Occupy Gotham

Garrison and Mia discuss the parallels to Occupy Wall Street in 2012's The Dark Knight Rises, conspiracy theories surrounding the movie, and the problem of constituent power. 

https://libcom.org/article/utopia-rules-technology-stupidity-and-secret-joys-bureaucracy-david-graeber 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Alson Media.

Speaker 2 (00:08):
Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about stuff
falling apart and how it can maybe come back together.
I'm Garrison Davis. Joining me today is Mia Wong. Hello. Hello.

Speaker 1 (00:20):
So I don't know what this episode is about. I
have been told the words David Graeber, and that's that's
that's all I know.

Speaker 2 (00:29):
Gra Graber will will come up. So we've we've been
We've had a lot of you know, upsetting stuff that
that's been covered on the pod recently. It's it's it's
not a it's not it's not a great time in
the world. It's a lot of upsetting things happening. But
I thought we we might get a small reprieve from

(00:50):
all of the all of the uh real real world
chaos and mayhem to talk about some fake world chaos
and mayhem. And it's also the it's also you know,
it's we are we are vastly approaching the holiday season,
which means that I I think next week am doing
my yearly Batman Returns watch party, which I am extremely

(01:13):
excited about. Is it's gonna it's gonna be a fun time, uh,
which is it's probably it's probably the best Batman movie.
Oh No, it's just about the aesthetics. The aesthetics are unparalleled.
But I'm discovering what this episode is about. But there
is another Batman movie that's also set during winter time,

(01:34):
which is also also very political, because Batman Returns is
weirdly political. We have the Penguin running for mayor. It
exposes the the corrupt core of our political system. And
there is another Batman movie, also set during winter that
tries to expose the corrupt core of the political system,
which is Christopher Nolans twenty twelve. The Dark Knight Rises,

(01:58):
a not very good movie which which I think we
have We have referenced before because there's this one essay
by one David Graber which really gets into the film
which we're gonna which we're gonna get to. But the
reason why I actually put together this episode, or I
wanted to do this, is because when I was at
the Ghost conference earlier this year in Seaside, Oregon, as

(02:21):
you can listen to that two parter which came out
last Halloween, I got a whole bunch of old magazines
from this conspiracy talk radio host. Now I love collecting
old magazines. I find them endlessly fascinating. We have this
one from two thousand and three called MK Zine. Uh

(02:41):
oh no. On the cover, we have a mind control,
ritual abuse and political implications, the cult of national insecurity.
I've not I've not flipped through this one super in
depth before because I'm more taken aback by the other
magazine I got from twenty twelve called Paranoia the Conspiracy Reader.

(03:04):
On this cover, we have beyond MK Ultra Satellite Terrorism
in America, science fiction or space faction. Oh no, and
Dark Knight kill programming, which is obviously the one we're
going to be talking about here today. No is this
the Sandy thing? No? No, this is this is this

(03:26):
will briefly get into the Aurora mass shooting because this
comes up in this in this article. I'm not going
to get too into that's actually not the focus.

Speaker 1 (03:34):
Yeah, I think I'm realizing, I'm confusing, my you're confusing.
Your's actually no twelve mass shootings. No, there's that because
there is actually a Alex Jones conspiracy that there was
predictive programming in the Dark Knight returns or the Dark
Knight rises.

Speaker 2 (03:50):
That's what this is going to be about. Oh okay, Okay, okay, yes,
this is by discount Alex Jones, Clyde Lewis, who lives
in power. Goddamn it. There's there's some pretty fun stuff
in this issue, which we might get to later at
the end to kind of close out all of our
political mamba jomba that that we will actually get into
as well. But I want to first look at how

(04:12):
conspiracy theorists read this movie and how they read the
political aspects of this movie, because this movie is obviously
very political if you've seen it, we will we will
get into some of some of the stuff, but I
want to I want to talk about how these conspiracy
theorists saw this movie because the way that they do
political analysis of media is very different from the way

(04:34):
actual academics and people who take this stuff seriously do
political analysis of media. And I think there's an interesting
juxtaposition there. So this is this is the cover page
for this story. The Storm is coming.

Speaker 3 (04:47):
Oh no, no, saves one already off for bands start, yes, yes,
all right, So I will read a little bit from
this magazine and then we can kind of talk about
it and then compare to uh to our our colleague
David Graeber, as I was watching Christopher Nolans The Dark
Knight Rises, I didn't know the political substance right away,

(05:08):
which is a great way to start.

Speaker 4 (05:09):
This because the film is so obviously political. This this movie,
like the Reeple whoever like this movie like starts with
Bain literally saying he's going to occupy Wall Street and
like seizing beflow.

Speaker 2 (05:23):
See this is Wall Street, this, this is this is
what we will soon be debated. But anyway, I only
saw it as a bit of predictive programming and a
believable scenario as to how it might all begin. In
The Dark Knight Rises, Catwoman as Selena Kyle and Batman
as Bruce Wayne are dancing at a socialight gathering when

(05:43):
Selena purs in his ear. There's a storm coming, mister Wayne.
As it turns out, The Dark Knight Rises is a
damning indictment of the anti corporate movement and the threat
of social chaos it poses. Despite rallying people around their
deceased hero Harvey Dent, the rich are losing their grip
on Gotham City. Antagonist Bain played by Tom Hardy, and

(06:04):
his League of Shadows rise up against the bankers and
the elite billionaires like Bruce Wayne and attack Wall Street,
savagely beating the rich while promising the good people of
Gotham that tomorrow you claim what is right for yours.
Bain's organized violence against the wealthy evokes the reality of
Occupy Wall Street, but Bain is no Robin Hood. He

(06:26):
is plotting a massive transfer of wealth through stock exchange
after inciting civil unrest and taking control of cutting age
weapons technologies whose algorithm can be directly traced to Bruce Wayne,
software which will avail them from the fortunes of the rich.
As the war between the people and the police in
the Dark Knight Rises indicates, the predictive programming of statistical
data could very well undermine the one percent and send

(06:49):
them into the streets where the disgruntled will eat them.
Fraudulent practices will be exposed, identity theft, credit card fraud,
securities fraud, and a number of other practices that the
elite do in order to bilk the poor out of
their money. This is one interesting thing about these sorts
of kind of conspiracy radio guys, how they're both against
the elite but also fundamentally also for the elite. Like

(07:12):
this film is celebrated as being you know, like it's
deriding the anti corporate occupy movement, which they hate because
they hate they would dislike, you know, a left wing
popular uprising. But in the end they actually prefer this
corporate like illuminati to the actual alternative.

Speaker 1 (07:30):
Well, and it's it's interesting too, Like the ways that
they think that, like rich people exploit people is through.

