Recasting The Dark Knight Rises (Thanks, Tom Waits!)

The story below contains spoilers for The Dark Knight Rises.

In the wake of a rather surprising level of attention given this weekend to the claim that Tom Waits may have inspired Heath Ledger’s performance as The Joker in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, we got to thinking about some of the characters in this month’s new release, Nolan’s finale The Dark Knight Rises.Superhero storytelling traditionally (and one might argue necessarily) traffics in larger-than-life personalities and iconic imagery. It’s coded into the DNA, going back to, “It’s a bird! It’s a plane!…”. Sometimes, though, you’re almost jarred out of your seat, thinking, “Wow, that character is so similar to this other specific guy that it’s a meme in the making!” A couple of those occurred to us while watching The Dark Knight Rises last week, so it seemed like a fun thing to share with you folks.