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BY SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK

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CULTURE 23 AUGUST 2012

Slavoj Žižek: The politics of Batman

From the repression of unruly citizens to the

celebration of the “good capitalist”, The Dark

Knight Rises re�ects our age of anxiety.

SUBMIT

 

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T he Dark Knight Rises shows that Hollywoodblockbusters are precise indicators of the ideological predicaments of our societies. Here is

the storyline. Eight years after the events of The

Dark Knight, the previous instalment of Chris topher

Nolan’s Batman series, law and order prevail in

Gotham City. Under the extraordinary powers

granted by the Dent Act, Commissioner Gordon has

nearly eradicated violent and organised crime. He

nonetheless feels guilty about the cover-up of the

crimes of Harvey Dent and plans to confess to the

conspiracy at a public event – but he decides that

the city is not ready to hear the truth.

No longer active as Batman, Bruce Wayne lives

isolated in his manor. His company is crumbling

after he invested in a clean-energy project designed

to harness fusion power but then shut it down, on

learning that the core could be modi�ed to become

a nuclear weapon. The beautiful Miranda Tate, a

member of the Wayne Enterprises executive board,

encourages Wayne to rejoin society and continue

his philanthropic good works.

Here enters the �rst villain of the �lm. Bane, a

terrorist leader who was a member of the League of

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Shadows, gets hold of a copy of the commissioner’s

speech. After Bane’s �nancial machinations bring

Wayne’s company close to bankruptcy, Wayne

entrusts control of his enterprise to Miranda and

also has a brief love a�air with her. Learning that

Bane has also got hold of his fusion core, Wayne

returns as Batman and confronts Bane. Crippling

Batman in close combat, Bane detains him in a

prison from which escape is almost impossible.

While the imprisoned Wayne recovers from his

injuries and retrains himself to be Batman, Bane

succeeds in turning Gotham City into an isolated

city state. He �rst lures most of Gotham’s police

force underground and traps them there; then he

sets o� explosions that destroy most of the bridges

connecting Gotham to the mainland and announces

that any attempt to leave the city will result in the

detonation of Wayne’s fusion core, which has been

converted into a bomb.

Now we reach the crucial moment of the �lm:

Bane’s takeover is accompanied by a vast politico-

ideological o�ensive. He publicly exposes the

cover-up of Dent’s death and releases the prisoners

locked up under the Dent Act. Condemning the rich

and powerful, he promises to restore the power of

the people, calling on citizens, “Take your city

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back.” Bane reveals himself, as the critic Tyler

O’Neil has put it, to be “the ultimate Wall Street

Occupier, calling on the 99 per cent to band

together and overthrow societal elites”. What

follows is the �lm’s idea of people power –

summary show trials and executions of the rich, the

streets surrendered to crime and villainy.

A couple of months later, while Gotham City

continues to su�er under popular terror, Wayne

escapes from prison, returns as Batman and enlists

his friends to help liberate the city and disable the

fusion bomb before it explodes. Batman confronts

and subdues Bane but Mir anda intervenes and stabs

Batman. She reveals herself to be Talia al-Ghul,

daughter of Ra’s al-Ghul, the former leader of the

League of Shadows (the villains in Batman Begins).

After announcing her plan to complete her father’s

work in destroying Gotham City, Talia escapes.

In the ensuing mayhem, Commissioner Gordon cuts

o� the bomb’s remote detonation function, while a

benevolent cat burglar named Selina Kyle kills

Bane, freeing Batman to chase Talia. He tries to

force her to take the bomb to the fusion chamber

where it can be stabilised, but she �oods the

chamber. Talia dies, con�dent that the bomb cannot

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be stopped, when her truck is knocked o� the road

and crashes. Using a special helicopter, Batman

hauls the bomb beyond the city limits, where it

detonates over the ocean and pre sumably kills him.

Batman is now celebrated as a hero whose sacri�ce

saved Gotham City. Wayne is believed to have died

in the riots. While his estate is being divided up, his

butler, Alfred, sees Wayne and Selina together alive

in a café in Florence. Blake, a young and honest

policeman who knew about Batman’s identity,

inherits the Batcave. The �rst clue to the ideological

underpinnings of this ending is provided by Alfred,

who, at Wayne’s apparent burial, reads the last lines

from Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities: “It is a far, far

better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a

far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever

known.” Some reviewers took this as an indication

that, in O’Neil’s words, the �lm “rises to the

noblest level of western art . . . The �lm appeals to

the centre of America’s tradition – the ideal of

noble sacri�ce for the common people . . . An

ultimate Christ-�gure, Batman sacri�ces himself to

save others.”

