Leo D.M.J. Aurini - The Villainy of Bane in The Dark Knight Rises (a response to Confused Matthew)

00:00:00.000 Confused Matthew is a movie reviewer that I really enjoy.

00:00:08.000 He deconstructed The Lion King, showing why it's actually a horrible movie.

00:00:12.000 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.

00:00:22.000 And he's caused me to re-evaluate my views of a number of movies that I liked upon first glance.

00:00:30.000 He's very well-spoken, very insightful. I do find myself disagreeing with him every so often, however, as is the case with his review of the latest Batman movie.

00:00:42.000 And, in this instance, the sort of thing that is actually appropriate for my channel.

00:00:47.000 Now, the modern Batman movies, beyond just the spectacle, actually have a very deep reactionary theme going throughout all of them.

00:01:01.000 In other words, these movies make a lot more sense to somebody alive in 1812 than they make to your typical person around today.

00:01:11.000 And it's hard to say if this was intentional or not.

00:01:18.000 Certainly the third one is an absolute critique of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

00:01:23.000 And yet Christopher Nolan had never heard of them, or only heard of them in passing, by the time the movie was finished.

00:01:29.000 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.

00:01:39.000 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.

00:01:50.000 But we'll get to that in a minute.

00:01:55.000 Now, in reviewing the latest Batman movie, Confused Matthew finds he's not a fan of it.

00:02:02.000 And now I'm not going to debate it on, I'm not going to debate the film on its own merits.

00:02:07.000 I think there's a lot of valid criticisms for this movie.

00:02:14.000 Certainly there's always suspension of disbelief is a problem with these type of films, these superhero movies.

00:02:21.000 I always find myself pondering the logistical organization that the supervillain needs to accomplish whatever they're doing.

00:02:30.000 Just an old habit of mine.

00:02:33.000 But some of the critiques are about Bane being an ineffective villain.

00:02:40.000 And I think that Matthew is missing exactly what Bane is supposed to be.

00:02:46.000 What sort of villain.

00:02:48.000 Because, like I said, he does not make sense to the 2012 mind.

00:02:52.000 He does not make sense to the liberal versus conservative sort of a mind.

00:02:57.000 This is a reactionary villain.

00:03:00.000 And there's four particular points that Matthew brings up.

00:03:04.000 And I'll be addressing each one of them in sequence. 0.99

00:03:07.000 First, he says that the people of Gotham act like absolute idiots when Bane takes power. 0.99

00:03:14.000 Second, he doesn't see what Bane's plan is. 0.99

00:03:19.000 How it makes any sense that he says he wants to give them hope because that will lead to the greatest despair.

00:03:26.000 And yet he's the one holding the nuclear bomb.

00:03:28.000 How does that make any sense?

00:03:30.000 Third, he doesn't understand what the people would see in Bane.

00:03:35.000 That they're all living in these crummy rundown houses that they stole from the rich people.

00:03:39.000 Who wants that? 1.00

00:03:41.000 And fourth, he doesn't find Bane threatening.

00:03:45.000 He says a physical threat is not as compelling as a psychological threat.

00:03:52.000 Bane's beyond psychological.

00:03:54.000 He is a moral threat.

00:03:56.000 And that's the beauty of the villain.

00:04:00.000 So let's get to these one by one. 1.00

00:04:04.000 So first of all, he points out that the people in Gotham act like idiots. 1.00

00:04:09.000 That they've had two madmen try and take over the city before. 1.00

00:04:13.000 And that both times they reacted normally.

00:04:17.000 They ran away and they screamed and panicked.

00:04:19.000 Whereas this time around, they all seem to be happy that Bane is taking over the city.

00:04:24.000 And for this it's useful to go back to a, there's a funny, funny little shared psychology between cops and criminals nowadays.

00:04:39.000 Both cops and criminals say the word citizen as if they want to spit after saying that.

00:04:51.000 So now when I hear the word citizen, me being, you know, an old red Tory reactionary.

00:04:58.000 I think of a homesteading farmer with a shotgun and a wife and a few kids and a dog.

00:05:05.000 You know, a responsible member of society.

00:05:08.000 Somebody, the pillar of the community.

00:05:10.000 That's what citizen means to me.

