Dark Knight Politics

No seguimento de Batman, Dark Knight Rises: Its Politics and Ours por Jeffrey Tucker:

The problem is that the film gives Gotham (and us) a choice between two forms of despotism, one “left wing” and one “right wing,” and asks us to choose the lesser of two evils. We can have one of two systems: bureaucratic/authoritarian or revolutionary/dictatorial. The idea of a self-managing society is just out of the question. The film biases that choice by showing one as offered by the evil villain and the other by a corrupt, yet stable status quo.

Do you see now? Dark Knight Rises replicates the choice that the present political system presents to us. We look at the choices and throw up our hands, knowing full well that neither really offers answers to the problem ..

It’s the two sides of the street fights between the Occupy protesters and the cops. It’s the left versus the right. It’s Republicans versus Democrats. It’s “law and order” versus revolutionary dictatorship. It’s Italian fascism versus Soviet communism. It’s the two sides of the Spanish Civil War. It is also the choice faced by old Rome in its late stage: rule by a corrupt oligarchy of the Senate or a cruel imperial dictatorship of Caesar.

It is the choice given to every nation in its late stages .. Dark Knight Rises doesn’t show us another way. It never shows us the option of a self-managing society where people are permitted to shape their own destinies apart from the will of two gangs of political elites. Whoever wins the great struggle over Gotham’s future, the results will be imposed from the top down.

The result is that viewers are left with a sense of hopelessness in the same way that the current political climate denies people authentic hope. Whatever happens will come from the center and top, leaving the rest of us unfree to manage our own lives, keep and use our own property, mind our own business and cobble together our own human associations. In The Dark Knight Rises, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are not even distant memories.