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"Batman is a reactionary"
In real life, if Batman was a reactionary, he would have spent the entirety of the Dark Knight Rises blogging about how he wasn't a conservative despite agreeing with most of Rush Limbaugh's opinions, blogging about how Lucius Fox was impressed and enamored by Batman's candor in telling Fox that he was a genetically inferior human being, and making snide comments on twitter about how Bane was a puritan.
Comments
last i checked, yes
and i'd like to think i know a thing or two about batman
You're poking me, right? :P
Batman is as bourgeois as a super hero could possibly get. The three Nolan films are very ideological, too.
What makes Batman Batman? The fact that he is fucking rich - he never could have become what he is if not for his inherited wealth. The system doesn't work, the people are defenseless, so whenever the need arises the weak, cowardly rabble calls the rich white vigilante to use his privilege for charity and save their asses. Many villains present a force of change, which Batman feels obliged to stop (this is symptomatic of Hollywood as a whole, though) - the Nolan movies are pretty obviously the most political of everything Batman-related ever, especially Dark Knight Rises, with Bane as a painstakingly obvious caricature of the revolutionary left.
You're taking me seriously.
I would recommend not doing that.
man i dont even take myself seriously anymore.
A rather understandable position.
Jokes aside, I meant simply that Tony Stark is arguably an even more glaring example of a bourgeois superhero. Specially considering that at least Batman does try to help the lower classes (even if all he does is throw money and batarangs at the problem)
And I saw the Tony Stark pic as a simple "wut face" image macro. :P
But yeah, you're absolutely right about Iron Man.
Hell, the first Iron Man movie has the whole "this is my private property, stay away government scum" thing going on.
The funny thing about Iron Man is that the whole point of the original series was to create a superhero that an audience ideologically opposed to him could still root for, if only as a sympathetic anti-hero. He was the Objectivist ideal because Lee wanted to challenge his predominantly left-of-centre readers (and to a degree, himself) to identify with someone far from their political comfort zone. And to be honest, I think that's a brilliant way of fostering an intelligent dialogue: Write a story from the point-of-view of someone that you totally disagree with on some level and show that they have good in them.
It's worth noting that unlike Bruce Wayne, Tony Stark isn't a superhero because he's rich. He creates the Iron Man suit in a cave with a box of scraps, not in a lab with expensive equipment.
While true, it's not like he needs to keep using the suit or to fight crime after the cave incident. Not to mention that the suit he uses after the whole cave thing is not exactly the one he created with a box of scraps.
Well, true. But Tony Stark's super-ness primarily comes from the fact that he's a genius rather than the fact that he's rich. He does have the whole "able to fight crime because he doesn't have to worry about money" thing going on I guess, but it's not as defining as it is with Batman.
I'm not quite sure of that. I mean, if Tony didn't have the money to upgrade his suit, would he have been able to do half of the shit he does? I don't think he could have fought Thor long enough to convince him it was all a misunderstanding and form the Avengers.
Not to mention that Batman has kind of a degree on everything. (admittedly a case of writers being lazy and not delimitating his skills and knowledge, but still, this is a dude who has built cars, computers, airplanes found antidotes to various poisons and you know, he does other things)
Eh, it's all perception I guess; the characters certainly have an awful lot in common. Somehow I can imagine an alternate Tony Stark as a college student who builds robot suits in his spare time much more easily than I can imagine an alternate Batman who lives on the streets.
Honestly, it all comes down to the fact that they can't operate on the way they do without enough brains to design the gadgets and, you know, enough money to actually make the gadgets real rather than just blueprints they could throw at criminals. (Admittedly a very underrated crimefighting technique.)
Perhaps because bruce wayne was rich, that the shock of his parent's deaths was more resonating with him, than it would be a bruce who came from an average family, whereupon he would've been more exposed to the underbelly of civilization than a rich bruce wayne.
Hmmmm?
Perhaps. What really matters is simply that Bruce has to be rich from the beginning in order for him to meet Sherlock Holmes at a young age. Or Liam Neeson. It depends on which version you are reading, really.
