzali život jiným – zjevně ne proto, že by podmanili svůj strach ze smrti, ale kvůli nedostatku čiré živočišné vitality či vůle k moci. Jejich morálka je učinila nemocnými. Nevěří, že mají právo žít na úkor ostatních. Anebo – ještě hůř – žijí na úkor ostatních všichni. Celý systém podporuje kanibalismus – k čemuž se ale nikdo z nich před ostatními nepřizná.

Batman si to vyloží jako známku toho, že lidé „chtějí věřit v dobro,“ tj. že se Joker mýlil, když prohlásil, že jakmile „jim začne týct do bot… tyhle civilizovaní lidi se sežerou navzájem.“ Joker se pokusil dostat přehnaně socializované lidi do kontaktu s jejich živočišnou vitalitou – a nepovedlo se mu to. Z biologické perspektivy je nepochybně zdravější sežrat se navzájem než jít en masse pasivně na smrt.

3. Joker spustí vražedné řádění, aby Batmana donutil sundat masku a vzdát se úřadům. Batman si musí zvolit: zříct se svého poslání nebo v něm pokračovat za cenu lidských životů. Pokud se rozhodne pokračovat, bude muset Jokerovy oběti považovat za nevyhnutelné úlitby vyššímu blahu, což by znamenalo, že lidé nemají absolutní práva, která by převažovala nad jejich obětováním se pro společnost.

4. Joker přinutí Batmana zvolit mezi záchranou života Rachel Dawesové – ženy, kterou miluje – a Harveyho Denta, idealistického veřejného činitele. Je-li Batmanovým pravým cílem služba obecnému blahu, pak by si měl zvolit Denta. Volí však Rachel, protože ji miluje – stává se však obětí krutého žertu. Joker zaměnil místa věznění Denta a Dawesové, takže Batman nakonec opravdu zachraňuje Denta. Když Batman říká Jokerovi, že má „jen jedno pravidlo“ (podle všeho nezabíjet), Joker odvětí, že ho bude muset porušit, jestli chce jednoho z nich zachránit – zachránit může totiž jen jednoho z nich, a tak nechat toho druhého zemřít.

5. Když se Batman k Jokerovi řítí na Batcyklu, vysmívá se mu Joker: „Sejmi mě, sejmi mě, tak pojď – chci, abys to udělal.“ Joker je svobodný a připravený v té chvíli zemřít. Batman ho však nedokáže zabít. Strhne stroj a vybourá se. Joker projevuje ochotu zemřít, jen aby Batmana naučil jednoduše zabíjet ze zdravého živočišného vzteku – bez kázání o právech, spravedlivém procesu a dalším moralistickém balastu.

6. Ke konci filmu Batman Jokera zachrání před smrtelným pádem. Nedokázal ho nechat zemřít, jako to udělal v případě Ra’s al Ghula. Joker říká: „No jo. Nemohl jsi mě nechat spadnout, že jo? To se stane, když se nezadržitelná síla střetne s nehybným předmětem. Ty jseš fakt nenapravitelnej, že jo?… Ty nezabiješ mě, protože máš blbej pocit, že by to bylo nespravedlivý a já tě nezabiju, protože na to je s tebou příliš velká sranda. Asi je nám souzeno patřit k sobě na věky.“ Člověk má znovu pocit, že by Joker klidně zemřel, jen aby zbavil Batmana jeho „blbýho pocitu, že by to bylo nespravedlivý.“

Možná teď budu znít jako Hádankář:

Otázka: Jak říkáme člověku ochotnému zemřít, aby prokázal filozofické tvrzení?

Odpověď: Filozof.

Materialistická vs. aristokratická morálka

Všechno hoří…

Moderní materialistická společnost spočívá na dvou základních zásadách: nic není horšího než smrt a nic není lepšího než bohatství. U kořenů aristokratické společnosti nalezneme přesvědčení, že existují horší věci než smrt a lepší než bohatství. Hanba a otroctví jsou horší než smrt, čest a svoboda lepší než bohatství.

Už jsme ukázali, že se Joker bojí smrti méně než neautentického a nesvobodného života. V jedné z nejpamětihodnějších scén filmu ukazuje svůj náhled na bohatství. Odehrává se v útrobách nákladní lodi, kde byla navršena obří hranice bankovek. Joker zajistil úspory mafie – za což z nich dostane polovinu. Na vrcholku hromady sedí svázaný pan Lau: s penězi, které měl vyprat, se totiž pokusil utéct.

Jeden z gangsterů se Jokera ptá, co bude dělat se svým podílem. Opáčí: „Víš, netoužím po přepychu. Stačí mi dynamit a střelný prach a … benzín!“ V tom momentu jeho pohůnci začnou hromadu peněz polévat benzínem. Joker pokračuje: „Víš, co ty věci mají společnýho? Jsou levný.“ Následně hromadu zapálí a osloví mafiány: „Záleží vám jen na prachách. Tohle město si ale zaslouží lepší zločince – a já mu je dodám.“

V rámci aristokratické morálky se za ctnost považuje přeměna bohatství na něco duchovního: čest, prestiž nebo krásné a zbytečné věci. Vyměnit bohatství za duchovní statky prokazuje povznesení člověka nad hmotnou závislost. Nejvyšší demonstrací pohrdání hmotnými statky pak je jejich zničení.

Indiáni z amerického Severozápadu měli obřad zvaný „potlatch,“ při kterém náčelníci nabývali prestiže rozdáváním hmotného bohatství. Jestliže ale panovala mezi některými z konkurentů výjimečně silná rivalita, trumfovali se v soupeření o čest nikoliv rozdáváním, ale ničením bohatství.

Joker vlastně provozuje potlatch. Třešničkou na dortu pak je, když dodá, že pálí jen svůj podíl peněz.

Člověk, který má plán

Bílý rytíř Gothamu…

Gothamský návladní Harvey Dent (ztvárněný archetypálně nordickým Aaronem Eckhartem) je skutečně šlechetný muž. Vždy má také plán a nic neponechává náhodě, i když předstírá opak. Rozhoduje se na základě výsledku hodu mincí – mince má ale dvě hlavy.

Joker nechává Harveyho Denta a Rachel Dawesovou unést a uvěznit na dvou různých místech – u tikající bomby. Staví Batmana před volbu zachránit jednoho z nich. Batman se žene zachránit Rachel, ale nachází Denta. Rachel umírá a Dent utrpí děsivé popáleniny. Polovinu tváře má zohavenou a jedna strana jeho mince (kterou u sebe měla Rachel) je zčernalá výbuchem. Z Harveyho Denta se stal „Two Face“ („Dvou tváří“)

Plán má samozřejmě i Joker. Popravdě jde o vrcholného intrikána, génia zločinu. (Jednou z mála výtek filmu by mohlo být, že Jokerovy složité pletichy se objevují jakoby z ničeho, bez plánování.) Když Joker navštěvuje Denta v nemocnici, přednáší mu v odpovědi na Dentovo nařčení, že smrt Rachel byla součástí Jokerova plánu, následující řeč:

Copak vypadám jako někdo, kdo má plán? Víš, co já jsem? Pes, co se honí za auty. Kdybych nějaký chytil, tak nevím, co s ním. Chápeš, já… neplánuju.

Mafie má plán, poldové maj plán… Jsou to plánovači. Pokoušejí se řídit svět, co maj kolem sebe. Já plánovač nejsem, Já se snažím plánovačům ukázat, jak ubohá ta jejich snaha všechno ovládat je… Plánovači můžou za to, co se děje. Patřil jsi mezi ně, měl jsi plán – no a hele jak to dopadlo. Udělal jsem to, co umím nejlíp. Vzal jsem váš plán a obrátil ho proti vám. Podívej se, co jsem dokázal s pár barely benzínu a několika náboji. Hm?

Víš… víš, čeho jsem si všimnul? Dokud „jde všechno podle plánu,“ nikdo nevyvádí. Ať je ten plán sebeděsivější! Kdybych zítra vzkázal do novin, že zastřelím nějakýho mafiána nebo že náklaďák s vojáky vyletí do vzduchu, je to v klidu, protože „jde o součást plánu.“ Ale když oznámím, že umře chudáček starosta, tak se všichni hned můžou zbláznit!

Nastol trochu anarchie. Naruš zavedený pořádek a pak ve všem zavládne chaos. Já jsem agent chaosu. A víš, jakej je chaos především? Je fér!

…a výsledek Jokerových moralních lekcí

Bezprostředním Jokerovým plánem je udělat manipulací z Harveyho Denta, Bílého rytíře Gothamu, šíleného vraha. Jak říká, „šílenství je jako gravitace. Stačí jen trochu pomoct.“ Pomocí má být tento proslov, jehož obsah musíme chápat s tímto na paměti. Například tvrzení, že chaos je „fér,“ očividně odkazuje na Dentovou využívání dvouhlavé mince, protože odmítá spoléhat na náhodu. (Chaos je tu postaven na roveň náhodě.) Dent reaguje návrhem, že na základě hodu mincí rozhodne o Jokerově životě nebo smrti. Joker souhlasí a hod dopadne v jeho prospěch. Pokračování scény nevidíme, ale Joker vychází z budovy nezraněn a z Harveyho Denta se stává Two Face.

