Occupy Gotham

and mayhem. And it's also the it's also you know, it's we are we are vastly approaching the holiday season, which means that I I think next week am doing my yearly Batman Returns watch party, which I am extremely excited about. Is it's gonna it's gonna be a fun time, uh, which is it's probably it's probably the best Batman movie. Oh No, it's just about the aesthetics. The aesthetics are unparalleled.

But I'm discovering what this episode is about. But there is another Batman movie that's also set during winter time, which is also also very political, because Batman Returns is weirdly political. We have the Penguin running for mayor. It exposes the the corrupt core of our political system. And there is another Batman movie, also set during winter that tries to expose the corrupt core of the political system,

which is Christopher Nolans twenty twelve. The Dark Knight Rises, a not very good movie which which I think we have We have referenced before because there's this one essay by one David Graber which really gets into the film

which we're gonna which we're gonna get to. But the reason why I actually put together this episode, or I wanted to do this, is because when I was at the Ghost conference earlier this year in Seaside, Oregon, as you can listen to that two parter which came out last Halloween, I got a whole bunch of old magazines from this conspiracy talk radio host. Now I love collecting old magazines. I find them endlessly fascinating. We have this

one from two thousand and three called MK Zine. Uh oh no. On the cover, we have a mind control, ritual abuse and political implications, the cult of national insecurity. I've not I've not flipped through this one super in depth before because I'm more taken aback by the other magazine I got from twenty twelve called Paranoia the Conspiracy Reader. On this cover, we have beyond MK Ultra Satellite Terrorism

in America, science fiction or space faction. Oh no, and Dark Knight kill programming, which is obviously the one we're going to be talking about here today. No is this the Sandy thing? No? No, this is this is this will briefly get into the Aurora mass shooting because this comes up in this in this article. I'm not going to get too into that's actually not the focus.

as well. But I want to first look at how conspiracy theorists read this movie and how they read the political aspects of this movie, because this movie is obviously very political if you've seen it, we will we will get into some of some of the stuff, but I want to I want to talk about how these conspiracy theorists saw this movie because the way that they do political analysis of media is very different from the way actual academics and people who take this stuff seriously do

political analysis of media. And I think there's an interesting juxtaposition there. So this is this is the cover page for this story. The Storm is coming.

of social chaos it poses. Despite rallying people around their deceased hero Harvey Dent, the rich are losing their grip on Gotham City. Antagonist Bain played by Tom Hardy, and his League of Shadows rise up against the bankers and the elite billionaires like Bruce Wayne and attack Wall Street, savagely beating the rich while promising the good people of Gotham that tomorrow you claim what is right for yours. Bain's organized violence against the wealthy evokes the reality of

Occupy Wall Street, but Bain is no Robin Hood. He is plotting a massive transfer of wealth through stock exchange after inciting civil unrest and taking control of cutting age weapons technologies whose algorithm can be directly traced to Bruce Wayne, software which will avail them from the fortunes of the rich.

As the war between the people and the police in the Dark Knight Rises indicates, the predictive programming of statistical data could very well undermine the one percent and send them into the streets where the disgruntled will eat them. Fraudulent practices will be exposed, identity theft, credit card fraud, securities fraud, and a number of other practices that the elite do in order to bilk the poor out of

their money. This is one interesting thing about these sorts of kind of conspiracy radio guys, how they're both against the elite but also fundamentally also for the elite. Like this film is celebrated as being you know, like it's deriding the anti corporate occupy movement, which they hate because they hate they would dislike, you know, a left wing popular uprising. But in the end they actually prefer this corporate like illuminati to the actual alternative.

it might look like an occupy. In this reads sands and evil drums soundtrack pounding out the perennial battle between the haves and the have nots, while the dark Knight rises acknowledges the systemic inequality and injustice. It is not the rich, but anarchy that is the bane of Gotham's existence.

Get It, Get it on. Nolan portrays the occupy anti hero bane as a demagogue, ultimately seeking to speculate on legitimate grievances and when Baine or hands the reigns of power over to the people, they really won't know what to do with it, which is something that never happens in the movie. By the way. Oh now this is at this point Clyde Lewis stops talking to the movie and instead it talks about this bit of predictive programming in the movie, which has which has a few kind

of aspects. Then there is the intriguing subplot that seemingly seeped into reality on the eve of The Dark Knight Rise's release, that a software company takes its findings to the Supreme Court and exposes so called political heroes which would lead to riots and marauding shooters creating mass casualties.

Imagine that intelligence is aware of the threat and issues a declassified memo from the Department of Homeland Security warning law enforcement that terrorists could be killing people in movie theaters. All that is needed is the catalyzing event, and immediately the police estate is activated. Flash riots take place in cities,

civil unrest bruise under the radar. Truth becomes stranger than fiction as we examine the media stories surrounding the main story of the so called brainwashed low nut James Holmes opening fire in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, on July twenty, twenty twelve, and allegedly killing twelve and injuring fifty nine others. Interesting use of the word allegedly there in regarding regarding the people that were killed. Oh boy. And then the next sentence is really where things pick up.

