fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #2065 ]

⌈ Secret Post #2065 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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02.

[Suits]

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03.

[Total Recall]

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04.

[My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic]

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05.

[Legend of Korra]

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06.

[Legend of Dragoon]

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07.

[My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic]

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08.

[Breath of Fire 4]

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09.

[Pretty Little Liars]

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10.

[SHINee]

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11.

[The Dark Knight Rises]

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[Marvel]

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[Stage Beauty]

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14.

[The Bourne Legacy]

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15.

[The Hunger Games]

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16.

[Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy]

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17.

[The Tribe]

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18.

[Sherlock]

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 00 pages, 055 secrets from Secret Submission Post #295.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ], [ 1 2 - posted twice ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

... how are you going to argue that it's NOT a political movie? Don't the Tale of Two Cities parallels alone indicate that pretty strongly? I'm not trying to be self-righteous here, I just thought the political element was pretty textual. If that doesn't matter to you, that's cool. I agree that it's kind of odious to pretend that liking or not liking a movie is a political test that you have to pass. Shit, people still watch Leni Riefenstahl propaganda films. I just don't see how you can say the movie's not politically oriented.

I think the deeper problem is that like all Nolan movies it's absurdly over-long and over-complicated. I'm just curious.

It's hard for me to think you're just curious when you're comparing Nolan to LENI RIEFENSTAHL, who was explicitly hired to make propaganda films. But I'll try.

1. I'm a firm believer in death of the author, and I don't take any creator's intentions into account when evaluating their work, unless it is actually created as propaganda.

2. I think culturally we have a weird relationship with the French Revolution, and that it often gets divorced from its political context for the sake of adventure stories. Like, how many Scarlet Pimpernel movies have there been? I think using the trappings of the French Revolution (on both sides) can be a cultural touchstone without being a political statement.

3. Bane is the one who says over and over that he is taking Gotham back for the people, and that the city's fate rests in the hands of an ordinary citizen. This turns out to be a lie, since Talia is not "one of Gotham's people" at all. Gordon, I think, unless it's Blake, says explicitly to whats-his-name the other police guy, "You don't think this is really the will of the people, do you?" and I believe that his insight into the will of the people is greater than Bane's.

4. Ultimately, neither the charging police force or Bane's "army" is actually particularly effective because they just run into each other and kill each other. I take that as a indictment of violent action on both sides. The people who make it out of the movie alive are the ones who don't resort to large-scale violence, the actual 99%. And that's something I can get behind. Also note that I'm not asking anyone else to read it my way.

There are certainly things that I found problematic about the movie--I think its treatment of the Dent Act and the issue of prisoners' rights was inconsistent as hell, for one--but I don't think it's political propaganda, and I think there are multiple ways of relating it to social and political issues. I didn't even care about this movie that much when I saw it, I'm just so sick of this holier-than-thou attitude. Especially because a lot of it in my experience has come from people who do not care about social issues but want a "good" excuse to not like a movie they didn't like anyway.

tl;dr: I don't think it makes sense to judge art that isn't propaganda by the standards of propaganda, and I think there was a lot of stuff in this movie that means there are multiple ways of reading it, and saying one of them is "correct" is dumb.

I wasn't comparing them as filmmakers - I was just saying that watching something does not necessarily entail endorsing its political agenda. Riefenstahl was just a ready-to-hand example of that.

1. Fair enough. But I think the movie functions as right-wing - I mean, the internal logic of the film's universe and the internal morality of the film, I guess, both play into a right-wing reading.