Plánování pro případ nepředvídané události

Jokerova řeč ale nemá pouze postrčit Denta přes hranu – Joker totiž konec konců skutečně nemá plán, což nejprůkazněji vykresluje skutečnost, že hod mincí klidně nechá rozhodnout i o svém vlastním životě. Jistě, Joker uvažuje s všemožnými eventualitami, nezapomíná však, že ani ty nejlépe připravené plány nedokáží eliminovat možnost nepředvídané události jako takové. To však není problém, protože Joker nakládá s nepředvídanými událostmi podobně jako se smrtí: jsou pro něj podstatou svobody.

Joker se totiž nevzbouřil jen pro morálce moderny, ale také její metafyzice – uznávanému výkladu Bytí, tedy že svět je v posledku prostupný rozumu a podléhá plánování a kontrole. Heidegger tuto interpretaci Bytí („das Sein“) nazval „das Gestell;“ termínem, který v sobě obnáší klasifikaci a uspořádání maximalizující dostupnost; jako knížka v dobře zorganizované knihovně, očíslovaná a zařazená tak, aby ji bylo možné kdykoliv najít. Pro moderního člověka „být“ podléhá klasifikaci, označení, zařazení a dostupnosti tohoto typu.

Heidegger takovýto svět považoval za nelidské peklo, v čemž se s ním Joker shoduje. Když ho zatknou, zjistí policisté, že nemají žádné jeho otisky prstů, zubařské záznamy ani DNA. Nemá žádné jméno, bydliště nebo průkaz. Jeho oblečení je ušité na míru a bez značek. Jak říká komisař Gordon, neměl „v kapsách nic kromě nožů.“ Jistě, systém ho dostal, ale nic o něm neví. Když následně unikne, nemají sebemenší představu, kde ho hledat. Je jako knížka bez čárového kódu: neoznačená, nezařazená, nedostupná… svobodná.

Pro Heideggera vede cesta ke svobodě skrz meditaci nad původem Gestell-u, který je podle něj zahalen závojem tajemství. Kdy si lidé začali myslet, že vše se dá pochopit a ovládnout? Přišlo snad s myšlenkou několik jednotlivců, kteří ji následně podle plánu rozšířili? Heidegger si to nemyslí. Gestell je proměnouZeitgeistu, kterou nelze vystopovat k jednotlivým myšlenkám a činům, ale která je spíše podmiňuje a utváří. Jeho moc a původ tedy zůstávají neproniknutelné. Gestell je „Ereignis“ – událost, eventualita.

Podle Heideggera má etymologicky „Ereignis“ také význam „uchopení“ a „podmanění.“ Někteří překladatelé se uchylují k „přisvojování“ nebo „zvlastňování.“ Osobně dávám přednost „uchvácení:“ moderní výklad Bytí je tu, nevíme proč, jako slepá událost. Prostě se udála. Nedokážeme ji vysvětlit ani ovládnout. Jak se tedy osvobodíme?

Zaříkávadlo je zlomeno v momentě, kdy si uvědomíme, že samotnou ideu Gestell-u – myšlenku, že dokážeme pochopit a ovládat vše – pochopit ani ovládat nedokážeme. Původ myšlenky, že vše se dá pochopit, nelze pochopit. Moc ideje, že všechno se dá naplánovat a ovládat, nelze naplánovat ani ovládnout. Nadvláda představy, že všechno je nezbytné a všechno se děje z nějakého důvodu, se objevila jako pustá, iracionální nepředvídaná událost.

Joker tedy usiluje zlomit moc Gestell-u nikoliv pouhou meditací nad nepředvídanostmi, ale z nepředvídanostivycházejícím jednáním – tj. sám se stává iracionální nepředvídanou událostí, agentem chaosu.

Vnáší chaos do vlastního života impulzivním jednáním; tím, že „dělá věci,“ které nedávají smysl, jako “pes, co se honí za auty“: vloží svůj život do rukou výsledku hodu mincí, hraje na zbabělce s Batmanem atd. Když se z něj Batman snaží vymlátit informace, říká mu, že „tady se dá smysluplně žít jedině bez pravidel.“

Komorník Alfred Jokerovu svobodu pochopil: „Jsou tací, které neženou logické pohnutky – jako peníze. Nelze je koupit, přinutit, přesvědčit ani přimět k jednání. Jsou tací, co touží vidět svět v plamenech.“

Joker následně vnáší chaos i do šiší společnosti tím, že povoluje sevření systému s jeho plány.

Může být agentem chaosu díky svému postoji ke smrti. Nebojí se jí, naopak ji vítá jako trvalou možnost, a tak se stává svobodným. Jeho svoboda ho vyvyšuje nad Gestell a on může zhlížet dolů … a smát se. Proto mu říkají Joker.

Ve vší vážnosti

Jokerova filozofie se mi líbí a myslím, že má pravdu. „Ale moment, Joker je přece netvor,“ namítnou někteří. „Heath Ledger Jokera popsal jako ‚psychopatického, vraždícího a schizofrenického klauna bez špetky empatie.‘ Přece nemůžeš k někomu takovému vzhlížet!“

Nezapomeňme ale, že tu máme co do činění s Hollywoodem. Ve „svobodné“ společnosti nelze nebezpečné pravdy potlačit úplně, je třeba proti nim lidi naočkovat. Proto Hollywood nechává čas od času zaznít nebezpečnou pravdu na plátně, ale výhradně z úst monster: Dereka Vinyarda v Kultu hákového kříže, Travise Bicklea v Taxikáři, Billa „Řezníka“ v Ganzích New Yorku, Ra’s al Ghula v Batman začíná, Jokera v Temném rytíři atd.

Temný rytíř

Musíme se naučit oddělovat poselství od posla a musíme to naučit také miliony lidí, kteří tento film (sedmý nejnavštěvovanější snímek všech dob) viděli. Jakmile se nám to povede, přestane být dílo nositelem poselství systému a namísto toho bude šířit poselství naše. V tom vidím svůj talent – beru jejich propagandu a obracím ji proti nim.

Co si tedy odnést z Temného rytíře?

Batman začíná vyobrazuje hluboké porozumění zásadního rozporu mezi tradičním cyklickým chápáním dějin a moderním progresivismem a předkládá do podoby zbraně upravený tradicionalismus (Liga stínů) coby úhlavního protivníka Batmana a sil pokroku.

Temný rytíř zase ukazuje hluboké porozumění morálky a metafyzických protikladů moderního světa: Nietzscheho konceptu panské morálky a kritiky otrocké rovnostářské morálky, ve spojení s Heideggerovým pojetím Gestell-u a moci čistě iracionální nepředvídatelnosti jej zlomit.

Joker z těchto idejí učinil zbraně a využívá Batmanova nevyřešeného vnitřního konfliktu mezi nietzscheovským sebe-překročením a oddaností lidským právům a rovnosti.

Zkrátka a dobře si někdo uvnitř Hollywoodu uvědomuje, kdo je nejradikálnějším a nejzásadnějším nepřítelem systému. Vědí, jaké myšlenky mohou zničit jejich svět. Nastal nejvyšší čas, abychom si to uvědomili také.

Ukažme plánovačům, jak směšné jejich pokusy nás ovládat ve skutečnosti jsou.

Source: http://deliandiver.org/2016/05/temny-rytir.html

3,296 words

English original here

Konečně se mi povedlo dostat se do města s kinem a zhlédnout třetí a závěrečnou část Nolanovy epické batmanovské trilogie Temný rytíř povstal.

Temný rytíř povstal se sice nevyrovná Temnému rytíři – což bylo ostatně sotva možné – ale i tak jde o skvělou filmařskou práci. Je to lepší film nežBatman začíná a rozvíjí a dovádí postavy i témata obou předchozích filmů k velice uspokojivým a dokonce dojemným rozuzlením.

Christian Bale, Gary Oldman, Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman a Cillian Murphy se vracejí v rolích svých postav z přechozích dílů. Michael Caine si s lehkostí přivlastňuje každý záběr, v kterém se objeví. Nově se objevuje úchvatná koketa Anne Hathawayová jako Kočičí žena (Cat Woman), mohutný charismatický Tom Hardy v roli Batmanovy Nemesis Bane, Marion Cotillardová jako Miranda Tateová (Talia) a Joseph Gordon-Levitt (nejmíň židovsky vypadající Žid od Williama Shatnera) jako (Robin) John Blake.

