"... a graphic depiction of the tyranny and violence inherent in every radical leftist movement from the French Revolution to Occupy Wall Street; and a tribute to those who find redemption in the harsh circumstances of their lives rather than allow those circumstances to mire them in resentment."
Says Andrew Klavan (in the WSJ).
Let me restate an old theme of mine: Art is right wing, even when the artists will only consciously voice political opinions of the left-wing kind.
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54 comments:
Obviously Orangehead hadn't seen the movie.
It is funny that the left believes they can link the movie's villian, Bane, who is an OWS type criminal, to Romney because of Bain Capital.
Why it is almost as if the left are stupid or something.
To echo what Roger Kimball said recently, the reason there is so much bad art today is because self-styled “artists” are obsessed with 1. Novelty; 2. Extremity; and 3. Trying ignorantly to politicize their own works.
You mean that art is intrinsically libertarian. That much is obvious.
Commercial art, as Limbaugh routinely preaches, has no politics. What sells, markets.
Saw it last Thursday with a couple of friends of mine who I used to work with. The villains in the movie were:
1) A cult of assassins lead who were dedicated to saving the Earth by destroying western civilization
2) A rival corporate CEO who used stock fraud to try to steal Wayne Enterprises who had a nearly identical name to an antagonist from an Ayn Rand novel
3) Occupy Gotham City
4) The head of a non-profit
5) 1,000 “victims” of a the Dent Act who were unjustly imprisoned for being violent criminals
The heroes were:
1) The CEO of Wayne Enterprises
2) His Butler who previously ran an anti-Nazi underground
3) The CCPD particularly its Commissioner and newest Detective
4) The President of Wayne Enterprises
5) A jewel thief looking for a fresh start
While I wholeheartedly agree with Klavan's points about the fundamental fairness of the free market as well as the essentially small "l" libertarian worldview behind his work here, I caution people to not presume that any of Nolan's Batman films can be read in an exclusively libertarian-conservative mindset. Forbes ran an article:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2012/07/27/the-dark-knight-rises-is-not-about-occupy-wall-street/
... linking to a ThinkProgress piece describing Nolan's 3 Batman films through a liberal's viewpoint (any more than one link and Yahoo makes my comments disappear, so I'm only linking the Forbes parent article). While that piece is not without flaws - for example, the claim that the Occupy movement "hasn’t really damaged anything other than public grass" is pure, unadultrated bullshit rewriting of recent history and substituting an outright lie for fact - its essential argument regarding political systems and general societal desire for freedom from fear of more than just criminals is not easily dismissable. Nor should it be. It's good food for thought, even when you come to different conclusions about whether a given theme is truly liberal/leftist or libertarian/conservative/right.
This is not to say that libertarian-conservative themes are not present in any of the films. It's definitely not to say that such a reading of those values into the works is in error (on the contrary; it's entirely legitimate). It's only to say that the thematic scope is wider that simplistic political labels, and it's rather amazing that the film has elements that resonate with both sides of the right-left divide.
So in the end, I would indeed say that it's legit to celebrate the presence and unashamed portrayals of essentially conservative and libertarian values. I would, however, caution against thinking that those are the only ones that are evident. Both Klavan and Kain, Spross & Beauchamp have legit readings of the thematic core of the trilogy. No one political side can claim them as their own.
"Art is right wing ..."
If so, that must be one strange looking bird -- the kind that only a gov'tal committee could come up with, a misshapen thing that would never get off the ground.
Art and politics have different origins and an antagonistic relationship. The one comes from individual effort, the other from 'you didn't make that' collectivism. But left wing/right wing talk is focused on message, not origins or process. So the syllogism doesn't really work.
If you have a Batcave, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen.
Take "High Noon" as an example. On one level it was an anti-McCarthyism parable. That's presumably left wing. But the sheriff who stood up to do what he believed to be his duty, at the risk not only of his life but also of his marriage, was a hero, an exemplar of individualism, courage, and freedom. That makes the movie, to me, anyway, right wing. Most movies about heroes seem to be more right wing than left, no matter who made them.
Klavan sure read a lot into a rather silly movie, but yes, I guess there were some well-placed digs at people who would take a thug's pronouncements of nobility and fairness at face value. But I agree with Tibore above: one could read the movie in a variety of ways.
Which makes it no different from a lot of movies. Righties or Lefties watching The Hunger Games and reading the books could see the same things, read the same words, and come up with vastly different conclusions.
Art exists mostly in bourgeoise capitalist societies. The great topic of such art is mostly the inequity of bourgeoise capitalist societies. Where is the Marxist Willie Loman or Madame Bovary? There are no great plays or novels about the Marxist death mills.
