Davis Aurini - The Villainy of Bane in The Dark Knight Rises (a response to Confused Matthew)

Jan. 7, 2013 - Davis Aurini

25:34

The Villainy of Bane in The Dark Knight Rises (a response to Confused Matthew)

My book: http://www.amazon.com/Walk-These-Broken-Roads-ebook/dp/B009RZYO2O/ My blog: http://www.staresattheworld.com/ My Twitter: http://twitter.com/Aurini Glorious Hat! http://www.commieobama.com/pages/hat_info.html Confused Matthew's review here: http://confusedmatthew.com/The-Dark-Knight-Rises-Miniview.php

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	Confused Matthew is a movie reviewer that I really enjoy.
	He deconstructed The Lion King, showing why it's actually a horrible movie.
	He's one of the few people that called out 2001 A Space Odyssey as the long, boring snore fest with no decent writing or plot that it actually is.
	And he's caused me to reevaluate my views of a number of movies that I liked upon first glance.
	He's very well spoken, very insightful.
	I do find myself disagreeing with him every so often, however, as the case with his review of the latest Batman movie.
	And in this instance, the sort of thing that is actually appropriate for my channel.
	Now, the modern Batman movies, beyond just the spectacle, actually have a very deep reactionary theme going throughout all of them.
	In other words, these movies make a lot more sense to somebody alive in 1812 than they make to your typical person around today.
	And it's hard to say if this was intentional or not.
	Certainly the third one is an absolute critique of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and yet Christopher Nolan had never heard of them, or only heard of them in passing by the time the movie was finished.
	So it's hard to say if he's planning any of this, or if it's all just him being deeply in touch with the cultural zeitgeist.
	I'm inclined to think the latter, and I'll point out one area specifically in the movie that I don't think he knew about, but he just nailed something from history.
	But we'll get to that in a minute.
	Now, in reviewing the latest Batman movie, Confused Matthew finds he's not a fan of it.
	And now I'm not going to debate it on, I'm not going to debate the film on its own merits.
	I think there's a lot of valid criticisms for this movie.
	Certainly, there's always suspension of disbelief is a problem with these type of films, these superhero movies.
	I always find myself pondering the logistical organization that the supervillain needs to accomplish whatever they're doing.
	Just an old habit of mine.
	But some of the critiques are about Bane being an ineffective villain.
	And I think that Matthew is missing exactly what Bane is supposed to be, what sort of villain.
	Because, like I said, he does not make sense to the 2012 mind.
	He does not make sense to the liberal versus conservative sort of a mind.
	This is a reactionary villain.
	And there's four particular points that Matthew brings up.
	And I'll be addressing each one of them in sequence.
	First, he says that the people of Gotham act like absolute idiots when Bane takes power.
	Second, he doesn't see what Bane's plan is, how it makes any sense, that he says he wants to give them hope because that will lead to the greatest despair, and yet he's the one holding the nuclear bomb.
	How does that make any sense?
	Third, he doesn't understand what the people would see in Bane, that they're all living in these crummy rundown houses that they stole from the rich people.
	Who wants that?
	And fourth, he doesn't find Bane threatening.
	He says a fiscal threat is not as compelling as a psychological threat.
	Bane's beyond psychological.
	He is a moral threat.
	And that's the beauty of the villain.
	So let's get to these one by one.
	So, first of all, he points out that the people in Gotham act like idiots.
	That they've had two madmen try and take over the city before, and that both times they reacted normally.
	They ran away and they screamed and panicked, whereas this time around, they all seem to be happy that Bain is taking over the city.
	And for this, it's useful to go back to there's a funny, funny little shared psychology between cops and criminals nowadays.
	Both cops and criminals say the word citizen as if they want to spit after saying that.
	See, now when I hear the word citizen, me being, you know, an old red Tory reactionary, I think of a homesteading farmer with a shotgun and a wife and a few kids and a dog, you know, a responsible member of society, somebody that a pillar of the community.
	That's what citizen means to me.
	But that's not what it means to the cops and the criminals.