Snad jen s výjimkou mdlé a tuctové hudby Hanse Zimmera jde o umělecky i technicky skutečně skvěle natočený film. Jistě by bylo nešťastné, kdyby lidé nešli na Temný rytíř povstal do kina kvůli řádění šíleného střelce během premiérové promítání v coloradské Auroře. (Mnoho aurorských diváků mimochodem jasně ukázalo, že hrdinství se neobjevuje jen na stříbrném plátně.) Na takový film se patří jít do kina. Blesk přece neuhodí dvakrát do stejného místa, ne?

Přestože se budu zabývat jednotlivými prvky zápletky včetně epilogu, k ději jako celku řeknu jen následující: Liga stínů se vrací zničit Gotham a Batman se vrací, aby ji zastavil. V této eseji se chci soustředit na šířeji pojaté otázky nastolené tímto filmem i celou sérií. Spojitosti úvodního dílu Batman začíná se završením trilogie jsou očividné, protože v obou filmech Batman čelí Lize stínů. Spojení Temného rytíře se zbytkem série už tolik zjevné není, přesto jej považuji za zásadní a důležité.

1. Tradicionalismus

Ve filmu Batman začíná je mladý Bruce Wayne zachráněn z brutálního vězení v himalájském království Bhútán Henri Ducardem (Liam Neeson) alias Ra’s al Ghulem (arabský výraz, který znamená hlava démona), členem Ligy stínů, tajného bratrstva válečníků-zasvěcenců, jehož sídlo se nachází vysoko v Himalájích.

Liga stínů věří v tradiční pojetí dějin. Ty se pohybují v sestupném cyklu, který začíná zlatým věkem/věkem pravdy (Satja juga), kdy lidé žijí plně v souladu s kosmickým řádem. Jak se ale lidstvo odvrací od pravdy, prochází společnost postupně úpadkem stříbrného a bronzového věku až k věku čtvrtému a poslednímu: železnému či věku temna (kalijuga), který zaniká ve své zkaženosti, aby z něj povstal nový zlatý věk.

Smyslem existence Ligy stínů je uspíšit konec temného věku i příchod nového zlatého věku. Jakmile tedy civilizace dospěje do stadia nezvratného rozkladu, objevuje se Liga, aby dekadentnímu systému udělila ránu z milosti: Řím, Konstantinopol a nyní Gotham. V každém z uvedených příkladů nejde jen o města samotná, ale o symboly celých civilizací. Liga stínů se tedy nepustila do ničeho menšího než zničení celého moderního světa.

V úvodním filmu se Bruce Wayne cvičí s Ligou stínů, ale před poslední zkouškou odepírá poslušnost a prchá zpět do Gothamu, kde na sebe bere identitu Batmana. Liga jej však do Gothamu následuje, aby celé zkažeností prolezlé město zničila. Batman sice Ra’s al Ghula poráží a zabíjí, ale v Temný rytíř povstal se Liga stínů pod novým vedením vrací, aby svůj úkol dokončila.

2. „Chceš vědět, odkud mám ty jizvy?“

Liga stínů nachází Bruce Waynea jako mladíka téměř na konci cesty k sebezáhubě. Wayne sám sebe ničí, protože se nedokáže vypořádat s jizvami své minulosti. Mučí ho hlavně vzpomínka, jak byl nucen přihlížet loupežné vraždě svých rodičů a nemístný strach z netopýrů.

Návdavkem k tvrdému fyzickému tréninku Liga stínů vyžaduje od adeptů i iniciaci duchovní. Jedno takové cvičení obnáší požití halucinogenu z himalájské rostliny, který v člověku vyvolává jeho nejhlubší strach – aby jej mohl překonat.

Poté následuje poslední zkouška: překonání vládnoucí morálky doby – rovnostářské ideje, že všichni lidé mají z podstaty jakousi hodnotu – zabitím člověka. Dozvídáme se, že jde o vraha, který si zasluhuje smrt. Wayne ale usoudí, že i vrah má cenu a proto si zasluhuje něco víc než okamžitý rozsudek, a to spravedlivý proces. Proto Wayne ucukne, test nedokončí, a na útěku zabíjí nemálo členů Ligy stínů. S tím ale zjevně problém nemá, protože to byli „špatní“ lidé, kteří nevěří v právo na spravedlivý proces a americký způsob života.

Bruce Wayne se tak vrací do Gothamu bez dovršení iniciačního procesu. Nabyl sice nadlidské odvahy překonáním traumat své minulosti a nadlidských schopností výcvikem v bojových uměních, ale přesto stále podléhá konvenční morálce. Je tedy ve zkratce superhrdinou: nadčlověk, který žije, aby ze sentimentálně chápané lidskosti sloužil lidem, kteří se mu nevyrovnají.

To ještě nemusí být nezbytně na škodu, pokud k němu tito lidé skutečně vzhlížejí a ctí jej jako svého vyššího. Protože ale sami také jsou rovnostáři, nenávidí všechny a všechno lepší než oni sami – i když jim to prospívá.

V Temném rytíři je Joker zobrazen jako plně zrealizovaný Übermensch. (Nezapomínejme, že v Hollywoodu se mohou muži vyššího řádu objevit pouze jako monstra, protože pro dnešní lidi monstry skutečně jsou.) Podobně jako Batman i Joker překonal jizvy minulosti – v jeho případě skutečné fyzické jizvy. Když se ho lidé na jeho odpudivé jizvy v obličeji ptají, pokaždé přijde s novou verzí příběhu. Podle skvělého postřehu Jamese O´Meary to ukazuje, že Joker svou minulost překonal. Pokaždé spřádá jiný příběh, protože pro něj není důležité, jak ke svým jizvám přišel. Překonal je – stejně jako celou svou minulost, jak uvidíme.

Na rozdíl od Batmana však Joker dospěl daleko za rovnostářský humanismus. Psychologicky se osvobodil od své minulosti a morálně od jařma služby podřadným. Jak tvrdím v eseji věnované filmu Temný rytíř, musíme Jokerovy zločiny chápat jako morální experimenty, konané s cílem vyrvat Batmana jeho oddanosti rovnostářskému humanismu.

Joker projevuje všechny znaky plné iniciace, i když nepůsobí úplně jako týmový hráč. Samozřejmě ale nevíme, jak se Joker stal tím, kým je – to totiž leží právě v minulosti, kterou překonal.

Na začátku filmu Temný rytíř povstal uplynulo od smrti Harveyho Denta (padoucha Two-Face) osm let. Coby poslední akt obětování se pro Gotham na sebe Batman vzal zodpovědnost za Two Faceovy zločiny, aby tak zachránil neposkvrněnou pověst Harveyho Denta coby symbolu neúplatné spravedlnosti. Batman zmizel, ale problém Gothamu s organizovaným zločinem byl vyřešen díky Dentovu zákonu, který dovoluje zadržovat zločince na neomezeně dlouhou dobu.

Lež si ovšem vybrala daň na svých původcích: Bruci Waynovi a komisaři Gordonovi. Gordon ztratil ženu i rodinu a sní o odhalení Denta a následném odchodu na odpočinek. Bruce Wayne pověsil na hřebík svou batmanovskou výbavu a žije v odloučení ve svém sídle. Truchlí pro Rachel Dawesovou, která se rozhodla pro Harveyho Denta, i když si Bruce Wayne myslel, že čeká na něj. Jeho společnost Wayne Enterprises se ocitla v rozkladu, neschopna splácet závazky akcionářům i veřejnosti.

Bruce Wayne se tedy vrátil do stavu ze začátku trilogie: ničí sám sebe, protože se nedokáže vyrovnat s traumaty své minulosti – a všechny okolo táhne ke dnu s sebou. Není zmrzačen jen na duchu, ale také na těle a chodí o holi.

S návratem Ligy stínů ale Wayne nasazuje ortézu, oprašuje batmanovský úbor a pouští se s nimi do boje. Alfed jej však varuje, že ani s technologickými berličkami není Wayne schopen porazit Banea, který bojuje s přesvědčením a silou zasvěcence Ligy stínů – kterým Bruce Wayne být přestal.

Alfred se nemýlil. Když se Batman s Banem konečně střetávájí, Bane jej rozdrtí, zlomí mu páteř a nechává soka uvrhnout do obří jámy kdesi v Bohem zapomenutém koutě Střední Asie. Jáma slouží jako vězení. Její ústí na povrch je otevřené, což násobí utrpení vězňů, kteří sice svět venku vidí, ale nemohou jej dosáhnout. Vylézt ven se povedlo jen jedinému člověku, mnoho dalších při pokusu zemřelo.

Uprostřed temnoty se Wayne musí obrodit, tělesně i duchovně. Jde o rekapitulaci jeho původní iniciace v Lize stínů a také iniciace jednoho z jeho protivníků, který se v jámě narodil a nakonec z ní ještě jako dítě úspěšně unikl. Wayne znovu ovládne svůj strach a z vězení utíká; ze tmy do světla, z jeskyně do skutečného světa: věčný symbol duchovního zasvěcení. V tomto případě však Wayne ovládne strach nikoliv jeho překonáním, ale využitím. Když se zbaví pojistky lana, znovu nastartuje strach, kterého následně využívá coby hybné síly nutné k poslednímu skoku.

