downplay official penal environments, they identify a “generalized social fear”: “In
some ways those who are in prison have less to fear; rather, even though the threats
they face from the carceral machine, the guards, and other inmates are severe, they
are more limited and knowable. Fear in the security regime is an empty signifier in
which all kinds of terrifying phantoms can appear” (Argo Navis Author Services,
2012, 24). Yet no sooner have these frightening apparitions been sighted than they
disappear in a utopian characterization of the movement for so-called direct
democracy, associated in particular with Occupy Wall Street but extending (in
Hardt and Negri’s catch-all view) to the uprisings of the Arab Spring and beyond:
“The encamped protesters—being together, discussing, disagreeing, struggling—
seem to have discovered a truth that Spinoza foresaw: real security and the
destruction can be achieved only through the collective construction of freedom”
(43). Freedom indeed! Would the actual prisoners with their supposedly “more
limited and knowable” dangers therefore have liberty if, within the penitentiary
walls, they adopted such interaction, “silently wiggling their fingers with hands up
or down to express approval or disapproval” (64) as a prelude to collective decisionmaking? I find it a most unconvincing proposition, involving a curious kind of
retro-conjuring trick that presents the problem of servitude only to magic away the
dimension of trauma and suffering that makes it matter. If “jazz hands” can save the
world, then not much is really wrong; Declaration strikes me more as a work of
consolation than militancy.
I begin at this tangent to try to short-circuit a trend in debates about Christopher
Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises: the idea that the film is a thinly veiled attack on
Occupy (which is assumed to epitomize emancipatory radicalism). The argument
runs that because masked mercenary Bane attacks the Stock Exchange and then
sets off French Revolution-style mob violence (rather than peaceful public
assemblies), it adds up to an alarmist denunciation of Occupy’s sinister potential.
But in terms of outright political content, it’s surely Selina Kyle (the film’s version
of Catwoman) who gives Robin Hood-style voice to Occupy’s ideas about economic
equality. The soldier of fortune Bane is more like a Shock Doctrine fundamentalist,
who wants to use Gotham as a lab to see what happens when people are no longer
shackled by regulation. He and his henchmen arrive, Bane declares, “not as
conquerors, but as liberators—to return the city to its people.” Doesn’t this make
him an incarnation of the Tea Party, Paul Ryan on steroids?
There are all sorts of further ambiguities. With justifiable cynicism, the film gives
the language of sustainability and global “balance” to its surprise sociopath,
Miranda (aka Talia al Ghul). And the parallel between Batman and Bane isn’t
avoided: both are initiates of the League of Shadows and, more subtly, there’s a
moment when the film cuts from Bruce Wayne in a room that boasts a collection of
African-looking masks to a character saying that Bane has been involved in a coup
in that same continent. The implication seems to be: such are the acts that Bruce’s
inherited wealth is made of. So, in typical Nolan fashion, The Dark Knight Rises is a
political puzzle, full of red herrings and sleights of hand. And full of lies. The film
begins with Commissioner Gordon’s manipulative speech falsely praising the late
Harvey Dent (whose secret villainy was hushed up at the end of The Dark Knight).
The next scene is a murderous deception: Bane getting on board a CIA plane
disguised under a prisoner’s hood. The third also involves a stratagem: Selina’s theft
of a string of precious Wayne pearls. From the start, Nolan inculcates an attitude of
suspicion.
In The Dark Knight, the Joker kept making up new fictions about his disfigurement.
Crucial statements in the new film are difficult in another way—as many viewers
have noticed with frustration. Sometimes Bane’s explanatory dialogue is
unintelligible in the sound edit, even after repeated viewing (a fact that is surely
ironically acknowledged when the mercenary says of the boy singing the “StarSpangled Banner” at the football stadium: “that’s a lovely, lovely voice”). Bane’s
black gas-mask contraption covers his mouth completely so there isn’t even any
visible facial twitching to reassure us that the voice is indeed connected to an
onscreen speaker. It’s a subversion of trust—one of many in the film—and of any
sense of what one might call the authenticity of political enunciation relied upon
by, and enshrined in the title of, Hardt and Negri’s pamphlet.
What do you make of Bane?