Not only is James Holmes connected to the neuroscience super Soldier Peak Soldier performance experiments, but his fa there works

for a software company that analyzes fraud. So I'm not going to actually read the next bit because it is just the ramblings of conspiracy brained lunatic who thinks that because the shooter's dad was a neuroscientist, that therefore his son must have been this victim of a super soldier program to brainwash you to activate the police state once you receive a bit of predictive programming, and the other will I will get to one other paragraph and then

will be done with this article, because there's really not much more substance quote. The chilling predictive programming looming behind the dark Knight Rises does not escape at least the unconscious of those watching. Bain, the leader of the fictional anarchist mob, decides to plant bombs in the Gotham underground, the final target being a stadium where the Mayor of Gotham attends a sports event. A young boy sings the

national anthem with a British act scent. Bain pauses to listen to the distinct voice, then says Nott the gerberge brigand, after which the stadium is bombed and the mayor is killed in his reserved viewing box. Now, Clyde Lewis believes that this was a bit of predictive programming in order to prepare people for a mash casualty event at the London twenty twelve Olympics, which you might you might know did not happen. Was not yea was not a thing.

But he is convinced that this is part of some predictive programming to either trigger this event, or cover up this event, or allude to this event again an event that did not happen. So that's you know, as as as we're going to be talking about, you know, how people view mass uprising and political movements in media. For

the for the rest of this episode. This is how a certain sect of conservative does their own media analysis, which I think is a really is a really fun, really fun look into how their brains operate sorting a very political film into these into these predictive programming boxes. But we will we will return to talk about the Virgin David Graeber and the Chad Mark Fisher. After this

ad break, we are back. I am. I am waiting watching for the rich to be thrown from their balconies as wealth as redistributed and a man in a very fancy coat takes over a sporting event. So I read almost every like serious political analysis of the doctment rices that I could find from fascists, from conservatives, from liberals, and from leftists and anarchists. Everyone agrees that this film

has some very very obvious occupy parallels. We're going to get into how much of those are actually kind of built into the film's production versus how much of those are more or less coincidental. Now unfortunately for me, not actually unfortunately, because I actually do like Graber a lot, but his analysis was by far the best out of

anybody else's in regards to this film. Unfortunately, the UH the schizoid, acid fueled chaos magic of Mark Fisher kind of paled in comparison to the precision of the anthropologist David Graeber in terms of their analysis of this film, but both of them had roughly the same opinion. Graber has just went into a lot more depth about how

kind of this film actually politically operates. So I'll be mostly talking about in quoting from Graber, with a few things from Fisher kind of mixed in, and then we'll compare it to some stuff in Breitbart and The Daily Caller and a few other reactions from liberals who enjoyed the film too much and are are are unwilling to kind of seed this conservative ground to Nolan's twenty twelve film.

And I think this is actually really interesting to talk about this film this year after the release of Oppenheimer, which I think is Nolan's probably most politically mature work. And he has definitely grown a lot in the past ten years as a filmmaker, at least in terms of his ability to get into politics in a way that is not just purely reactionary, where I think a lot of his early films are kind of absorbed by this reactionariness, and I think I think he has matured a decent bit,

at least as as a political filmmaker. So we will start with a paragraph from Graber quote Christopher Nolan's Batman. The Dark Knight Rises, not the title of the film is really a piece of anti occupy propaganda. Christopher Nolan, the director, claims that the script is written before the movement even started, and that the famous scenes of the occupation of New York Gotham City were really inspired by Dickens's account of the French Revolution. This is probably true,

but it's disingenuous. Everyone knows Hollywood scripts are continually rewritten while movies are in production, and when it comes to messaging, even details like precise wording or where a scene a shot can make all the difference. Then there's the fact that the villains actually do attack the stock Exchange. Still, it's precisely this ambition, the filmmaker's willingness to take on the great issues of the day that ruins the movie.