Když tedy de facto znovu prošel iniciací Ligy stínů, je s ní Wayne nyní schopen bojovat a porazit. Poselství ani nemůže být jasnější: technologie bez náležité duchovní přípravy a iniciace z nás nedokáže učinit nadlidi.

3. Iniciace a nadlidství

Co spojuje Nietzscheho nadčlověka, kterým se zabýval Temný rytíř, a iniciaci tradicionalistů ze zbylých dvou filmů?

Tradicionalismus v posledku chápu optikou nedualistické interpretace Védanty: dovršená iniciace je mystickým zážitkem jednoty duše s Bytím, aktivním vesmírným principem. V našem obyčejném lidském vědomí sami sebe vnímáme jako ohraničená jsoucna podmíněná ostatními ohraničenými jsoucny, včetně našich traumat – to jsou naše jizvy. Když ale zažíváme jednotu s Bytím, naše ohraničená těla prostupuje tvořivá a aktivní nekonečná síla: zdroj všech věcí. To zasvěcenci dává sílu překonat jak vlastní ohraničené, podmíněné já, tak i všechna ostatní ohraničená jsoucna. Proto i tradicionalisté mají své vlastní nadlidi: jogíny, kteří nabývají nadpřirozených schopností (siddhi) prostřednictvím vědomého prožívání jednoty s Bytím.

Bytí je jediné, tedy mimo veškeré duality, včetně té dobra a zla. Proto vystupuje zasvěcenec, který dosahuje jednoty s Bytím, mimo dobro a zlo. Vystupuje také nad rovnostářství, jelikož mezi zasvěcencem a nezasvěceným zeje nesmírná propast. Nakonec vystupuje také nad humanismus, protože si uvědomuje, že jednotliví lidé nemají sami o sobě žádnou hodnotu či bytí. Jsme jen party, které Bytí chvíli hraje; masky, které nasazuje a následně odkládá. A pokud je úlohou zasvěcence v této kosmické hře zavrhnout miliony těchto nicotností, jaká z toho vzniká škoda? Bytí samotné nemůže zemřít a jeho tvořivá moc nezná hranic, takže se nikdy nevyčerpává.

Shrnuto vede v nedualistickém modelu Védanty dovršení iniciace mystickým zážitkem jednoty s Bytím k: (1) prostoupení nadlidskými silami, (2) překonání vnějších podmínek, včetně vlastní minulosti, (3) pohledu na svět prostý všech dualit, včetně dobra a zla a (4) překonání rovnostářského humanismu.

Batman i Joker některé z těchto vlastností projevují, přestože se zdaleka nevyrovnají v podstatě kouzelným dovednostem připisovaným jogínům. Batman samozřejmě nikdy nepřekročil dobro a zlo ani rovnostářský humanismus. A Joker, který dosáhl morální svobody, zase neprojevuje žádné nadlidské schopnosti, přestože je mimořádně zdatný.

4. „Kromě nožů v kapsách nemáme nic“

Když je Joker v Temném rytíři zatčen, komisař Gordon rozpačitě zjišťuje, že neví, o koho jde. Nemají žádnou DNA, otisky prstů ani zubů. Neznají jeho jméno ani datum narození. Jeho oblečení je ušité na míru a bez štítků. Jak dodává Gordon, „nemáme nic kromě nožů v kapsách.“

Kdyby se snad někdo přece jen pokusil stát nadčlověkem, moderní společnost se nás všechny shromažďováním záznamů snaží udržet pevně připoutané k naší minulost. Obyčejné účetnictví samozřejmě nedokáže zabránit vnitřní duchovní proměně, jejímž podstoupením se z člověka stává nadčlověk překračující omezení své minulosti. Máme ale co do činění s materialisty, pro které vaše karma nic neznamená – na rozdíl od daňových přiznání a historie internetového prohlížeče.

Ve filmu Temný rytíř povstal usiluje Selina Kyleová (Kočičí žena) o počítačový program Clean Slate („Čistý štít“), který dokáže vymazat její existenci ze všech existujících digitálních záznamů a umožní jí tak zcela uniknout vlastní minulosti. Touží po Jokerově svobodě. Batman jí program slibuje výměnou za její pomoc. Nakonec podle všeho oba programu využívají, aby unikli své minulosti a začali spolu nový život v Itálii.

Vymazání všech existujících záznamů vlastní minulosti není samozřejmě totéž jako psychologické a existenční překonání minulosti – toho lze dosáhnout jedině zásadní proměnou vlastního bytí. Jakmile jí ale člověk dosáhne, technologie se jistě může hodit.

5. „Záleží vám jenom na penězích.“

A to ti nade mnou dává moc?

Dalším motivem spojujícím prostřední a závěrečný díl trilogie je pohrdání penězi. V Temném rytíři Joker projevuje opovržení penězi podpálením svého podílu obřího jmění.

Některé z nejlepších Baneových replik ve filmuTemný rytíř povstal se týkají peněz. Za cíl svých nejpůsobivějších útoků si vybírá burzu a fotbalový zápas (jak trefně poznamenal Gregory Hood: chléb a hry dekadentní americké říše).

Na burze se jeden z makléřů obrací na Banea jako na obyčejného zločince, a to dost nedovtipného zločince: „Tady není co ukrást.“ Načež Bane odvětí: „Tak co tu děláte vy?“

Když Bane poruší dohodu s byznysmenem, kterého už nepotřebuje, ten namítá, že mu zaplatil celé jmění. Bane odpovídá: „A to ti nade mnou dává moc?“

Spoustu komentátorů Baneův postoj k penězům poněkud mate, protože se staví do čela kvazikomunistické revolty proti boháčům. Peníze ale lze kritizovat z dvojí pozice. Člověk se na ně může obrazně řečeno dívat shora či zezdola.

Lidem kritizujícím peníze zezdola peníze chybí a oni po nich touží. Pohání je v prvé řadě závist, což nemusí být nutně špatné. Hladový má dobré důvody závidět vám váš chléb a stejně dobré důvody vás nenávidět, rozhodnete-li se svůj chléb raději vyhodit, než se o něj podělit. Kritici peněz zezdola mají ve skutečnosti hodně společného s lidmi, kterým závidějí – jde jim jen o peníze: buď je získat – nebo o ně nepřijít.

Bane ale podrobuje peníze kritice shora, z aristokratické, nikoliv rovnostářské perspektivy. Bane je zasvěcenec, duchovní válečník proti dekadenci. Uvědomuje si přítomnost vyšších hodnot, než jsou peníze, a tak pohrdá těmi, kterým peníze vládnou a kteří je mají za nejvyšší hybnou moc světa. Patří totiž, Jokerovými slovy, k „lepší třídě zločinců.“

Podobně jako Joker Bane v boji za vyšší, duchovní cíle umně manipuluje přízemním, materiálním světem, od něhož se zcela oprostil. Podobně jako Jokerovi se Baneovi nijak nepříčí využít k dosažení svých duchovních cílů lidi, kterým jde jen o peníze. A tak Bane pletichaří s boháči a zároveň proti nim poštvává závistivý dav – to vše k urychlení zničení Gothamu.

6. Ctnostní lidé města gothamského

V Temném rytíři Joker tvrdí, že obyvatelé Gothamu jsou dobří jen to do té míry, do jaké jim to svět umožňuje, a jakmile vypukne krize, „sežerou se navzájem.“ Jakkoliv to zní jako vážná urážka, z Jokerova pohledu jde vlastně o projev jistého druhu optimismu. Být schopen sežrat se navzájem je známkou živočišné vitality nesvázané otrockou morálkou rovnostářského humanismu. Joker se nepovažuje za monstrum, jen „trochu vidí za roh:“ tedy že je už teď tím, kým by stal i zbytek Gothamu, jen kdyby mu to společnost „dovolila“ (nebo měl dost odvahy udělat to i bez jejího svolení).

Joker umístí bomby na dvě plavidla a rozbušky k nim dá lidem vždy na tom druhém z člunů. Řekne jim, že pokud vyhodí do vzduchu druhý člun, nechá je žít. Jestliže ale nebude do půlnoci ani jedna z lodí zničena, nechá je vybuchnout obě. Na jedné z lodí jsou zločinci a policisté, na druhé ctnostní občané gothamští. Nakonec ale ani jedna skupina nedokáže vyhodit tu druhou do povětří a Batman zabrání Jokerovi zničit je obě.

Batman dospívá k mylnému závěru, že na člunech byli uvězněni lidé, kteří věří v dobro, zatímco ve skutečnosti byli prostě jen příliš zbabělí, povrchní a prostí vitality, než by udělali cokoliv „špatného“ – dokonce i pro záchranu vlastních životů. Ukazuje se tak, že Joker viděl mnohem dál za roh, než si připouštěl.