Speaker 2 (07:36):
Like credit card fraud is like that, that's how you
think rich people get rich, Like really, like all right,
we are almost at the end here. Christopher Nolan's epic
sounds the alarm of the advent of an organized puppet
master anarchy that plans to topple the government by exposing
and gutting the fortunes of the elite. In real life,

(07:58):
it might look like an occupy. In this reads sands
and evil drums soundtrack pounding out the perennial battle between
the haves and the have nots, while the dark Knight
rises acknowledges the systemic inequality and injustice. It is not
the rich, but anarchy that is the bane of Gotham's existence.
Get It, Get it on. Nolan portrays the occupy anti

(08:20):
hero bane as a demagogue, ultimately seeking to speculate on
legitimate grievances and when Baine or hands the reigns of
power over to the people, they really won't know what
to do with it, which is something that never happens
in the movie. By the way. Oh now this is
at this point Clyde Lewis stops talking to the movie
and instead it talks about this bit of predictive programming

(08:44):
in the movie, which has which has a few kind
of aspects. Then there is the intriguing subplot that seemingly
seeped into reality on the eve of The Dark Knight
Rise's release, that a software company takes its findings to
the Supreme Court and exposes so called political heroes which
would lead to riots and marauding shooters creating mass casualties.

(09:04):
Imagine that intelligence is aware of the threat and issues
a declassified memo from the Department of Homeland Security warning
law enforcement that terrorists could be killing people in movie theaters.
All that is needed is the catalyzing event, and immediately
the police estate is activated. Flash riots take place in cities,
civil unrest bruise under the radar. Truth becomes stranger than

(09:25):
fiction as we examine the media stories surrounding the main
story of the so called brainwashed low nut James Holmes
opening fire in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, on
July twenty, twenty twelve, and allegedly killing twelve and injuring
fifty nine others. Interesting use of the word allegedly there
in regarding regarding the people that were killed. Oh boy.

(09:48):
And then the next sentence is really where things pick up.
Not only is James Holmes connected to the neuroscience super
Soldier Peak Soldier performance experiments, but his fa there works
for a software company that analyzes fraud. So I'm not
going to actually read the next bit because it is
just the ramblings of conspiracy brained lunatic who thinks that

(10:11):
because the shooter's dad was a neuroscientist, that therefore his
son must have been this victim of a super soldier
program to brainwash you to activate the police state once
you receive a bit of predictive programming, and the other
will I will get to one other paragraph and then

(10:32):
will be done with this article, because there's really not
much more substance quote. The chilling predictive programming looming behind
the dark Knight Rises does not escape at least the
unconscious of those watching. Bain, the leader of the fictional
anarchist mob, decides to plant bombs in the Gotham underground,
the final target being a stadium where the Mayor of

(10:54):
Gotham attends a sports event. A young boy sings the
national anthem with a British act scent. Bain pauses to
listen to the distinct voice, then says Nott the gerberge brigand,
after which the stadium is bombed and the mayor is
killed in his reserved viewing box. Now, Clyde Lewis believes

(11:16):
that this was a bit of predictive programming in order
to prepare people for a mash casualty event at the
London twenty twelve Olympics, which you might you might know
did not happen. Was not yea was not a thing.
But he is convinced that this is part of some
predictive programming to either trigger this event, or cover up

(11:36):
this event, or allude to this event again an event
that did not happen. So that's you know, as as
as we're going to be talking about, you know, how
people view mass uprising and political movements in media. For
the for the rest of this episode. This is how
a certain sect of conservative does their own media analysis,

(11:57):
which I think is a really is a really fun,
really fun look into how their brains operate sorting a
very political film into these into these predictive programming boxes.
But we will we will return to talk about the
Virgin David Graeber and the Chad Mark Fisher. After this
ad break, we are back. I am. I am waiting

(12:32):
watching for the rich to be thrown from their balconies
as wealth as redistributed and a man in a very
fancy coat takes over a sporting event. So I read
almost every like serious political analysis of the doctment rices
that I could find from fascists, from conservatives, from liberals,
and from leftists and anarchists. Everyone agrees that this film

(12:55):
has some very very obvious occupy parallels. We're going to
get into how much of those are actually kind of
built into the film's production versus how much of those
are more or less coincidental. Now unfortunately for me, not
actually unfortunately, because I actually do like Graber a lot,
but his analysis was by far the best out of

(13:18):
anybody else's in regards to this film. Unfortunately, the UH
the schizoid, acid fueled chaos magic of Mark Fisher kind
of paled in comparison to the precision of the anthropologist
David Graeber in terms of their analysis of this film,
but both of them had roughly the same opinion. Graber
has just went into a lot more depth about how

(13:39):
kind of this film actually politically operates. So I'll be
mostly talking about in quoting from Graber, with a few
things from Fisher kind of mixed in, and then we'll
compare it to some stuff in Breitbart and The Daily
Caller and a few other reactions from liberals who enjoyed
the film too much and are are are unwilling to

(13:59):
kind of seed this conservative ground to Nolan's twenty twelve film.
And I think this is actually really interesting to talk
about this film this year after the release of Oppenheimer,
which I think is Nolan's probably most politically mature work.
And he has definitely grown a lot in the past
ten years as a filmmaker, at least in terms of
his ability to get into politics in a way that

(14:21):
is not just purely reactionary, where I think a lot
of his early films are kind of absorbed by this reactionariness,
and I think I think he has matured a decent bit,
at least as as a political filmmaker. So we will
start with a paragraph from Graber quote Christopher Nolan's Batman.

(14:42):
The Dark Knight Rises, not the title of the film
is really a piece of anti occupy propaganda. Christopher Nolan,
the director, claims that the script is written before the
movement even started, and that the famous scenes of the
occupation of New York Gotham City were really inspired by
Dickens's account of the French Revolution. This is probably true,
but it's disingenuous. Everyone knows Hollywood scripts are continually rewritten

(15:05):
while movies are in production, and when it comes to messaging,
even details like precise wording or where a scene a
shot can make all the difference. Then there's the fact
that the villains actually do attack the stock Exchange. Still,
it's precisely this ambition, the filmmaker's willingness to take on
the great issues of the day that ruins the movie.
So the script was written well before Occupy started. Shooting

(15:29):
for Dark Knight Rises ended two months after the start
of Occupy. Most of the shooting for the film took
place before Occupy even happened, and now in twenty eleven,
it was widely misreported that the movie was going to
be filming at Occupy itself, which started from like I
think something in the La Times, which just got blown out,

(15:51):
blown out of proportion. Was not true. They did shoot
in New York, but they did not shoot at Occupy
yeampubliccause you would have got run out probably Now, leading
up to twenty eleven, both Nolan and what became Occupy
were on very similar conceptual roads. They were just leading
to two very different places. The Dark Knight released in

(16:12):
the middle of the two thousand and eight financial crisis,
right after the two thousand and eight writers strike ended,
so there were a lot of class issues circling around
in Nolan's bubble. So it made sense that Nolan's next
Batman flick would tackle these things that rose to cultural
prominence by the time he finished The more Patriot Act
inspired at The Dark Knight. Now, Nolan and other writers

(16:32):
obviously saw economic inequality and corruption seating people's anger and
the rising possibility of civil unrest, and that was put
into the script and then it just happened two months
before they finished shooting. Now Nolan also took a lot
from the Tale of Two Cities. This probably more than
anything else. The Dark Knight rices is actually based on
the Tale of Two Cities, a passage of which is

(16:53):
read at the end of the film, And there's plenty
of parallels to the Front Revolution, including the storming of Bestile.
Actually two prison breaks inside the Dark Knight rises. There
is the release of Black Eight, and then there's of
course when Bruce Wayne escapes the giant hole in the
ground and frees the other prisoners as well. So still,

(17:13):
throughout all of these kind of class issues that Nolan
is talking about in this film, he still shows a
deep distrust of populism, or at the very least feared
how easily it could be subverted in a charged financial climate.
I'm going to read one quote from Fisher here. Quote.
When Nolan revived the Batman franchise in two thousand and five,

(17:34):
the setting Gotham in the midst of an economic depression
seemed like an achronistic reference to the superhero's origins in
the nineteen thirties. Two thousand and eight, the Dark Knight
was too early to register the impact of the financial crisis,
but the Dark Knight Rises clearly attempts to respond to
the two thousand and eight situation. The film isn't this
simple conservative parable that the right wingers would like, But

(17:54):
in the end it is a reactionary vision, which I
think is the fairest way to look at this film.
But now we're going to go deep into into Graber's analysis,
which is by far, probably one of the best write
ups on twentieth century superheroes and their role in American culture.