MARK FISHER: Duplicity is certainly the major theme in Nolan’s work going back
to his first film, Following. But my initial impulse was to read The Dark Knight Rises as
incoherent and opportunistic rather than engaging in the duplicitous shadow play
that characterizes the director’s best work. I say opportunistic, because it was almost
as if Nolan went out of his way to give someone from practically any political
persuasion some nugget of satisfaction to take away from the film. Bane seems to
typify the incoherence of the film as whole. Slavoj Žižek tries to read Bane as the
leader of a “dictatorship of the proletariat”
(www.newstatesman.com/culture/culture/2012/08/slavoj-žižek-politics-batman).
Yet this take on Bane only works if we leave out of account Bane’s ultimate plan to
destroy Gotham with a nuclear device. How could Bane be engaged in an
emancipatory project if in the end he will resume his mentor R’as al Guhl’s fascist
project of cleansing the city by incinerating it?
I agree that that Bane’s voice and mask are fascinating on many levels. Firstly: is
what Bane wears a mask at all? He plainly doesn’t choose to wear it in the same way
that Bruce decides to become Batman. Furthermore, the apparatus doesn’t conceal
Bane’s identity. Batman tells his young protégé, Blake, that if he’s going to perform
heroics he should wear a mask in order to protect those he loves, but Bane doesn’t
have a private identity that could be obscured in the same way. The film never
explains why Bane wears the facial apparatus, and the gap in explanation has
prompted all kinds of bafflement and speculation online (for instance here:
answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20120720013004AAHcSKd). In the
comics, Bane uses it to imbibe a drug known as Venom, the source of his increased
physical strength. This is never referred to in the film. Nolan told Rolling Stone
magazine that “Bane is someone ravaged by pain from a trauma suffered long ago,
and the mask dispenses a type of anesthetic that keeps his pain just below the
threshold so he can function” (www.rollingstone.com/movies/news/christophernolan-dark-knight-rises-isn-t-political-20120720). Yet this explanation isn’t given in
the film either. According to both these accounts, though, Bane’s headgear isn’t
properly speaking a mask at all: it’s a prosthesis, a cybernetic augmentation of his
body and nervous system that only accidentally obscures his features. In that sense,
it is his face—or part of a cyborgian extended face. At the same time, one could
equally well say that Bane’s prosthesis deprives him of a face.
Then there’s the question of the voice. Is Bane an example of what Michel Chion
calls the acousmêtre: someone who speaks, but who isn’t seen? Chion derives the
concept of the acousmêtre from Pierre Schaeffer’s concept of acousmatic sound—
sound that is floating free from its source. Acousmêtres seem to be omnipotent and
omniscient, but, as we see with the most famous example of the acousmêtre, the
Wizard of Oz, this aura is stripped away from them once the moment of “deacousmatization” occurs, and the sound can be traced back to a particular body.
Mladen Dolar adds a further complication. In A Voice and Nothing More, Dolar
argues that de-acousmatization never really happens. Even in everyday cases, Dolar
claims: “The source of the voice can never be seen, it stems from an undisclosed
and structurally concealed interior, it cannot possibly match what we see … [T]here
is always something totally incongruous in the relation between the appearance,
the aspect, of a person and his or her voice, before we adapt to it. It is absurd, this
ROB WHITE: “No one cared who I was until I put on the mask,” Bane says to the
ill-fated CIA operative at the beginning, but I think you’re right that the covering
over whatever remains of his face is a life-sustaining prosthesis. With such a
prosthesis we can’t any longer separate mask and face, apparatus and person,
technology and humanity—thus the cyborg fusion of man and machine. So is
Nolan giving us a sort of deconstruction of human identity in The Dark Knight Rises?
There’s an element of “the dog that didn’t bark”—the “dog” in this case being
precisely the unmasking you mention. We never, that’s to say, get to see the
grotesque—and pathetically human—disfigurement that the prosthesis conceals.
There’s no equivalent here of the scene in Return of the Jedi when Darth Vader’s
pasty human face can finally be seen. The same is true at the end of the sewer fight.
