The Dark Knight Trilogy (2005-2012): The Dark Knight Rises

I love The Dark Knight Rises, but it has its problems. For the longest time, about six years now, I’ve pondered why the movie still works for me even though its conceit contradicts the ending of the last movie, it has clunky pacing, some atrocious expository dialogue and an anti-climatic ending that seemingly undercuts its villain. Film Crit Hulk, however, sums it up succinctly: it’s a texture thing. 

As Hulk puts it, the text of a movie is the story as written, and the texture is the style, tone and aesthetic. And he has this to say when comparing The Dark Knight to Rises:

Loving textural filmmaking is ultimately just about getting indulged in the feeling itself. I have yet to see an argument for “singular tone” that compels me beyond “it is easier to fall into it.” It is an end unto itself. So I could sit here and explain for days why the The Dark Knight is brilliantly told and why The Dark Knight Rises is a chaotic shit-show of a text-based story on all levels, but for some it just won’t matter. Because the tone keeps them in it. And while they’re “in it,” they’ll accept whatever is happening and believe it, regardless if it makes sense for the characters and regardless of what it’s really saying.

His ultimate thesis is that a synthesis of text and texture is where you find real success, and that The Dark Knight pulls that off whereas Rises coasts on a singular tone. This makes a lot of sense, but while he’s referring to this singular tone in a negative sense, as a kind of facade of maturity and importance that covers up the narrative problems, I can admit that it works for me.

Hulk, however, says this about maturity in a later article: “The truth is that maturity in art has so much more to do with the complexity of the message than it does the mere allure of texture.” This second essay is more about how certain textures (like the “controversy” over ThunderCats Roar and, even more recently, the newly reimagined She-Ra) can have a mature text even with a texture seemingly for kids. And the benefit of art is not just it interrogating complex issues but providing tools, usually emotional, to handle them. This brings into focus why The Dark Knight is successful while exploring complex, adult themes in the text, and Man of Steel and Batman v Superman struggle (however much I defend them) because they’re mostly surface-level mature (dark aesthetic, violence, sex, foul language, freshman-level philosophy).

I’d argue, however, Rises is different from those two movies because where it excels is in its compelling character arcs that create a consistent througline for the trilogy’s thematic concerns. That’s enough to, even in the face of a hot-mess script, make the movie enjoyable for me.  

So what are the problems on a narrative level? Rises doesn’t quite make the transition from Bruce getting his back broken to three months later. I love the idea of the pit prison, I love Gotham under siege, but jumping three months ahead so Bruce can heal drags the movie to a halt. I don’t buy thousands of cops being stuck underground that whole time. The resistance movement led by Gordon and John Blake (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is unearned, especially considering Gordon, who was practically a co-lead in the last movie, is relegated to supporting character here. And the meltdown of the fusion device has to be the blandest ticking clock I’ve ever seen.

Some would argue the script suffers from Nolan’s lack of engagement, as he didn’t want to tell another Batman story after Heath Ledger’s death. There’s perhaps a kernel of truth to that, as the movie reeks of overcompensation, such as with a few stylistic experiments and the cramming in of too much plot. It’s also one of his more straightforward, linear movies. Even with the flashbacks using footage from previous movies, it’s an A to B to C story without any metaphorical layers or playfulness with form like Memento or Inception.

It’s just that the straightforward story brings in too much. While The Dark Knight used The Long Halloween and The Killing Joke as inspiration, here Nolan tries to directly adapt famous iconography while remixing the contexts. Plot points and dialogue are directly lifted from The Dark Knight Returns and Knightfall while No Man’s Land is only touched upon in the broadest sense of the premise. No Man’s Land is about an earthquake decimating Gotham, leading to supervillains carving out little fiefdoms in the different boroughs and Batman having to retake the city block by block.

The second half of Rises, however, is Bane blows up the bridges and holds the city hostage with a bomb, a fusion reactor that is perhaps the worst MacGuffin and ticking clock that could’ve been used. It’s unnecessary, and doesn’t add any sense of momentum. Consequently the similarities to No Man’s Land really end with the city being cut off, except maybe Blake leaving the bat symbol markings in chalk is vaguely like the prominence of spray paint tagging in the book. Consequently, the combination of these stories could have perhaps gelled somewhere else, but in Rises they feel undercooked.