Speaker 1 (18:10):
It's my it's my favorite by far. This is the
one that I always like push on people when people
talk about Marvel.

Speaker 2 (18:15):
Because yes, no, absolutely, I mean this is this is
an essay that you've referenced a lot on this show.
I've been I've been going into a bit of a
graver resurgence lately. I deeply enjoyed his essay on Puppets,
which I'm going to respond to by writing an essay
on why nihilists hate puppets and except the U and
accept the adversarial framing of the police. But that is

(18:37):
a digression. Now we will we will get back to
Graber's essay in the New Inquiry titled Superposition.

Speaker 1 (18:44):
Oh the thing, the thing I want to mention here
about this essays he wanted to oh god, what was that?
He wanted to call it on Batman and the problem
of constituent power, but they wouldn't let him do it.

Speaker 2 (18:55):
So it's well super position instead. This is that is
certainly what it's actually about, constituent power. We will get
to that very shortly. So quote. Superheroes are a product
of their historical origins. Superman is a Depression era displaced
to Iowa farmboy. Peter Parker, a product of the sixties,
is a smartass, working class kid from Queens. Batman, the

(19:17):
billionaire playboy, is the scion of the military industrial complex
that was created just as he was at the beginning
of World War Two. I will say the early origins
of Batman are far divorced from that, but that is
certainly what Batman has evolved into. Quote. These heroes are
purely reactionary in a literal sense. They have no projects
of their own, at least not in their roles as heroes.

(19:39):
Almost never do superheroes make, create, or build anything. The villains,
in contrast, are endlessly creative. They are full of plans
and projects and ideas. Clearly we are supposed to at first,
without constently realizing it, identify with the villains. After all,
they're the ones having all the fun. Then, of course
we feel guilty about it, reidentify with the hero and

(20:00):
have even more fun watching the super ego clubbing the
the Errant. It back into submission. This essay that Grab
wrote is very Freudian. Craper makes a lot of freud
references in this. I'm not gonna be getting into that
as much, but superheroes are also very very Freudian.

Speaker 1 (20:19):
Yeah, I want to I want to say one thing
about this specific passage or specifically the the the way
that you're encouraged identify with the hero and then like
that gets like that gets subverted. You're supposed to come
back to the hero.

Speaker 2 (20:30):
So this used to be a kind of so to
identify with the villain and then yeah, and then come
back back to the era.

Speaker 1 (20:36):
Yeah, so and this is part this works as like
a conserv ave project of conservative ideology, and this used
to be like an implicit thing in these movies. And
then you get to Black Panther, which is literally well
literally they just like that. That is just the me,
like like they they stopped being subtle and we're like, hey,
here's a guy who's an anti imperial list and then
the ending reveal is, oh my god, he's actually evil.

Speaker 2 (20:57):
In terms of Marvel, I would say, yes, I think
my two favorite superhero movies, which would be Tim Burton's
Batman and Batman Returns, do the reverse of this where
very obviously the villain is the main characters of both
of those and Batman is really just a side character.
And I think that was actually work better for this
medium so much more. Oh yeah, but when it comes

(21:18):
to Marvel, absolutely, yeah, yeah, they're just like openly doing this. Now.
It's really sort of like, yeah, it was what the
second one's about? Two? Yes, yes now. Grayber then talks
about kind of what the project of these comic books
were originally supposed to be and how that kind of
continues on today into pop culture. Quote. Politically speaking, superhero

(21:39):
comic books can seem pretty innocuous. If all a comic
is trying to do is tell a bunch of adolescent
boys that everyone has a certain desire for chaos and mayhem,
but ultimately such desires need to be controlled, the implications
would not seem especially dire, especially because the message still
does carry a healthy dose of ambivalence. After all, the
heroes of even the most rightly ining action movies seem
to spend much of their time mashing up suburban shopping malls,

(22:01):
something that many of us would like to do at
some point in our lives. In the case of most
comic book superheroes, however, the mayhem has an extremely conservative
political implication. This is where we can start getting into
God versus the people and using both of these things
as constructs. Right, neither of these things really fully exist
in a super material way. Both of these things are

(22:22):
constructs quote unquote God, quote unquote the people. They both
occupy a very similar ontological role, and this is something
that Graper gets into quote any power capable of creating
a system of law cannot itself be bound by them.
In the Middle Ages, the solution was simple. The legal
order was created either directly or indirectly by God. The English,

(22:42):
American and French revolutions changed all that when they created
the notion of popular sovereignty, declaring that the power once
held by kings and by extension, God, is now held
by an entity called the people. The people, however, are
bound by the laws. They are able to create the
laws through those revolutions themselves. But of course revolutions are

(23:05):
acts of law breaking, so laws emerge from illegal activity.
This creates a fundamental incoherence and the very idea of
modern government, which assumes that the state has a monopoly
on the legitimate use of violence. It's okay for police
to use violence because they are enforcing the law. The
law is legitimate because it's rooted in the constitution. The
constitution is legitimate because it comes from the people. That

(23:27):
people create the constitution by acts of illegal violence. It
all circles back on itself. Quote. The obvious question then,
is how does one tell the difference between the people
and a mere rampaging mob, Which is a question that
comes up all the time across the political spectrum, from
anarchists to fascists to liberals. This is a debate that

(23:48):
still goes on. Is without the law, what is the
difference between the people and just a lynch mob. Now
Graber doesn't really give an answer to this, because this
doesn't really have an answer. This is a very vague question,
and kind of, as Graver points out, it's vague by design. Quote.
The response by mainstream, respectable opinion is to push this

(24:08):
problem as far away as possible. The usual line is
that the age of revolutions is over. Now we can
change the constitution or legal standards by legal means. This
of course means that the basic structures will never change, unquote.
And this is where kind of Graver talks about how
the role of tradition has totally taken over the legal

(24:31):
implications of our system. Here, how the US, which was
you know, at once progressive in its like in its
electoral college and two party system, is now quite old
fashioned compared to a lot of other you know, popular
democratic countries. There's a good line quote we base the
legitimacy of the whole system on the consent of the people,

(24:51):
despite the fact that the only people who were ever
really consulted on the matter lived over two hundred years
ago in America at least, quote unquote, the people are
long since dead. So now we have this situation that
we have this idea of the legal order which comes
from God, which then came from armed revolution, and now
it just comes from this idea of sheer tradition. Now

(25:13):
there's obviously a lot of American politicians who would want
to give this power back to God.