Seen from this perspective, the storyline is a short

step back from Dickens to Christ at Calvary. But

isn’t the idea of Batman’s sacri�ce as a repetition of

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Christ’s death not compromised by the �lm’s last

scene (Wayne with Selina in the café)? Is the

religious counterpart of this ending not, instead,

the well-known blasphemous idea that Christ

survived his cruci�xion and lived a long, peaceful

life in India or, as some sources have it, Tibet? The

only way to redeem this �nal scene would be to read

it as a daydream or hallucination of Alfred’s.

A further Dickensian feature of the �lm is a

depoliticised complaint about the gap between rich

and poor. Early in the �lm, Selina whispers to

Wayne as they are dancing at an exclusive, upper-

class gala: “A storm is coming, Mr Wayne. You and

your friends better batten down the hatches.

Because when it hits, you’re all going to wonder

how you thought you could live so large and leave so

little for the rest of us.” Nolan, like any good liberal,

is “worried” about the disparity and has said that

this worry permeates the �lm: “The notion of

economic fairness creeps into the �lm . . . I don’t

feel there’s a left or right perspective in the �lm.

What is there is just an honest assessment or honest

exploration of the world we live in – things that

worry us.”

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Although viewers know Wayne is mega-rich, they

often forget where his wealth comes from: arms

manufacturing plus stock-market speculation,

which is why Bane’s games on the stock exchange

can destroy his empire. Arms dealer and speculator

– this is the secret beneath the Batman mask. How

does the �lm deal with it? By resuscitating the

archetypal Dickensian theme of a good capitalist

who �nances orphanages (Wayne) versus a bad,

greedy capitalist (Stryver, as in Dickens). As Nolan’s

brother, Jonathan, who co-wrote the screenplay,

has said: “A Tale of Two Cities, to me, was the most

. . . harrowing portrait of a relatable, recognisable

civilisation that had completely fallen to pieces. You

look at the Terror in Paris, in France in that period,

and it’s hard to imagine that things could go that

bad and wrong.” The scenes of the vengeful

populist uprising in the �lm (a mob that thirsts for

the blood of the rich who have neglected and

exploited them) evoke Dickens’s description of the

Reign of Terror, so that, although the �lm has

nothing to do with politics, it follows Dickens’s

novel in “honestly” portraying revolutionaries as

possessed fanatics.

The good terrorist

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An interesting thing about Bane is that the source of

his revolutionary hardness is unconditional love. In

one touching scene, he tells Wayne how, in an act of

love amid terrible su�ering, he saved the child

Talia, not caring about the consequences and

paying a terrible price for it (Bane was beaten to

within an inch of his life while defending her).

Another critic, R M Karthick, locates The Dark Knight

Rises in a long tradition stretching from Christ to

Che Guevara which extols violence as a “work of

love”, as Che does in his diary:

Let me say, with the risk of appearing

ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided

by strong feelings of love. It is impossible to

think of an authentic revolutionary without this

quality.

What we encounter here is not so much the

“christi�cation of Che” but rather a “che isation” of

Christ – the Christ whose “scandalous” words from

Luke (“If anyone comes to me and does not hate his

father and his mother, his wife and children, his

brothers and sisters – yes, even his own life – he

cannot be my disciple”) point in the same direction

as these ones from Che: “You may have to be tough

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but do not lose your tenderness.” The statement

that “the true revolutionary is guided by a strong

feeling of love” should be read together with

Guevara’s much more problematic description of

revolutionaries as “killing machines”:

Hatred is an element of struggle; relentless

hatred of the enemy that impels us over and

beyond the natural limitations of man and

transforms us into e�ective, violent, selective

and cold killing machines. Our soldiers must be

thus; a people without hatred cannot vanquish a

brutal enemy.

Guevara here is paraphrasing Christ’s declarations

on the unity of love and the sword – in both cases,

the underlying paradox is that what makes love

angelic, what elevates it over mere sentimentality,

is its cruelty, its link with violence. And it is this link

that places love beyond the natural limitations of

man and thus transforms it into an unconditional

drive. This is why, to turn back to The Dark Knight

Rises, the only authentic love portrayed in the �lm is

Bane’s, the terrorist’s, in clear contrast to

Batman’s.

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The �gure of Ra’s, Talia’s father, also deserves a

closer look. Ra’s has a mixture of Arab and oriental

features and is an agent of virtuous terror, �ghting

to correct a corrupted western civilisation. He is

played by Liam Neeson, an actor whose screen

persona usually radiates digni�ed goodness and

wisdom – he is Zeus in Clash of the Titans and also

plays Qui-Gon Jinn in The Phantom Menace, the

�rst episode of the Star Wars series. Qui-Gon is a

Jedi knight, the mentor of Obi-Wan Kenobi as well

as the one who discovers Anakin Skywalker,

believing that Anakin is the chosen one who will

restore the balance of the universe, and ignores

Yoda’s warnings about Anakin’s unstable nature. At

the end of The Phantom Menace, Qui-Gon is killed

by the assassin Darth Maul.