V Temný rytíř povstal dokazuje Bane pravdivost Jokerových argumentů, ale s názornou ukázkou toho, že aby v sobě lidé Gothamu nalezli dost odvahy sežrat se navzájem – počínaje boháči – není třeba ničeho menšího než revoluční vlády davu. Ta poskytuje lidem svolení jednat atavisticky. Kromě toho ale také mají morální svolení, protože rovnostářský altruismus je ve svém důsledku skutečně kanibalskou etikou.

Nejméně přesvědčivým prvkem filmu se mi jeví zobrazení nepravděpodobně idealistické a obětavé policie. V Temném rytíři policejní sbor tvoří z drtivé většiny zkorumpovaní byrokrati se zbraněmi, kteří netrpělivě odpočítávají zbývající dny do penze. V Temný rytíř povstal Bane vyláká 3000 policistů do tunelů pod Gothamem, kde je uvězní. Když se konečně dostanou ven, en masse se vyzbrojeni jen svými pistolemi vrhají do bitvy s Baneovými těžce ozbrojenými bojovníky. Nepopírám, že i u těch nejcyničtějších státních zaměstnanců se dá vyvolat takovýto idealismus, ale pro tak dramatickou proměnu bych potřeboval vidět nějaký důvod, možná analogický transformaci Bruce Wayna v jeho vlastním podzemním vězení.

Kočičí ženu pohání v prvé řadě závist vůči bohatým, přesto ale cítí z gothamské revoluce silné znechucení. Batmanovi prozrazuje, že jakmile najde způsob, odejde. Setrvává ale i z osobních důvodů: chce zachránit i Batmana. Vyzývá ho, aby šel s ní, protože už lidem dal úplně všechno. Odpovídá: „Všechno ještě ne.“ Následně se pouští do podle všeho sebevražedné záchrany města – nakonec se ale přece jen dozvídáme, že Bruce Wayne se pro Gotham vzdát života přece jen schopen nebyl. Byl se však pro svůj život ochoten vzdát Gothamu i Batmana.

Konec filmu je hádankovitý, ale chápu jej tak, že Bruce Wayne konečně dospěl na vyšší úroveň iniciace. Znovu překonal svou minulost, tentokrát defitivně, a použil Čistý štít k vymazání všech stop svého života i existence Kočičí ženy. Povznesl se také nad rovnostářský humanismus a už nežije pro lidi horší než on sám. Žije sám pro sebe a našel štěstí s Kočičí ženou, což představuje zajímavý obrat, jelikož se rozhodl dát přednost svému štěstí před skutečností, že Kočičí žena je hledaným zločincem.

V mých očích samozřejmě Bruce Wayne ztrácí v porovnání s Banem, protože si podle všeho zvolil soukromý život. Ano, přestal sloužit podřadným lidem, ale život pro sebe samotného má nižší hodnotu než služba něčemu vyššímu, co člověka přesahuje – což udělal Bane.

7. Pravda nebo následek

Jedním z nejdůležitějších nově uvedených prvků do filmu Temný rytíř povstal je ničivost lží. Gordona s Waynem táhne ke dnu tíha lží, s kterými přišli, aby ochránili pověst Harveyho Denta. Wayna ničí i ztráta Rachel Dawesové, dále zhoršená tím, že mu Alfred neřekl o tom, že se ho Rachel rozhodla opustit kvůli Harveymu Dentovi. A konečně ke konci filmu Robin Blake zalže skupince sirotků, aby jim dodal naději v situaci, kdy vlastně žádná není. Společným jmenovatelem všech těchto lží je altruistická motivace uchránit lidi – a zvlášť „lid“ obecně – před pravdou. Lži tvoří nevyhnutelnou součást repertoáru státníků, a to i těch nejnestrannějších – i tak však vytvářejí pouta ke společnosti i minulosti. Proto je lidé usilující o svobodu musejí odvrhnout, i když se zasvěcenci se nijak nebrání využít klamu a násilí pro vyšší cíle.

8. Levice jako předvoj nihilismu

Temný rytíř povstal je nadmíru pravicový, autoritářský fašistický film.

V prvé řadě sjednocuje hrdiny (Wayne, Gordon) i jejich antagonisty (Liga stínů) přesvědčení o zkaženosti a dekadenci Gothamu. V předchozích dílech hrdinové ještě zjevně věřili v možnost pokroku – teď ale už jen čekají na záminku odejít na odpočinek, protože společnost už jim nemá co nabídnout. Bez díků dávali a dávali, dokud nevyčerpali všechen svůj idealismus i sílu ducha. Následkem nevděčné služby horším lidem se z nich staly vyhořelé skořápky.

Zadruhé Nolan ve svém snímku velice nelichotivě vykresluje levici: levicové hodnoty jsou zobrazeny jako nihilistické, a proto se tak skvěle hodí těm, kteří usilují o zničení společnosti. To nakonec neplatí jen pro filmovou fikci.

Třetí a nejbanálnější důvod: nekriticky obdivné vyobrazení policejního sboru nepochybně potěší každého člověka s prvky autoritářské osobnosti, přestože bílí nacionalisté nejsou tak naivní, aby ho nekriticky přijali.

* * *

Temný rytíř povstal je pozoruhodný film a důstojné zakončení velice zábavné a zároveň myšlenkově hluboké a podnětné trilogie. Jakkoliv nepravděpodobné se to může zdát, dotýkají se – a živě vykreslují – snímky ústředních témat kritiky modernity z tábora Nové pravice/radikálního tradicionalismu. Desítky milionů mladých bělochů tyto filmy nadšeně sledují a rozebírají a proto je tak důležité využít jich k propagaci našich myšlenek.

Jistě, Hollywood nevyhnutelně vkládá naše ideje do úst šílenců – jako určitou formu vakcinace před nimi. Ale především díky nim jsou padouši vždy zajímavější než Batman, který působí jako pouhý nástroj.

Soudím, že tyto filmy si pohrávají s radikálně tradicionalistickými a nietzscheanskými übermenschovskými tématy k dosažení maximálního dramatického napětí – a jaký konflikt by mohl být zásadnější než střet těch, kteří svět chtějí zničit na jedné a těch, kteří jej chtějí zachránit, na straně druhé? Proto se musím seriózně zamýšlet nad tím, zda Christopher a Jonathan Nolanovi nechovají k těmto myšlenkám jisté sympatie, jakkoliv by to při přímém dotazu jistě kategoricky popřeli. Ať už si ale myslí cokoliv, někdo v Hollywoodu ví, kde hledat tu nejfundamentálnější kritiku moderního světa. Nenastal konečně čas, aby si to bílí nacionalisté uvědomili také?

Source: http://deliandiver.org/2016/06/temny-rytir-povstal.html

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Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy (Batman Begins, The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises) begins with the evocation of fear which becomes the motivational impulse for Bruce Wayne’s story. As a child he accidentally falls down a disused well, and, whilst he lies trapped and injured, he is terrified by a flock of bats that appear like a chthonic force of nature from the bowels of the earth. His father rescues him and tries to encourage a sense of self-overcoming: “Why do we fall? So we can learn to pick ourselves up.” The entire trajectory of the three films is set in motion with this brief motivational dictum.

When the young Bruce attends a performance of the opera Mefistofele with his parents he experiences a panic attack brought on by some of the performers dressed as bats. Their appearance causes his primal fear to re-emerge. The family cut short the opera and leave, and this is why his parents end up being shot by a mugger in a street outside the theater.

Some years later Bruce attends a parole hearing for his parents’ murderer. He takes a gun intending to kill the man on his release thus resolving both his sense of fear and his guilt at his parents’ deaths. Unfortunately, (or fortunately), for Bruce, the freed man is first shot by one of Falcone’s employees as a punishment for testifying against Falcone. Bruce then seeks to run away from both his inheritance and his unresolved inner conflicts, ending up in a foreign prison where he meets Ra’s al Ghul (under a false name) from The League of Shadows. At the culmination of his training with the League, Bruce learns that they intend to destroy Gotham. In fact, the League presents itself as a group of Spenglerian shock troops who, throughout history, have repeatedly intervened at the end point of a civilization, pushing it over the edge to destruction in order to allow something new and vital to come into existence:

“This is not how man was supposed to live. The League of Shadows has been a check against human corruption for thousands of years. We sacked Rome; loaded trade ships with plague rats; burned London to the ground. Every time a civilization reaches the pinnacle of its decadence, we return to restore the balance.”

In this encounter with Ra’s al Ghul, Bruce learns to become a strong, superempowered individual but he is also presented with the opportunity to ally himself with a particular view of historical unfolding. The League exists to oversee the trajectory of civilizational development and to ensure that at the end point of a civilization there is a complete destruction of the decadent forces. As far as the League is concerned, Gotham represents the pinnacle of decadence, and as Gotham is modeled on New York this is perhaps not entirely surprising. Once Bruce Wayne learns of the League’s strategic goals he rejects them and decides to oppose them. But, apart from the training he has undergone with the League, he does take one important lesson from them. Ra’s al Ghul forces Bruce to confront his personal demons (and, perhaps significantly, Ra’s al Ghul’s name is Arabic for ‘head of the demon’):

“To conquer fear, you must become fear. You must bask in the fear of other men. And men fear most what they cannot see. You have to become a terrible thought. A wraith. You have to become an idea!”