00:05:13.000 But that's not what it means to the cops and the criminals.

00:05:18.000 The cops and the criminals, it means sheep.

00:05:20.000 It means victim.

00:05:22.000 They both utter it with the exact same tonal inflection.

00:05:26.000 Because the modern day citizen doesn't own a gun.

00:05:29.000 Modern day citizen can't defend themselves.

00:05:32.000 They're, they're, they're weak.

00:05:34.000 They're callow. 0.93

00:05:35.000 They hide and call the cops to protect them from the criminals.

00:05:39.000 And the criminals, they have some grudging respect for the cops.

00:05:43.000 They don't like the cops, but they certainly don't hate the cops the way a civil libertarian hates them.

00:05:50.000 They feel far more in common with the cop than your typical ACLU pinko.

00:05:57.000 There's, they're not the men that voluntarily stood up and joined the army to fight a war because that's what men do.

00:06:06.000 That's what citizens do. 0.77

00:06:08.000 Your modern citizen is a, a weak, contemptible little thing. 0.95

00:06:13.000 And the cops and the criminals see this. 0.71

00:06:16.000 So to say that the citizens acted rationally in the earlier Batman movies, well that's perhaps rationally.

00:06:27.000 They, they ran away from the super villains.

00:06:30.000 But did they do anything to defeat the super villains?

00:06:33.000 Did they do anything to resist them?

00:06:35.000 And I'll take the, the second one with the Joker is the perfect example of this.

00:06:40.000 Where he, the Joker puts the citizens into these two cruise lines.

00:06:45.000 Uh, just foretell alls. 0.97

00:06:48.000 The Joker is the ultimate troll. 0.95

00:06:50.000 He sees how corrupt and broken Gotham is. 0.97

00:06:54.000 The exact same way Bane and the League of Shadows see that Gotham is broken and corrupt.

00:06:59.000 But the Joker, he doesn't have a point to make.

00:07:02.000 He wants, just wants to watch the monkey dance.

00:07:04.000 And so he gives, he loads both these ships.

00:07:07.000 One of the ships has all the richest people in Gotham City in it.

00:07:10.000 And the other one has all the, the criminals from the penitentiary in it.

00:07:14.000 And, somehow, he loads both of them with massive amounts of explosives.

00:07:20.000 And hands a detonator over to the other ship.

00:07:25.000 So that the rich people can blow up the criminals.

00:07:26.000 And the criminals can blow up the rich people.

00:07:28.000 And says, I'm going to blow up both ships by midnight.

00:07:31.000 If somebody doesn't blow up the other one.

00:07:34.000 And let's remember what happens in that scene.

00:07:39.000 It's one of the criminals that saves the day.

00:07:44.000 Big Black Bubba grabs the remote detonator from the, from the prison guard's sergeant.

00:07:53.000 That's too weak to push the button, even though he's terrified and he wants to live.

00:07:57.000 And Big Black Bubba throws it out the window. 1.00

00:08:02.000 The damn criminal acts like more of a man than anybody, any of the citizens on the rich cruise liner. 1.00

00:08:10.000 And any of the prison guards. 1.00

00:08:12.000 And speaking from personal experience. 0.90

00:08:15.000 A large portion, portion of prison guards are callow contemptible bullies of men.

00:08:22.000 Not, not real men by any sane measure.

00:08:25.000 And so yes, in the other two movies you did see the citizens running away from the super-villains.

00:08:35.000 But that's because the super-villains were attacking them.

00:08:38.000 That's not what Bane is doing.

00:08:40.000 And so that's why they're not running away from Bane.

00:08:45.000 They are acting consistently. 0.98

00:08:54.000 The citizens of Gotham are absolute moral cowards. 0.99

00:08:59.000 And they will, all they want is to go home and have some hot porn and have some fast food 1.00

00:09:08.000 and just be left alone and not have to think or take responsibility for anything. 0.80

00:09:13.000 And so if that means blowing up a bunch of criminals to save your own life, they'll do that.

00:09:18.000 If it means supporting a dictator because he promises them a better future, they'll do that as well. 0.99

00:09:24.000 These citizens are low, contemptible, little creatures.