So the script was written well before Occupy started. Shooting for Dark Knight Rises ended two months after the start of Occupy. Most of the shooting for the film took place before Occupy even happened, and now in twenty eleven, it was widely misreported that the movie was going to be filming at Occupy itself, which started from like I think something in the La Times, which just got blown out,

blown out of proportion. Was not true. They did shoot in New York, but they did not shoot at Occupy yeampubliccause you would have got run out probably Now, leading up to twenty eleven, both Nolan and what became Occupy were on very similar conceptual roads. They were just leading

to two very different places. The Dark Knight released in the middle of the two thousand and eight financial crisis, right after the two thousand and eight writers strike ended, so there were a lot of class issues circling around in Nolan's bubble. So it made sense that Nolan's next Batman flick would tackle these things that rose to cultural prominence by the time he finished The more Patriot Act

inspired at The Dark Knight. Now, Nolan and other writers obviously saw economic inequality and corruption seating people's anger and the rising possibility of civil unrest, and that was put into the script and then it just happened two months before they finished shooting. Now Nolan also took a lot from the Tale of Two Cities. This probably more than

anything else. The Dark Knight rices is actually based on the Tale of Two Cities, a passage of which is read at the end of the film, And there's plenty of parallels to the Front Revolution, including the storming of Bestile. Actually two prison breaks inside the Dark Knight rises. There is the release of Black Eight, and then there's of course when Bruce Wayne escapes the giant hole in the

ground and frees the other prisoners as well. So still, throughout all of these kind of class issues that Nolan is talking about in this film, he still shows a deep distrust of populism, or at the very least feared how easily it could be subverted in a charged financial climate. I'm going to read one quote from Fisher here. Quote.

When Nolan revived the Batman franchise in two thousand and five, the setting Gotham in the midst of an economic depression seemed like an achronistic reference to the superhero's origins in the nineteen thirties. Two thousand and eight, the Dark Knight was too early to register the impact of the financial crisis, but the Dark Knight Rises clearly attempts to respond to

the two thousand and eight situation. The film isn't this simple conservative parable that the right wingers would like, But in the end it is a reactionary vision, which I think is the fairest way to look at this film. But now we're going to go deep into into Graber's analysis, which is by far, probably one of the best write ups on twentieth century superheroes and their role in American culture.

of World War Two. I will say the early origins of Batman are far divorced from that, but that is certainly what Batman has evolved into. Quote. These heroes are purely reactionary in a literal sense. They have no projects of their own, at least not in their roles as heroes. Almost never do superheroes make, create, or build anything. The villains, in contrast, are endlessly creative. They are full of plans and projects and ideas. Clearly we are supposed to at first,

without constently realizing it, identify with the villains. After all, they're the ones having all the fun. Then, of course we feel guilty about it, reidentify with the hero and have even more fun watching the super ego clubbing the the Errant. It back into submission. This essay that Grab wrote is very Freudian. Craper makes a lot of freud references in this. I'm not gonna be getting into that as much, but superheroes are also very very Freudian.

second one's about? Two? Yes, yes now. Grayber then talks about kind of what the project of these comic books were originally supposed to be and how that kind of continues on today into pop culture. Quote. Politically speaking, superhero

comic books can seem pretty innocuous. If all a comic is trying to do is tell a bunch of adolescent boys that everyone has a certain desire for chaos and mayhem, but ultimately such desires need to be controlled, the implications would not seem especially dire, especially because the message still

does carry a healthy dose of ambivalence. After all, the heroes of even the most rightly ining action movies seem to spend much of their time mashing up suburban shopping malls, something that many of us would like to do at some point in our lives. In the case of most comic book superheroes, however, the mayhem has an extremely conservative political implication. This is where we can start getting into God versus the people and using both of these things

as constructs. Right, neither of these things really fully exist in a super material way. Both of these things are constructs quote unquote God, quote unquote the people. They both occupy a very similar ontological role, and this is something that Graper gets into quote any power capable of creating a system of law cannot itself be bound by them. In the Middle Ages, the solution was simple. The legal

order was created either directly or indirectly by God. The English, American and French revolutions changed all that when they created the notion of popular sovereignty, declaring that the power once held by kings and by extension, God, is now held by an entity called the people. The people, however, are bound by the laws. They are able to create the laws through those revolutions themselves. But of course revolutions are acts of law breaking, so laws emerge from illegal activity.

This creates a fundamental incoherence and the very idea of modern government, which assumes that the state has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. It's okay for police to use violence because they are enforcing the law. The law is legitimate because it's rooted in the constitution. The constitution is legitimate because it comes from the people. That people create the constitution by acts of illegal violence. It

all circles back on itself. Quote. The obvious question then, is how does one tell the difference between the people and a mere rampaging mob, Which is a question that comes up all the time across the political spectrum, from anarchists to fascists to liberals. This is a debate that still goes on. Is without the law, what is the difference between the people and just a lynch mob. Now Graber doesn't really give an answer to this, because this

doesn't really have an answer. This is a very vague question, and kind of, as Graver points out, it's vague by design. Quote. The response by mainstream, respectable opinion is to push this problem as far away as possible. The usual line is that the age of revolutions is over. Now we can change the constitution or legal standards by legal means. This of course means that the basic structures will never change, unquote.