"Art exists mostly in bourgeoise capitalist societies."
Like the caves at Lascaux, for instance.
Art is apolitical, even when it appears to be political.
Art is political, especially when it appears to be apolitical.
"It is funny that the left believes they can link the movie's villian, Bane, who is an OWS type criminal, to Romney because of Bain Capital."
Who on "the left" is doing that? Rather, a few overexcited rightwingers have imagined that Nolan was using a villain named Bane to smear Romney.
"Where is the Marxist Willie Loman or Madame Bovary? There are no great plays or novels about the Marxist death mills."
As to your second point first, this may be because there have never been any Marxist death mills. However, Alexander Solzhenitsyn did write a pretty good book about life in Stalin's prison camps, ONE DAY IN THE LIFE OF IVAN DENISOVICH.
As to your first point, what do you mean, exactly? I'm sure Arthur Miller wrote DEATH OF A SALESMAN from a leftist perspective, if not "Marxist," and probably meant it in part, at least, as a critique of our mercenary economic system. MADAME BOVARY, as well, is seen as a critique of the petty bourgeousie by Flaubert, which, if not a "leftist" perspective, necessarily, can hardly be considered a "rightist" perspective either.
I remember the flack Johnny Ramone took when he declared in an interivew, "punk rock is right wing". In the same interview, he said Reagan was the best president in his life. He explained that people often gravitate towards liberalism when they are young, but over time they come to understand how the world really works and they become conservative.
Of course, he joins Alice Cooper, Ted Nugent, Dave Mustaine, and others. Moe Tucker, drummer for the Velvet Underground, showed up at Tea Party events and gave inerviews about her conservative political views and distate for socialism.
Robert Cook wrote, "As to your second point first, this may be because there have never been any Marxist death mills."
Please elucidate. I hope you're not trotting out the hoary "Stalin was not a Marxist" theme.
Robert Cook said...
"Where is the Marxist Willie Loman or Madame Bovary? There are no great plays or novels about the Marxist death mills."
As to your second point first, this may be because there have never been any Marxist death mills. However, Alexander Solzhenitsyn did write a pretty good book about life in Stalin's prison camps, ONE DAY IN THE LIFE OF IVAN DENISOVICH.
And Stalin was a ......................?
He also wrote ,"The First Circle" and "The Gulag Archipelago"
20 million and that's rounding down.
As movies go it was just pure escapism. I just enjoy Gary Oldman being an American. Other than that,meh.
My wife goes to the movies to be entertained. Things like symbolism, archetypes, none of that matters to her. She just doesn't want to think about it.
Millions of movie goers share her point of view. I would guess roughly 90% if not more.
Bane as a character is the anti-Batman. Pretending to be suave, and sophisticated, he was raised in a prison where his mother, a whore, was killed by the warden. Opposing him is Bruce Wayne. Beloved scion of a beloved family, whose parents were killed by a criminal. A true jet setter, hiding his suaveness under a facade of debauchery.
The tie in with Raj A Ghuls sect was just a ploy to tie the three movies together.(I thgought the first movie the weakest of the three) To be fair, I haven't seen TDKR yet because I'm still incapacitated at home.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
"And Stalin was a ......................?"
A sociopathic dictator. Really, Rusty, I'm sure you knew this.
Re: Thorley Winston:
2) His Butler who previously ran an anti-Nazi underground
Hmm. Are you sure that's what it was? Don't you recall his little parable from the last movie about burning the Burmese jungle down to catch a bandit?
Anyhow, I think it's probably reading too much into the movie to assign either a pro-Capitalist or pro-Anarchy message to it -- the political philosophies the characters espouse don't drive the plot, and serve as (obvious) covers for their true motivations, whether revenge or escape or atonement.
If there's a political message at all, it's that people who mouth words like social justice and liberation and clean energy are lying psychopaths. But I don't think that's the "message" of the film at all -- it's just incidental, in that those are fun words to put in the villains' mouths and tweak the audience with.
As to your second point first, this may be because there have never been any Marxist death mills.
That's because Marxism has never really been tried, right?
Oh, wait: Lenin tried it, but the resulting poverty and ruin exceeded even the misery of the Czars. So Lenin then added the New Economic Policy to try and spur some growth, but that resulted in too many prosperous individuals. So Lenin then concocted Leninism - since he knew Marxism could not work - and that gave birth to the state police system that enabled Uncle Joe Stalin to purge, murder, create death mills, and otherwise terrorize everyone in the good old USSR.
"I hope you're not trotting out the hoary 'Stalin was not a Marxist' theme."
