How The Dark Knight Ris­es fore­shad­owed the dawn of Trump

The streets of Gotham are bar­ren and dust­ed with snow. The build­ings are tall and life­less. This is a metrop­o­lis far removed from the high-rise slums of Bat­man Begins and the dirty sky­scrap­ers of The Dark Knight. Through­out his acclaimed tril­o­gy, direc­tor Christo­pher Nolan has used build­ings to chart Batman’s sto­ry. The Nar­rows reflect­ed how Gotham’s poor had been aban­doned, and the 2008 sequel’s fetishis­tic destruc­tion of land­marks and mon­u­ments showed the con­se­quences of the war on terror.

In The Dark Knight Ris­es, Nolan filmed in New York for the first time, and sap­ping the streets of per­son­al­i­ty was his was of sug­gest­ing the impact that polit­i­cal deci­sions have on a pop­u­la­tion. Gotham isn’t allowed to thrive under Bane (Tom Hardy) and the city almost dies because of the muz­zled menace’s actions. The Dark Knight’s Bush-Bin Laden para­ble has been writ­ten about count­less times before, and that film’s obses­sion with pol­i­tics trans­ferred into the sec­ond sequel.

Released in 2012, around the time that Oba­ma was mount­ing his re-elec­tion bid, The Dark Knight Ris­es ties up var­i­ous loose ends. One such plot point is the chang­ing of the guard. In the Dark Knight, Gor­don (Gary Old­man) is appoint­ed Com­mis­sion­er. The only good cop in the city has been pro­mot­ed to the high­est posi­tion of pow­er, and after a rough start, he man­ages to over­see eight years of rel­a­tive peace and sta­bil­i­ty. By hav­ing Gor­don spend the same amount of time in pub­lic office as a two-term pres­i­dent, Nolan is say­ing that the work done by the per­son elect­ed to save the day can only be undone by an unpop­u­lar successor.

Bane (Tom Hardy) is that suc­ces­sor. He becomes the city’s rogue sher­iff after tak­ing it by force. He has (lit­er­al­ly) been lay­ing the ground work for a long time, and very few peo­ple have both­ered to notice let alone take his threat seri­ous­ly. Bane’s pop­ulist rise to pow­er is too force­ful, and he eas­i­ly fends off any­one that oppos­es him. Gor­don is hos­pi­talised, and Bat­man is trapped in a hole in the ground. Bane’s sud­den rise is bru­tal on the peo­ple of Gotham, as he imme­di­ate­ly upends the social hier­ar­chy of the city for the greater good.

With his weird speak­ing pat­tern, he drones on about Gotham’s cit­i­zens tak­ing ​“con­trol of their city”. He pur­ports to be their ​“lib­er­a­tion”, the strong leader who’s look­ing out for the lit­tle guy. At first, Gotham is all for it; Bane’s wealth dis­tri­b­u­tion pol­i­cy sim­ply too entic­ing to ignore. He is cre­at­ing a fair­er world and tak­ing from the Gotham estab­lish­ment. Bane is the out­sider who has caused a storm so big the city’s big­wigs need to bat­ten down their hatch­es if they wish to survive.

Of course, Bane is a fraud – a tool for cer­tain sec­tions of the elite who has duped the city into believ­ing that he will fix their prob­lems. Bane may remove some of the estab­lish­ment by forc­ing them to walk across a thin­ly frozen riv­er, but the cit­i­zen with the nuclear trig­ger is one of Gotham’s extrem­ist elites. Bane is revealed to be the face of some­one else’s agen­da, and he has no qualms about the amount of destruc­tion he will cause to achieve their aims.

With Bane, Nolan posits that the politi­cians who pre­tend to help the peo­ple are only in it for the gain of a priv­i­leged few, that moral­i­ty is a thing of the past. The per­son who comes after peace will cre­ate war. The inclu­sion of the Scare­crow (Cil­lian Mur­phy) harkens back to Bat­man and Gordon’s begin­ning while indi­cat­ing the fal­la­cy of faux-politi­cians like Bane, for a scare­crow is always less than it seems.

In all dic­ta­tor­ships, how­ev­er, there is always hope. Bat­man and Gor­don are allowed to rise again. When the film was released some crit­ics saw it as a right-wing wet dream, as Bat­man, a One Per­center, saved Gotham. Inci­den­tal­ly, the cur­rent pres­i­dent-elect of the Unit­ed States reviewed the film for his YouTube chan­nel (spoil­er: he liked it). But Nolan’s movie is real­ly more cen­trist than it ini­tial­ly appears. Gotham’s cit­i­zens, in order to over­come an unqual­i­fied mani­ac, must put their faith in the estab­lish­ment. Bruce Wayne may be trapped down a hole, but he might as well be walk­ing in the woods being stopped for self­ies. In Nolan’s pseu­do-real­is­tic world, the estab­lish­ment fig­ures who put Bane in pow­er and are the only peo­ple who can stop him. It is the per­son in the mid­dle, whose views are not all that extreme, that can restore bal­ance to the city.

This notion of renewed faith in the estab­lish­ment is rein­forced through Batman’s rela­tion­ship with Gotham’s police force. Bruce becomes Bat­man because the police are too cor­rupt and Gotham’s elites need ​“dra­mat­ic exam­ples to shake them out of apa­thy.” In the Dark Knight Ris­es, the police sym­bol­ise the estab­lish­ment. Foley (Matthew Modine) wears an archa­ic uni­form and chas­es Bat­man because it is the easy thing to do. In the end, a giant bat-sym­bol on the bridge is a dra­mat­ic enough event to wake him out of his slum­ber. The sym­bol not only gives him hope, it mobilis­es him. Nolan pins real-world issues to his com­ic book mate­r­i­al and the elec­tion of a dem­a­gogue is enough to shake the elites out of their reverie.

Nolan’s tril­o­gy is often accused of being too cyn­i­cal, but as it draws to a spec­tac­u­lar close, the pop­ulist mon­ster has been van­quished. As Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s rook­ie cop ascends the bat-plat­form, it is clear that hope is on the oth­er side. What Nolan is telling us is that the night is dark­est before the dawn, and the dawn is near­ly here. For now, after eight years of rel­a­tive calm, we bet­ter get ready for a fight.