Speaker 1 (25:20):
Yeah, but even then I was like, it's really hard
to actually do that. Like, even governments that are very
explicitly theocratic, like for example, like Oron, it's like, well,
they still have elections and they still have this like
the notion of popular sovereignty belonging to the people is

(25:45):
very hard to dislodge unless you're going to straight up
impose a monarchy. And even a lot of the monarchies
now are like, you know, they follow the European thing
of like claiming to like derive the authority from the
people or something.

Speaker 2 (25:56):
Sure, but we also we also have people like like
a Wall Michael Knowles, who are very openly like Castlic monarchists,
who yeh, you're getting a lot of prominence in American culture.

Speaker 1 (26:09):
Yeah, it's it's it's a like, I don't know, I
wish them bad luck.

Speaker 2 (26:14):
Yes, that is a that is a more moderate thing
I wish upon them. So back to Graber, quote, for
the radical left and the authoritarian right, the problem of
constituent power is very much alive, but each takes dimetrically
opposite approaches to the fundamental question of violence. Unquote. Now,

(26:36):
I think this is something that has I'd be interested
to see Graber revisit this idea now. Unfortunately that cannot
be the case, because this question of violence has certainly
evolved a lot in the ten years in which he
wrote this, both in terms of how the alt right operates,
but also also in terms of how the quote unquote
left views violence as a necessary political tool. But getting

(26:56):
into his analysis of the twentieth century, I think it
is still fairly accurate quote. The left, chastised by the
disasters of the twentieth century, has largely moved away from
its older celebration of revolutionary violence, preferring nonviolent forms of resistance.
Those who act in the name of something higher than
the law can do so precisely because they don't act
like a rampaging mob. For the right, on the other hand,

(27:17):
and this has been true since the rise of fascism
in the twenties, the very idea that there is something
special about revolutionary violence, anything that makes it different from
mere criminal violence, is so much self righteous twaddle. Violence
is violence, but that doesn't mean a rampaging mob can't
be the people, because violence is the real source of

(27:38):
law and political order. This is why, as Walter Benjamin noted,
we cannot help but admire the great criminal, because, as
so many movie posters have put it, he makes his
own law. After all, any criminal organization does inevitably begin
developing its own, often quite elaborate set of internal laws.
They have to as a way of controlling what would

(27:58):
otherwise be completely random violence. From the right wing perspective,
that's all law, ever, is. It is a means of
controlling the very violence that it brings into being and
through which it is ultimately enforced. Now, I think this
is also true of even certain aspects of the left,
where we have we don't call them laws, we might
call them like community guidelines or something, but we often

(28:19):
actually do this same process, especially in the anarchist kind
of formations that try to replicate gang formations, like purposefully
we get this this same essence that is developed in
order to people might you know, reject these to the
word police, but at least, you know, make some kind
of structure that deems which violence is acceptable and which

(28:41):
violence isn't. But back to Graber quote, this makes it
easier to understand the often surprising affinity between criminals, criminal gangs,
right wing political movements, and the armed representatives of the state. Ultimately,
they speak the same language, they create their own rules
on the basis of force. As a results, they typically
share the same broad political sensibilities. In Athens nowadays, there's

(29:01):
active collaboration between the crime bosses in poor immigrant neighborhoods,
fascist gangs, and the police. In fact, in this case,
it was clearly a political strategy. Faced with the prospect
of popular uprisings against a right wing government, the police
first withdrew protection from neighborhoods near the immigrant gangs, then
started giving tacit support to the fascists for the far right.

(29:22):
Then it is in that space where different violent forces
operating outside of the legal order interact that new forms
of power and hence of order can emerge. What does
this have to do with costume superheroes. Well everything, because
this is exactly the space that superheroes and supervillains also inhabit.
An inherently fascist space inhabited only by gangsters would be dictators,

(29:45):
police and thugs with endlessly blurring lines between them. Sometimes
the cops are legalistics, sometimes they're corrupt. Sometimes the police
themselves slip into vigilanteism. Sometimes they pursue the superhero, sometimes
they look the other way. Sometimes they help villains and
heroes a case a team up. The lines of force
are always shifting. If anything new where to emerge, it

(30:05):
could only be through such shifting forces. There's nothing else
since in the DC and Marvel universes, neither God nor
the people really exist. Now this is I think this
is great hitting on something that really actually does hit
at the core of this whole genre is that this
is the genre which is really only inhabited by the
uber mench as this like governing body. Right, there's there

(30:28):
really isn't the God in any kind of meaningful way.
There isn't the people in any kind of meaningful way.
There is just the super individual, the uber minch himself
is what inspired Joe Schuster and Jerry Siegel to create Superman.
Like that, this is this is the origin of this
entire genre.

Speaker 1 (30:43):
By the way I want to I want to mention
some some comic book nerds are gonna get very angry
here and be.

Speaker 2 (30:47):
Like, Wow, there's some one above all.

Speaker 1 (30:49):
It's like okay, like God, like there are there is
technically God in this right, but like God is the
thing that you can beat the crap out of. Like
it's not God in the sense of like God or
dame authority is bla bla bla blahah, Like no, it's not.
It's not the same thing this is. That's not what
we were talking about. Leave don't be pedanic in the comics,
and I'm.

Speaker 2 (31:07):
Talking like as like a literary tradition. God does not
operate as a significant role in these pieces of art
like that that like that, like if you're gonna be
looking at this genre as art for twelve year old boys,
God does not operate in a specific crucial role in
in this world's ontology.

Speaker 1 (31:25):
And it's funny too because one of the things that
happens after this is there's there's a thing called there's
a thing called Occupy Avengers, and they make this attempt
to bring the people.

Speaker 2 (31:34):
It's it's a shit show. It is awful.

Speaker 1 (31:37):
It's so bad, like it's well, and it's interesting to
you because like anytime they try to so that, that
was an attempt to bring in like sort of the
people as like a left wing constitutive body, and that
was a disaster. They tried to do it, like they've
tried to do it again, but the people exist as this.

Speaker 2 (31:55):
Sort of like very right wing like.

Speaker 1 (31:58):
Forced that is like as like this Bob that's constantly
on the edge of sort of like destroying society whatever,
and that's been like the most yeah, attempts to do it.

Speaker 2 (32:08):
Now, there are certainly attempts to bring in, like the
American political system into various aspects of comics, whether that's
like Lex Luthor being president, whether it's stuff like in
the I know this stuff and I think it's called
the Immortal Hulk has has has a lot of politics.
But I do think Raper's kind of point here is

(32:28):
still still still accurate and rings true. I have one
other paragraph from Graper then we'll kind of get into
a little bit more more discussion. Quote. Insofar as there
is a potential for constituent power, then it can only
come from purveyors of violence. The super villains and evil masterminds,
when they are not merely indulging in random acts of terror,

(32:49):
are always scheming of imposing a new world order of
some kind or another. Surely, if Red Skull King the
Conqueror or Doctor Doom did ever succeed in taking over
the planet, there'd be lots of new laws created very quickly.

Speaker 1 (33:01):
Yeah, And there was actually after he wrote this, there
was an arc where doctor dun successfully conquered the entire universe,
and he did, in fact do exactly that, which also
one another w for common David Graeber w.