In the Batman trilogy, Ra’s is the teacher of the

young Wayne. In Batman Begins, he �nds him in a

prison in Bhutan. Introducing himself as Henri

Ducard, he o�ers the boy a “path”. After Wayne is

freed, he climbs to the home of the League of

Shadows where Ra’s is waiting. At the end of a

lengthy and painful period of training, Ra’s explains

that Wayne must do what is necessary to �ght evil,

and that the league has trained Wayne to lead it in

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its mission to destroy Gotham City, which the

league believes has become hopelessly corrupt.

Ra’s is thus not a simple embodiment of evil. He

stands for the combination of virtue and terror, for

egalitarian discipline �ghting a corrupted empire,

and thus belongs to a line that stretches in recent

�ction from Paul Atreides in Frank Herbert’s Dune

to Leonidas in Frank Miller’s graphic novel 300. It is

crucial that Wayne was a disciple of Ra’s: Wayne

was made into Batman by his mentor.

At this point, two common-sense objections

suggest themselves. The �rst is that there were

monstrous mass killings and violence in real-life

revolutions, from the rise of Stalin to the rule of the

Khmer Rouge, so the �lm is clearly not just

engaging in reactionary imagination. The second

objection is that the Occupy Wall Street (OWS)

movement in reality was not violent – its goal was

de�nitely not a new Reign of Terror. In so far as

Bane’s revolt is supposed to extrapolate the

immanent tendency of OWS, the �lm absurdly

misrepresents its aims and strategies. The ongoing

anti-capitalist protests are the opposite of Bane: he

stands for the mirror image of state terror, for a

murderous fundamentalism that takes over and

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rules by fear, not for the overcoming of state power

through popular self-organisation. What both

objections share, however, is the rejection of the

�gure of Bane.

The reply to these two objections has several parts.

First, one should make the scope of violence clear.

The best answer to the claim that the violent mob

reaction to oppression is worse than the original

oppression was the one provided by Mark Twain in

his novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s

Court:

There were two “Reigns of Terror” if we would

remember it and consider it; the one wrought in

hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood . . .

Our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the

minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to

speak, whereas, what is the horror of swift

death by the axe compared with lifelong death

from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and

heartbreak? . . . A city cemetery could contain

the co�ns �lled by that brief Terror which we

have all been so diligently taught to shiver at

and mourn over; but all France could hardly

contain the co�ns �lled by that older and real

Terror, that unspeakably bitter and awful

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Terror, which none of us have been taught to

see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.

Then, one should demystify the problem of

violence, rejecting simplistic claims that 20th-

century communism used too much extreme

murderous violence. We should be careful not to fall

into this trap again. As a fact, this is terrifyingly

true. Yet such a direct focus on violence obfuscates

the underlying question: what was wrong with the

communist project as such? What internal

weakness of that project was it that pushed

communists towards unrestrained violence? It is

not enough to say that communists neglected the

“problem of violence”; it was a deeper,

sociopolitical failure that pushed them to violence.

It is thus not only Nolan’s �lm that is unable to

imagine authentic people’s power. The “real”

radical-emancipatory movements couldn’t do it,

either; they remained caught in the co-ordinates of

the old society, in which actual “people power” was

often such a violent horror.

Finally, it is all too simplistic to claim that there is

no violent potential in OWS and similar movements

– there is a violence at work in every authentic

emancipatory process. The problem with The Dark

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Knight Rises is that it has wrongly translated this

violence into murderous terror. Let us take a brief

detour here through José Saramago’s novel Seeing,

which tells the story of strange events in the

unnamed capital city of an unidenti�ed democratic

country. When election day dawns with torrential

rain, the voter turnout is disturbingly low. But the

weather turns by mid-afternoon and the population

heads en masse to the polling stations. The

government’s relief is short-lived, however: the

count shows that more than 70 per cent of the

ballots cast in the capital have been left blank.

Ba�ed, the government gives the people a chance

to make amends a week later at another election.

The results are worse. Now 83 per cent of the ballots

are blank. The two major political parties – the

ruling party of the right and its chief adversary, the

party of the middle – are in a panic, while the

marginalised party of the left produces an analysis

claiming that the blank ballots are a vote for its

progressive agenda. Unsure how to respond to a

benign protest but certain that an anti-democratic

conspiracy is afoot, the government quickly labels

the movement “terrorism, pure and unadulterated”

and declares a state of emergency.

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Citizens are seized at random and disappear into

secret interrogation sites; the police and seat of

government are withdrawn from the capital; all

entrances to the city are sealed, as are the exits. The

city continues to function almost normally

throughout, the people parrying each of the

government’s thrusts in unison and with a

Gandhian level of non-violent resistance. This, the

voters’ abstention, is a case of authentically radical

“divine violence” that prompts panic reactions

from those in power.