Bane easily defeats Batman and contemptuously holds his adversary’s mask, which
he must have removed, in his hand. But there isn’t the expected followup: we don’t
see Bruce Wayne’s unmasked face until he reappears later, locked away in the
prison pit. Maybe Nolan felt that the scene of unmasking is too much of a
superhero cliché, but in any case its absence maintains the indeterminacy in regard
to the relation between mask and face.
At the start of Living in the End Times, Žižek comments on burqa-wearing in
Europe: “[W]hy does the encounter with a face covered by a burqa trigger such
anxiety? Is it that a face so covered is no longer the Levinasian face: that Otherness
from which the unconditional ethical call emanates? But what if the opposite is the
case? From a Freudian perspective, the face is the ultimate mask that conceals the
horror of the Neighbor-Thing … The very covering-up of the face obliterates a
protective shield, so that the Other-Thing stares at us directly (recall that the burqa
has a narrow slit for the eyes; we don’t see the eyes, but we know there is a gaze
there” (Verso, 2010, 2). It’s not a stretch from this to assert that Bane’s visage reflects
back our own increasing cyborg inseparability from audiovisual devices—as with
those technology stories about Google implants and the like; that Bane is not a
monster, but is us, because we’re more monstrous and thing-like than we like to
think as well as less independent of our gadgets. Having said that, though, the film
insists on the trackability of identity too. Selina steals Bruce’s fingerprints and,
using them fraudulently, Bane’s cronies manage to bankrupt Wayne Enterprises by
authorizing stock-market trades with this unique ID. Selina herself is motivated by
the promise of access to Clean Slate, a computer program that can erase her from
all the world’s databases (by means of which Bruce is quickly able to identify her as
the burglar). Thus, presumably, she can start over—which is the idyllic prospect,
too, glimpsed at the end of the film when Blake (the film’s Robin) finds the exotic
new Batcave, and Alfred sees Bruce having a cozy lunch with Selina in Florence.
There’s a tension in The Dark Knight Rises, then, as in other Nolan films, between a
nightmarish sense of techno-mutation (and mutilation) and a more caper-like
escape from the terrible apparatus.
What are the politics of all this? Let’s not forget how Bane came to need his
prosthesis. Such was his devotion to Talia when they were together down in the pit
that he was willing to endure the savage beating that disfigures him. ( Just such a
fierce, chaste, avuncular protectiveness also prevails between Alfred and Bruce,
though Alfred gets to keep his face. I’m surprised how much, judging by reviews,
Alfred’s care has touched viewers: I find the scenes between the two men mawkish
and clumsy.) Žižek in the article you cite invokes Christ, Kant, Robespierre, and
Guevara and praises Bane’s unwavering, self-sacrificing loyalty as the kind of
“unconditional love” that revolutions are made of. Žižek gets positively exultant on
the subject! (It reminds me of the emphasis Hardt and Negri place on the joy of
direct democracy in Declaration.) I just don’t get this; I can’t reconcile Bane the
deformed cyborg with Bane the heroic altruist.
Perhaps things can be shaken up a bit by pointing out that, metaphorically
speaking, loyalty and devotion are also prosthetic—attachments, in psychoanalytic
terms, emotional ties that get ingrained and impossible to detach. What do you
make of the film’s presentation of loyalty, affection, dedication, and so forth?
MARK FISHER: Once again, I think Žižek has to squint quite hard to make his
interpretation of Bane seem to work. He has to ignore the fact that it is Bane’s
unconditional love for Talia which makes him forget any emancipatory principles
and collude in the plot to obliterate Gotham. Instead of standing for a cause, Bane’s
loyalty is ultimately of a familial type. It’s an excellent example of what Hardt and
Negri mean when they say that the family is, like the corporation and the nation, a
“corrupt form” of the common (Commonwealth, Harvard University Press, 2009,
160). Bane’s relationship to R’as al Guhl is intensely Oedipalized: like Bruce, he’s
positioned as the errant son of R’as, just as R’as becomes a failed father. Bruce
rejects the League of Shadows, whereas Bane remains loyal to his “father’s” project,
continuing it after his death. What’s missing—or rather what’s suppressed—is the
notion of an abstract Idea to which Bane could show unwavering loyalty. This is a
particularly glaring absence because of the Nolans’ evident fascination with the
potency of Ideas. After all, what is Inception about if not the power of an Idea to
destroy someone?