Speaker 2 (33:14):
Which also does not last very long because if if
that happened for a while, it would make the story incredibly boring. Yeah,
things doing things will always return to the status quo,
which is also another crucial aspect of this genre. That
things have to return to the status quo, which is
something I will get to very shortly. Back to Greber quote,
although their creator would doubtless not himself feel bounded by them,

(33:36):
superheroes resist this logic. They do not wish to conquer
the world. Now, this is where I'm gonna actually disagree
slightly with Graber. He writes that superheroes quote remain parasitical
off the villains, in the same way that police remain
parasitical off criminals. Without them, they'd have no reason to exist. Now,

(33:57):
I'd argue that the police actually create the spectral ca
category of criminals to justify their own existence. Yeah, criminals
didn't create the police. It's the other way around, right.
You can look at you can look at like the
way even the past few years, police have been lying
about inflated crime rates to justify their own increased funding.
And now, obviously people always broke social norms, but if

(34:18):
you're looking at the actual, like the actual like political
class of criminal and the political class of police, this
is like it's like everyone has done a crime, right,
Like police commit more crimes than the average person, but
they do not often get called a criminal. I'm talking
about like a very political class that we call criminal,
and this is something that the police create. And curiously,

(34:42):
in the same way, most superheroes also predate their respective supervillains,
as it is the presence of the superhero that often
births the adversarial supervillain. We see this across tons of
superhero medias where they use the example of how the
superhero predated the of these theatrical villains, and this is
actually the superhero's fault, right, this is this, This happens in Batman,

(35:04):
this happens in Spider Man. This is this is very
very common. We even see this in something like The
Boys or The Watchmen, both of which targets superheroes as
a reactionary right wing tendency, which are our line of
the police and military. We we literally have Homelander creating
supervillains to justify his own existence, or super terrorists in

(35:25):
the Watchman, the actual team predates the arrival of many
super villains. So this, this is this is one one
small nitpick I might I might say with this article,
at least in terms of the like the the causality
loop between superheroes and villains and criminals and police. Do
you know what also pre dates all all of us,

(35:46):
every every single person listening. We're gonna have like someone
who's one hundred and the advertising industrial complex predates every
single one of you fuckers. The surrealists burst this hell
hole of h of advertising which tricks your mind via
predictive programming, the ditch to buy this fucking food box. Okay,

(36:15):
we are we are back. We have returned to the
status quo of our podcast. Speaking, speaking of which we're
going to talk about returning to the status quo. So
what what superheroes and the police, which are very ontologically
similar roles in a lot of cases, what their end
project is is that they seek to maintain what is

(36:37):
and then seek out and destroy anything that threatens to
alter our civilizational fabric. They fundamentally are defenders of the
status quo. That is, that is the that is the
role of the superhero across almost all media. This is why,
if you had the powers of Superman, why are you
just saving cats from trees and instead not fundamentally reshaping

(36:59):
the world in something that is better. Now, this is
a question that gets tackled by people like Grant Morrison
and Alan Moore. Is to they often give reasons for
why someone shouldn't do that, but still, this is a
fundamental aspect of this genre is that these guys never
really have any generative political project. They are purely reactionary,
and they purely are made to hold up the status

(37:21):
quo and always return to this single point from which
they emerged. Back to grayber quote, they remain defenders of
a legal and political system which itself seems to have
come out of nowhere, and which, however faulty or degraded,
must be defended because the only alternative is so much worse.
They aren't fascists. They're just ordinary, decent, super powerful people

(37:44):
who inhabit a world in which fascism is the only
political possibility. Why might we ask what a form of
entertainment premised on such a peculiar notion of politics emerge
in the early to mid twentieth century America at just
around the time that actual fact was on the rise
in Europe. Was it some kind of fantasy American equivalent?

(38:05):
Not exactly. It's more that both fascism and superheroes were
products of a similar historical predicament. What is the foundation
of social order when one has exercised the very idea
of revolution, and above all, what happens to the political imagination?
So at this point Graver starts talking about how basically

(38:26):
all power goes to the individual, but the individual who
is embedded within a system. He discusses how the core
audience for superhero comics are adolescent or pre adolescent, to
white boys. At least that was in the nineteen twenties
or thirties and forties, and roughly is still the case.
It's that these comic books and now Marvel films, although
unfortunately Marvel films have a much broader audience, but they

(38:49):
are targeted to people who are at a point in
their lives where they're like where they're likely to be
both like the most imaginative and a little bit rebellious. Right,
this is the twelve year old white Boy is the
is the thing that that this is targeting. So they're
both very imaginative, they're a little bit rebellious, but they're
also being groomed to take on positions of power and

(39:10):
authority in the world. Right, They're about to transition to
being fathers, share of small business owners, middle management. Right.
So this is what this genre is targeted towards. So
what are they supposed to learn from these kind of
endlessly repeating stories that are all very much the same story.
One aspect is that imagination and rebellion will inevitably just

(39:33):
lead to violence, right, And then second is like imagination
and rebellion violence can actually be a lot of fun,
but ultimately violence must be directed back against any overflow
of imagination and rebellion or else everything will kind of
go into chaos. These things have to be contained. So
this is why superheroes are only allowed I'm gonna I'm

(39:54):
gonna quote from Graper again quote their imagination can only
be extended to the design of their clothes, their cars,
maybe their home, and their various successories unquote. Basically, all
of their imagination for the superhero is limited to commodities. Right.
This is this is the fundamental aspect where that's the
only acceptable outlet for your imagination. It's it's it's just

(40:15):
with these, it's just with commodity fetishism like that. That's that,
that's the only possible way. Back to grayber quote, it's
in this sense that the logic of the superhero plot
is profoundly, deeply conservative. Ultimately, the division between left and
right sensibilities turns on one's attitude towards the imagination. For
the left, imagination creativity and by extension, production, the power
to bring new things and new social arrangements into being

(40:38):
is always celebrated. It's the source of all real value
in the world. For the right, it's dangerous and ultimately evil.
The urge to create is also a destructive urge. But
this is also what separates conservatives from fascists. Both agree
that the imagination unleashed can only lead to violence and destruction.
Conservatives wish to defend us against this possibility. Fascists wish

(40:58):
to unleash it anyway. They aspired to be, as Hitler
imagined himself, great artists painting with the minds, bloods, and
sinews of humanity. I think this is a really good
distinction between conservatives and fascists in terms of how they
view creative violence. And to get back to superheroes, I
think this medium, as Grab points out, has this kind

(41:19):
of built in essence of a guilty pleasure. It revels
in the absurdity of both the costumed heroes and villains,
all while still targeting in imagination which is too expansive
to outside the norm as being the ultimate crime. This
guilty pleasure aspect even applies to the great superhero satires
like The Watchmen and The Boys, which we applaud for

(41:41):
poking and prodding at the conservative superhero all while still
reveling and watching the outlandish antics on screen or on
the page. Now. Graver even applies this guilty pleasure aspect
into explaining the kind of the conservative backlash to superheroes
in the forties and fifties, particularly with the book Seduction
of the Innocent, which kind of viewed superheroes as this

(42:03):
weirdly fetishistic kind of naughty impulse, which resulted in superheroes
getting very sanitized and much more much more silly, much
more campy, which all which resulted in the fantastic nineteen
sixty six Batman show. But but but still it kind
of it kind of points at this this this guilty
pleasure aspect. There's there's something inherently kind of naughty about