No. The rather more obvious one that Karl Marx was never a politician or head of state and never involved in the creation of any concentration camps.
I doubt, however, that Stalin was particularly concerned with Marx's writings except as a basis to claim validity for the tyranny of the Soviet State for which he was largely responsible. If you want to blame Karl Marx for the Stalinist concentration camps and mass executions, then, by the same rationale, one must blame Jesus Christ for the horrible tortures and mass murders committed by the Spanish Inquisition.
I guess, though, on some level, it's difficult to make Bruce Wayne into some kind of anti-capitalist hero (though I am sure people have tried). He's (a) a plutocrat, who (b) inherited his wealth along with a gigantic manor house, and (c) spends his evenings beating up poor muggers (and themed supervillains).
I think some of that has developed over the years as part of his evolution into a kind of gothic hero. For example, Wired (I think) had a gallery showing the evolution of his mansion. Early depictions aren't particularly mansion-like (they look like a large suburban house). I don't think it becomes a gothic palace until Tim Burton's Batman movie. And of course, the gothic palace matches the image of the doomed hero in his crumbling ancestral pile, last of a lordly line, attended by the faithful old retainer, etc. etc.
Not compatible with OWS. A stretch to see him as an avatar of modern capitalism too, though.
***SPOILERS***
Selena Kyle makes the best left-wing argument - to paraphrase, that if the fabulously wealthy spend too much time reveling in their fabulous wealth and forgetting about the little guys, then someday it will come back to bite them on the ass. Not necessarily because wealth is immoral, but because, eventually, people who are both hungry and envious will take matters into their own hands. Bane, like any good left-wing thug from Lenin to Mao to Obama, exploits this feeling for his own nefarious ends, but the fact remains a society made up of just gentry and serfs will not be stable over the long term, at least not in a world where fertilizer and diesel fuel are freely available.
Bruce Wayne screwed up - he went all-in on a massive "green energy" project, and tanked his company - crippling its ability to provide good jobs and to use profits for charitable ends. He tried to solve the world's (supposed) biggest problem with a one-shot super-solution, and instead lost sight of all the people he was responsible for. And created a bomb to boot.
There are tons of interesting themes like this in the movie - some overlapping and some contradictory.
One last thought, since Wayne Enterprises was no longer showing a profit, not only could it not fund the orphanages it had been sponsoring for years, but it probably didn't have much of a tax bill either. So this zombie corporation really wasn't much good to anyone. All because Bruce Wayne bought into the "sustainable energy" hoax.
Robert Cook said...
"I hope you're not trotting out the hoary 'Stalin was not a Marxist' theme."
No. The rather more obvious one that Karl Marx was never a politician or head of state and never involved in the creation of any concentration camps.
I doubt, however, that Stalin was particularly concerned with Marx's writings except as a basis to claim validity for the tyranny of the Soviet State for which he was largely responsible. If you want to blame Karl Marx for the Stalinist concentration camps and mass executions, then, by the same rationale, one must blame Jesus Christ for the horrible tortures and mass murders committed by the Spanish Inquisition.
7/30/12 1:13 PM
Marxism was the impetus for one and Christ was the impetus for the other.
If neither existed then the resulting misery based on their creed wouldn't have existed.
The more I see of Klavan, the more I think he's kind of a crank.
And no, I definitely don't think art is inherently right-wing, unless you're one of those people who insists that fascism is a creature of the right. Art is made by artists, who believe in creation and control by their very essential nature. It lends itself to conspiracy-mindedness, apophenia, experimentation, and political creativity. These are not conservative or right-wing characteristics.
Journalism, on the other hand, is inherently conservative and reactionary. Done rightly, it delves into the details and dirt of the real world, which is inherently grounded and chaotic. Journalism, done properly, presents to the audience a world of stubborn facts, stubborn people, and irrational actors at odds with each other and even at odds with themselves.
Art, on the other hand, is full of otherworldly ideals and platonic lies of world-striding competence.
Journalism is tragic. Art is romantic.
"Art, on the other hand, is full of otherworldly ideals and platonic lies of world-striding competence."
Disagree! Art is about reality, albeit as seen through the lens of an individual (or individuals). What you're talking about, otherworldly ideals and platonic lies, is called propaganda. And creation, and control and autonomy over your own product - these are very conservative characteristics.
Re: Holdfast
Selena Kyle makes the best left-wing argument - to paraphrase, that if the fabulously wealthy spend too much time reveling in their fabulous wealth and forgetting about the little guys, then someday it will come back to bite them on the ass.
That's not a left-wing argument, that's classic Bismarckian aristocratic socialism.
