The Dark Knight Rises, and When Comics Get Political

Back when The Dark Knight came out, there was a lot of discussion–volumes of it, really, and mostly not in the comics press–surrounding the film’s politics. While most agreed that it was a commentary on post-9/11 America, it seemed many couldn’t quite figure out what side director Christopher Nolan came down on when it came to a number of issues, just that he had “something to say.”Even just having something to say, of course, is enough to land a filmmaker in hot water with some people. The fact is, if fans don’t agree with a movie’s point-of-view, they can feel excluded from what they perceive as a little club the director has made for himself and the fans that agree with him, and it can alienate them from not just that movie but potentially from the filmmaker’s canon as a whole.Fast-forward another four years to the release last month of The Dark Knight Rises, and suddenly you’ve got a version of Batman who many commentators think has come off as pretty far right.(That’s ironic, of course, since conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh made headlines just before the film’s release, claiming that liberals were going to use it as a rallying cry on the grounds that the villain’s name sounded like the investment group for which presumptive Republican Presidential nominee Mitt Romney used to work. Limbaugh was widely mocked for taking this position, for a number of reasons.)

It’s all true that the cops help restore order by fighting it out in a magnificent brawl with Bane’s terrorist mob. With that said, I think it’s deeply telling that in order to brand The Dark Knight Rises as a “conservative” movie [New York Times blogger Ross Douthat] has to eschew the conservatives of today (Hannity’s), and even the conservatives of 50 years ago (Ayn Rand) in favor of the “conservatism” of nearly 200 years ago. In the present the greatest evinced of a “quiet Toryism” is the Democratic candidate for president.

The attention the movie got from Limbaugh (and the two days of non-stop coverage of Limbaugh’s comments as he alternately tried to clarify them, double down on them or rephrase them) and the complaints from the Left seem to have come together to create an environment where there’s a lot of “serious” discussion of the politics of the film (and, taken in tandem with a return of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns to the headlines, of Batman in general), with neither side seeming particularly happy and the ever-present message board and Twitter lament, “Why does everything have to be political? Just let me enjoy the movie!”