I found Bane’s love for Talia much less interesting than the love that Bane’s
followers show toward him. There’s a strange tenderness in that opening scene
when Bane tells one of his men that he must remain on the plane and die. The sad
but stoically accepting way in which the man goes to his anonymous death was far
more moving to me than any number of scenes between Alfred and Bruce. What is
it that motivates this devotion to Bane? Of course, this could be yet another case of
quasi-familial clannishness, but there’s at least a suggestion here of an Idea so
powerful that it can motivate people to give up their lives.
I also find Bane the deformed cyborg more alluring than Bane the heroic altruist.
One consequence of Bane’s prosthesis is that it means that certain kinds of
intimacy—kissing for example—are impossible for him. He’s instead condemned
to what Lacan called “extimacy,” but as Jacques-Alain Miller explains, “Extimacy is
not the contrary of intimacy. Extimacy says that the intimate is Other—like a
foreign body, a parasite” (www.lacan.com/symptom/?p=36). The concept of
extimacy points to the key psychoanalytic claim that what most makes us what we
are is also other to us. When we go deep inside, we encounter something from
outside. This brings us back to Bane’s voice—he can only speak because “a foreign
body, a parasite” permanently clings to his face. (Is it an accident, incidentally, that
Bane’s prosthesis resembles the “facehuggers” from the Alien film series?) But if we
follow Dolar, Bane’s prosthesis only makes visible what is always the case. For Dolar,
the voice is inherently cyborgian. The voice doesn’t “belong” to the body or to the
mind, it’s the mysterious apparatus which binds them together. There’s a peculiarly
extimate quality to how we hear Bane’s voice. Partly because of the way that the
effects were added to it in postproduction, Bane’s voice doesn’t quite belong to the
film’s shared reality, so it’s as if we’re hearing the voice inside our own heads.
Squinting is what you have to do if you want to see Bane as a revolutionary leader—
or indeed if you want to extract any egalitarian potentials from a film that, in the
end, is deeply reactionary. I agree with Žižek that the film is a “precise indicator” of
“the ideological predicament of our societies”—but that’s because it’s a reactionary
vision which can only imagine radical social transformation as catastrophic.
Following from the basically Hobbesian orientation of The Dark Knight (the people
cannot be trusted with the truth; abuses of power are justified if they achieve social
order), The Dark Knight Rises offers Terror without Revolution: we see chaos,
summary justice, and generalized criminality, but no hint of any new social
relations.
But I think this kind of squinting can actually be a valuable exercise, provided we
acknowledge that’s what we’re doing. If we look beyond its manifest reactionary
message, The Dark Knight Rises gives us some of the materials for a revolutionary
vision, but fragmented, inverted, “upside down as in a camera obscura,” as Marx
and Engels put it in The German Ideology. There’s more than an element of
revolutionary romanticism and philosophical theatre in Žižek’s invocation of
Christ, Guevera et al. It’s worth dwelling on this, because I think this kind of
thinking is a vice in certain kinds of political philosophy. The twinning of Love and
Terror in Žižek’s (and also Alain Badiou’s) account of revolution invites us to see
radical transformation in high-flown ethico-philosophical terms whereas a
successful struggle is likely to be beyond good and evil in a far more murky,
Machiavellian way.
There’s a more promising approach to the question of “revolutionary personality”
in Žižek’s new book, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously. Žižek briefly discusses Adam
Kotsko’s Why We Love Sociopaths: A Guide to Late Capitalist Television (Zero Books,
2012). Kotsko analyzes the preponderance of sociopathic types in some of the most
celebrated U.S. television of the past decade or so: Homer Simpson, McNulty in The
Wire, Jack Bauer in 24, Dexter, Mad Men’s Don Draper. Žižek argues that the
sociopathic features of some of these characters “provide the perfect model for the
authentic revolutionary . . . :what we need is a subject who combines the dedication
of Jack Bauer, the inventive pragmatic spirit of [The Wire’s] Stringer Bell, and the
innocently malicious joy of Homer Simpson” (Verso, 2012, 124). Couldn’t the same
be said of the Batman films—that the potentially “revolutionary” personality traits
shown take the form of sociopathic tendencies, displayed not only by Bane, but also
by some of the reactionary characters? Certainly, Bane’s strength, charisma, and
leadership would be crucial assets in any struggle to radically transform society; but
so also would Selina’s criminal ingenuity and improvisatory guile, Batman’s
capacity to induce fear, even Harvey’s instrumentalization of the legal system (in
The Dark Knight), and Gordon’s reluctant collusion with Harvey’s draconian policies
and self-mythologization. It’s one thing to self-sacrifice in some grand gesture of
altruism; it’s another to sacrifice one’s ethical conscience itself in order to further
the cause. And as regards fear: surely one reason that neoliberalism has survived
the bank crisis is that the hyper-rich do not fear the poor, and the sad fact is that
the peaceable encampments of Occupy have done nothing to induce such fear.