00:09:29.000 And every single one of the Batman villains saw that. 0.94

00:09:34.000 They are acting consistently.

00:09:36.000 It's just that Bane doesn't let them know that he's going to eat them.

00:09:41.000 Next, to Bane's plan.

00:09:47.000 See, what Bane says to Batman after he breaks his back and they're in that prison,

00:09:55.000 he says that there can be no true despair without hope.

00:10:01.000 And so he wants to offer Gotham hope.

00:10:04.000 Now, confused Matthew says, and I'm mostly quoting here.

00:10:12.000 It is a video I'm quoting from.

00:10:19.000 Bane says that this city will endure.

00:10:22.000 And Matthew says, this city will endure this thing I'm doing to it. 1.00

00:10:27.000 Think, you morons, think. 1.00

00:10:29.000 Usually if you're characterizing yourself as a liberator, you don't threaten to kill everybody. 1.00

00:10:34.000 Matthew, you need to read more history.

00:10:39.000 How do you think the liberators of the French Revolution got power?

00:10:50.000 How do you think Soviet Russia began?

00:10:53.000 Every single liberator threatens great violence upon the people that they're liberating.

00:11:01.000 Bane is no different.

00:11:03.000 And the people lap it up.

00:11:05.000 They beg for tyranny.

00:11:07.000 It seems that your average person just can't stand being free.

00:11:11.000 Go too long without the slave master's lash, they start voting a tyranny back into power.

00:11:20.000 And see, that's...

00:11:22.000 You're mistaking the atomic bomb that Bane has.

00:11:26.000 He has an atomic bomb and he says, if anybody invades Gotham City, then I'm going to set it off.

00:11:33.000 That's not the threat.

00:11:36.000 That's not the threat that Bane is offering against the citizens.

00:11:43.000 The way he wants them to despair is he wants to give them freedom.

00:11:48.000 He wants to actually make them free in the way he says he's making them free.

00:11:53.000 Not the old-school definition of negative liberties type of free, but the freedom of license. 1.00

00:12:00.000 The freedom of those foolish little boys in the Pinocchio movie that smoked and drank until they turned into asses. 1.00

00:12:07.000 Present company excluded, of course. 1.00

00:12:14.000 The threat is not the atomic bomb.

00:12:19.000 The threat, the despair that Bane is looking forward to, is the absolute moral corruption of the citizens of Gotham.

00:12:30.000 And if you hear those crazy religious people talking about moral law, this is what moral law boils down to. 0.66

00:12:39.000 That if you consistently behave a certain way in your life, no number of bailouts is ever going to save you. 0.58

00:12:46.000 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 flow, 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.

00:13:09.000 Not even the richest can get away with that.

00:13:12.000 And see, that's what Bane is offering them.

00:13:15.000 The hope of freedom, but the despair of damnation for their own evil choices.

00:13:26.000 The nuclear bomb isn't aimed at the citizens, at least not as far as they know.

00:13:31.000 It's aimed to keep the rest of the world out.

00:13:34.000 In other words, I'm going to hold my breath mummy if you don't buy that toy that I want.

00:13:41.000 The little boy holding his breath is not afraid of passing out or injuring himself.

00:13:47.000 He's too self-centered, too narcissistic.

00:13:55.000 On to the next point.

00:13:57.000 What does Bane offer the people?

00:14:00.000 You know, Matthew rightly points out that Gotham after Bane is a far worse place.

00:14:10.000 The economy has shut down, obviously, for a metropolitan center.

00:14:15.000 The economy shut down.

00:14:18.000 Yes, they're all squatting in the beautiful houses that used to belong to the rich people.

00:14:23.000 But they're not very nice houses, are they?

00:14:26.000 The thing is, everybody, post-Bane, is worse off than they were before Bane.

00:14:35.000 Again, I'd like to point you towards the Communist Revolution and the French Revolution.

00:14:41.000 The exact same thing has happened then.

00:14:44.000 He also points out the kangaroo court, where the scarecrow sends people to go walk out on the ice and die in the water.

00:14:54.000 And he says, who would want something like that?

00:14:56.000 This is one of those things that I'm not sure if Nolan is doing this intentionally or not, or if he's just that switched into the zeitgeist.

