Batman - "Dark Knight Rises"

Joe wanted to see this movie. I was a little apprehensive:

SIERRA VISTA, Ariz. -- ... Cochise County sheriff's officials say 27-year-old Michael William Borboa entered a Cinemark theater in Sierra Vista on Friday carrying a backpack. Witnesses say he appeared to be drunk and was acting strangely during a showing of the same movie that was on screen when the Colorado shooting occurred.

Someone confronted the man. According to the sheriff's office, that caused "mass hysteria," and about 50 people fled the theater.

So, I kept my eyes on the exits at the 5:20 p.m. showing at the IMAX Theater.

I couldn't quite make out what was going on in the movie. Too much smash-boom-crash. It didn't help that the chief villain had a mouth full of what may as well have been marbles. Meanwhile, Joe didn't feel like he missed anything, even though he dozed sporadically through the movie. Smash-boom-crash was the whole point of the movie, as far as Joe was concerned.

One thing I was interested in was the movie's political leanings. Was it left-wing (Rush Limbaugh says the name 'Bane' is meant to impugn conservatives), or was it right-wing (Occupy-type protesters get maligned by the movie)? In the end, it's more right-wing than left-wing (since Cat Woman reconsiders her Robin Hood ideals during the final struggles), but in truth there is just too much smash-boom-crash to make it much of a political movie at all.

Andrew O'Hehir thinks the movie's a great fascist spectacle:

Let’s back up for a minute and observe that all this stuff — the French Revolution and the Middle Eastern pit-prison and the vision of America’s greatest city capitulating to the ugliest kind of anarchy and terror — happens in a Batman movie. There are all kinds of valid reasons not to like “The Dark Knight Rises,” which absolutely does not offer the summery, pure-popcorn pleasure of something like Joss Whedon’s “The Avengers.” It’s loud and bombastic and exceptionally long — 164 minutes from opening to closing credits — and brutal in several senses of the word, taking sadistic pleasure in both its scenes of violence and its Camus-meets-Nietzsche existential nihilism. It has no villain with even half the charisma of Heath Ledger’s now-legendary Joker, since Tom Hardy’s monstrous, ‘roided-out Bane remains figuratively and literally a masked figure, behind his Hannibal Lecter-as-Darth Vader faceplate.

As I’ve suggested, I think it’s a trap to read too much into this movie by way of political commentary, but whatever you come away with, it won’t be uplifting. The Gotham status quo is a cynical regime based on “useful lies,” false heroes and systemic inequality — straight out of the playbook of neocon founding father Leo Strauss — that corrupts even decent men like Gary Oldman’s Commissioner Gordon. But the so-called revolution that overthrows it, overseen by the forbidding mercenary Bane (who is himself just the mouthpiece for a sinister hidden agenda, or several at once), is an Orwellian nightmare of atavism, unreason and anarchy.

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. Whether you think Nolan is endorsing or condemning that idea, or straddling the fence with a smirk on his face, is very much up to you.

But if “The Dark Knight Rises” is a fascist film, it’s a great fascist film, and arguably the biggest, darkest, most thrilling and disturbing and utterly balls-out spectacle ever created for the screen.