[J m HofMarN]

Now that I've had some time to think about the last Batman movie, I have to say it's rather a lot of fascist propaganda. First of all, OK, the character of Batman is of course right out of Ayn Rand, a wealthy captain of industry whose wealth means that he has the right to beat the fuck out of lower class people who he deems to be criminals, but that's just the way Batman is, and I can't fault Nolan for that, it's inherent to his mythology.

What I can fault him for is the fact that this movie is purported to have any sort of relevance to real life issues whatsoever. If we are to understand the very, very vague simile here, the message is "Don't support occupy Wall Street, because they're with the terrorists" but beyond that bit of Capitalist rhetoric there's a lot more under there.

For instance - Catwoman, the one bright spot in this dull mess, occasionally points out what everyone knows - that the exploiters need to pay for their crimes, etc. The movie seems to spend a lot of time proving Catwoman wrong, first by promoting the idea that, first of all, a revolutionary must be a thug with ulterior motives which might include nuclear destruction, a thug who Catwoman becomes more afraid of than she initially was of the exploiting class. And then, further, we're treated to a brief scene where somehow reasonable wealth redistribution has been conflated to taking over the primary residences of the wealthy and living in them. That's not really how it works.

And let's look at the similies drawn between the Dent Act and its obvious inspiration, the PATRIOT ACT. The Dent act apparently was meant to take down organized crime by denying bail to those involved in the mafia. Fair enough. The Patriot Act on the other hand, denies Habeaus Corpus, and set the stage for the gulag at Guantanamo, torture, etc. The lack of Habeaus Corpus means that the majority of people detained under that act were innocent of everything but being the wrong religion and color. However, the people detained under the Dent act, after being busted out Bastille style, form a criminal army loyal to Bane, making it clear that they are indeed the bad guys. In essence : We need the PATRIOT act or bad people will get out of prisons/secret torture facilities, and take over our cities. Bullshit.

Finally, of course, we have the police triumphantly emerging to beat back the uppity proletarians in a final heroic battle between common people and the uniformed enforcers of our class enemies, who we are asked to root for. Double bullshit.

Fuck Chris Nolan, the only way this movie can be said to bare any resemblance to reality, to have a relationship to real events, is if we are to accept how a right wing retard would view those events, which no doubt many audience members will. As for me, fuck DKR.

[civilian_number_two]

As much as I would love to disagree with you, to say that any movie is open to numerous interpretations, yeah. This one was a bit reactionary. Here's the thing. In A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens gave us one artist's interpretation of what happened when a proletariat movement succeeded in overthrowing the government. His story was based in some part on real events. So Nolan took that idea, it seems, and asked what would happen were the current proletariat movement to succeed. Here are the distinctions he does not recognize: 1) Occupy Wall Street asks that the US government take power from big business and give it back to government. This is different from tsking power and giving it to a mob. 2) Even were power given to a mob, it would not be the mob.

I liked a lot of the movie, and I'd like to meet it halfway, but given its historical context I can't help but see it as propaganda. Half-true at best, exaggeration and/or lies at worst.