They tend to be very individualistic and they don’t always have to deal with civil rights issues because they (usually) aren’t police or soldiers. But they stand up on behalf of the powerless and people who’ve been failed by the system, which tends to be more of a leftist concern. You can use superheroes to make points about the left and the right, as many people have done, and I think the Batman-as-conservative point of view that’s being offered in this thread is a major oversimplification.
Exactly.
Batman’s a 99%er who pretends to be a 1%er. He’s more like Catwoman than Catwoman knows.
I agree with that. And I guess I should clarify and say the methods of vigilante superheroes tend to fall more to one side, while the end goal not so much.
The methods of pretty much every superhero, when viewed as a proxy for an ineffective government, will almost inherently echo the complaints about the Bush administrations tactics.
But we all kind of like a dictator. So long as it is a benevolent (however that is defined by the individual) dictator.
No, I don’t think Christopher Nolan is “taking a shot” at the Occupy protestors. I also don’t think Hathaway’s lines are completely divorced from current events. But my immediate reaction was that the trailer was more pro-Occupy than against. She’s attacking Bruce Wayne, not Batman. Unlike Tony Stark, who embraces the millionaire lifestyle as a true part of his identity, “Bruce Wayne” is a character Batman plays to hide who he really is. You’re not supposed to be rooting for Bruce Wayne.
He’s a rich kid with issues.
And I am not offering that.
What I am saying is that Christopher Nolan’s Batman films have a conservative perspective. The Dark Knight seems to be a defense of George Bush and the War on Terror.
Based on what little we see in the new trailer, The Dark Knight Rises seems to be taking a shot at “class warfare,” the bugbear of Republicans ever since Obama’s election. (Look again at the rabble ransacking the mansion at 0:50.)
And I’m saying I think that’s a major oversimplification.
How so?
Bruce Wayne is. Batman on the other hand…
Having watched the trailer, I’m not seeing the criticism of the left or Occupy movements. I can see where you can take it that way if you already feel that’s what is intended and are looking for evidence.
Yes, we see Wayne Manor get looted, but what does that have to do with Occupy Wall Street? They didn’t loot anything and the manor doesn’t get occupied, or at least it wasn’t occupied in the trailer. I think the Koch brothers might agree with the interpretation of OWS types as violent rabble who hate the rich, but I don’t think a lot of other people would take it that way. 
As already noted, Catwoman isn’t the villain of the movie and the germ of the dialogue is very old. Would I be surprised to see some visual parallels of OWS stuff in the movie? No. I don’t think you’re supposed to draw the connection that the rioters are Occupy Wall Street and Batman is The Job Creators or the GOP.
Gordon as a “war hero” getting dumped… what, like Bush got dumped by being term-limited out of office or McCain got dumped by losing an election? Are we supposed to draw a parallel between people deciding Bush was a shitty president and Gordon getting left off the ticket? I’m not seeing the parallel here.
I never saw the spying in The Dark Knight as a justification of War on Terror tactics. The surveillance was presented as a major violation of the rights of Gotham citizens. Lucius is not presented as a weak-kneed ACLU member who’s worrying about technicalities and doesn’t care about getting the bad guys; he’s close to Batman and Batman takes his criticism seriously. More importantly things like the USA PATRIOT Act were not presented that way. The Bush administration never said “You have to sacrifice some civil rights, there’s a war on.” The people who wrote and defended the law insisted it didn’t civil rights violations, and since the movie takes it as a given that it does, that concedes about half of the argument right there. And of course Batman uses the surveillance once and only once and then destroys it, which also doesn’t fit with the War on Terror idea and is nothing like anything the Bush administration did or suggested should be done. The War on Terror was supposed to be almost a permanent state of emergency and I can’t remember anybody involved with the government suggesting that things like warrantless wiretaps or rendition or waterboarding would go away if the war ended. They said the stakes justified the tactics, but never said that one day they’d stop wiretapping once Al Qaeda was gone.