Nolan really needed to kill his darlings when formulating the story. An older Batman comes out of retirement for one last battle/Bruce Wayne losing his business and wealth/Gotham City being cut off from the world and held hostage by terrorists are all three great ideas that could be their own movies, and all essentially serve the same purpose (Batman/Bruce brought down to his lowest point), but they don’t quite gel here. As is, it feels like two separate movies, the second half being a sequel to itself, and there’s a weird intermission where the movie doesn’t quite recover until Bruce is back in the suit.

That singular tone, however, carries me through. The fascinating thing about Rises is it has the grounded aesthetic of The Dark Knight but the more portentous tone of Batman Begins. Can you imagine, for instance, seeing someone’s hallucination in The Dark Knight? Yet that very thing happens in Rises, with a blurring of reality and hint at the supernatural when Ra’s al Ghul visits a Bruce who is recovering in the prison pit.

Where Rises stands apart is in the aforementioned stylistic tics, some of the few of the trilogy. This includes a strobe-light Batman attack during his assault on Bane’s underground lair, but also other little touches like the camera spiraling around during the Bane-takes-over-Gotham montage in the second half of the movie, one of Nolan’s signature moves. All of this lends the movie a surreal dream logic that is, at times, completely divorced from reality. As Chris sims puts it:

As someone who tends to read a lot into things — particularly the moral victory at the end of The Dark Knight — I was genuinely thrilled at how much Nolan decided to just literalize the ideas at the core of his story. For good or ill, there’s very little subtlety to anything that’s going on here, from Catwoman’s desire for something that’s literally called “the Clean Slate” to Christian Bale and Michael Caine saying their opinions of each other’s actions out loud in a scene that would’ve been awful if it had been attempted by lesser actors.

The entire second half of the film follows a logic that has absolutely nothing to do with reality, and everything to do with symbolism. From a realistic perspective, it makes no sense that every policeman in Gotham City would be sent underground to be buried alive for three months, but it works in context as a representation of law and order being overthrown and suppressed by Bane and his fanatical army of devotees. The same goes for the scene where Batman gets his spine broken and then pretty much just walks it off, does a few push-ups and decides that he doesn’t have a limp anymore.

The truth is, Nolan operates better with dream logic. There’s a reason why, even if they’re not your favorite Nolan movies, his most successful movies are Memento and Inception. He goes for the big moment that’s usually based around a clockwork intensity within little vignettes that have their own internal logic but don’t necessarily hold up within the greater canvas. That’s why The Dark Knight has instances like “Why didn’t anyone notice that bus pulling out of a hole in the side of the bank?” or “Why did Gordon fake his death?” The same is true of Bane’s plane hijacking at the start of Rises, as the plane’s blown-off wings would’ve landed miles behind the plane itself, drawing suspicion.

I’m fine with this, however, as I watch The Dark Knight and Rises through the lens of Inception, thinking, okay, now they’re in the bank level of the dream, now they’re in the Hong Kong level of the dream, now they’re in the breaking-into-Gotham level of the dream, etc. They’re much more satisfying that way. But the real Rosetta Stone for Nolan’s filmmaking is stated by Michael Caine’s Cutter in The Prestige:

Every great magic trick consists of three parts or acts. The first part is called “The Pledge”. The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards, a bird or a man. He shows you this object. Perhaps he asks you to inspect it to see if it is indeed real, unaltered, normal. But of course… it probably isn’t. The second act is called “The Turn”. The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. Now you’re looking for the secret… but you won’t find it, because of course you’re not really looking. You don’t really want to know. You want to be fooled. But you wouldn’t clap yet. Because making something disappear isn’t enough; you have to bring it back. That’s why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part, the part we call “The Prestige”.

Nolan considers himself to be a magician, with each action scene in particular based around this three-act structure. The individual sequences of his movies don’t hold up to scrutiny, but in the moment they dazzle you into not questioning them.