00:15:08.000 If he understands human nature that well.

00:15:11.000 Because that kangaroo court looked exactly, exactly like Robespierre in revolutionary France.

00:15:20.000 You know, I might have seen a picture a long time ago, or I might just have read about it.

00:15:24.000 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.

00:15:49.000 Of course everything is worse off, except the people are free now.

00:15:52.000 They let all the criminals out of prison.

00:15:54.000 They all get to live in the fancy rich houses.

00:15:57.000 Yeah, we're all starving, but at least we all have a vote in our Soviet collective.

00:16:06.000 And lots and lots of people would go for this in the drop, at the drop of a hat.

00:16:17.000 And I'll give you two examples of our contemporary degenerate society that are just perfect.

00:16:22.000 Let's look at the black community.

00:16:27.000 Now blacks vote 98% Democrat.

00:16:31.000 That's a fact.

00:16:32.000 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.

00:16:41.000 And they get 2% of them. 0.99

00:16:44.000 Ridiculous. 0.99

00:16:45.000 But let's look at the black community. 0.99

00:16:47.000 Now, 50 years ago, you go back to before civil rights got passed. 0.96

00:16:53.000 The blacks were poor. 1.00

00:16:55.000 They were largely the have-nots, and in some places they were treated like second-class citizens.

00:17:00.000 But as individuals, they might have been poor, but they had some dignity.

00:17:06.000 Families stayed married. 0.64

00:17:08.000 Black men dressed well.

00:17:11.000 They were poor, but dignified.

00:17:14.000 And it's kind of hard to compare the two eras together, but if you just look at something as simple as divorce.

00:17:20.000 Unwet mothers were extremely uncommon back then. 0.99

00:17:24.000 Nowadays, the black ghetto, you see baby mamas with 19 different kids from 15 different dads. 0.88

00:17:33.000 That's become the norm for the black community. 0.76

00:17:37.000 Now the reason they vote liberal is because the liberals promise them all sorts of free stuff.

00:17:42.000 They get their free welfare, their EBT card, and they get all of that BS.

00:17:47.000 Except is this good for the black community? 1.00

00:17:50.000 Is it strengthening the black community?

00:17:53.000 Is it helping them?

00:17:55.000 Good God, no.

00:17:56.000 No more than Bain is helping the citizens of Gotham.

00:18:00.000 And yet, each time an election rolls around, 98% of them vote Democrat.

00:18:08.000 But, you know, let's not turn this into a party issue. 0.99

00:18:10.000 Let's look at the bloody Republicans, because they're just as bad. 0.97

00:18:14.000 I'm half tempted to get into some theology and explain why Romney's a monster, but let's just go more basic. 0.97

00:18:21.000 The voters for the Republican Party are made up as Moldbug breaks it down.

00:18:32.000 There's the Optimates, which are the old wealth, the country club people, who are year by year.

00:18:41.000 They're a smaller and smaller group within American society.

00:18:45.000 And I believe he calls them the Baisias, basically the blue-collar working class. 0.53

00:18:51.000 The guys that go to work, farmers, mechanics, small business owners, those sorts of guys.

00:18:58.000 And, sorry, I should have muted my microphone.

00:19:05.000 My speaker, that is.

00:19:10.000 And the Republicans always want to lower taxes on the rich.

00:19:17.000 Now, who are the rich?

00:19:20.000 The rich are all liberals.

00:19:22.000 The rich are all doing fancy jobs that they love.

00:19:26.000 The number of rich Republicans out there are very few and far between.

00:19:32.000 Aside from Donald Trump, there aren't that many of them.

00:19:35.000 And all of these rich Democrats vote for higher taxes.

00:19:39.000 They all vote Democrat.

00:19:40.000 They all want to pay higher taxes.

00:19:41.000 Because they make so much money they don't care about it.

00:19:44.000 And the Republicans, meanwhile, in their whole, we're free market, quote unquote, because we

00:19:50.000 all know they're really not, get chummy with the corporations, the really big money, and

00:19:56.000 these unprincipled sociopaths will be friends with whoever writes the laws.

00:20:01.000 And so, the Republicans are just as likely to write a whole bunch of laws that shut down

00:20:06.000 small business, empower corporations, and they get votes from the very small business owners

00:20:12.000 that they're harming.