And this is where kind of Graver talks about how the role of tradition has totally taken over the legal implications of our system. Here, how the US, which was you know, at once progressive in its like in its electoral college and two party system, is now quite old fashioned compared to a lot of other you know, popular

democratic countries. There's a good line quote we base the legitimacy of the whole system on the consent of the people, despite the fact that the only people who were ever really consulted on the matter lived over two hundred years ago in America at least, quote unquote, the people are long since dead. So now we have this situation that we have this idea of the legal order which comes from God, which then came from armed revolution, and now

it just comes from this idea of sheer tradition. Now there's obviously a lot of American politicians who would want to give this power back to God.

impose a monarchy. And even a lot of the monarchies now are like, you know, they follow the European thing of like claiming to like derive the authority from the people or something.

to see Graber revisit this idea now. Unfortunately that cannot be the case, because this question of violence has certainly evolved a lot in the ten years in which he wrote this, both in terms of how the alt right operates, but also also in terms of how the quote unquote left views violence as a necessary political tool. But getting into his analysis of the twentieth century, I think it

is still fairly accurate quote. The left, chastised by the disasters of the twentieth century, has largely moved away from its older celebration of revolutionary violence, preferring nonviolent forms of resistance. Those who act in the name of something higher than the law can do so precisely because they don't act

like a rampaging mob. For the right, on the other hand, and this has been true since the rise of fascism in the twenties, the very idea that there is something special about revolutionary violence, anything that makes it different from mere criminal violence, is so much self righteous twaddle. Violence is violence, but that doesn't mean a rampaging mob can't be the people, because violence is the real source of

law and political order. This is why, as Walter Benjamin noted, we cannot help but admire the great criminal, because, as so many movie posters have put it, he makes his own law. After all, any criminal organization does inevitably begin developing its own, often quite elaborate set of internal laws. They have to as a way of controlling what would otherwise be completely random violence. From the right wing perspective,

that's all law, ever, is. It is a means of controlling the very violence that it brings into being and

through which it is ultimately enforced. Now, I think this is also true of even certain aspects of the left, where we have we don't call them laws, we might call them like community guidelines or something, but we often actually do this same process, especially in the anarchist kind of formations that try to replicate gang formations, like purposefully we get this this same essence that is developed in order to people might you know, reject these to the

word police, but at least, you know, make some kind of structure that deems which violence is acceptable and which violence isn't. But back to Graber quote, this makes it easier to understand the often surprising affinity between criminals, criminal gangs, right wing political movements, and the armed representatives of the state. Ultimately, they speak the same language, they create their own rules on the basis of force. As a results, they typically

share the same broad political sensibilities. In Athens nowadays, there's active collaboration between the crime bosses in poor immigrant neighborhoods, fascist gangs, and the police. In fact, in this case, it was clearly a political strategy. Faced with the prospect of popular uprisings against a right wing government, the police first withdrew protection from neighborhoods near the immigrant gangs, then started giving tacit support to the fascists for the far right.

Then it is in that space where different violent forces operating outside of the legal order interact that new forms of power and hence of order can emerge. What does this have to do with costume superheroes. Well everything, because this is exactly the space that superheroes and supervillains also inhabit. An inherently fascist space inhabited only by gangsters would be dictators, police and thugs with endlessly blurring lines between them. Sometimes

the cops are legalistics, sometimes they're corrupt. Sometimes the police themselves slip into vigilanteism. Sometimes they pursue the superhero, sometimes they look the other way. Sometimes they help villains and heroes a case a team up. The lines of force are always shifting. If anything new where to emerge, it could only be through such shifting forces. There's nothing else since in the DC and Marvel universes, neither God nor

the people really exist. Now this is I think this is great hitting on something that really actually does hit at the core of this whole genre is that this is the genre which is really only inhabited by the uber mench as this like governing body. Right, there's there really isn't the God in any kind of meaningful way. There isn't the people in any kind of meaningful way. There is just the super individual, the uber minch himself is what inspired Joe Schuster and Jerry Siegel to create Superman.

Like that, this is this is the origin of this entire genre.

a little bit more more discussion. Quote. Insofar as there is a potential for constituent power, then it can only come from purveyors of violence. The super villains and evil masterminds, when they are not merely indulging in random acts of terror, are always scheming of imposing a new world order of some kind or another. Surely, if Red Skull King the Conqueror or Doctor Doom did ever succeed in taking over the planet, there'd be lots of new laws created very quickly.

the world. Now, this is where I'm gonna actually disagree slightly with Graber. He writes that superheroes quote remain parasitical off the villains, in the same way that police remain parasitical off criminals. Without them, they'd have no reason to exist. Now, I'd argue that the police actually create the spectral ca category of criminals to justify their own existence. Yeah, criminals didn't create the police. It's the other way around, right.

