"The Dark Knight Rises is a Proto-Fascist Movie"

Artigo obrigatório. Está (quase) tudo lá.

"A note for clarity: I’m going to be using the words fascism and fascist a lot in this review. Since, as Orwell warned us, those terms have come to be used as synonyms for “stuff I don’t like”, I should pin down the sense in which I use them here. Fascism is a political ideology fixated on authoritarianism, militaristic imagery and action, and the use of authoritarian force against internal and external Others who are defined as threats to the continued existence of society. Fixations on nationalism and national or racial purity and unity are also common. Fascism is a phenomenon of the political right, and has always been fanatically anti-communist, communism being what happens when the political left gets equally douchey.

(...)

Bane’s agenda is that of the Occupy movement as seen by people who don’t know anything about the Occupy movement. (Google “Dark Knight Rises” + “Occupy Wall Street” and prepare to sigh deeply.) He overcomes the current strongman of Gotham City and imprisons its police, thereby successfully taking over the city. This only makes any sense at all if we assume that government is solely comprised of a strongman and his enforcement apparatus, which… well, that’s a little fascist, isn’t it? The enforcement apparatus removed, the economic status quo is reversed, with rich people being turned out of their homes so the poor can take their stuff.

This is a key point: Bane keeps talking about The People, but the people of Gotham City do not appear in this film.

The People are entirely absent. Everyone we see dragging rich folks out of their homes, everyone we see freeing the men imprisoned under the Harvey Dent Act, everyone we see fighting the police in the big authority-vs.-rebellion showdown at the end, they’re all Bane’s staff members. The only character with a speaking part who expresses any support for Bane’s agenda and isn’t a known supervillain or paid-up member of the League of Shadows is Selina Kyle’s girlfriend Holly. It’s one of her three lines. Nobody got a SAG card playing a Gotham citizen in this movie; their only role was to cheer Batman in crowd scenes.

This is important: if the people of Gotham are present, then when the enforcement mechanism of the current power structure is removed, the people immediately rise up and overthrow the system. This would imply that Gotham citizens are so oppressed that only brutal enforcement keeps them from naturally rising against this oppression, which makes Bane the good guy. However, the people are not present; only Bane’s thugs rise against the rich. The people are so absent from this movie that, in every single vehicle scene, there are no civilian vehicles on the road. Everything on the road in every scene belongs to either Batman, the cops, or Bane, resulting in some rather odd-looking chase scenes down completely unused urban streets.

(...)

Bane’s “power to the nonexistent people” schtick is designed to echo vague impressions of Soviet communism, with its empty stores, kangaroo courts, and a lingering shot of a breadline, something American audiences have been conditioned to believe was solely a Soviet phenomenon. A similarly lingering shot of a tattered and torn American flag under Bane’s regime is there for people too slow to pick up on the other symbols.

In the end, of course, the police and the Batman triumph and order is restored by force, thus freeing the nonexistent people of Gotham to enjoy their existing system where the police can lock you up without parole at will.

All this would not be too bad, except for the little matter of cultural context.

Americans live in a society right now where fascism is trendy. We are more militarized, by money spent, than the entire rest of the world put together, and one of the men running for president has promised to increase that spending. We have more people imprisoned per capita, than any society in human history, including China, apartheid-era South Africa, and the Soviet Union. These are facts. They reflect a status quo in which fascist solutions for society’s ills are considered good ones by a portion of the populace, and it is to that demographic, the American political right, that The Dark Knight Rises is explicitly pitched. The entire film is peppered with conceptual catchphrases, like “peacetime”, “appeasement strategy”, “those who have too much”, and so on, designed to appeal to the worldview of people who think Fox News does journalism. A deliberate caricature of the imagined opposition is created, and then duly punched into submission in accordance with superheroic genre convention.

(...)

Fascism may not always be palatable or pleasant, the film tells us, but it is necessary and it works. At no point in the movie do fascist solutions fail, except in cases where they are not fascist enough. The strongmen who Do What Must Be Done, the classic excuse of the fascist, are always right. When the Gotham police are led into a trap, it is under the command of Gordon’s successor, who is shown to be a cowardly quisling who only redeems himself by putting on a uniform and shooting scruffy people.

In short, The Dark Knight Rises posits a conflict between the form of fascism some Americans currently favor, and a strawman version of their imagined opponents, and places the center of moral good firmly on the pro-fascist side. This isn’t even subtext, it’s just text in context. I’m sorry if this ruins the movie for anyone".