But the purpose of such a transformation is clear:

“A vigilante is just a man lost in the scramble for his own gratification. He can be destroyed, or locked up. But if you make yourself more than just a man, if you devote yourself to an ideal, and if they can’t stop you, then you become something else entirely . . . A legend, Mr Wayne.”

This is the crucial point in Bruce Wayne’s (and the film’s) development. Bruce has an opportunity to embrace an ethos that transcends, not only the self, but also the limitations of a late civilization. But such a prospect is intensely problematic for Bruce Wayne. As the head of Wayne Industries, he is not a typical inhabitant of Gotham; he is in some ways an aristocratic figure, almost a sort of medieval prince. This is partly suggested by the appearance of Wayne Manor which is meant to resemble an English stately home (and in fact, for both the original and the reconstructed Wayne Manors, English stately homes were used). And the point is further emphasized by casting the English actor Sir Michael Caine in the role of Alfred. Even more significantly, Bruce Wayne’s name is embedded in the architecture of Gotham. The central landmark of Gotham is Wayne Tower, and the transport network around the city is provided by Wayne Industries. The hub and spokes of the city are nominally identified with Wayne and he is born into a sense of noblesse oblige due to his father’s dual bequest of wealth and social responsibility. One of Bruce Wayne’s roles in this film is to return as the head of Wayne Industries and thus fulfill his inheritance and reclaim the name of the father.

Thus, Bruce chooses to reject the meta-historical role offered to him by The League of Shadows and to instead focus on a very personal project of self-overcoming. He is offered Spengler but he accepts Jung.

C. G. Jung’s concept of individuation is an important theme throughout the trilogy. It is first introduced by the rogue psychiatrist Dr. Jonathan Crane whose alter ego is Scarecrow. Whilst in the persona of Scarecrow, Crane drives Falcone to madness with his fear toxin, and Falcone is left babbling the single word, “scarecrow.” Crane explains that, “Patients suffering delusional episodes often focus their paranoia on an external tormentor, usually one conforming to Jungian archetypes . . . in this case a scarecrow.” It is significant that the film introduces this concept as a false explanation by a criminal psychiatrist.

At the end of Batman Begins, Bruce has defeated Ra’s al Ghul, he has appropriated the symbol of the bat to represent the overcoming of his own fears, and he has forged an effective alliance with Jim Gordon of the Gotham police force. The crime syndicates have begun to be defeated and corruption has been tackled. But the appearance of the Joker’s calling card at the end of the film gives an intimation that all is not well. It also establishes that Bruce Wayne and Gordon are engaged in a process of endlessly deferring the collapse rather than preventing it, a tacit admission that The League of Shadows represents an inevitable process rather than a mortal adversary.

When the Joker does appear in The Dark Knight he enables Bruce to confront the shadow side of his self. According to Jung, the shadow sometimes appears in the form of the trickster, a mythological motif that has both a collective, social function as well as an individual one. This makes sense because, as already mentioned, Bruce is nominally identified with the infrastructure of Gotham.

The Joker represents the trickster in a number of ways. The trickster is the embodiment of the unconscious; he is not evil, it is just that his distance from any sense of rational order makes him do appalling things. Alfred recognizes this when he says that, “some men aren’t looking for anything logical, like money. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.” The trickster can also appear as either male or female, just as the Joker does when he cross-dresses as a nurse. Even his observation that, “I’m a dog chasing cars. I wouldn’t know what to do with one if I caught it! You know, I just . . . do things,” hints at the theriomorphic form that the trickster will sometimes adopt.

But most significant, and most sinister, is the Joker’s lack of a biography. When he is arrested the police are able to find no trace of him on their files, and they discover that his clothes are all hand made. He is disturbing because he appears to have no relational ties with society. He even seems to have no name. The subtextual implication here is that identity cannot exist without some form of societal context. The Joker emerges ex nihilo and has no connection to anything. Consequently, his motivations, as such, can never be comprehended because they can never be located in a particular context. He is a shade who is not afraid of death because, effectively having no identity, he is already dead.

He also makes up stories about his past, giving contradictory accounts of how he got his facial scars. This lack of a biography lends an ethereal chill to the characterization. In contrast to a book such as The Killing Joke, which explores the family background and origin story of the Joker, The Dark Knight turns him into someone who seems to have never existed in society at all. We simply can’t get a grip on him because he doesn’t exist as a social agent. Whereas Bruce Wayne is unusual in the extent to which his own interests are embodied in the infrastructure of society, the Joker is unique because he has absolutely no interface with society at all. No family, no branded clothing, no police record; nothing. This makes him a particularly powerful iteration of the Joker because more mythic qualities are allowed to speak through him.

Meanwhile, Batman has been becoming more and more identified with the role of a Caesar figure. This is made explicit in the discussion between Bruce, Rachel, and Harvey Dent:

Harvey Dent: When their enemies were at the gates, the Romans would suspend democracy and appoint one man to protect the city. It wasn’t considered an honor, it was considered a public service.

Rachel Dawes: Harvey, the last man who they appointed to protect the Republic was named Caesar, and he never gave up his power.

This identification of Batman with Caesar is only an intensification of the already existing identification of Bruce with Gotham. Just as Bruce seems to embody the interests of Gotham due to his investment in its infrastructure, the Dark Knight emerges as the Caesar figure who embodies the state in his own person. And this makes explicit the notion that the late phase of a civilization is the propitious moment for a Caesar figure to appear. There is thus a progression from Bruce Wayne in his role as technocrat ruler of the city state, the de facto Prince of Gotham, to the Dark Knight who becomes Caesar as a desperate response to the declining power of the state.

As the Dark Knight progressively becomes closer to a Messiah figure, the importance of the Joker’s role as the shadow in the guise of the trickster becomes more apparent. In an essay on the trickster, Jung writes, “Only out of disaster can the longing for the savior arise — in other words the recognition and unavoidable integration of the shadow creates such a harrowing situation that nobody but a savior can undo the tangled web of fate.”[1] In both a personal and civilizational sense this can be seen to be particularly true for the film. The two figures are linked in such a way that the emergence of the Dark Knight as Caesar must necessarily coincide with the appearance of the Joker as the trickster. They respectively represent the response to and the background disorder of the late phase of a civilization. This is why the Joker insists, “I think you and I are destined to do this forever.”

Something worth noting is that although the trilogy is filled with gestures towards religious notions, there really are no religion and no gods anywhere to be found in Gotham. In Spengler’s terms, this accords with the formlessness of the age of Caesarism. The prior animating spirit has now disappeared from the civilization, the age of money has coarsened and promoted cynicism to such an extent that the very possibility of a religious awakening seems risible. But one real joy of Nolan’s trilogy is the way in which he continually allows the form of prior religious functions to intrude into the secular world of Gotham. Whether this is in the form of the Dark Knight as a Messiah figure, or the apparent immortality of Ra’s al Ghul when he reappears in The Dark Knight Rises as an actual wraith, there is an implicit acknowledgement that the forms of religious observance are ineradicable, even if the gods themselves are not.

In The Dark Knight Rises, The League of Shadows reappears in the guise of Bane. There is little to be said here about the course of this film other than to note that the League’s reappearance serves to underscore the inevitability of the form of historical unfolding that they describe. The Dark Knight has committed himself to preventing their victory, but the trilogy seems resigned to its inevitability. This is what gives a real feeling of tragedy to the films.

The ending of The Dark Knight Rises seems problematic. After recovering the nuclear bomb from Ra’s al Ghul’s daughter, Batman flies off out to sea where the bomb detonates. It would appear that, having once more deferred the process of civilizational decline, the Dark Knight has now completed his mission of personal transformation in an act of supreme self-sacrifice, laying down his life to save his people. His realization of Messiah status is complete; perhaps there will also be a cult that will develop around him allowing the citizens of Gotham to rediscover the sense of the numinous that has now become so obscure to them.

But we quickly learn that the Dark Knight’s sacrifice is actually no such thing. At the end of the film, Alfred sees Bruce and Selina Kyle seated at a nearby table whilst on holiday in Florence. Apparently, Batman did not die in the explosion after all. John Blake, the police officer who earlier confronted Bruce about his social responsibilities, then discovers the Batcave and we are led to believe that he will adopt the persona of Robin and continue the fight against corruption in Gotham.

There is a school of thought that interprets Alfred’s discovery of Bruce and Selina as a dream, or fantasy, although the film itself makes it pretty clear that Bruce had set up his faked death in advance. Still, the happy ending does seem out of keeping with the darkness that had preceded it. There is something unsatisfying in learning that Bruce has emigrated to a life of domestic happiness, leaving the fight to save Gotham up to someone else. Thinking about the ending along these lines reveals that, in fact, the “happy” ending merely masks a very deep pessimism. The decline of Gotham will continue with increasingly ineffective interventions from the forces of law and order. Bruce’s personal transformation, which might have achieved its apotheosis in a moment of true self-sacrifice, has been put aside for the purpose of domestic tranquility. And the possibility of Gotham’s renewal through an act of numinous immolation is shown to be predicated on a lie.