You can look at you can look at like the way even the past few years, police have been lying about inflated crime rates to justify their own increased funding. And now, obviously people always broke social norms, but if you're looking at the actual, like the actual like political class of criminal and the political class of police, this is like it's like everyone has done a crime, right, Like police commit more crimes than the average person, but

they do not often get called a criminal. I'm talking about like a very political class that we call criminal, and this is something that the police create. And curiously, in the same way, most superheroes also predate their respective supervillains, as it is the presence of the superhero that often

births the adversarial supervillain. We see this across tons of superhero medias where they use the example of how the superhero predated the of these theatrical villains, and this is actually the superhero's fault, right, this is this, This happens in Batman, this happens in Spider Man. This is this is very very common. We even see this in something like The Boys or The Watchmen, both of which targets superheroes as a reactionary right wing tendency, which are our line of

the police and military. We we literally have Homelander creating supervillains to justify his own existence, or super terrorists in the Watchman, the actual team predates the arrival of many super villains. So this, this is this is one one small nitpick I might I might say with this article, at least in terms of the like the the causality loop between superheroes and villains and criminals and police. Do you know what also pre dates all all of us,

every every single person listening. We're gonna have like someone who's one hundred and the advertising industrial complex predates every single one of you fuckers. The surrealists burst this hell hole of h of advertising which tricks your mind via predictive programming, the ditch to buy this fucking food box. Okay, we are we are back. We have returned to the status quo of our podcast. Speaking, speaking of which we're

going to talk about returning to the status quo. So what what superheroes and the police, which are very ontologically similar roles in a lot of cases, what their end project is is that they seek to maintain what is and then seek out and destroy anything that threatens to alter our civilizational fabric. They fundamentally are defenders of the status quo. That is, that is the that is the

role of the superhero across almost all media. This is why, if you had the powers of Superman, why are you just saving cats from trees and instead not fundamentally reshaping the world in something that is better. Now, this is a question that gets tackled by people like Grant Morrison and Alan Moore. Is to they often give reasons for why someone shouldn't do that, but still, this is a fundamental aspect of this genre is that these guys never

really have any generative political project. They are purely reactionary, and they purely are made to hold up the status quo and always return to this single point from which they emerged. Back to grayber quote, they remain defenders of a legal and political system which itself seems to have come out of nowhere, and which, however faulty or degraded, must be defended because the only alternative is so much worse.

They aren't fascists. They're just ordinary, decent, super powerful people who inhabit a world in which fascism is the only political possibility. Why might we ask what a form of entertainment premised on such a peculiar notion of politics emerge in the early to mid twentieth century America at just around the time that actual fact was on the rise in Europe. Was it some kind of fantasy American equivalent? Not exactly. It's more that both fascism and superheroes were

products of a similar historical predicament. What is the foundation of social order when one has exercised the very idea of revolution, and above all, what happens to the political imagination? So at this point Graver starts talking about how basically all power goes to the individual, but the individual who is embedded within a system. He discusses how the core audience for superhero comics are adolescent or pre adolescent, to

white boys. At least that was in the nineteen twenties or thirties and forties, and roughly is still the case. It's that these comic books and now Marvel films, although unfortunately Marvel films have a much broader audience, but they are targeted to people who are at a point in their lives where they're like where they're likely to be both like the most imaginative and a little bit rebellious. Right, this is the twelve year old white Boy is the

is the thing that that this is targeting. So they're both very imaginative, they're a little bit rebellious, but they're also being groomed to take on positions of power and authority in the world. Right, They're about to transition to being fathers, share of small business owners, middle management. Right. So this is what this genre is targeted towards. So what are they supposed to learn from these kind of endlessly repeating stories that are all very much the same story.

One aspect is that imagination and rebellion will inevitably just lead to violence, right, And then second is like imagination and rebellion violence can actually be a lot of fun, but ultimately violence must be directed back against any overflow of imagination and rebellion or else everything will kind of

go into chaos. These things have to be contained. So this is why superheroes are only allowed I'm gonna I'm gonna quote from Graper again quote their imagination can only be extended to the design of their clothes, their cars, maybe their home, and their various successories unquote. Basically, all of their imagination for the superhero is limited to commodities. Right. This is this is the fundamental aspect where that's the only acceptable outlet for your imagination. It's it's it's just

with these, it's just with commodity fetishism like that. That's that, that's the only possible way. Back to grayber quote, it's in this sense that the logic of the superhero plot is profoundly, deeply conservative. Ultimately, the division between left and right sensibilities turns on one's attitude towards the imagination. For the left, imagination creativity and by extension, production, the power to bring new things and new social arrangements into being

is always celebrated. It's the source of all real value in the world. For the right, it's dangerous and ultimately evil. The urge to create is also a destructive urge. But this is also what separates conservatives from fascists. Both agree that the imagination unleashed can only lead to violence and destruction. Conservatives wish to defend us against this possibility. Fascists wish