Back to Nolan. The trilogy of Batman �lms follows

an internal logic. In Batman Begins, the hero

remains within the constraints of a liberal order:

the system can be defended with morally acceptable

methods. The Dark Knight is, in e�ect, a new version

of two John Ford western classics, Fort Apache and

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, which show how,

to civilise the Wild West, one has to “print the

legend” and ignore the truth. They show, in short,

how our civilisation has to be grounded in a lie –

one has to break the rules in order to defend the

system.

In Batman Begins, the hero is simply the classic

urban vigilante who punishes the criminals when

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the police can’t. The problem is that the police, the

o�cial law-enforcement agency, respond

ambivalently to Batman’s help. They see him as a

threat to their monopoly on power and therefore as

evidence of their ine�ciency. However, his

transgression here is purely formal: it lies in acting

on behalf of the law without being legitimised to do

so. In his acts, he never violates the law. The Dark

Knight changes these co-ordinates. Batman’s true

rival is not his ostensible opponent, the Joker, but

Harvey Dent, the “white knight”, the aggressive

new district attorney, a kind of o�cial vigilante

whose fanatical battle against crime leads to the

killing of innocent people and ultimately destroys

him. It is as if Dent were the legal order’s reply to

the threat posed by Batman: against Batman’s

vigilantism, the system generates its own illegal

excess in a vigilante much more violent than

Batman.

There is poetic justice, therefore, when Wayne plans

to reveal his identity as Batman and Dent jumps in

and names himself as Batman – he is more Batman

than Batman, actualising the temptation to break

the law that Wayne was able to resist. When, at the

end of the �lm, Batman assumes responsibility for

the crimes committed by Dent to save the

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reputation of the popular hero who embodies hope

for ordinary people, his act is a gesture of symbolic

exchange: �rst Dent takes upon himself the identity

of Batman, then Wayne – the real Batman – takes

Dent’s crimes upon himself.

The Dark Knight Rises pushes things even further. Is

Bane not Dent taken to an extreme? Dent draws the

conclusion that the system is unjust, so that, to

�ght injustice e�ectively, one has to turn directly

against the system and destroy it. Dent loses his

remaining inhibitions and is ready to use all manner

of methods to achieve this goal. The rise of such a

�gure changes things entirely. For all the

characters, Batman included, morality is relativised

and becomes a matter of convenience, something

determined by circumstances. It’s open class

warfare – everything is permitted in defence of the

system when we are dealing not just with mad

gangsters, but with a popular uprising.

Should the �lm be rejected by those engaged in

emancipatory struggles? Things aren’t quite so

simple. We should approach the �lm in the way one

has to interpret a Chinese political poem. Absences

and surprising presences count. Recall the old

French story about a wife who complains that her

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husband’s best friend is making illicit sexual

advances towards her. It takes some time until the

surprised friend gets the point: in this twisted way,

she is inviting him to seduce her. It is like the

Freudian unconscious that knows no negation; what

matters is not a negative judgement of something

but that this something is mentioned at all. In The

Dark Knight Rises, people power is here, staged as an

event, in a signi�cant development from the usual

Batman opponents (criminal mega-capitalists,

gangsters and terrorists).

Strange attraction

The prospect of the Occupy Wall Street movement

taking power and establishing a people’s democracy

on the island of Manhattan is so patently absurd, so

utterly unrealistic, that one cannot avoid asking the

following question – why does a Hollywood

blockbuster dream about it? Why does it evoke this

spectre? Why does it even fantasise about OWS

exploding into a violent takeover? The obvious

answer – that it does so to taint OWS with the

accusation that it harbours a terrorist or totalitarian

potential – is not enough to account for the strange

attraction exerted by the prospect of “people

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power”. No wonder the proper functioning of this

power remains blank, absent; no details are given

about how the people power functions or what the

mobilised people are doing. Bane tells the people

they can do what they want – he is not imposing his

own order on them. This is why external critique of

the �lm (claiming that its depiction of OWS is a

ridi culous caricature) is not enough. The critique

has to be immanent; it has to locate inside the �lm a

multitude of signs that point towards the authentic

event. (Recall, for instance, that Bane is not just a

bloodthirsty terrorist but a person of deep love,

with a spirit of sacri�ce.)

In short, pure ideology isn’t possible. Bane’s

authenticity has to leave traces in the �lm’s texture.

This is why The Dark Knight Rises deserves close

reading. The event – the “People’s Republic of

Gotham City”, a dictatorship of the proletariat in

Manhattan – is immanent to the �lm. It is its

absent centre.

Slavoj Žižek’s latest book is “Less Than Nothing: Hegel

and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism” (Verso,

£50)