(42:25):
about viewing this material. All right, we are we are
nearing the end of Graber's analysis here. Quote. If the
message was that rebellious imagination was okay as long as
it was kept out of politics and simply confined to
consumer choices like clothes, cars, and accessories, this had become
the message that even executive Hollywood producers could easily get behind,

(42:46):
which results in stuff like the nineteen sixty six Batman
show and now leading us back into Christopher Nolan, Uh,
we get we get this. This really good, really good
paragraph from Graber. Quote. If the classic comic book is
extensively political about mad Been trying to take over the world,
but really psychological and personal, about overcoming the dangers of
rebellious adolescents, but then ultimately political after all, then the

(43:11):
new superhero movies are precisely the reverse. They are sensibly
psychological and personal, but really political, but ultimately they go
back to being psychological and personal. So this is me
just ripping. Now let's take Batman begins, right, we have
Racial Ghul, who operates in this psychological role of a
second father for Bruce right after Bruce's training initiation to

(43:34):
the League of Shadows. Only then does Race reveal his
political goals to destroy Gotham and rid the world of corruption.
So this is like the psychological is the first bit,
then it's actually political, and then by the end it
actually it goes all the way back into being truly psychological.
Now I'm gonna I'm gonna read one paragraph from Graver,

(43:55):
which is only because it has a very funny oh
two word combination. In the ritual comics, we learned that
racial Ghoul, a character introduced telling Lee in A nineteen
seventy one, is in fact a zerzen Esque primitivist and
no terrorist, determined to restore the balance of nature by

(44:17):
reducing the Earth's human population by roughly ninety nine percent.
None of the villains in any of the three movies
want to rule the world. They don't wish to have
power over others or to create new rules of any
sort unquote. And I just really like the term Desi
Esque primitives to describe the seventies racial Ghoul, which is
a deeply a deeply brain poisoned way to describe a

(44:42):
comic book likelier. John Zergeon is an eco anarchist writer
who certain sects of kind of social anarchist theorists liked
to make fun of.

Speaker 1 (44:56):
I think Great Graver's most devastating thing about the premi
of this was calling them all Marxists, because they're the
only people on earth who say it's a program, not
a critique.

Speaker 2 (45:06):
He's very funny.

Speaker 1 (45:08):
I think like one of the things that's kind of
going on here is like everyone who's writing about superhero
movies is also trying to settle their own grudges a
little bit, and oh absolutely grudges in this is like
one of Graber's grudges that he was like like he
was tear gased, like very very close to a lot
of where these things were shot, like a month before.
And his second grudge is that he had to spend

(45:29):
the whole fucking nineties arguing with a bunch of primitivests.

Speaker 2 (45:32):
He's very annoying in it because two thousands. Yeah, so
that those those are his grudges going into And I
do believe his his kind of framing of the Nolan
supervillains of not really having any desire to like rule
the world as ringing true. They they really only want
to like wape the slate clean. I think a. Graber

(45:54):
correctly identifies Nolan's supervillains as being primarily some form of anarchist,
just a very peculiar type that really only exists in
Nolan's imagination. Graber describes them as quote, they are the
anarchists who believe that human nature is fundamentally evil and
corrupt unquote. I think this has taken to its most
obvious extent in the Dark Knight, with the Joker, who

(46:16):
openly claims affiliation with anarchy and fetishizes destruction. His sick
and twisted imagination is the real villain, even with the
backdrop of the film's kind of deceptive war on terror framing. Now,
between the production of The Dark Knight and The Dark
Knight Rices, the funniest thing happened. The economy completely collapsed

(46:36):
in two thousand and eight, and it wasn't due to
an eco terrorist cult or a clown set on a
total negation. Instead, it was bankers and finance managers and
Wallstree bros. Who became the obvious villains in their quest
to maintain the lie of endless growth. Millions of people
lost their homes and source of income. So in response,
there was a whole bunch of popular uprisings that took

(46:57):
place all around the world. Graber lists regimes being toppled
in the Middle East and people occupying squares everywhere from
Cleveland to Karachi trying to create new forms of democracy.
So there's this resurgence of constituent power, right, and this
imagination driven kind of radical and largely non violent form
of resistance at least hearing the States. And this is

(47:20):
the sort of political situation which superhero universes can never
really fully tackle because it can't exist within their own
weird ontology. To quote Graver or quote in Nolan's world,
something like occupy could only have been the product of
some tiny group of ingenious manipulators who are really pursuing
some secret agenda. Why does Bain wish to lead the
people in a social revolution if he's just going to

(47:41):
nuke them all in a few weeks anyway, it's anyone's guess.
He claims that before you destroy someone first, he must
give them hope. So is the message that utopian dreams
can only lead to nihilistic violence presumably it's something like that,
but it's singularly unconvincing, since the plan to kill everyone
came first and the revolution was a decorative afterthought. In fact,
what happens to the city can only possibly make sense

(48:02):
as a material echo of what's been most important, what's
happening in Bruce Wayne's tortured brain. Yeah, it's like it's
a good line, which, yes, yeah, because in the end,
Batman and the police rise from the abyss. Literally in
both cases, both of them are trapped underground. They both
rise from underground join forces to battle the people occupying

(48:27):
outside of the Gotham City Stock Exchange. Batman fixed his
own death by disposing of this nuclear bomb, and Bruce
Wayne gets to live happily in Florence with the criminal
Selena Kyle. And then a new new phony martyr legend
is born in the role of Batman, and people of
Gotham are returned once again to the status quo. I'm

(48:49):
gonna read kind of Graver's final final kind of overview
of the entirety of this message, right, like, of what
this thing is really trying to convey, right quote, if
they're supposed to be a take message from all of this,
it must run something like, yes, the system is corrupt,
but it's all we have anyway. Figures of authority can
be trusted if they've first been chastised and endued terrible suffering.

(49:11):
Normal police might let children die on the bridges, but
the police who've been buried alive for weeks can employ violence. Legitimately,
charity is much better than addressing structural problems. Any attempts
to address to such structural problems, even through nonviolent civil disobedience,
really is a form of violence, because that's all it
could possibly be. Imaginative politics are inherently violent, and therefore

(49:32):
there's nothing inappropriate If police respond by smashing protesters' heads
repeatedly against the concrete as a response to occupy, this
is nothing short of pathetic. When The Dark Knight came
out to this in eight, there was much discussion over
whether the whole thing was really just a vast metaphor
for the War on Terror. How far is it okay
for the good guys America obviously to adapt the bad
Guy's methods. The filmmakers managed to respond to these issues

(49:53):
and still produce a good movie. This is because the
War on Terror actually was a battle of secret networks
and manipulative spectacles. It began with a bomb and ended
with an assassination. One can almost think of it as
an attempt on both sides to actually enact a comic
book version of the universe. Once real constituent power appeared
on the scene, the universe shriveled into incoherence. Revolutions were

(50:16):
sweeping the Middle East, and the US was still spending
hundreds of billions of dollars fighting a ragtag bunch of
seminary students in Afghanistan. Unfortunately for Nolan, for all of
his manipulative powers, the same thing happened to his world
when even the hint of real popular power arrived in
New York. So that is kind of the essence of
Graber's view of this movie. I think it's pretty good.