to unleash it anyway. They aspired to be, as Hitler imagined himself, great artists painting with the minds, bloods, and sinews of humanity. I think this is a really good distinction between conservatives and fascists in terms of how they view creative violence. And to get back to superheroes, I think this medium, as Grab points out, has this kind

of built in essence of a guilty pleasure. It revels in the absurdity of both the costumed heroes and villains, all while still targeting in imagination which is too expansive to outside the norm as being the ultimate crime. This guilty pleasure aspect even applies to the great superhero satires like The Watchmen and The Boys, which we applaud for poking and prodding at the conservative superhero all while still reveling and watching the outlandish antics on screen or on

the page. Now. Graver even applies this guilty pleasure aspect into explaining the kind of the conservative backlash to superheroes in the forties and fifties, particularly with the book Seduction of the Innocent, which kind of viewed superheroes as this weirdly fetishistic kind of naughty impulse, which resulted in superheroes getting very sanitized and much more much more silly, much more campy, which all which resulted in the fantastic nineteen

sixty six Batman show. But but but still it kind of it kind of points at this this this guilty pleasure aspect. There's there's something inherently kind of naughty about about viewing this material. All right, we are we are

nearing the end of Graber's analysis here. Quote. If the message was that rebellious imagination was okay as long as it was kept out of politics and simply confined to consumer choices like clothes, cars, and accessories, this had become the message that even executive Hollywood producers could easily get behind, which results in stuff like the nineteen sixty six Batman show and now leading us back into Christopher Nolan, Uh, we get we get this. This really good, really good

paragraph from Graber. Quote. If the classic comic book is extensively political about mad Been trying to take over the world, but really psychological and personal, about overcoming the dangers of rebellious adolescents, but then ultimately political after all, then the new superhero movies are precisely the reverse. They are sensibly psychological and personal, but really political, but ultimately they go back to being psychological and personal. So this is me

just ripping. Now let's take Batman begins, right, we have Racial Ghul, who operates in this psychological role of a second father for Bruce right after Bruce's training initiation to the League of Shadows. Only then does Race reveal his political goals to destroy Gotham and rid the world of corruption. So this is like the psychological is the first bit, then it's actually political, and then by the end it actually it goes all the way back into being truly psychological.

Now I'm gonna I'm gonna read one paragraph from Graver, which is only because it has a very funny oh two word combination. In the ritual comics, we learned that racial Ghoul, a character introduced telling Lee in A nineteen seventy one, is in fact a zerzen Esque primitivist and no terrorist, determined to restore the balance of nature by reducing the Earth's human population by roughly ninety nine percent. None of the villains in any of the three movies

want to rule the world. They don't wish to have power over others or to create new rules of any sort unquote. And I just really like the term Desi Esque primitives to describe the seventies racial Ghoul, which is a deeply a deeply brain poisoned way to describe a comic book likelier. John Zergeon is an eco anarchist writer who certain sects of kind of social anarchist theorists liked to make fun of.

Nolan's imagination. Graber describes them as quote, they are the anarchists who believe that human nature is fundamentally evil and corrupt unquote. I think this has taken to its most obvious extent in the Dark Knight, with the Joker, who openly claims affiliation with anarchy and fetishizes destruction. His sick and twisted imagination is the real villain, even with the backdrop of the film's kind of deceptive war on terror framing. Now, between the production of The Dark Knight and The Dark

Knight Rices, the funniest thing happened. The economy completely collapsed in two thousand and eight, and it wasn't due to an eco terrorist cult or a clown set on a total negation. Instead, it was bankers and finance managers and Wallstree bros. Who became the obvious villains in their quest to maintain the lie of endless growth. Millions of people lost their homes and source of income. So in response, there was a whole bunch of popular uprisings that took

place all around the world. Graber lists regimes being toppled in the Middle East and people occupying squares everywhere from Cleveland to Karachi trying to create new forms of democracy. So there's this resurgence of constituent power, right, and this imagination driven kind of radical and largely non violent form of resistance at least hearing the States. And this is the sort of political situation which superhero universes can never really fully tackle because it can't exist within their own

weird ontology. To quote Graver or quote in Nolan's world, something like occupy could only have been the product of some tiny group of ingenious manipulators who are really pursuing some secret agenda. Why does Bain wish to lead the people in a social revolution if he's just going to nuke them all in a few weeks anyway, it's anyone's guess. He claims that before you destroy someone first, he must

give them hope. So is the message that utopian dreams can only lead to nihilistic violence presumably it's something like that, but it's singularly unconvincing, since the plan to kill everyone came first and the revolution was a decorative afterthought. In fact, what happens to the city can only possibly make sense as a material echo of what's been most important, what's happening in Bruce Wayne's tortured brain. Yeah, it's like it's a good line, which, yes, yeah, because in the end,

Batman and the police rise from the abyss. Literally in both cases, both of them are trapped underground. They both rise from underground join forces to battle the people occupying outside of the Gotham City Stock Exchange. Batman fixed his own death by disposing of this nuclear bomb, and Bruce Wayne gets to live happily in Florence with the criminal Selena Kyle. And then a new new phony martyr legend is born in the role of Batman, and people of

Gotham are returned once again to the status quo. I'm gonna read kind of Graver's final final kind of overview of the entirety of this message, right, like, of what this thing is really trying to convey, right quote, if they're supposed to be a take message from all of this, it must run something like, yes, the system is corrupt, but it's all we have anyway. Figures of authority can be trusted if they've first been chastised and endued terrible suffering.