More evidence of the neo-con angle of The Dark Knight:
Here, Alfred explains that there’s no reasoning with terrorists. This scene seems aimed at the “blame America” crowd who bother to try to understand why terrorists attacked the US. Listen to Alfred you weak-kneed namby pambies. They attacked us because they are evil! No sense exploring their motivations. No sense in giving their grievances a moment’s thought. They are just evil, and that’s the end of it. (Not my perspective. The perspective of the film, just to be clear.) This scene seems to me to be Nolan’s voice coming through loud and clear.
We also have Batman operating an invasive surveillance system.
Batman engaging in extraordinary rendition.
Batman engaging in torture.
And all of it is justified in the name of fighting terror.
And then at the end we have the scene I linked previously where poor George Bush, I mean Batman, has to shoulder the burden of public acrimony.
Taken on the whole, I’d say The Dark Knight pretty unambiguously embraces a right wing view of the War on Terror.
And The Dark Knight Rises, from what little we can see, seems also to have a conservative perspective (though taking up a different issue).
The only flaws with this is that it bears no resemblance to what Alfred says or the meaning of the scene. He didn’t say the tribal leader was evil or that his motivations were unimportant. He was saying his unit failed to stop the attacks because they didn’t understand what the tribal leader wanted. He didn’t have a grievance or a clear motivation. He just liked the chaos, the same way The Joker does. That’s why Alfred is telling the story. And again, that was not the Bush administration’s position on terrorism. Remember “they hate our freedom?” They did not argue that Al Qaeda were a bunch of crazy people who were destroying things for no reason. They had an inaccurate and oversimplified view of their demands, but they did acknowledge that those demands existed.
And then blowing it up after using it one time.
I’m not sure you can call beating people up extraordinary rendition and torture, and it’s a Batman movie, so I am not sure what you expect to see.
Except that he’s not fighting terror. He’s fighting The Joker. He’s fighting a specific person who likes to blow stuff up, but who isn’t a terrorist because he doesn’t have a plan or any discernable motivation. And it’s not clear to me that it’s justified at all. One of the themes of the first two movies was escalation: Batman is a hero but his tactics have unambiguously negative consequences, one of which is that they attract crazier and more dangerous people. It’s pretty clear that will be continued in the third movie. How does that fit into this “neo-con angle?” I don’t remember anybody arguing in favor of Bush’s policies by saying they would invite bigger and bigger terrorist attacks.
I think the extraordinary rendition is Batman’s kidnap of that one dude from Hong Kong. Remember, he used the CIA’s “Operation Skyhook” idea or whatever? And the torture would be beating the shit out of a prisoner (the Joker) in police custody.
I agree with everything else you said though. 
Nor did I. Extraordinary rendition is kidnapping a suspect in one country and taking him to another, which Batman did.
And Batman did more than “beat up people.” He tortured the Joker while he was in custody.
Who is engaged in terrorism, and who is specifically referred to as a terrorist in the movie (in case the point weren’t clear enough).
I think Spoke is 100% right. It’s one of the reasons I love Christopher Nolan movies and a refreshing change from Hollywood’s usual left-leaning philosophy. 
Fair point. I forgot about that. Of course, the rendition only brings bigger reprisals. Is that pro-rendition?
That’s the scene I was describing. The “torture” fails: the Joker provokes Batman into beating him, then lies to him even after the beating. Is that pro-torture?
He’s referred to as all kinds of things. I don’t think it’s convincing.
By the way, your misreading of that speech by Alfred identifies the U.S. with imperial Britain when it was occupying Burma. Does that strike you as a favorable comparison?
From a conservative perspective? 
I don’t think they’d have a very favorable view of it either. It’s usually liberals who compare the U.S. to an empire and they do that as a pejorative. But I’d appreciate a response to some of the other points I made.
What bigger reprisals? It’s what lets them use RICO to try the bad-guys.