(50:39):
This is a This is a pretty a pretty solid
take on this. Now, there's obviously people who have opinions
that are less good than this. I'm gonna read I'm
gonna read this. This right up from from these two guys,
Jeff Sprousse and Zach Buchemp, who argue that Batman represents

(51:00):
this symbolic defense of liberal democracy, which I think is true,
but the way that they go about their analysis I
think is heavily flawed, because yes, I do think he
represents a defensive liberal democracy. I just don't think that's
necessarily a good thing. Yeah. So they talk about how
fear is the kind of the core emotion across all

(51:23):
of Nolan's Batman films. Right, we have in Batman begins
fear and takes the form of Scarecrow, as you know,
one of the main villains. But we also have this
terror of there being a powerful criminal underworld which overwhelms
the power of political and social intitutions that are meant
to address such criminal underworlds. We have Batman, in his

(51:45):
role is to fight injustice by turning quote fear against
those who pray on the fearful right Batman is this
terrifying symbol meant to restore the balance of fear between
the anarchic private underworld and the gutless public spear to
quote jeffin zax rite up quote. In The Dark Knight,
Nolan continues his examination of the terror of anarchy, as

(52:07):
well as the potential for the state and allied institutions
to abuse their enormous power. Bain and each of Nolan's
other villains attempt to exploit fear for ideological projects, revenge
or simple fun. Batman aims to channel it to make
his opponent's legitimate grievances subject for debate in an orderly system,
rather than through violent resolution, which is not what Batman does.

(52:30):
Thatman punches people. They were we watching the same movies
quote to entrust Gotham to heroes with a face, as
he says in The Dark Knight, and to democratize Batman
as a symbol that can be embodied by anyone. It's
not that it's not that Christopher Nolan is taking a
side in our political debates. He's simply defending a particular

(52:51):
system through which we address them. Which is nonsense of
a writer from Forbes that this analysis is quach a
beautiful rebuttal to those critics who viewed the film as
fascistic or as a critique of left wing populism. Batman
as the defender of liberal democracy, not of conservatism or liberalism,

(53:12):
but the system itself from the forces of fear and chaos.
Gotham as an examination of the frailties and pressure points
that make this system weak in the face of the
unexpected and uncontrollable. While there is indeed both praise for
the role of civil society in these films, there's also
a portrait of economic inequality that provides the brittleness needed
for men like Bay to truly succeed. This is not

(53:35):
a critique of the government or private sector as so
much as it is a critique of the frailty and
fragility of our system and its institutions and the power
of symbols to combat this fragility, which is a deeply
liberal analysis.

Speaker 1 (53:49):
We're just not even good, like I mean, this is
the thing. This is the thing that really pisses me
off about. So the cadre of liberal intellectuals that we've
gotten in the last like twenty years is like, look,
you don't have to be like unable to form coherent
and that like it is. It is not a precept

(54:10):
of liberal of like of like liberal intellectualism that you
are unable to form a coherent argument or do any
piece of analizamble like they used to be able to
do this, and then at some point, like after the
War on Terror, they just stopped. Now all we have
is like matt Iglesias, and it's like these.

Speaker 2 (54:26):
I think this is what a greater talks about when
there's like a fundamental incoherence, And I think this is
really exemplified by like the structure of The Dark Knight,
Rice is. It's a very messy film. The pacing is bad,
the plot is very convoluted. It's it's so it's so plotting,
which is often Nolan's kind of biggest failure as a
as a filmmaker. In my opinion, it's it's it's very

(54:46):
structurally just confusing, whereas The Dark Knight is actually pretty clear.
It still has a few of those weird plot like
super plotty elements, but overall it's it's it's it's much clearer.
But in the wake of the War on Terror and
then financial crash, there's this fundamental incoherence that kind of
seeps into everything. I have two final takes to read.

(55:07):
I know we are getting along here, but I think
it's important to look at what the conservatives and the
fascist rite actually said about this movie, beyond just the
conspiracy rattled ramblings that we started this episode with. This
is from The Daily Caller twenty twelve. The film is
sympathetic to the concerns of the poor and points out

(55:27):
that some who achieve wealth don't earn it legitimately. But
these themes disappear as soon as the hulking terrorist Baine
takes over Gotham City. All that criminals are released, rich
people are executed in sham trials headed up by Baines's
lunatic friends, Government officials and police officers are killed or captured.
Bain claims that he is solving inequality by leveling the

(55:48):
playing field, but his true plan is to perpetuate massive
murder by setting off a nuclear bomb. In this way,
viewers see a familiar story unfold, and that's reminiscent of
communist and fascist revolutions in Russia, Germany, Cambodia, and North Korea.
No matter how legitimate criticisms of the economic, political, and
social order may be, any revolution that shatters the rule

(56:11):
of law or eliminates the market entirely well necessarily resulted
in greater inequality, suffering, and death.

Speaker 1 (56:19):
It's so funny you can tell how on the defensive
they are, like in the wake of occupied because you
have these people going like, wait, social inequality is real,
but if you try to do anything to it, it's
also so funny, and this is this is the interesting
thing about like I think I think the fundamentally incoherence
of it politically is that they've tried to graft the
French Revolution onto Occupied because like, yes, yes, the two
things that Occupied resolutely refused to do was one have

(56:41):
a leader and two like do any kind of mass violence,
like well, arguably outside of Oakland, but that wasn't even
like what that was like in Oakland.

Speaker 2 (56:50):
Sometimes they fought the.

Speaker 1 (56:51):
Cops, like in New York, like not the only bank
window in New York that was broken the entire time
was I think it was a Bank of America window
that was broken with a hop smash of protests head
through it, like.

Speaker 2 (57:02):
That's it's that's why, That's why I really don't think
the Dornet Rices isn't about Occupy. It just like it
just isn't It arose from similar conditions that Occupy a
rose from, and then in its final tunes of filming
they did some parallels to Occupy, But it is much
more about the French Revolution, especially in like Bean is
like a vanguard, like he is a leader of this

(57:23):
there is there's no but there's no such rule. And
Occupy now during during the editing and final production of
the film, obviously they realize that there is some obvious
parallels here, which they do they did indulge in. But
I mean most of the writing and the filming of
this took place before occupy. I think it just came
from a very similar social place. Yeah. Also, though even
as a French Revolution thing, it's incoherent.

Speaker 1 (57:44):
Because it's not like it's not like rose Fier got
in there and was like this is all a secret
plot executing beggars, like it doesn't make any sense. It's
like that's why it has that fundamental incoherence, right. Yeah,
there's one othergraph from the from the Daily Caller. Then
we will read something from Breitbart, like the communist parties

(58:06):
of real authoritarian states. Bain and his Cohurtz represent a
new ruling class that pretends to care about equality and liberation,
but in practice resorts to oppression and extreme violence. The
film's good guys are Batman and the police officers of Gotham,
who bravely go to war to prevent Baine's genocide.

Speaker 2 (58:29):
These guys have these guys.

Speaker 1 (58:30):
Have never had more than two thoughts like consecutively. It's
surely impressive.

Speaker 2 (58:35):
If the political message of The Darkness Rises seems muddled,
which it does, it's because real life problems can't be
solved with Batman. There is no well funded superhero with
a glut of fancy gadgets and moral incruptibility. No, a
core Parties films is that Batman is morally corrupt. This
is sorry. Nor are there villains in America as damning

(58:58):
and transparently evil is Baine. The film doesn't offer much
right there. The film doesn't offer much of a practical
answer for what The film doesn't offer much of a
practical answer for what to do about inequality, social unrest
or terrorism. Great great work, daily collar God. Now where

(59:21):
do they find these guys?