According to Spengler, the age of Caesarism represents the closing of a chapter in history. With no more room for spiritual development, the civilization becomes a personal plaything of various rulers who no longer express the numinous vitality felt directly in the early and high stages of its development:

By the term “Caesarism” I mean that kind of government which, irrespective of any constitutional formulation that it may have, is in its inward self a return to thorough formlessness. It does not matter that Augustus in Rome, and Huang Ti in China, Amasis in Egypt and Alp Arslan in Baghdad disguised their position under antique forms. The spirit of these forms was dead, and so all institutions, however carefully maintained, were thenceforth destitute of all meaning and weight. Real importance centered in the wholly personal power exercised by the Caesar, or by anybody else capable of exercising it in his place.[2]

Hence the inevitability of Bruce’s very personal quest and the impossibility of his grasping the truths uttered by Ra’s al Ghul, truths which are literally above time. Bruce is living at the wrong point in history to be able to engage in a mission that might enable a transcendence of the self and the realization of a truly aeonic role, so he must confront his own inner demons and meanwhile do what he can for Gotham. True history cannot take place here.

The full pessimism of the trilogy’s message can be seen with this passage from Spengler:

With the formed state having finished its course, high history also lays itself down weary to sleep. Man becomes a plant again, adhering to the soil, dumb and enduring. The timeless village and the “eternal” peasant reappear, begetting children and burying seed in Mother Earth — a busy, easily contented swarm, over which the tempest of soldier-emperors passingly blows.[3]

With his retirement from Gotham and his new life of family and contentment, Bruce reveals the full force of the trilogy’s pessimistic view of history. Gotham continues to fall, hope is built on a falsehood and each victory over the forces of chaos is brief. In Bruce Wayne Gotham really does get the hero it deserves.

Notes

1. C. G. Jung, Four Archetypes: (From Vol. 9, Part 1 of the Collected Works of C. G. Jung) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 151.

2. Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West (New York: The Modern Library, 1962), 378.

3. Ibid., 381.

3,073 words

Christopher Nolan’s Batman Trilogy deserves its large audience among White Nationalists. Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and The Dark Knight Rises all comprise a canon in the superhero genre that stands above the rest, perhaps only succeeded by Watchmen in its representation of Right-wing themes and philosophy. Much has been said about the emphatically Right-wing character of Batman’s villains, especially the League of Shadows, but less has been said about the Rightist aspects of Batman himself.

Typical of the superhero genre, Nolan’s Batman protects the liberal system. Batman is nominally portrayed as the defender of liberalism, a “heroic” savior of the neoliberal, cosmopolitan city of Gotham. He ostensibly believes in the democratic system and its institutions that are worth fighting for. All it needs is a little help from a crime- fighting billionaire. In this, Nolan’s Batman is no different from other superheroes, who follow the same narrative pattern of protecting the existing system as its hero from the villain who critiques the system and seeks to destroy it.

Yet in Nolan’s trilogy, this narrative framework is routinely undermined and revealed as a weakness in Batman’s character. A tragic flaw that serves as the habitual source of Batman’s undoing and frustration. Furthermore, unlike conventional superheroes who are portrayed as “heroic” because they champion liberal values, Batman betrays the system he seeks to uphold, acting outside of the rule of law in defiance of liberal notions of justice. Indeed, once the mask is removed from Batman as the “silent guardian, watchful protector” of neoliberalism, a much deeper Right-wing character emerges.

Symbolism & Imagery

The first clue that Batman is a Right-wing character are his appellations the Dark Knight and the Caped Crusader. Both refer to medieval European warriors who adhered to an ethical code glorifying honor, righteousness, and loyalty. Such men are reviled by the Left as exemplified in Obama’s equation of crusaders to present-day jihadists. Other medieval allusions are woven into Batman’s backstory. Bruce Wayne’s family is Gotham nobility, they built most of Gotham, and are its most wealthy and powerful family, emblematic of American-style aristocracy. When Bruce Wayne’s parents are shot by a vagrant in Batman Begins, they had been attending an opera, a hallmark of aristocratic culture. As sole heir of the Wayne family, Bruce is free to engage in higher pursuits as he is secure in his wealth and power like most feudal elites. The mob boss Falcone even refers to him as the “Prince of Gotham” when Bruce confronts him about the release of his parent’s killer in Batman Begins. As such, Batman can be viewed as a contemporary version of a noble who transforms himself into a crime-fighting knight, both of which are representative of historical institutions on the Right.

Notwithstanding his use of advanced military technology, Batman fights with a grittiness that is not flashy or enhanced by any supernatural capabilities; it’s authentic and brutal. He fights with his fists and defeats his opponents through mastery of an ancient style of martial arts, one that employs the psychological (deception and fear) as well as the physical (strength and technique) to overcome enemies. The art of combat, a celebration of virtus, is unequivocally Right-wing and plays a prominent role in the Batman character. Altogether, the aesthetics of Batman harken to pre-liberal masculinity, when men were nobles and knights, fought for their people, believed in grand visions, and pursued higher callings in life. Even the uninitiated receive a healthy dose of manliness, the bedrock of any Right-wing movement.

All of this is set against the backdrop of Gotham, a giant metropolis that signifies an amalgamation of America’s premier globalist cities: New York, LA, and Chicago. These shining cities of liberal utopia are accurately depicted in Gotham. Crime and corruption are rampant throughout the city choking off its lifeblood. The streets of Gotham are dark, dreary, and deadly, bereft of all beauty and awash in the refuse of humanity that liberalism produces but cannot eliminate. Gotham is the future that awaits our Western cities. Even the rich in Gotham are not safe, something we have yet to look forward to in the coming years. Within this dying liberal dystopia springs forth Batman, entrenched in medieval symbolism and masculinity, bringing real change: righteous violence.

Actions

The most Right-wing aspect of Batman is his fascist use of force. Batman recognizes that order must be brought about by violence. Violence is necessary; violence is justice. The Left believes that “violence is not the answer,” that criminality and corruption can be solved by displays of acceptance and understanding, or programs that address the “root cause” of such problems. Batman understands that only violence can stop criminality. No social programs will ever stop the criminal dregs of society from becoming who they are. Batman flouts the legal system’s procedures that protect criminals, and defies society’s laws that restrain law enforcement. The actions of Batman reveal the failure of “the rule of law,” which requires a vigilante to break the law in order to uphold the law. Society’s preoccupation with the rights of criminals has disarmed authority from the ability to properly fight criminality. Justice requires force, Batman exemplifies this truth.

We on the Right understand that force in itself is amoral. Its morality depends on who wields it and who triumphs. Liberalism restricts the use of force and violence against criminals because it sympathizes with the criminals, the miscreants, and the reprobates that liberals see as victims of an oppressive white society. Libertarians fear the potential abuse from more violence. On the Right, however, we understand that violence cannot be avoided. It is necessary to maintain civilization. The goal is to find those worthy of the power, those of higher character and justice, those like Batman. This can only be achieved in a society that appreciates violence and virtue, not one of democracy and equality.

In Nolan’s trilogy, the villains reinforce the conclusion that Batman’s use of force is just and that he should use more force not less. In The Dark Knight, Batman deploys a city-wide wiretapping device to finally locate the Joker despite the liberal objections of Lucius Fox who sees it as violation of sacred privacy rights. Batman is proven correct in his fascist use of force as it successfully results in the Joker’s location and capture, demonstrating the value of force when used for the right purpose. Earlier in the movie, the necessity of uninhibited force is again justified when Batman travels to China and kidnaps Lau, the mob money launderer, and brings him back to Gotham for trial. The law had become not only a shield but an enabler of criminality as Lau exploited the law’s limits on jurisdiction and extradition to advance his criminal empire. Only through force unbound by the law does Batman render Justice against Lau.

In this respect, Batman pays heed to Ra’s al Ghul’s counseling from Batman Begins that “criminals mock society’s laws.” The irony is that Ra’s al Ghul delivered this pronouncement in light of the need to kill extrajudicially, which serves as the final test for Bruce Wayne to become a member of the League of Shadows and “demonstrate his commitment to justice.” In the Nietzschean figure of Ra’s al Ghul, the killing of the condemned by the righteous is the ultimate expression of justice. Bruce Wayne objects to such a test, asserting that the execution of a murderer should only be delivered by a court of law. Wayne’s refusal to kill is arbitrary. Although Wayne recognizes the necessity of being freed from legal limitations, he quixotically believes that killing alone requires judicial sanction—the demarcating line between just avenger and unjust vigilante. In Snyder’s rendition of the character in Batman v Superman, Batman’s refusal to kill is rightly done away with. However, Nolan uses the refusal as a critical mistake.