Normal police might let children die on the bridges, but the police who've been buried alive for weeks can employ violence. Legitimately, charity is much better than addressing structural problems. Any attempts to address to such structural problems, even through nonviolent civil disobedience, really is a form of violence, because that's all it

could possibly be. Imaginative politics are inherently violent, and therefore there's nothing inappropriate If police respond by smashing protesters' heads repeatedly against the concrete as a response to occupy, this is nothing short of pathetic. When The Dark Knight came out to this in eight, there was much discussion over whether the whole thing was really just a vast metaphor for the War on Terror. How far is it okay for the good guys America obviously to adapt the bad

Guy's methods. The filmmakers managed to respond to these issues and still produce a good movie. This is because the War on Terror actually was a battle of secret networks and manipulative spectacles. It began with a bomb and ended with an assassination. One can almost think of it as an attempt on both sides to actually enact a comic book version of the universe. Once real constituent power appeared

on the scene, the universe shriveled into incoherence. Revolutions were sweeping the Middle East, and the US was still spending hundreds of billions of dollars fighting a ragtag bunch of seminary students in Afghanistan. Unfortunately for Nolan, for all of his manipulative powers, the same thing happened to his world when even the hint of real popular power arrived in New York. So that is kind of the essence of Graber's view of this movie. I think it's pretty good.

This is a This is a pretty a pretty solid take on this. Now, there's obviously people who have opinions that are less good than this. I'm gonna read I'm gonna read this. This right up from from these two guys, Jeff Sprousse and Zach Buchemp, who argue that Batman represents this symbolic defense of liberal democracy, which I think is true, but the way that they go about their analysis I think is heavily flawed, because yes, I do think he

represents a defensive liberal democracy. I just don't think that's necessarily a good thing. Yeah. So they talk about how fear is the kind of the core emotion across all of Nolan's Batman films. Right, we have in Batman begins fear and takes the form of Scarecrow, as you know, one of the main villains. But we also have this terror of there being a powerful criminal underworld which overwhelms the power of political and social intitutions that are meant

to address such criminal underworlds. We have Batman, in his role is to fight injustice by turning quote fear against those who pray on the fearful right Batman is this terrifying symbol meant to restore the balance of fear between the anarchic private underworld and the gutless public spear to quote jeffin zax rite up quote. In The Dark Knight, Nolan continues his examination of the terror of anarchy, as well as the potential for the state and allied institutions

to abuse their enormous power. Bain and each of Nolan's other villains attempt to exploit fear for ideological projects, revenge or simple fun. Batman aims to channel it to make his opponent's legitimate grievances subject for debate in an orderly system, rather than through violent resolution, which is not what Batman does. Thatman punches people. They were we watching the same movies quote to entrust Gotham to heroes with a face, as he says in The Dark Knight, and to democratize Batman

as a symbol that can be embodied by anyone. It's not that it's not that Christopher Nolan is taking a side in our political debates. He's simply defending a particular system through which we address them. Which is nonsense of a writer from Forbes that this analysis is quach a beautiful rebuttal to those critics who viewed the film as

fascistic or as a critique of left wing populism. Batman as the defender of liberal democracy, not of conservatism or liberalism, but the system itself from the forces of fear and chaos. Gotham as an examination of the frailties and pressure points that make this system weak in the face of the unexpected and uncontrollable. While there is indeed both praise for the role of civil society in these films, there's also a portrait of economic inequality that provides the brittleness needed

for men like Bay to truly succeed. This is not a critique of the government or private sector as so much as it is a critique of the frailty and fragility of our system and its institutions and the power of symbols to combat this fragility, which is a deeply liberal analysis.

and that like it is. It is not a precept of liberal of like of like liberal intellectualism that you are unable to form a coherent argument or do any piece of analizamble like they used to be able to do this, and then at some point, like after the War on Terror, they just stopped. Now all we have is like matt Iglesias, and it's like these.