Where the dream logic struggles a bit, however, is in how Rises is very concerned with time. Whereas The Dark Knight takes place an indeterminate amount of time after Batman Begins, it’s spelled out that this is eight years later. It’s also stated clearly that Gotham is under siege for three months. Like Sims says in the quote above, Nolan is chiefly concerned with ideas, so it actually would have benefited him more to stay away from concrete declarations of time passing.

Where dream logic works is how it extends into the literalization of those ideas that the characters represent. People don’t want to accept the fantastical elements of Rises, but the fact is that it operates more on a thematic and character level in relation to Bruce. The first time he puts on the suit and uses the brace for his leg, it’s unnatural. He hasn’t earned the right to be Batman again, and he gets his ass handed to him. It’s Rocky III. Getting thrown into the pit, he not only trains but by escaping it he is symbolically reborn. I truly, 100% believe that when Bruce leaves the pit he is healed in soul and body: there’s cartilage in his leg again. Don’t ask me the logical explanation. The mythological explanation is he emerges from a symbolic birth canal as a new man with a new body.

Bane, by contrast, manifests many things that prey upon this aging Batman’s fears, including challenging his masculinity and his sexuality. This is, of course, in a long tradition of Batman villains reflecting the superhero’s psyche going back to at least Grant Morrison’s Arkham Asylum. What’s compelling about Nolan’s particular take, however, is that, compared to Tim Burton where Batman’s arc is accepting his similarities with his villains, in The Dark Knight trilogy Batman ultimately proves he’s not like them.

First of all, much like Nolan’s handling of the Joker there’s a hint of gay panic with Bane. There’s a sensuality to him that’s hard for me to put into words, but in most scenes when he’s about to inflict violence (always on men, and in contrast to Joker’s handling of Gambol compared to his flirtation with Rachel) it’s almost loving in how he cradles them. I’ve wondered for a while if the openly bisexual Tom Hardy chose to play Bane as coded queer.

Although more than gay panic, I think Bane challenges Batman’s masculinity not only by being more man, but by blurring the sexes in how he simultaneously personifies the Dark Knight’s hangups on women. As a whole Nolan is generally cold toward his female characters, with only Interstellar having a co-lead in Jessica Chastain’s Murph. In Rises, meanwhile, Anne Hathaway’s Selina Kyle, the Cat, is introduced stealing and wearing Bruce’s mother’s pearls and Marion Cotillard’s Miranda Tate finds a picture of Rachel right before they sleep together. All are petite, brunette white women around the same age. Bruce’s libido must be a strange and complicated thing.

Since Martha Wayne’s silent walk-on role in Begins, I’ve wondered if she would ever get her due in these films. The comics have a similar fascination with daddy issues, but there’s at least Leslie Thompkins to stand in as a mother surrogate. Jeph Loeb in The Long Halloween and Greg Rucka in Death and the Maidens have explored Martha’s relationship with Bruce, so there’s precedent. Rises, however, only pays this lip service with the pearl necklace.

Impotence is a common trope in these kinds of stories, in both the literal and metaphysical sense. What’s fascinating about Rises is Bruce sleeping with Miranda/Talia is the first time in the series sex has been foregrounded. That scene is immediately followed by him going after Bane, led there by a woman, and there he is made even more helpless. And what does Bane wear on his face but a gaping maw with hoses evoking teeth, preying upon the image of the vagina dentata mentioned in last week’s post. Simultaneously his bald head (different from the comics, where Bane covers a crew cut with a luchador mask), with its throbbing veins, evokes a phallus, thus combining the sexes in a monstrous, biomechanoid fashion reminiscent of H.R. Giger’s alien. That is another way Bruce, with his leg brace, is a foil for Bane as they are both unnatural amalgamations of man and machine.

Bruce is then left in the pit prison, itself a vagina dentata full of emasculated men, and escapes with the memory of his father serving as inspiration. He doesn’t get his groove back until he overcomes the female influence. Concurrently, he influences Selina to shed her former life and adopt his uber-masculine lifestyle, complete with riding a high-powered phallus. Bane, meanwhile, is overpowered by Batman when it is revealed the former’s been the pawn of Talia all along, and is appropriately enough destroyed by that high-powered phallus. This is all after Batman has been, ironically, pierced by Talia.