And creation, and control and autonomy over your own product - these are very conservative characteristics.
It's a continuum, but the more concrete the medium, the less art, the more description - and the more imaginative, the more art, the less description. Agreed? The artist cuts corners via various techniques to present things of great cost and effort through a sort of imitation. The painter (or more recently, cgi artist) creates vast awe-inspiring cities of infinite depth and sky-darkening towering spires which could never, ever be built by mortal men. Super-Manhattans, entire worlds covered from pole to pole in Manhattan gone metastatic like Coruscant or Trantor - these are the fascist dreams of the artist let loose to play in the platonic sandbox.
The left-wing fascist artist is a dreamer who puts the abstracted proletariat of the mind to work in the salt-mines of his imagination. The right-wing conservative journalist is a grind who endlessly stomps through factories stinking of oil, flop-sweat, and poor ventilation, between the seized-up machines swarming with repairmen; then outside through the half-paved, half-ruined streets of the half-working city to follow those repairmen home to see how they spend the spoils of their frustration.
Re: Balgefor
But your Bismarkian socialism requires that all such assistance to the poor be done by the state via taxes (ok, Bismarkian taxes would probably look pretty good right now . . . ), whereas the Wayne foundation was previously known for doing a lot of good works though private philanthropy.
It's also about attitude - it's good to be rich, but you don't have to be a jerk and rub it in people's faces all day, especially in a crappy economy. Everybody assumes Bill Gates has a nice car, good vacations, access to private jet, etc., but he's fairly reserved about it, and he not only gives to charity, but he's also involved in how it is spent. And you never read about him hiring Fiddy Cent to perform at a Sweet 16 Party.
TDKR is pretty much anti-occupy and anti-green energy boondoggles. No wonder the left hates it.
"TDKR is pretty much anti-occupy and anti-green energy boondoggles. No wonder the left hates it."
Does "the left" hate it?
Cook - did you read the Slate review? The left abhors TDKR.
Liberal Film Critics Rail Against 'Fascistic' 'Dark Knight Rises' That Defends the 'One Percent'
"Marxism was the justification for one and Christ was the impetus for the other.
If neither existed then the resulting misery based on their creed wouldn't have existed."
Human beings are fairly violent and savage, but we have enough intellect to want to validate our violent impulses with high-sounding rhetoric and ideologies. Can we, for example, blame the Constitution for the depredations of the Bush and Obama administrations? No. But they do.
So...to be accurate, we may refer to Stalin's concentration camps or purges, (i.e., mass killings), or the Inquisition's (or the Church's) tortures and murders, but we cannot fairly hold Marx or Christ responsible for either. Their precepts were perverted by power-seeking human monsters and only those monsters can be blamed.
Yes indeed Marx advocated for violence:
Well it's hardly like the Bourgeoisie are just gonna give up the means of production and go about their merry lives. They're greedy little shits they are. Violence is needed. But of course, kill as least as possible when the time comes.
Yes Robert Cook - own this. These are YOUR people.
Alex, I don't read Slate. Is Slate considered "left?" Do they speak for the "left" as a whole?
I did see a very positive review of the film on COUNTERPUNCH a week or two back, and I would definitely consider COUNTERPUNCH a leftist website, although they do publish writers with a variety of views, (including, frequently, Paul Craig Roberts, a former Treasury official in the Reagan administration).
Cook - you don't deny that many in the left hate the message of TDKR?
Alex, you presume too much. I have never claimed to be a Marxist, and I've never read a word of him.
(BTW, if your sentence in blue is meant to be a hyperlink, it doesn't work for me.)
I can't answer the question, as I haven't paid too much attention to reviews of TDKR, but I certainly have not heard any hint of any sort of group outrage over the film from "the left." To the extent "the left" (whoever you think they may be) thinks at all about superheros, I'd expect they view them all as, by definition, fascistic.
I do see the article you link to by Sean Whitlock refers to three movie reviews and asserts from this that "liberal film critics across the country" have "blasted" TDKR.
Does "three" constitute the amorphous "left?" Or do they reflect the individual responses of the three quoted reviewers? Moreover, these reviewers seem to enjoy the film, but merely point to it's fascistic underpinnings. Well...Batman is fascistic. We can enjoy him as fiction, but we would not want him to operate in real life.
Re: Robert Cook:
I have never claimed to be a Marxist, and I've never read a word of him.
Really? I find that hard to believe. I admit, I read him only in translation, but I'd have thought every educated man in the modern period would have read at least some of his more entertainingly spittle-flecked passages from Das Kapital.
He is a more entertaining writer than one would expect, given the humourless po-faced solemnity of his modern acolytes.