	The cops and the criminals, it means sheep.
	It means victim.
	They both utter it with the exact same tonal inflection.
	Because the modern-day citizen doesn't own a gun.
	Modern day citizen can't defend themselves.
	They're weak.
	They're callow.
	They hide and call the cops to protect them from the criminals.
	And the criminals, they have some grudging respect for the cops.
	They don't like the cops, but they certainly don't hate the cops the way a civil libertarian hates them.
	They feel far more in common with the cop than your typical ACLU pinko.
	They're not the men that voluntarily stood up and joined the army to fight a war because that's what men do, that's what citizens do.
	Your modern citizen is a weak, contemptible little thing.
	And the cops and the criminals see this.
	So to say that the citizens acted rationally in the earlier Batman movies, well, that's perhaps rationally.
	They ran away from the supervillains, but did they do anything to defeat the supervillains?
	Did they do anything to resist them?
	And I'll take the second one with the Joker is the perfect example of this.
	Where the Joker puts the citizens into these two cruise lines.
	Just four tell all the Joker is the ultimate troll.
	He sees how corrupt and broken Gotham is the exact same way Bane and the League of Shadows see that Gotham is broken and corrupt.
	But the Joker doesn't have a point to make.
	He just wants to watch the monkey dance.
	And so he gives, he loads both these ships.
	One of the ships has all the richest people in Gotham City in it.
	And the other one has all the criminals from the penitentiary in it.
	And.
	And somehow, he loads both of them with massive amounts of explosives and hands a detonator over to the other ship so that the rich people can blow up the criminals and the criminals can blow up the rich people and says, I'm going to blow up both ships by midnight if somebody doesn't blow up the other one.
	And let's remember what happens in that scene.
	It's one of the criminals that saves the day.
	Big Black Bubba grabs the remote detonator from the prison guard sergeant that's too weak to push the button, even though he's terrified and he wants to live.
	And Big Black Bubba throws it out the window.
	The damn criminal acts like more of a man than anybody, any of the citizens on the rich cruise liner and any of the prison guards.
	And speaking from personal experience, a large portion of prison guards are callow, contemptible bullies of men.
	Not real men, by any sane measure.
	And so, yes, in the other two movies, you did see the citizens running away from the supervillains, but that's because the supervillains were attacking them.
	That's not what Bain is doing.
	And so that's why they're not running away from Bane.
	They are acting consistently.
	The citizens of Gotham are absolute moral cowards.
	And they will, all they want is to go home and have some hot porn and have some fast food and just be left alone and not have to think or take responsibility for anything.
	And so if that means blowing up a bunch of criminals to save your own life, they'll do that.
	If it means supporting a dictator because he promises them a better future, they'll do that as well.
	These citizens are low, contemptible little creatures.
	And every single one of the Batman villains saw that.
	They are acting consistently.
	It's just that Bane doesn't let them know that he's going to eat them.
	Next, to Bane's plan.
	See, what Bane says to Batman, after he breaks his back and they're in that prison, he says that there can be no true despair without hope.
	And so he wants to offer Gotham hope.
	Now, confused, Matthew says, and I'm mostly quoting here.
	It is a video I'm quoting from.
	Bane says that this city will endure.
	And Matthew says, this city will endure this thing I'm doing to it.
	Think you morons, think.
	Usually if you're characterizing yourself as a liberator, you don't threaten to kill everybody.
	Matthew, you need to read more history.
	How do you think the liberators of the French Revolution got power?
	How do you think Soviet Russia began?
	Every single liberator threatens great violence upon the people that they're liberating.
	Bane is no different.
	And the people lap it up.
	They beg for tyranny.
	It seems that your average person just can't stand being free.
	Go too long without the slave master's lash.
	They start voting a tyranny back into power.
	And see, that's you're mistaking the atomic bomb that Bain has.
	He has an atomic bomb and he says, if anybody invades Gotham City, then I'm going to set it off.
	That's not the threat.
	That's not the threat that Bain is offering against the citizens.
	The way he wants them to despair is he wants to give them freedom.