00:20:16.000 It's no surprise that the citizens of Gotham believe the rhetoric that Bain is telling them,

00:20:22.000 rather than the evidence before their own eyes.

00:20:29.000 The fourth, he says that Bain doesn't do anything threatening, aside from a physical threat.

00:20:36.000 And that, for instance, the Joker was a psychological threat, put you into these very, very weird

00:20:44.000 game-theoretic scenarios, prisoner's dilemmas and whatnot.

00:20:49.000 And see, Bain doesn't do that.

00:20:51.000 I mean, you're right.

00:20:53.000 Bain gives people exactly what they want, and exactly what will kill them.

00:21:00.000 And see, that's why Bain is truly a terrifying criminal, is because he sees people for the

00:21:09.000 evil, vile little things that they actually are.

00:21:14.000 This isn't a psychological threat in this movie, it's a moral threat.

00:21:19.000 Bain is the iceberg upon which democracy breaks.

00:21:29.000 When you get right down to it, the entire series of movies has been reactionary.

00:21:36.000 And Batman, in Nolan's universe, represents the aristocracy.

00:21:48.000 Early on, in the latest movie, there was a scene where Batman ran into Catwoman at some fancy prick ball.

00:22:00.000 And he commented to her, or to the hostess or somebody, that he really doesn't like these things,

00:22:05.000 they seem pretentious as all hell.

00:22:09.000 Because, see, this is that, these are those Brahmin, as Moldbug would call them, these are the upper-class, 1.00

00:22:16.000 the upper-class Democrats.

00:22:19.000 With their fancy pretensions of giving charity to the poor people.

00:22:24.000 Of their showing off their wealth, of their manipulations behind the scenes,

00:22:30.000 their narcissism, their broken little amygdalas.

00:22:35.000 This is the Democrat, this is the modern ruling caste of democracies.

00:22:42.000 And Bruce Wayne is not one of them.

00:22:44.000 Bruce Wayne is an optimist.

00:22:47.000 Bruce Wayne is an aristocrat.

00:22:50.000 This entire series of movies was about how democracies cannot rule themselves,

00:22:55.000 how they need to go back to monarchy.

00:22:58.000 And that's the funny thing, is that both Batman and Bane fundamentally agree on these aspects.

00:23:16.000 That people cannot rule themselves.

00:23:19.000 The majority of people, they need strong, patriarchal leadership.

00:23:27.000 Bane hates them so much that he wants to destroy this blight upon the earth.

00:23:32.000 While Batman, as a member of that society, tries to defend it and save it.

00:23:37.000 But, the sort of false ending you get at the movie, where everything just returns back to normal,

00:23:44.000 even though we know that could never happen, suggests that, in reality, Batman wouldn't be victorious.

00:23:53.000 A lot of people compared the first movie to Bush-era politics.

00:24:00.000 Possibly it was the second movie with surveillance technology or something.

00:24:05.000 And this completely misses the point.

00:24:07.000 Yes, you can find more similarities.

00:24:10.000 You can find more talking points from a Republican point of view in the Batman movies,

00:24:16.000 than you can from a Democrat point of view.

00:24:20.000 But it still doesn't quite make sense.

00:24:24.000 The pieces don't quite add up.

00:24:29.000 These movies make sense, if you look at them, like a person living in 1812, in Britain,

00:24:36.000 watching the horrors of the French Revolution, and trying to strengthen your own monarch,

00:24:41.000 in the hopes that such a vile thing never comes to your island.

00:24:46.000 The way it did with the London riots, just a couple years ago.

00:24:54.000 There's one message to take away from the Batman movies.

00:24:56.000 It's that, so long as we hold on to these pretenses of absolute equality, democracy,

00:25:07.000 of this religious fervor over fundamentally secular things, like a legal code,

00:25:15.000 that we are damned.

00:25:20.000 And not until we return to a sane way of governance is there truly any hope.

00:25:28.000 Irini out, folks.

00:25:30.000 Matthew, if you watched this long, I appreciate your patience, my friend.

00:25:35.000 Take care.

Leo D.M.J. Aurini - January 07, 2013

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

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