Balfegor: It's not greatly surprising that a modern leftist would have never read a word of Marx. That was one of Jonah Goldberg's big points in his two books: the progressives maintain purity by forgetting or never learning the provenance of that which they believe. Thus, they don't go back to first principles first writers, first sources, because those are almost always compromised in some fashion - Victorian attitudes towards sex, or race, bad, obsolete science, silly pseudo-scientific notions polluting the original formulations, etcetera, etcetera. This is how people like Cook forget that Planned Parenthood started out as a scaldingly racist eugenics organizaation, for instance.
Thus, Cook can think of Karl Marx as this idealized scholar, almost Fabian social democrat-in-the-shell, and divorce him from the actual revolutionary proponent of violence and exploded economic theory. Because if you don't look at the writer himself, you can carry about with you a perfectly platonic ideal of the faultless progressive genius. Helps even more if you discard the man, Marx, and replace him with some bodiless faceless proponent of the Frankfurt School instead, right? Maybe an empty featureless void wrapped in a keffiyah, to get that Third-World frisson of virtue, yeah?
Re: Mitch H:
If that is the case, they are really missing out. Even when he is completely off base, Marx is hilariously full of himself. Here, for example, is his judgment of Bentham:
Bentham is a purely English phenomenon. Not even excepting our philosopher, Christian Wolff, in no time and in no country has the most homespun commonplace ever strutted about in so self-satisfied a way. The principle of utility was no discovery of Bentham. He simply reproduced in his dull way what Helvétius and other Frenchmen had said with esprit in the 18th century. To know what is useful for a dog, one must study dog-nature. This nature itself is not to be deduced from the principle of utility. Applying this to man, he that would criticise all human acts, movements, relations, etc., by the principle of utility, must first deal with human nature in general, and then with human nature as modified in each historical epoch. Bentham makes short work of it. With the driest naiveté he takes the modern shopkeeper, especially the English shopkeeper, as the normal man. Whatever is useful to this queer normal man, and to his world, is absolutely useful. This yard-measure, then, he applies to past, present, and future. The Christian religion, e.g., is "useful," "because it forbids in the name of religion the same faults that the penal code condemns in the name of the law." Artistic criticism is "harmful," because it disturbs worthy people in their enjoyment of Martin Tupper, etc. With such rubbish has the brave fellow, with his motto, "nuila dies sine line!," piled up mountains of books. Had I the courage of my friend, Heinrich Heine, I should call Mr. Jeremy a genius in the way of bourgeois stupidity.
Here he is mocking Theodore Mommsen:
In encyclopaedias of classical antiquities we find such nonsense as this — that in the ancient world capital was fully developed, "except that the free labourer and a system of credit was wanting." Mommsen also, in his "History of Rome," commits, in this respect, one blunder after another.
Here he is, being sarcastic about someone I never heard of:
Although Ure's work appeared 30 years ago, at a time when the factory system was comparatively but little developed, it still perfectly expresses the spirit of the factory, not only by its undisguised cynicism, but also by the naïveté with which it blurts out the stupid contradictions of the capitalist brain.
What are those from? Newspaper columns, or personal letters? I haven't read much Marx past the Manifesto and his contemporary newspaper commentary on the American Civil War - we all of us have our areas of familiarity, after all.
Mommsen I've heard of from Gibbon, who if I recall correctly, had little more respect for him than did Marx. Not that it didn't keep Gibbon from quoting him every third page in Decline and Fall.
Marx's Civil War commentary is pretty sharp - very pro-Union, reads like a 2004-era warblogger, or a Centennial pop-historian in full blovation mode.
They're from Das Kapital. Not even his best bits. They're just what comes up when I search for words like "stupid".
I think you may have Mommsen confused with the French fellow Gibbon cites all the time (don't recall the name). Mommsen is about a century after Gibbon if I recall rightly.
Who on "the left" is doing that?
Google is your friend.
I think you may have Mommsen confused with the French fellow Gibbon cites all the time (don't recall the name). Mommsen is about a century after Gibbon if I recall rightly.
Actually, it turns out that Mommsen kept getting cited against the text by the fabulously bitchy editor of the old Modern Library edition of Decline and Fall, one Oliphant Smeaton. I conflated Smeaton's superior attitude and his use of Mommsen to refute his author. In my defense, it's been 22 years since I read this as a college freshman. Still have the old brown books, though, just pulled them off the shelf to check.
Art is right wing, ESPECIALLY when the artists will only consciously voice political opinions of the left-wing kind
Art is right wing, ESPECIALLY when the artists will only consciously voice political opinions of the left-wing kind
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