The Dark Knight Rises is a pretty consistently exciting action flick. Unfortunately, it also aspires to weld layers of social commentary into just about each of its sprawling set pieces. The most prevalent theme is: “The 1 percent sucks—or do they?” or something. There’s the demonization of the rich by the film’s minor characters, the populist rhetoric spouted by the sociopathic villain Bane, a bluntly metaphorical assault on Wall Street itself, and a pointed effort to aesthetically link the unruly mob of bad guys to “protestors.”Within the film’s universe, most of this is ultimately meaningless; the quotes and memes seem plucked from last year’s headlines to lend the film a veneer of “importance,” or at least topicality. But it’s interesting nonetheless how DKR fumblingly channels those uneasy themes into pro-America, pro-status quo Hollywoodified entertainment.Lech Harris at the Massachusetts Review thinks it reveals how audiences simultaneously want to identify with underdog protestors/freedom fighters and relish in America’s superior military might, morality, and technology. Harris notes that the film accommodates this desire by inverting the municipal power structure: “here it is the police that are rag-tag and poorly equipped, united by the courage of their common cause, while the "protestors" are brutal-looking and heavily armed, outfitted with advanced weaponry and standing on the steps of city hall. The social map has been replotted, the signifiers reversed.” Others argue that the thematic elements are so void of meaning that they boil down to nothing but empty plot contrivances.Curious, then, that one of those plot contrivances amounts to a massive affront to clean energy technology: Much of the plot swims around an expensive but failed prototype of a nuclear fusion reactor that a super-smart physicist can turn into a bomb. Hence the film wraps at least two prominent myths about clean energy into its narrative:a) That it’s an over-expensive boondoggle.
Wayne Enterprises has evidently all but bankrupted itself investing in the technology that was never able to bear fruit; shades of Solyndra abound. Characters discuss the clean energy project as an exercise in do-gooding that was doomed never to make a dime; the rich, powerful villain-abetter John Dagget mocks the endeavor, and wealthy heiress Miranda Tate defends it not as potentially being quite effective, but because it’s noble, the pursuit of those who care about other things than money. Which leads us to myth #2:b) That it’s a pipe dream and an ultimately dangerous one.
The characters talk solemnly about the promise of abundant clean energy, of a sustainable future. But they do so as though it’s a foregone conclusion that such a thing is fantasy. They touch on the obvious possibility that the failed device should never fall into the wrong hands, and, of course, it promptly does. But the takeaway is that clean power is far from ready for the prime time — wealthy investors can sink billions into the technology, but it’ll never work, and probably someone will just use it to kill people anyways.Now, it’s important to note that the technology in the film is actually some kind of nuclear fusion (cinema’s go-to pie-in-the-sky energy ambition), but that it’s more commonly referred to simply as the “clean” power source, at least until Bane turns it into a giant bomb.As such, Nolan appears to have absorbed the predominant conservative ideology surrounding clean power and dribbled it out into his script, wittingly or no. After all, the “the potentially world-changing energy source that turns deadly in the wrong hands” plot mechanism is as old as the superhero itself. More recently, it provided the suspense in Spiderman 2:But those plot lines usually touch on something grander and more fundamental — the quest for limitless clean energy as an act of hubris, like trying to build the tower of Babel. In The Dark Knight Rises, with its “gritty realism,” we get explanations about how the technology isn’t financially viable, how it will bankrupt your company to invest in it — and very little moralizing about the nature of the search for renewable power itself. Instead, it’s just a failed stab at cleantech that some dude happened to figure out how to turn into a bomb. Bruce Wayne isn’t some over-reaching idealist like Dr. Octavius; he’s a rich dude who plunked his money down on something that sounded cool.In fact, Tate (spoiler alert), who turns out to be the primo bad guy pulling Bane’s puppet strings, seems to have commissioned Wayne’s investment in the project specifically to eventually use it as a bomb (but who knows, the plot’s cohesion sort of unspools all over the place, especially at the end). Which would mean that, at least in the film’s universe, clean energy isn’t just folly — it’s a delusion.Which obviously isn’t the case. Plenty of people, after all, are getting rich off of clean energy, and the industry is booming worldwide. Clean energy is, in some regions, reaching grid parity with fossil fuels. The ubiquity of clean power, in other words, is anything but a pipe dream; it’s a few years away. I don’t really think that Christopher Nolan is anti-clean energy, or that this film was intended to carry any explicit message about the topic. But as with Nolan’s treatment of the ‘Occupy’ zeitgeist, it’s distressing to see a quietly derisive attitude seeps out between the reels.
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Wayne Enterprises has evidently all but bankrupted itself investing in the technology that was never able to bear fruit; shades of Solyndra abound. Characters discuss the clean energy project as an exercise in do-gooding that was doomed never to make a dime; the rich, powerful villain-abetter John Dagget mocks the endeavor, and wealthy heiress Miranda Tate defends it not as potentially being quite effective, but because it’s noble, the pursuit of those who care about other things than money. Which leads us to myth #2:b) That it’s a pipe dream and an ultimately dangerous one.
The characters talk solemnly about the promise of abundant clean energy, of a sustainable future. But they do so as though it’s a foregone conclusion that such a thing is fantasy. They touch on the obvious possibility that the failed device should never fall into the wrong hands, and, of course, it promptly does. But the takeaway is that clean power is far from ready for the prime time — wealthy investors can sink billions into the technology, but it’ll never work, and probably someone will just use it to kill people anyways.Now, it’s important to note that the technology in the film is actually some kind of nuclear fusion (cinema’s go-to pie-in-the-sky energy ambition), but that it’s more commonly referred to simply as the “clean” power source, at least until Bane turns it into a giant bomb.
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