It's also why he has to see his parents die when he's a kid. If he was a teenager, he probably would just go "I'm gonna go get VENGEANCE" and then procastinate on it until he's a grown-up with a job, finds a journal detailing his dreams of vigilantism and just laughs at silly ol' teen Bruce.
>Bane being part of the revolutionary left
The dude was basically a South African mercenary with the motive "blow up gotham." I mean he even took out African governments and dealt with blood diamonds. Doesn't seem to apply to the American Left.
Oh come on.
The dude was practically occupy wall street with a muzzle and a scottish accent.
Hell, the whole movie's narrative is basically "You know what's scary? poor people, man."
So, In a Batman parody of a christmas carol, you're saying that the part of Ghost of Christmas Future will be played by Bane.
Interesting.
I don't know, it was made pretty explicit that Gotham's rich is pretty decadent and that things were a timebomb waiting to go off. I mean the Dent Act was a pretty major violation in rights and was protected by a lie.
Its just humorous to think of a genocidal mercenary as being an analogue for Occupy movement when he really just wanted to blow up Gotham from the beginning and the first scene we see is of CIA doing morally questionable things.
Well, yes, but the movie's narrative doesn't really condemn what the CIA is doing there while taking care of Bane. In fact, Littlefinger and company's deaths are used to show us how bad this guy is in the first place.
It's true that the actions that Bruce and Jim took at the end of the Dark Knight are also questioned, but even the Dent Act is something Jim regrets. Not to mention that we almost never see the rich being decadent. At least, not as much as we see the middle and lower classes laying siege to Gotham.
I never got the feel that it was to show how bad these guys were, I mean much of what happened can ultimately be put on Daggert's bill.
But Jim showed regret but never actually went public with it, when he was questioned by Robin he essentially defers blame on to Batman and doesn't take it himself. "Your hands look plenty dirty" or whatever the line was doesn't mesh with that idea. The fact that Gordon fails to come out with it publicly gives Bane a ton of power over the population.
But we see little of the riots of Gotham. We see some scenes during Bane's speech. We have the breakout from the prison. The show trials were something set up by Bane's men and were, if anything, indicative of the Sans Culotte then they were occupy.
But I don't see Bane being anything more than someone who manipulated the people of gotham much like the joker manipulated the mob.
Everything else he's ever done needs highly specialized industrial or laboratory equipment as well as custom, immensely expensive parts.
Can Tony Stark fight crime purely from hobby stores, dumpster-diving outside laboratories, and kitbashing? Sure. He can. But two out of five times his equipment is going to fail because of shoddy parts, incompatible fits, and the fact that none of this stuff was meant for combat.
I think it's the Nolan films more than anything else, as they've had a huge impact on the public perception of Batman. Batmedia before Nolan was a bit more ideologically balanced; you still have a rich dude defending the poor, but unlike the Nolan films, the villains aren't leftist caricatures. Like, the second film was about anarchism being evil, the third about socialism being evil... and I guess the first one was about ninjas being evil? I dunno.
It worked during the second film because the Joker is, and has always been, all about chaos, and anarchism gone wrong is at severe risk of being just that. Attaching Bane to socialism was a weird move, though, and a lot of the third film seemed phoned in. Nolan is a fantastic and skilled director, but he's very firmly entrenched in the traditional right wing of politics to such an extent that it's become very obvious throughout his movies. Outside of Batman, too; you can see a common preference towards stoic, martyr-like masculinity, for instance, rather than outward expression.
Not to say that Batman isn't pretty bourgeois, but Nolan definitely exacerbated the matter.
It was actually played by Joker. Catwoman was the ghost of Christmas Past and Superman was the Ghost of Christmas Present.
Well in the movies the two villains who you could argue are a force for change, Ra's and Bane, honestly don't give a fuck about changing things for the better. They just want to burn Gotham to make a point. And for comics, almost every person in Batman's rogue's gallery is out causing crimes for selfish personal reasons.
Wasn't the first one about the power of symbols and their last impressions and ability to change status quos.
Yeah, this is was kind of how it went down I suppose.
Idk, or maybe qui gon jinn really was on his way to a senate meeting to propose liberalism in Gotham, and batman didn't like that so he killed him.
fuckin batman