The Dark Knight Rises

Not feelin' it for The Dark Knight Rises.

Don't get me wrong, the rapid pace and intelligent script make for an entertaining thought-provoking film, packed tight with a judicial balance of solid and cheesy lines/imagery/situations, set within an armageddonesque scenario which exemplifies the apotheosis of campy mainstream political drama basking in subtly sensational ludicrousy.

Note that it's just a movie.

Within however, the villain Bane (Roger Hardy), who works in the sewers and is backed by some of Bruce Wayne's (Christian Bale) excessively wealthy competitors, has been using construction workers and freelance thieves to launch a strategic attack which will incarcerate Gotham City's entire police force, set up a kangaroo court to 'judge' the wealthy, get his hands on a source of limitless energy that can be turned into a catastrophically destructive weapon, the whole time acting like a person of the people.

It's a bit much.

And the ways in which construction unions are depicted is frustrating.

Of course it's just a movie, within which Bane is a fanatical lunatic who employs absurd methods to achieve insane objectives.

I mean, what person of the people would destroy a football stadium?

But making him a 'person of the people' does cunningly vilify genuine persons of the people like Franklin D. Roosevelt (who still had to operate in a political dynamic which encountered expedient matters I'm assuming) which is problematic.

He is financed by the excessively wealthy, as mentioned earlier, which logically states that plutocrats are theoretically capable of using popular tropes to achieve despotic ends, thereby making Bane's adoption of the label 'person of the people' all the more problematic.

But this doesn't mean individuals who come from privileged backgrounds don't care about structural issues relating to poverty, individuals such as Jack Layton, and want to try to do something about them using legitimate political methods (pointing out a social democrat's rich upbringing is a divisive tactic used by the right to discredit them, from what I can tell anyway).

Having a source of limitless environmentally friendly power that can be turned into a weapon of mass destruction is also problematic, inasmuch as it indirectly vilifies alternative energy sources while propping up the nuclear/petroleum-based-product status quo.

Obviously, when your economy is seriously dependent on this status quo (see The End of Suburbia, 2004) and the ways in which its revenues fuel social programs, you can't simply change everything overnight without causing mass unemployment (perhaps I'm wrong here, I don't know, but it seems to me that if your economy is functioning with a significant deficit, large scale structural changes to its infrastructure will be disastrous unless they can definitively generate mass profits in the aftermath [which is a pretty big risk to take if you're not flush with cash]).

But at the same time, not trying to find environmentally friendly alternatives to the petroleum/nuclear power base that can't be turned into WMDs or be inexpensively integrated into the grid is equally disastrous (I suppose while searching for such power sources it's important to hire people to continuously monitor whether or not their construction can lead to the creation of WMDs [obviously enough {perhaps this isn't so obvious: it took a very long time to cap the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 because they weren't prepared}]).

People often call me naive, but, whatever: "It was all the more [troublesome] because by nature I have always been more open to the world of potentiality than to the world of contingent reality"(Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, vol. 5 [I don't think I'm like Proust, I just love reading In Search of Lost Time]).

Hence, as an escape, I did enjoy The Dark Knight Rises, but I can't support some of its structural issues inasmuch as, according to this viewing, they aren't very progressive.

There is the issue of Selina (Anne Hathaway) however who is trying to change her life around but can't due to the ways in which her criminal record prevents her from finding employment.

Just my thoughts on the subject.

Take 'em or leave 'em.