Batman—a wealthy man terrorizing the criminal underclass—is the inverted image
of what we need now: the poor organizing to terrorize the super-rich.
One value of Nolan’s Batman series—something it inherits from Frank Miller’s
Reaganite take on the character—is that it’s open about the low cunning that the
Right need in order to maintain power and hegemony. The mistake is to oppose
this low cunning with some kind of ethico-philosophical purity. The Left needs its
own low cunning, its own strategies for subordinating institutions to its interests.
It’s significant that Don Draper isn’t mentioned in Žižek’s list of potentially
revolutionary sociopaths, because what the Left sorely lacks at the moment is a
force capable of contesting and reversing the libidinal manipulations engineered by
PR and advertising. We’ve been good at denouncing the Right’s manipulations, but
far less effective at countering them, in part because that would involve engaging in
manipulative strategies of our own, something the Left has rather lost the stomach
for. Revolutionary romanticism is far more comfortable with violence than with
the idea that “the people” might need to be manipulated to act in their own
interests.
ROB WHITE: In his pomp, orchestrating the total shutdown of Gotham through
simultaneous detonations, Bane achieves an almost magical power—he becomes
this urban island’s Prospero. Yet for all his strength, brutality, ingenuity, and
managerial–military authority, there’s something sad and suffering about Bane:
your notion of the mouthless one who can’t kiss captures this quality perfectly, as
does the image of him defiantly alone in the dungeon with sackcloth covering his
bloody, torn-up face. He’s Caliban too, traumatized, burdened by a vengeful
anguish that he can only enact loyally (as you suggest), channeling all this pain into
the megalomaniacal project of R’as rather than a truly emancipatory endeavor. (As
Hardt and Negri remind us in Commonwealth, Caliban is often invoked as a figure of
anticolonial resistance.) But Nolan’s empowered Caliban is also unmistakably
middle-aged. Nolan’s film—like The Prestige and Inception—lets growing-older
regretfulness infuse the action-thriller genre. (Indeed maybe this is the director’s
distinctive contribution.) Loves lost, roads not taken, bodies that can’t perform
without prostheses: thus Bruce hobbles around grumpily in his mansion until
Selina starts a process of medically assisted recovery. She, too, though clearly
younger, is a representative of those who “have a past”—who wish things could have
gone differently (thus the desire for the Clean Slate).
The ruefulness of The Dark Knight Rises has political resonance. It’s an appropriate
attitude for what one might call the austerity-making generations in the west—the
Baby Boomers, Generation X-ers like you and me—that so miserably failed to
defend against the neoliberal storm, but that will survive in relative comfort to
worry about Alzheimer’s and the Right to Die while today’s children and teenagers
wear shackles and have only an increasingly threadbare safety net beneath them.
When intellectuals like Hardt and Negri in Declaration breathlessly celebrate direct
democracy as if radical togetherness could be all one summer youth camp (with
lectures by admired professors of a certain age, of course!), they abandon precisely
the hard-bitten sensibility you rightly insist is needed. Give me the through-aglass-darkly vision of lawless Gotham, however Hobbesian, rather than this sort of
airy and irresponsible sentimentality! And give me a Left intelligentsia that
honestly explores its guilty conscience (the kind of past-one’s-prime angst that
Nolan is very good at depicting).
