And Batman – “The Dark Knight Rises”
What is it we imagine when we try to envision evil, define it, encapsulate its essence in a few words, give it a face – a mind? What kind of people, bearing what kind of characteristics or personalities, what power systems and structures, come to mind when we endeavor to understand it? What torments and sufferings, indeed, what histories do we recall when we want to explain it by providing examples?
In her seminal “The Origins of Totalitarianism”, Hannah Arendt lays out a profound systematization of an evil that outdoes all other evils, measurable by the completeness of its destruction, such that history itself ends, together with the human nature within that history. Because humanity’s essence, its ability and innate desire to begin again, to create, to start something new out of an ended world, has been so utterly outstripped by the speed of absolute and alienating terror that Man’s supreme capacity for renewal is destroyed without the hope of rising again.
In ultimate terms, there must be a supreme gloating Evil, and countless millions must surely die, while those who are left suffer indescribably, immeasurably. Hitler. Stalin.
And what of the men who follow such leaders – their entourage, their henchmen – who in their absolute loyalty will even accept their own deaths at the hands of the infallible supreme will?
In Chapter 11 Arendt writes:
“What binds these men together is a firm and sincere belief in human omnipotence. Their moral cynicism, their belief that everything is permitted, rests on the solid conviction that everything is possible … Yet they too are deceived, deceived by their impudent conceited idea that everything can be done and their contemptuous conviction that everything that exists is merely a temporary obstacle that superior organization will certainly destroy. Confident that power of organization can destroy power of substance… they constantly underestimate the substantial power of stable communities and overestimate the driving force of a movement.”
Is not evil, then, an expression of free will? A free will that is beguiled by the feeling of power, of holding it, of wielding it – over others, of course; a feeling that necessarily carries with it the notion of the destruction of those others, of their future, of their lives, if it proves necessary. It always does.
And does this not provoke in the mind a sort of necessary delusion, a lie, a perversion, which justifies the actions that one undertakes to attain the desired power? A derangement of will, a depravity, an insanity, which supports the fictitious world it has created and defends it against the encroachments of the real world of facts outside?
In the 2012 “The Dark Knight Rises”, the final installment of director Christopher Nolan’s superb Batman Trilogy, Bane, who portrays himself as a militant proletarian revolutionary and liberator, is a terrorist writ large – a homicidal maniac endowed with a murderous physique and a penchant for the tirades of a megalomaniacal demagogue.
While Bane, according to Wikipedia, “proclaims that his revolution’s enemies are the rich and the corrupt, who he contends are oppressing ‘the people’ and fooling them with myths of opportunity,” it is a wonder he even bothers passing sentence on the powerful and rich, as he’s ultimately intent on destroying Gotham City. From the moment he comes on the scene, publicly announcing his plans of ultimate destruction, insanely, perversely, treacherously cloaked in the overblown rhetoric of revolution, he unleashes a citywide campaign of murder and mayhem, blowing up parts of the metropolis and keeping the people of Gotham under siege and the threat of nuclear annihilation.
Tom Hardy, who plays Bane, gives his character the shaky voice, diction, and speech of an aristocratic old man with butterflies in his head, heard through a nightmarish bondage mask “that supplies him with an analgesic gas to relieve pain he suffers from an injury” (Wikipedia), which contrasts starkly with his muscular young physique, eerily creating a character who is disturbing, repulsive and frightening.
Bane is a reject of the League of Shadows, run by the evil genius Ra’s al Ghul, who is pretty much immortal, even though Batman killed him in “Batman Begins”, the first movie in the series. Nevertheless, it is Bane’s intention to carry out Ra’s al Ghul’s unfinished mission to destroy Gotham.
The desire to destroy Gotham is so great and so ingrained in the forces aligned against the embattled city that at the end of the movie, a dying Talia al Ghul, Ra’s al Ghul’s daughter, presses the nuclear detonator thinking she has completed her father’s work and that the city’s destruction is imminent.
What bugs Manny Face about this is that she does this just because she’s Ra’s al Ghul’s daughter. Is there, then, some kind of “moral” duty to complete the evil works of our fathers? Does this mean that, like some insanity, evil is passed down genetically and inherited? Why did the idea to destroy Gotham have such a hold on these people; why was it so compelling? Why couldn’t Ra’s al Ghul use his immortality and the powers appertaining thereto to help Gotham rather than yearning to destroy it? Was Ra’s al Ghul a maniac to think of it, as were his followers in their intentions to see his plans fulfilled, or did the thought of it turn them into maniacs?
The answer may be none of these, since, as Ra’s al Ghul explains in “Batman Begins”, the League of Shadows has been doing this work for thousands of years, destroying great cities throughout history, like Rome and London, when The League decided those cities had become “corrupt beyond saving” and “polluted with crime” (Wikipedia). Their maniac state was, therefore, a given from the get-go and likely considered quite normal, quite sane, by their standards. They undoubtedly considered themselves higher types with a higher mission to attain a higher goal.
Hitler. Stalin.
When reason invests an evil idea with perverted logic, justification and reason for being, it has already begun the process of manipulating minds into believing the idea a good one and therefore worthy of action, which by its very nature soon devolves into degenerate extremism and lunacy.
What does this have to do with The Hunched Cornish? Nothing. It has nothing to do with him. The Hunched Cornish is about many things, but he’s not about this. If he’s about anything, it’s between me and him.
Manny Face, January 28, 2014