	He wants to actually make them free in the way he says he's making them free.
	Not the old school definition of negative liberties type of free, but the freedom of license.
	The freedom of those foolish little boys in the Pinocchio movie that smoked and drank until they turned into asses.
	present company excluded of course the threat is not the atomic bomb The threat, the despair that Bain is looking forward to, is the absolute moral corruption of the citizens of Gotham.
	And if you hear those crazy religious people talking about moral law, this is what moral law boils down to.
	That if you consistently behave a certain way in your life, no number of bailouts is ever going to save you.
	You can be a trust fund baby.
	You can be a Hollywood celebrity.
	But if you spend all your time just pursuing the next line of blow, pursuing the next sex act with some anonymous stranger, just living an empty, callow life without any higher principles, it's going to catch up to you eventually.
	Not even the richest can get away with that.
	And see, that's what Bain is offering them.
	The hope of freedom, but the despair of damnation for their own evil choices.
	The nuclear bomb isn't aimed at the citizens, at least not as far as they know.
	It's aimed to keep the rest of the world out.
	In other words, I'm going to hold my breath, mummy, if you don't buy that toy that I want.
	A little boy holding his breath is not afraid of passing out or injuring himself.
	He's too self-centered, too narcissistic.
	On to the next point.
	What does Bain offer the people?
	You know, Matthew rightly points out that Gotham after Bain is a far worse place.
	The economy has shut down, obviously, for a metropolitan center.
	The economy's shut down.
	Yes, they're all squatting in the beautiful houses that used to belong to the rich people, but they're not very nice houses, are they?
	The thing is, everybody, post-Bain is worse off than they were before Bain.
	Again, I would like to point you towards the Communist Revolution and the French Revolution.
	The exact same thing has happened then.
	He also points out the kangaroo court, where the scarecrow sends people to go walk out on the ice and die in the water.
	He says, who would want something like that?
	This is one of those things, and I'm not sure if Nolan is doing this intentionally or not, or if he's just that switched into the zeitgeist, if he understands human nature that well.
	Because that kangaroo court looked exactly, exactly like Robespierre in Revolutionary France.
	You know, I might have seen a picture a long time ago, or I might just have read about it, but that courtroom they have with the scarecrow administering quote-unquote justice, justice for the people, by the people, looks exactly like my mental image of a French courtroom during the turn of the 19th century.
	Of course everything is worse off, except the people are free now.
	They let all the criminals out of prison.
	They all get to live in the fancy rich houses.
	yeah, we're all starving, but at least we all have a vote in our Soviet collective.
	And lots and lots of people would go for this in the drop, at the drop of a hat.
	And I'll give you two examples of our contemporary degenerate society that are just perfect.
	Let's look at the black community.
	Now, blacks vote 98% Democrat.
	That's a fact.
	They are completely owned by the Democrat Party, yet for some reason the Republicans always try and prove that they're not racist by appealing to black voters, and they get 2% of them.
	Ridiculous.
	But let's look at the black community.
	Now, 50 years ago, you go back to before civil rights got passed, the blacks were poor.
	They were largely the half-nots, and in some places they were treated like second-class citizens.
	But as individuals, they might have been poor, but they had some dignity.
	Families stayed married.
	Black men dressed well.
	They were poor, but dignified.
	And it's kind of hard to compare the two eras together.
	But if you just look at something as simple as divorce, unwed mothers were extremely uncommon back then.
	Nowadays, the black ghetto, you see baby mamas with 19 different kids from 15 different dads.
	That's become the norm for the black community.
	Now the reason they vote liberal is because the liberals promise them all sorts of free stuff.
	They get their free welfare, their EBT card, they get all of that BS.
	Except is this good for the black community?
	Is it strengthening the black community?
	Is it helping them?
	Good God, no.
	No more than Bain is helping the citizens of Gotham.
	And yet, each time an election rolls around, 98% of them vote Democrat.
	But, you know, let's not turn this into a party issue.
	Let's look at the bloody Republicans, because they're just as bad.
	I have to get into some theology and explain why Romney's a monster, but let's just go more basic.
