I viewed the The Dark Knight Rises midnight show... what I saw through my paradygm... "The Dark Knight Rises" is a metaphor for "The People Rises."
Its morality plays out in a Gotham that is a modular Earth: Manhattan Island, its tunnels and bridges cut off, isolated from the rest of the world. The film directly references Wall Street. It depicts the consequences of maintaining an "us and them" divide between "Occupiers" and "law enforcement."
Real time, even the U.N. is noticing that divide occurring, with a $4.6 million encouragement to NYPD courtesy JPMorgan, in NYC and elsewhere.
While the first movie in the trilogy depicted corruption in the police department, the second set up the hope and inspiration that cured that corruption. The third reminds us that many police officers are, as consistently portrayed throughout the series by Commissioner Gordon, good, brave men, gentlemen intending to protect and serve. When they are removed, nearly the full force trapped in tunnels beneath the city, ordinary citizens are encouraged, by the mumbled blah blah ranting of villain Bane, to see and seize their freedom from law.
Speaking through a mouthpiece in his mask that distorts his voice, it is only at this point that Bane’s diction becomes something other than "I’m straining uncomfortably hard to make out what he just said." Perhaps that was Nolan's artistic choice since, like Orson Welles reading the phone book, like particular politicians at the pulpit, Bane utters, with Shakespearian elegance, crocks of shit hardly worth making out.
In their glee for freedom, the ordinary citizens encourage themselves to not see the new law of Bane’s thumb on their throats. Fed up with the rich, they invade homes and toss the wealthy onto the streets. As in days of the Fool King, they hold mock trials where they judge and sentence the wealthy, and the remaining untrapped police officers, including Commissioner Gordon, to exile and death upon the thin ice surrounding the island. Thus the movie depicts a version of Anarchy winning out, while only suggesting, to the imaginative, the consequences of the alternative, the Police State, winning out. Either scenario winning out would prove undesirable for Joe Public, but would serve Joe Public's mutual enemy... a League of Shadows that every citizen must make a stand against... because every citizen matters.
A character like Batman makes a strange Joe Public. But Bruce Wayne, stripped of his own wealth and physical health, gets much more screen time than Batman. Presumably years of superhero activity has worn the cartilage from his joints, the death of loved ones has crushed his spirit, and Catwoman antics upon the fingerprints of his apathy has left him penniless. Even as he takes a final gasp to rise, Bane breaks his back and leaves him imprisoned in the pit of his childhood well.
Finding what is important enough to raise ourselves from that pain, despair and hopelessness, is the thick story that plays upon the backdrop of rich and poor, war and wall obstacles. There is a wall to scale that can only be accomplished with the full commitment of abandoning the net. To trust what has killed you will not kill you again. To give all that you can give and then to rest, knowing you have inspired the good you’ve seen in others to carry on.
This movie’s premier was marked with real time tragedy. Should we make a blanket statement of "man massacres audience/movie bad?" The shooter may very well be a kid with a loose screw, even one whose screw unwound via engaging with violent media. Yet, in this world that we all know contains, at the very least, "secret shoppers," is it too much of a stretch, too comic booky to consider, that it also contains "secret operatives" being, or employing, "catcher in the rye screwdriver" types? Idealistic influence via artistic ability, to maximize counter consciousness in our culture via whichever movie genre may catch large audience attention, is one of the few weapons we have against the psychopaths pulling our murderers' strings - the shadows without a mask - the Bankman.
Am I missing the compassionate element of the massacre? I personally know what it is to lose a teenage son. Among things I learned from my own tragedy is that there is time required to cry the tears to settle the soul, and to learn to cherish more what was once had, rather than solely miss what is now gone, so sadness may be a sweeter sadness with memories sweetly recalled. The world doesn't necessarily cooperate with giving us that required time when we want it. Sometimes, even while there are tears in our eyes, there is work that can not be delayed or dismissed.