Twenty years ago in the U.K., many teenagers were entitled not only to free
university tuition but also to a maintenance grant that was sufficient to live on. You
could leave university with no debt, an unthinkable scenario now. What this state
support permitted—reinforced by what was by today’s standards totally
rudimentary communications technology that made phoning home a chore—was
the opportunity to leave home without obligatory ties of financial dependence and
without the jittery mutual monitoring of online social networking. There’s much
more to leaving home than geographical distance, of course, and you rightly invoke
familialism as the complex psychosocial forcefield that can easily allow dutiful
obedience to mistake itself for rebellion. Hardt and Negri refer in Commonwealth to
the fallback on family models as evidence of “a pathetic lack of social imagination
to grasp other forms of intimacy and solidarity” (161). Leaving home is a name for
the process of opening the door to “other forms of intimacy and solidarity,” and
creating possibilities too for an antisocial hostility that may be just as important if
we care to really acknowledge the scale of the problem of our dependencies on an
imprisoning social order. Reverting to more concrete and local terms, the fact that
so many in the U.K. can’t any longer actually leave home because of reliance on
parental support, especially in the form of housing, is one indicator of family
retrenchment. (The recent criminalization of squatting in the U.K. also contributes
to this process.) But what has this got to do with The Dark Knight Rises?
There’s a curious topographical anomaly in Nolan’s latest that connects it in a
certain way to Inception: the world gets smaller as you go deeper down—or, at least,
we see less of it. The Dark Knight Rises has, toward the end, swooping helicopter
shots that emphasize the extent of the metropolitan sprawl, even though it’s mostly
cut off from the rest of America by Bane’s bombs. But the visible sewer world
beneath the city is strangely restricted. Bane’s first subterranean hideout is little
more than a low-ceilinged room; most of Gotham’s cops get crammed into a
tunnel or two. Yet we get a hint of there being something more down there. Near
the start of the film, Blake—state-raised kid turned idealistic law enforcer—finds
the washed-up dead body of a teenager called Jimmy, who’s “aged out” of St.
Swithin’s, a Wayne Foundation-funded orphanage that must discharge its
occupants once they’re adults. How did Jimmy die? It’s not clear, but it seems to
have something to do with going underground—because (as someone says) “there’s
work down there.” Perhaps Bane has been recruiting in the sewers, but his
henchmen seem like hardier veterans than Jimmy would have been. So can we
instead suppose that beneath Gotham is a zone where institutional rejects who
don’t become cops earn and congregate (though it must be a dangerous place too,
judging by Jimmy’s fate)?
I agree with you that with a film like The Dark Knight Rises, we’re not dealing with an
openly insurrectionist blockbuster like Rise of the Planet of the Apes. So it’s necessary
to look—perhaps here the middle-aged awareness of tracks not followed is helpful
—for loose threads, for hints, deviations, potentialities. I do have some sympathy
for Žižek’s point in his review that The Dark Knight Rises does at least explicitly
envisage the kind of endemic class war that’s habitually disavowed by neoliberal
propaganda, but for the most part I’m inclined to think as you do that we need to
look for character elements that are emancipatory “figures of subjectivity” (to use a
phrase of Hardt and Negri’s that’s useful). Only the key character for me in the film
isn’t Bane or any of his henchman, but Blake—with the crucial proviso that it’s a
different Blake … one who took same the perilous path as Jimmy.
When Blake hectors Bruce into dusting off the Batsuit, he talks about his
experience of being orphaned—which is, of course, Bruce’s experience too—and
feeling “angry in your bones.” Such a child is misunderstood by the custodians who
substitute for parents: “they want the angry little kid to do something he knows he
can’t do: move on. So after a while they stop understanding; they send the angry
kid to a boys’ home,” where “you got to learn to hide the anger, practice smiling in
the mirror—it’s like putting on a mask.” If crippling dependency in the form of
debt and possibly never-ending social obligations of one kind or another is what’s
now, under the name of austerity, being mercilessly inflicted upon the young of
Europe and beyond, then perhaps one result will be to trigger in many rightly
angry minds a process of “orphaning” in which, at first behind a mask, later in
hidden meeting places, bonds of allegiance to the corrupt institutions of
dependency are destroyed. Perhaps this is how the necessary cunning will be learnt.