	The voters for the Republican Party are made up, as Moltbuck breaks it down.
	There's the Optimates, which are the old wealth, the country club people, who are year by year, they're a smaller and smaller group within American society, and I believe he calls them the Vaicyas, basically the blue-collar working class.
	The guys that go to work, farmers, mechanics, small business owners, those sorts of guys.
	And, sorry, I should have muted my microphone.
	My speaker, that is.
	And the Republicans always want to lower taxes on the rich.
	Now, who are the rich?
	The rich are all liberals.
	The rich are all doing fancy jobs that they love.
	The number of rich Republicans out there are very few and far between.
	Aside from Donald Trump, there aren't that many of them.
	And all of these rich Democrats vote for higher taxes.
	They all vote Democrat.
	They all want to pay higher taxes because they make so much money they don't care about it.
	And the Republicans, meanwhile, in their whole we're free market, quote-unquote, because we all know they're really not, get chummy with the corporations, the really big money, and these unprincipled sociopaths will be friends with whoever writes the laws.
	And so Republicans are just as likely to write a whole bunch of laws that shut down small business, empower corporations, and they get votes from the very small business owners that they're harming.
	It's no surprise the citizens of Gotham believe the rhetoric that Bain is telling them rather than the evidence before their own eyes.
	And fourth, he says that Bain doesn't do anything threatening, aside from a physical threat.
	And that, for instance, the Joker was a psychological threat.
	Put you into these very, very weird game-theoretic scenarios, prisoners' dilemmas and whatnot.
	And see, Bain doesn't do that.
	You're right.
	Bain gives people exactly what they want and exactly what will kill them.
	And see, that's why Bain is truly a terrifying criminal, is because he sees people for the evil, vile little things that they actually are.
	This isn't a psychological threat in this movie, it's a moral threat.
	Bain is the iceberg upon which democracy breaks.
	When you get right down to it, the entire series of movies has been reactionary.
	And Batman, in Nolan's universe, represents the aristocracy.
	Early on in the latest movie, there is a scene where Batman ran into Catwoman at some fancy prick ball and he commented to her or to the hostess or somebody that he really doesn't like these things.
	They seem pretentious as all hell.
	Because see, this is that, these are those Brahmin, as Moldbuck would call them.
	These are the upper class, the upper class Democrats with their fancy pretensions of giving charity to the poor people, of their showing off their wealth, of their manipulations behind the scenes, their narcissism, their broken little amygdalas.
	This is the Democrat.
	This is the modern ruling caste of democracies.
	And Bruce Wayne is not one of them.
	Bruce Wayne is an optimate.
	Bruce Wayne is an aristocrat.
	This entire series of movies was about how democracies cannot rule themselves, how they need to go back to monarchy.
	And that's the funny thing, is that both Batman and Bane fundamentally agree on these aspects.
	That people cannot rule themselves.
	The majority of people need strong patriarchal leadership.
	Bain hates them so much that he wants to destroy this blight upon the earth, while Batman, as a member of that society, tries to defend it and save it.
	But the sort of false ending you get at the movie where everything just returns back to normal, even though we know that could never happen, suggests that in reality, Batman wouldn't be victorious.
	A lot of people compared the first movie to Bush-era politics.
	Possibly it was the second movie with surveillance technology or something.
	And this completely misses the point.
	Yes, you can find more similarities, but you can find more talking points from a Republican point of view in the Batman movies than you can from a Democrat point of view.
	But it still doesn't quite make sense.
	The pieces don't quite add up.
	These movies make sense if you look at them like a person living in 1812 in Britain watching the horrors of the French Revolution and trying to strengthen your own monarch in the hopes that such a vile thing never comes to your island the way it did with the London riots just a couple years ago There's one message to take away from the Batman movies.
	It's that so long as we hold on to these pretenses of absolute equality, democracy of this, this religious fervor over fundamentally secular things like a legal code that we are damned, and not until we return to a sane way of governance is there truly any hope.
	Rini out, folks.
	Matthew, if you watched this long, I appreciate your patience, my friend.

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