How Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy laid the political groundwork for today's superhero movies
Christopher Nolan's Batman films are pretty good (the first two, anyway). But there's more going on than the Caped Crusader getting into fistfights.
Once upon a time there was a movie about a billionaire who beat up mentally ill poor people and allied with a literal army of cops to defeat a revolutionary force, largely composed of people of color, that was radically redistributing wealth and trying oppressors for their crimes.This movie made upwards of $1 billion in worldwide box office. You have almost certainly seen it.
I’m talking about The Dark Knight Rises, of course. It’s by far the weakest of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy. I also omitted the bit about Bane’s band of merry men holding all of Gotham hostage with a literal nuke and appointing noted psychopath Scarecrow to preside over the people’s court, but analyzing the actual text and not the subtext (which here has the subtlety of a cement mixer full of anvils) is for squares.
The Nolan trilogy is regarded by many as the defining superhero work of the early 21st century, that set the mold for most of what came after it. I’d argue that Bryan Singer’s (yuck) X-Men and Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man are also important milestones that helped paved the way for the omnipresent Marvel Cinematic Universe and whatever the hell it is DC’s doing, but it was Nolan who decided to treat Batman like a crime thriller and not like a pulpy B-movie. He did it while making Batman into a vigilante perfectly suited for messed-up modern power structures.
To his credit, it largely worked. Watching Batman Begins after watching the souped-up Power Rangers episode that is Raimi’s Spider-Man (to be clear, that’s a compliment) can give you whiplash. Christian Bale’s Batman is a brooding force of nature. Both Willem Defoe and Cillian Murphy give their Green Goblin and Scarecrow some over-the-top madness, but Scarecrow’s evil is a very tangible evil. Vinnie Mancuso’s love letter to Murphy’s performance is well worth your time, but the long and the short of it is that even the crazy psychiatrist who invents fear gas feels somewhat realistic.
Arguably the most important character in the Nolan films is Gotham City itself. In Batman Begins we find the city to be a seedy, filthy metropolis overrun by crime and corruption. Batman (and let’s be real, Batman occasionally becomes Bruce Wayne, not the other way around) returns home to save his city from the villainous League of Shadows and, more importantly, from itself. The action mostly takes place in two locations once he’s back in Gotham: at ritzy Wayne Manor, and in the Narrows, a ramshackle impoverished neighborhood. The big final battle happens in the Narrows, and on one of the rundown elevated subways the movie made sure to depict as crime-ridden and scary.
Neither the Narrows nor the elevated trains appear in The Dark Knight. In fact Gotham has seemingly had most of its problems solved between Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. Gotham is now a modern city filled with glass towers and is depicted mostly in daylight. The mob is on its last legs thanks to Batman and hotshot new district attorney Harvey Dent, a general jackass who sleeps with his direct subordinate and thinks flipping a coin is a substitute for having a personality. The ubiquitous elevated train lines are nowhere to be found, and the Narrows is never mentioned or seen. We’re left to assume that Batman cleaned the joint up and got rid of all those nasty poor pe- err, criminals.
Here’s a particularly revelatory scene from the sequel, in which Batman is now fighting against the Joker.
The Joker does indeed just want to watch the world burn, but is the same true of this “bandit” Alfred is referencing from his days as a soldier (or perhaps a post-colonial mercenary) in Burma? Did the “bandit” really just want to watch the world burn, or was he fighting against colonial rule and in favor of the independence of his people? Moreover, neither Bruce nor Alfred can comprehend someone fighting against governmental powers for anything other than power or money. Later in the movie, Bruce asks Alfred if they ever caught the bandit. Alfred responds by saying they burnt the forest down.
How many people did they kill by doing that? How many livelihoods were destroyed so that this local government could bribe tribal leaders? For Alfred and Bruce, it’s not a horror story but a learning moment. The Dark Knight is generally a pretty great movie, but not always for the intended reasons.
The Dark Knight Rises is when everything pretty much goes to hell. Our villain this time is Bane, an aging Shakespearan actor trapped in a mask and the body of an Olympic wrestler with excellent taste in coats. Bane works for the same League of Shadows who tried to destroy Gotham in the first movie, and after a memorable opening sequence that launched a thousand memes, he sets his sights on Gotham to finish the job.
