And says nothing about the people who create and participate in the movement? Nothing about the concept of protest? The legitimacy of popular uprisings? The rights to assemble and demand change?
In the real world version of these movements, we have the movements attacked by organized, militarized, unlawful police violence. That has been the real world result of popular struggle over the last year. To put his head up his ass and pretend it's all a story with no bearing on the world, despite looking a hell of a lot like the TV news is disingenuous in the extreme.
I had a major problem with Nolan and his Batman in The Dark Knight. He thought it would be fun or "interesting" in his parlance, to have Batman torture the Joker in the police interrogation room. The hero, the champion who tortures? That is an infuriating immoral aspect to a lot of Hollywood films today, a sign of the debauchery and immorality of those in power to edit the scripts that become the films shoved down our collective throats. When the "hero" Batman resorted to torture, I was quite disgusted in the extreme.
For all its budget and and technical wizardry, The Dark Knight left me worried at the current state of comic book films and their power to alter and affect young minds. This fear was solidified as The Dark Knight okay's the total surveillance of Gotham -- NSA spying on us all -- to save us, of course. Every police state is saving us. Every totalitarian is saving us. Every fascist regime is saving us. It's all for our own good, according to Christopher Nolan and his Batman. As Dick Cheney found it easy to identify with the "Dark Knight," who apparently got the memo and was operating in "the shadows," we should be very wary of the propaganda threaded throughout these films. Not everyone is as sophisticated at analyzing them as you and me. They're called children (and a lot of the poorly educated public).
Christopher Nolan is of course a brilliant filmmaker.* No one could deny that. He's also well on his way to becoming a billionaire and joining the ranks of the 1%. To do this, he must rake in the money of the 99% while appeasing his 1% paymasters. That's his game. That's his motivation.
As should have been painfully obvious on the opening night of this film, the messages and the ideas thrown against the wall matter. The spree-killing "Joker," with bright red hair found quite a bit to chew on in the previous film. It was he whom The Batman tortured in the cell. It was he whom he idolized and modeled his behavior on. The real-life Joker wired his apartment with bombs, much as the on-screen Joker would have done. The real-life Joker had similar nonsensical motivations for his actions. They were pointedly pointless. When you play with fire, you get burned. But in this case, it was a lot of innocents getting burned, and not those responsible for putting those ideas out there.
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* Leni Riefenstahl (Hitler's propagandist) was also an undeniably brilliant filmmaker, as was D.W. Griffith (Ku Klux Klan proselytizer). It's not enough.
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