It still has a few of those weird plot like super plotty elements, but overall it's it's it's it's much clearer. But in the wake of the War on Terror and then financial crash, there's this fundamental incoherence that kind of seeps into everything. I have two final takes to read. I know we are getting along here, but I think it's important to look at what the conservatives and the fascist rite actually said about this movie, beyond just the

conspiracy rattled ramblings that we started this episode with. This is from The Daily Caller twenty twelve. The film is sympathetic to the concerns of the poor and points out that some who achieve wealth don't earn it legitimately. But these themes disappear as soon as the hulking terrorist Baine takes over Gotham City. All that criminals are released, rich people are executed in sham trials headed up by Baines's lunatic friends, Government officials and police officers are killed or captured.

Bain claims that he is solving inequality by leveling the playing field, but his true plan is to perpetuate massive murder by setting off a nuclear bomb. In this way, viewers see a familiar story unfold, and that's reminiscent of communist and fascist revolutions in Russia, Germany, Cambodia, and North Korea.

No matter how legitimate criticisms of the economic, political, and social order may be, any revolution that shatters the rule of law or eliminates the market entirely well necessarily resulted in greater inequality, suffering, and death.

a leader and two like do any kind of mass violence, like well, arguably outside of Oakland, but that wasn't even like what that was like in Oakland.

there is there's no but there's no such rule. And Occupy now during during the editing and final production of the film, obviously they realize that there is some obvious parallels here, which they do they did indulge in. But I mean most of the writing and the filming of this took place before occupy. I think it just came from a very similar social place. Yeah. Also, though even as a French Revolution thing, it's incoherent.

but in practice resorts to oppression and extreme violence. The film's good guys are Batman and the police officers of Gotham, who bravely go to war to prevent Baine's genocide.

right there. The film doesn't offer much of a practical answer for what The film doesn't offer much of a practical answer for what to do about inequality, social unrest or terrorism. Great great work, daily collar God. Now where do they find these guys?

and content instead of miserable like him. That is not Bain's gripes, but anyway, in Gotham sewers Bain recor fruits those like himself, the 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, violence, terror, and ultimately total and complete destruction As expected, The Dark Night Rises is a love letter to Gotham City, its

flawed but ultimately decent people, its industry and generosity, all of which are by products of liberty, free markets, and capitalism. In other words. In other words, just as The Dark Knight was a touching tribute to an embattled George W. Bush who chose to be seen as a villain in order to be the hero, Rises is a love letter to an imperfect America that, in the end always does

the right thing. And Nolan loves the American people, the wealthy producers who are more often than not trickled down their hard earned winnings, the workaday folks who keep our world turning a financial system worth saving because the benefits it's all, And those everyday warriors who offered their lives for the greater good with every punch of a clock.

Nolan's love for this country is without qualifiers, and is symbolized and all of its unqualified sincerity in the form of 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. Nolan, sorry, I can.

guy fundamentally misunderstands this. Nolan's genius is a filmmakers. Well, Nolan's genius as a filmmaker is, without question, the pacing, the editing, the performances, the humanity of the duc Knight Rises will be talked about for decades, which it doesn't. This is by far one of his worst films. This is widely seen as one of one of his worst films. The editing, pacing, performances are all heavily criticized. This is

actually like a bad movie. I do like the juxtaposition of the star spangled banner at the sporting event with this like spectacle of destruction. I think that plays very well, but like that is this is come on, come on, like these are the people who and this is this is the thing. This is this.

any ideas whatsoever. They just have that like they just have this like reflexive flag worship stuff and that it's awful. It's it's like the whole fucking American right was like this. It's just like yeah, and then the South TRUMPI has just destroyed them because this is a really good example of nothing of the conservative political conditions that led to populace to takeover right.

this stuff is a very good look at that. And I know this is too long, but the final final thing to just laugh at. We will return, as as all good superhero stories do, return to the status quo of my Paranoia Conspiracy Reader magazine, which also had a review for The Cabin in the Woods movie, which it thinks is a secret Illuminati message about how there's secretly control rooms that are that are like navigating your entire life. There's like people in control rooms who are like controlling

every spect of your life. The Cabin in Woods was an ironic admission of this pretty good, Pretty good. Our technico credit controllers and manipulators are crass and evil pretenders, able to get off only spectacles of pain and torture. Pretty funny. There's some quite racist stuff in the middle, which I'm is not not even gonna mention. Oh yeah, that's the everything. It was like. People were really racist. People are still really racist. People are still quite racist.

they are they are certainly quite amusing. There's one other aspect in this article that I wanted to mention. Here's discerns to Oh here it is here? What it is?

Knight Rice is not very good movie. And instead, if you want to watch a Batman film about politics and Christmas, just watch Batman Returns. That's what I'm doing this week, So get your friends together. Watch Danny DeVito vomit black Doo for two hours. Watch Michelle Feifer's Catwoman in a latex suit. It is much much better. So that does

it for us today here. It could happen here. I hope we learned a little bit something about constituent power police superheroes and how CERN is building a matrix and this predictive programming targeting the next Winter Olympics. It could happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.