His hilarious plan involves toying with the city’s residents by inciting some sort of poplist revolution, trapping the entire police force underground (seriously, this actually happens) and the rest of the population on the island that Gotham sits on, and threatening to blow up a nuke if the outside world interferes.
Another component of Bane’s nefarious plot is to expose that Commissioner Gordon lied about Dent’s post-Two Face transformation crimes and has propped him up as a martyr to fill Gotham’s prisons without a chance for the convicts to get parole. That’s some extremely shitty stuff on Gordon’s part! Here’s how it’s all portrayed in the movie:
Calls for criminal justice reform have long been met with claims that not being “tough on crime” would lead to roving gangs of violent criminals and chaos in the streets. Nolan doesn’t depict Gordon as having done the right thing, but he does show an army of largely brown people storming out of prison with AK-47’s (you know, the guns the anti-American bad guys have been using in the movies for the last few decades) held aloft. That army later clashes with an army of mostly-white police officers, led by Matthew Modine looking absolutely absurd in a dress uniform, in the movie’s climactic battle. Bane and Batman have a fistfight right in the middle of the chaos. I don’t really need to explain the politics of that visual to you.
To be clear, I’m not saying Bane was right or anything. I’m saying that the film co-opts leftist goals (the film came out right around when the Occupy Wall Street movement was in full swing) and places them in the hands of a bruising villain who leads an army of brown people with guns who drag the rich out of their homes and victimize the police. It’s the culmination of three films’ worth of messaging about the dirty lower classes, and the valiant efforts of the billionaire who uses his resources to beat people up instead of pouring his vast wealth into causes to help revitalize the city he professes to love.
Christian Bale himself saw the ridiculousness of it all. He said that Batman is Bruce Wayne’s “true, monstrous self” and played the character accordingly. Nolan’s Batman doesn’t use Bruce Wayne’s endless money to fund projects to help people because he doesn’t want to. He wants to use his money to build better bat-suits and bat-tanks.
Did the Batman trilogy really have a lasting impact on our superhero media consumption? It did and it didn’t. Iron Man, which kicked off the Marvel Cinematic Universe, came out the same year as The Dark Knight. Tony Stark gives up manufacturing weapons so that he can turn his own body into a gun and get revenge on the terrorists who kidnapped him and tried to force him to build one of the mega-missiles he’d just sold to the American military. Stark decides to give up making guns because he saw that his guns were being used to kill Americans. He didn’t seem to mind offering a missile that turned into a bunch of other missiles to kill brown people.
Tony of course goes on to save the universe. Thankfully Marvel’s films went on to be influenced less by imperialism and more by Downey’s dry wit and the weirdness James Gunn introduced into the equation in Guardians of the Galaxy. You’d be hard-pressed to call Thor: Ragnarok or Black Panther coded with anti-left messaging, even if Killmonger's justifiable rage turned into violent radicalism. But there’s also Captain Marvel, ostensibly Marvel’s girl power movie, which is also two hours of worship directed at the military. Captain Marvel, supposedly the universe’s savior against Thanos, winds up with all of fifteen minutes of screen time in Endgame and doesn’t wind up defeating the big purple guy as much as she gives Tony an opening to do so.
The Nolanverse enabled the rise of DC’s lurching, try-hard edgy disasters. The DC movies are, uh, bad and wantonly violent. It’s also impossible to have last year’s Joker without Nolan’s Batman movies. What’s perhaps the most ironic part about all of this is that it resulted in the Joker, not Batman, becoming the go-to avatar of lashing out against all the perceived badness in the world. Last year’s film depicted the character’s descent into depravity and violence, and there’s a not-insignificant portion of the Internet that views it as inspirational. Fun!
The idea of the superhero is an inherently appealing one. A powerful do-gooder whose sole purpose in life is to look out for the little guy. It’s nice. But everyone has an ideology, and Nolan’s Batman’s is one that’s inherently flawed in the same way that American strength is inherently flawed.