The Joker lays bare Batman’s “self-righteousness” as utterly foolish, and exploits it just as Ra’s al Ghul warned: “your compassion is a weakness your enemies will not share.” The Joker willingly allows himself to be captured by Batman knowing that he will be taken into custody unharmed. Once inside the interrogation room, the Joker delivers his punch line that both Harvey Dent and Rachel Dawes have been kidnapped and bound in separate warehouses, and Batman must choose which one to save before they are both blown up. Batman chooses Rachel but inadvertently saves Harvey, as the Joker lied about their locations. Rachel dies, and Batman loses his closest friend and love interest. He also fails to “save” Harvey Dent who turns into the madman Two-Face in the aftermath. If Batman had simply executed the Joker earlier when he had the chance, such a loss would have been avoided, but sadly he lacked the “courage to do what is necessary” to defeat evil.

Worldview

Another dimension to Batman’s character worth examining is his worldview. The killing of his parents motivates Wayne to transform himself into a crime-fighting superhero to clean up the streets of Gotham. Initially, he is consumed by rage after the release of his parents’ killer and embarks on a seven-year journey of criminality in an attempt to make sense of a corrupt world. His crimes land him in a Bhutanese prison where he is rescued by the League of Shadows, a traditionalist order that trains Bruce to become a member. Under Ra’s al Ghul’s tutelage, he learns to sublimate his rage towards the higher cause of justice and vengeance. Although Wayne objects to their radical vision, the League of Shadows imparts to Wayne a warrior ethos that animates his actions.

Bruce fights to uphold liberal institutions, but his actions and motivations derive not from his belief in egalitarian morality but rather from a warrior code that is one-part League of Shadows and one-part his own moralistic fabrication. The net result is a warrior code that recalls the spirit of chivalry: protecting the weak, fighting injustice, defending the city. But is also deeply flawed as it perpetuates a corrupt system. Understood in this light, Batman fights for Gotham not because he believes in egalitarian ideals, but because he wants to defeat criminality, the source he perceives as the cause of his parents’ deaths.

This rejection of equality is openly hinted at in The Dark Knight when Batman impersonators question Batman’s supremacy as sole vigilante: “What gives you the right, what’s the difference between you and me?” to which Batman dismissively responds “I’m not wearing hockey pads.” Bruce Wayne also mocks the lifestyle of our cosmopolitan elites by relying on an outwardly hedonist image of Bruce Wayne who spends his time lavishly drinking and consorting with bimbos as the perfect cover to avoid suspicion in a society that glorifies such vanities as normal. Batman does fight for the system and not against it, but he stands apart from the system, motivated instead by a warrior ethos unbound by society’s rules that make his actions admirable but ultimately frustrating.

Ra’s al Ghul diagnoses such a warrior ethos that fails to do “what is necessary to defeat evil” as a weakness derived from the denial of the Will. In a scene that appears inspired by Nietzsche, Ra’s al Ghul instructs Wayne on the primacy the Will as they spar on a frozen lake:

Ra’s al Ghul: Your parents’ death was not your fault.

[Bruce attacks Ra’s al Ghul with his sword]

Ra’s al Ghul: It was your father’s.

[Bruce furiously attacks Ra’s al Ghul, but is easily defeated]

Ra’s al Ghul: Anger does not change the fact that your father failed to act.

Bruce Wayne: The man had a gun!

Ra’s al Ghul: Would that stop you?

Bruce Wayne: I’ve had training!

Ra’s al Ghul: The training is nothing! The will is everything!

[Ra’s al Ghul bests Bruce once again]

Ra’s al Ghul: The will to act.

This Nietzschean Will is constantly denied and suppressed by Batman. His failure of the Will is ultimately the most important Right-wing critique offered in Nolan’s films, most strikingly the disasters that follow when Batman captures the Joker instead of executing him. A knight’s moral code of chivalry serves little good for the protection of a system that rejects all the values a chivalric code was meant to uphold. In the end, Batman’s worldview is self-defeating. Wayne can never save Gotham because the corrupt system never changes. Wayne refuses to “become who you are”—the Prince of Gotham, its ruler—and instead believes that lesser men like Harvey Dent should govern the city. A knight can fight against the forces of corruption, but only a king can change the system to end corruption and injustice.

Villains

Batman’s denial of the will, makes his character rigid. His belief in Gotham’s institutions denies the heroic nature within him that his villains attempt to bring out.

The Joker taunts Batman to release the inner beast, to free himself entirely from society’s norms as the Joker has done. He points out that society already considers Batman a freak like him, so why bother following their rules. “The only sensible way to live in this world is without rules” the joker says, to live according to one’s Will, to be authentic. Western man has subjugated our Dionysian self to Apollo, always making sure that actions proceed from a reasoned plan, which the Joker delights in destroying. A little chaos is needed to reignite tribal man; he’s just ahead of the curve.

Similarly, the villain Two-Face who starts out as Harvey Dent, envies Batman’s power. He instructs Bruce Wayne on how the Romans would suspend democracy and appoint an absolute ruler during war, which was considered an honor for the man chosen. Harvey in a sense wishes to be Batman, to take control of the city by force, whereas as Batman would rather be Harvey Dent, who attempts to change society through the system. Two-Face implores Batman to be Gotham’s hero, but Batman shirks from such power. The juxtaposition, as with the Joker, is an explicit call for Batman to use more force, to take control of his city.

The villains Bane and Ra’s al Ghul of the League of Shadows challenge the very identity of Batman as just and morally good. Both villains rail against Batman’s desire to save Gotham. Batman is not justice but injustice. Gotham must die. It must be destroyed so that it can be reborn anew, cleansed of its decadence. The only justice that can be rendered is Gotham’s reckoning, and by standing in the way, Batman is unjust. In Batman Begins, Wayne describes his vision for Batman as an incorruptible symbol of hope, to inspire people that “good” will win out. In The Dark Knight Rises, Bane ridicules Batman as worse than an empty symbol, a symbol of despair:

There’s a reason why this prison is the worst hell on earth . . . Hope. I learned that there can be no true despair without hope. So, as I terrorize Gotham, I will feed Its people hope to poison their souls. I will let them believe they can survive so that you can watch them clamoring over each other to stay in the sun.

Bane is directly challenging Batman’s sole purpose and declaring him not a symbol of justice but of self-delusion and despair. Justice rests upon truth, but Batman would rather perpetuate a lie that Harvey Dent was Gotham’s white knight than tell the truth about his murders because “people will lose hope.” In contrast, Bane’s whole message is about truth, the harsh truth about Gotham as a lost city of decadence and corruption that must be eliminated. Bane reveals the truth about Harvey Dent to the people: “you have been supplied with a false idol to stop you from tearing down this corrupt city.” Batman is thus shown to be a deceiver standing in the way of truth and justice. The League of Shadows show Batman for what he is: a fruitless charade that merely prolongs the decay. Rather than wait out the decay as civilization crumbles, Bane and the League of Shadows accelerate “progress,” allowing democracy to be fully realized by handing over the rule of the city entirely to the people. “Gotham is yours. None shall interfere, do as you please” Bane tells the denizens of Gotham, releasing the masses to consume themselves and tear apart the city as its final destiny.

This is why Batman’s villains are far more memorable and interesting than Batman himself. They are free to pursue their will, whereas Wayne is trapped in a fool’s game where nothing materially changes, one that the Joker finds irresistibly amusing: “You won’t kill me out of some misplaced sense of self-righteousness. And I won’t kill you because you’re just too much fun. I think you and I are destined to do this forever.”

Conclusion

While recovering in Bane’s prison pit, Batman hallucinates a vision of Ra’s al Ghul. It is a subconscious admission of his failure:

You, yourself fought the decadence of Gotham for years with all your strength, all your resources, all your moral authority and the only victory you achieved was a lie. Now you understand Gotham is beyond saving and must be allowed to die.

Even though Wayne rises from the pit to save Gotham one last time, he knows Ra’s al Ghul is right and that he has failed. He can’t let Gotham be destroyed on his watch, so he performs his final deed and then passes the buck to somebody else and leaves the city for good. Wayne is destined for heroic nobility, but he is insincere. He does not remain true to his calling of justice, failing to do what he knows to be right and necessary out of misplaced self-righteousness. He lacks the will to act, the will to power. Maybe one day a truly heroic Batman will emerge, one that uses his superhero abilities to rule the people not serve them.

Nonetheless, Batman conveys an altogether Right-wing impression that can be admired and appreciated for its traditionalist outlook and approach. The medieval symbolism and imagery, as well as the depiction of righteous violence all invoke important Right-wing attributes concerning masculinity, discipline, and order. Where Batman falters, his villains are there to offer compelling foils and to shed light on the right path to take. The Nolan Trilogy offers a total work of art dedicated to a fascist superhero in need of his King. In the coming ethnostate, we can look forward to a Batman who finds him.

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