As well, as Elizabeth Sanders suggests, Bane shares left-leaning politics with Joker, which says a lot about what Nolan fears, and also the fact that they’re both liars. Joker, of course, has the anarcho-punk rock look and ideology. At least, he claims to have a kind of ideology that will enlighten people to their true natures, but really he’s just a nihilist. But aesthetically, there’s a DIY aspect to the Joker that I mentioned last week and really appreciate. Everything looks jerry-rigged; for instance, the detonator during the ferry scene is all duct taped. This is in stark contrast to the usual portrayal of the Joker who has a kind of twisted sophistication, with his high-society suits, pocket flower, sometimes he carries a cane, etc. Ledger’s Joker, however, seems to be mocking that idea, with a suit that doesn’t quite fit right, has seen better days, and is contrasted by his sloppy makeup and greasy long hair.

Bane’s argument to his victims is certainly a lie, but his offshoot of the League of Shadows is fascinating. First of all, they’re led by a woman and are essentially eco-terrorists. So yes, far-left leaning. And there appears to be a Project Mayhem-esque idea of members of the League being part of a greater whole. Bane’s, “No, they expect one of us in the wreckage, brother” feels like, at the time, Bane has a cult of personality and is manipulating his men into sacrifice, but by the end of the movie both he and Talia are willing to die for their cause.

You basically have to go with Nolan’s implication that the poor, hungry masses are easily swayed by rhetoric and a target to blame. Bane says the rich and those in power are culpable, and the gullible masses immediately go frothing at the mouth to tear them down from their high towers. It’s almost like they’re…deplorable. Yes, Bernie Bros and ironic millennials who hate-voted for Trump for the spectacle or to burn it all down were not necessarily directly inspired by Ledger’s Joker and Hardy’s Bane (although, maybe?), but Nolan was certainly anticipating the zeitgeist of the forthcoming decade with these characters. 

Of course, the good guys swayed the public with a lie at the end of The Dark Knight, as well. In The Dark Knight people are good unless they’re pushed too far, but the tide can be turned as they’re right at the brink. In Rises, however, the people go right over the edge and plunge into oblivion, and only the police can step up to bring them back. But the police are the ones who lied to them and pushed them too far so Blake rejects being police and becomes Batman, even though Batman was only supposed to be temporary so that the people and police could save themselves.

John “Robin” Blake works to bridge a gap between the people and the police. In a way he’s drawn in line not just with Bruce but with Bane. It’s not a perfect parallel, but Ra’s recruited lost young men and Bane took in orphans. Blake, himself an orphan like Bruce, resists Bane’s silver tongue and always maintains his moral purity. When Gordon tells Blake, “There’s a point, far out there when the structures fail you, and the rules aren’t weapons anymore, they’re… shackles letting the bad guy get ahead. One day… you may face such a moment of crisis. And in that moment, I hope you have a friend like I did, to plunge their hands into the filth so that you can keep yours clean!”, Blake rejects it as cynical but by the end he’s lost faith in the system and is on a path to operate outside it.

There’s a sense, however, that his Batman will be more successful than Bruce’s because he brings with him less baggage. He operates beneath a Wayne Manor that will offer orphans a better life, both an embrace and subversion of the League of Shadows’ ideology. He doesn’t have the weight of a legacy since he has no family name, going as far as to rewrite his own history by renaming himself John rather than Robin. He’s seemingly untroubled by the advances of women, lacking a mother to be hung up on. And he’s free of the corruption of wealth, something that always plagued Bruce. 

And with that, Nolan draws the series to a close. It’s clear that in the end he’s not a man who advocates revolution, but rather reformation from the inside. He believes in the power of institutions, but has his doubts about people. And while it’s all a little muddled, both from a storytelling and thematic perspective, Nolan’s parlor tricks are enough to distract from any shortcomings.