Speaker 1 (59:22):
I guess they find these guys from failed actors. So
makes sense.

Speaker 2 (59:26):
So you mentioned Bush as being an obvious villain. Well,
Breve Part disagrees. Obviously, Bright Part disagrees. Here is Here's
here's our final take on on The Dark Knight Rises.
Quote Bain, a hulk of a man burning with resentment
against a society whose only provocation is being prosperous, generous, welcoming,

(59:49):
and content instead of miserable like him. That is not
Bain's gripes, but anyway, in Gotham sewers Bain recor fruits
those like himself, the insecure thumbsuckers, raging with a sense
of entitlement, desperate to justify their own laziness and failure,

(01:00:10):
and to flaunt a false sense of superiority through oppression, violence, terror,
and ultimately total and complete destruction As expected, The Dark
Night Rises is a love letter to Gotham City, its
flawed but ultimately decent people, its industry and generosity, all

(01:00:31):
of which are by products of liberty, free markets, and capitalism.
In other words. In other words, just as The Dark
Knight was a touching tribute to an embattled George W.
Bush who chose to be seen as a villain in
order to be the hero, Rises is a love letter

(01:00:52):
to an imperfect America that, in the end always does
the right thing. And Nolan loves the American people, the
wealthy producers who are more often than not trickled down
their hard earned winnings, the workaday folks who keep our
world turning a financial system worth saving because the benefits
it's all, And those everyday warriors who offered their lives

(01:01:13):
for the greater good with every punch of a clock.
Nolan's love for this country is without qualifiers, and is
symbolized and all of its unqualified sincerity in the form
of a beautiful young child sweetly singing a complete version
of the Star Spangled Banner, just before Occupy attempts to
fulfill its horrific vision of what equality really means. Nolan, sorry,

(01:01:38):
I can.

Speaker 1 (01:01:41):
Like this is this is one passage, this whole thing is.
It's such a great explanation if you weren't around for it,
for how the Trump guys just completely blew aside all
of the old George Bush coalition because all of the
George Bush guys were fucking like this. They all talked
like this. It was this like absolutely insufferable. Like since

(01:02:03):
it's completely completely sincere nonsense, it's crazy. It's still all
this shit because it.

Speaker 2 (01:02:09):
Fundamentally misunderstands Nolan's a filmmaker. He is purposely juxtaposing a
British child singing the Star Spangled Banner at a sporting
event with this destruction inherent to America. He's he's, he is,
He's making these things kind of combat each other like
this is this is actually pretty good framing, and this
guy fundamentally misunderstands this. Nolan's genius is a filmmakers. Well,

(01:02:32):
Nolan's genius as a filmmaker is, without question, the pacing,
the editing, the performances, the humanity of the duc Knight
Rises will be talked about for decades, which it doesn't.
This is by far one of his worst films. This
is widely seen as one of one of his worst films.
The editing, pacing, performances are all heavily criticized. This is
actually like a bad movie. I do like the juxtaposition

(01:02:56):
of the star spangled banner at the sporting event with
this like spectacle of destruction. I think that plays very well,
but like that is this is come on, come on,
like these are the people who and this is this
is the thing. This is this.

Speaker 1 (01:03:10):
This is why the sort of trumpest like the sort
of sort of like ironic detachment stuff became so popular,
because these are the people who listen to Born in
the USA and are like this rules this rue like
this is this is this is about how America is good.
And it's just like like these people they have nothing,
there's nothing going on with them. There's just just like

(01:03:31):
there's nothing going on in their heads. They don't have
any ideas whatsoever. They just have that like they just
have this like reflexive flag worship stuff and that it's awful.
It's it's like the whole fucking American right was like this.
It's just like yeah, and then the South TRUMPI has
just destroyed them because this is a really good example
of nothing of the conservative political conditions that led to

(01:03:53):
populace to takeover right.

Speaker 2 (01:03:55):
We have all of these guys who are lamb poooning
populism and have this very like deeply sincere neoconservative outlook
which then got all got decimated in three years by
Trump's very kind of basic childish rhetoric. Just just blew
this stuff out of the water. I think this is
all this stuff is a very fascinating snapshot into the

(01:04:15):
politics of ten years ago. I know there's a lot
of zoomers who listened to this who may not has
been as politically kind of engaged in twenty twelve. All
this stuff is a very good look at that. And
I know this is too long, but the final final
thing to just laugh at. We will return, as as
all good superhero stories do, return to the status quo
of my Paranoia Conspiracy Reader magazine, which also had a

(01:04:40):
review for The Cabin in the Woods movie, which it
thinks is a secret Illuminati message about how there's secretly
control rooms that are that are like navigating your entire life.
There's like people in control rooms who are like controlling
every spect of your life. The Cabin in Woods was
an ironic admission of this pretty good, Pretty good. Our

(01:05:01):
technico credit controllers and manipulators are crass and evil pretenders,
able to get off only spectacles of pain and torture.
Pretty funny. There's some quite racist stuff in the middle,
which I'm is not not even gonna mention. Oh yeah,
that's the everything. It was like. People were really racist.
People are still really racist. People are still quite racist.

Speaker 1 (01:05:17):
Shit that like like you could say ship back, like
like people who are ostensibly liberals would say shit back
then that like would get you like thrown off a building.

Speaker 2 (01:05:26):
Today we have an article by someone who says, quote,
my father worked with Jimmy Carter on the submarine one
Killer and chased flying saucers for a Project blue book,
which is a fascinating article. Then it talks it also
talks about here that a cern is building a matrix
like you know, like the movie The Matrix. Fucking God,

(01:05:48):
we have one. When you do an episode about about
the cern Concira, we should this the silliest thing. We
really should do an episode about certain conspiracies, because yeah,
they are they are certainly quite amusing. There's one other
aspect in this article that I wanted to mention. Here's
discerns to Oh here it is here? What it is?

Speaker 3 (01:06:07):
This?

Speaker 2 (01:06:07):
It is in the Alistair Crowley section of the article. No,
oh no, you know, I think we've actually suffered enough.
I will I will let you imagine what this guy
what this guy says it about Alistair Crowley, Hitler and
BIFA Vendetta. Oh no, so I'll let you imagine what

(01:06:28):
that says. Because we've gone on too long. I' I'm
happy you were able to join us in our in
our deep dive into the twenty twelve disaster. The Dark
Knight Rice is not very good movie. And instead, if
you want to watch a Batman film about politics and Christmas,
just watch Batman Returns. That's what I'm doing this week,
So get your friends together. Watch Danny DeVito vomit black

(01:06:49):
Doo for two hours. Watch Michelle Feifer's Catwoman in a
latex suit. It is much much better. So that does
it for us today here. It could happen here. I
hope we learned a little bit something about constituent power
police superheroes and how CERN is building a matrix and
this predictive programming targeting the next Winter Olympics. It could

(01:07:17):
happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.

Speaker 4 (01:07:19):
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
find sources for It could Happen here, Updated monthly at
coolzonemedia dot com slash sources.

Speaker 2 (01:07:33):
Thanks for listening.