2. I think that's true, but I think the film wasn't just evoking the French Revolution, it was evoking Tale of Two Cities, which is a v specific account of the French Revolution and what it meant, and one that is, I think, harder to divorce from its political context. I mean, I really like that book, but it does have a specific political understanding of what the French Revolution was that the movie seems to be endoring

3. I don't think that's at all incompatible with the movie being conservative. I mean, I think that's something that's really easy to read as a conservative message. The whole political reading of the film is that Bane etc represent Occupy, left-wing protest, etc and that the police - Batman - etc represent the 1%, right-wing reaction, etc, right? So then the narrative there is - the left-wing protesters challenging the status quo claim to represent the people, but really they're wrong, deluded, or mislead by liars. The right wingers are the people who understand what the people REALLY want. I mean, it's that Joe-the-Plumber, salt-of-the-Earth, REAL AMERICA thing. So, yes: in the movie's reality, the people are not on the side of Bane, except insofar as they've been misled or corrupted. But that's not really evidence that it's not conservative, to me.

4. Fair enough. I guess it just seems like there's a lot of stuff within the movie that lends itself really, really easy to a conservative reading to the point where it just seems kind of obvious to me, and difficult to see it any other way, which is probably as much a failure of my imagination of anything else.

I definitely agree that the holier-than-thou attitude can be annoying (and I hope I didn't come off like that; I certainly didn't intend to and I really do apologize if I did). And I don't think any of this is necessarily a reason not to like the movie; just something to be aware of, I guess. I definitely find that attitude of "if you like this movie, you're a bad person, because it's terrible conservative propaganda" pretty odious. I definitely agree that some people use it as an excuse for disliking the movie (which is a really weird phenomenon in general, btw - when did we get the point where we needed that kind of excuse to dislike a movie? When did it stop being okay to just say "I didn't like the movie because it was long and boring" or whatever?) It just seemed to me that the elements of the movie that people are reading as conservative are inextricable from the movie. But, well, that was clearly wrong.

Thanks for your thoughtful reply.

when did we get the point where we needed that kind of excuse to dislike a movie?

I wish I knew. I guess people want to have their opinion validated by someone they think is more thoughtful than they are, but at some point, it just gets silly.

2. Sorry, I think I wasn't very clear. That's why I brought up The Scarlet Pimpernel, which is another French Revolution story about saving the poor oppressed rich people from the clutches of the slobbering masses (including those sneaky Jews, oh my!). It rests on the hero pretending to be a flaky dandy type and secretly being shrewd and working under cover… so basically, Batman (I could swear I read something about it being an influence in Batman canon, but I can't find it). And I think we have the same relationship with it that we do with Tale of Two Cities.

3. I think that conservatives can (will?) use exactly the argument you present, and I guess my question is, why do we have to accept that when it is based on fundamental misinformation about Occupy? Bane's so-called revolution doesn't look like Occupy actually looks; it looks like a hostage situation, and its goals are not actually about fairness and social change. It's aping certain left-wing rhetoric (and certain right-wing rhetoric), but at its core is pointless violence. So if a conservative says, This is what the evil socialist ninety-nine-percenters do!! I can feel free to say, lol nope, if that's what it was going for it missed the mark. The fact is, conservatives will use whatever they can to support their values, including completely missing the point of popular media (e.g. the idiotic Bain/Bane thing because OMGliberalhollywoodboo!). So the fact that conservatives can find fodder in this movie doesn't make it inherently a conservative movie to me. I'm sure that's partly a semantic difference, too.

I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to me about this.

2. I see what you mean now. And yeah, that's a good point. Although I think someone could argue that Batman is, in general, kind of a conservative character (see eg this Reginald Hunter video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8l1PMVvfjDM) (Reginald Hunter is a funny guy). But that's a whole nother conversation and I wouldn't really insist too much on that interpretation.

3. Well, I mean. "I can feel free to say, lol nope, if that's what it was going for it missed the mark." I think that is what it was going for and it is just incorrect and bad in its portrayal - and that, more broadly, the structure of the movie's plot provides a lot of things that give conservatives ammo to call it a conservative movie (things that are much more realistic than the dumbass Bain/Bane stuff).

But that's ultimately a question, partly of interpretation, and like you say partly a question of semantics as well.

[ SECRET POST #2065 ]

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