Re-packaging Disaster Post 9/11 and Christopher Nolan’s

Re-packaging Disaster in Films Post 9/11

Nolan’s trilogy being situated post 9/11, his treatment of anarchy seems to be mediated by the imagery as well as the discourse surrounding this cataclysmic ‘event’. But it can likewise be stated that the 9/11 ‘kamikaze’ act of the terrorists could have been directly inspired by Hollywood disaster movies. It is here that the difference between the real and the simulated seem to get blurred. The real appeared to be a contrived stunt, but one that was more spectacular than any imagined by disaster filmmakers. While it is true that the magnitude of devastation caused was relatively moderate when compared to other events (such as, the Gulf War, or the ‘war on terror’ in Afghanistan), yet in terms of its symbolic and spectatorial value, its influence across political and cultural spaces have been quite remarkable. The continental philosopher Karlheinz Stockhausen considered the airplane’s collision upon the twin towers as ‘the greatest work of art of Lucifer’ (Stockhausen 2001). It has, in fact, spawned various theories popularly classified as ‘9/11 discourse’ (see Redfield 2007, p. 56), ranging from the ‘real’ (Slavoj Žižek’s consideration of it in terms of the Lacanian Real) to the hyperreal (Jean Baudrillard). Certain scholars have tried to downplay the event’s agonistic dimension, making detached analysis where they claimed the nature of the attack to be uncannily familiar to the point of banality (Baudrillard 2002; Žižek 2002) insofar as it had been foreshadowed in countless Hollywood disaster flicks. Such high theorizations made by (mostly) Continental scholars have been criticized by Susan Sontag who has termed such notions of reality becoming a spectacle ‘a breathtaking provincialism’ (Sontag 2003, p. 10). Her perception of the event borders on a paradox. She has observed: ‘After four decades of big-budget Hollywood disaster films, “it felt like a movie” seems to have displaced the way survivors of a catastrophe used to express the short-term unassimilability of what they had gone through: “It felt like a dream”’ (Sontag 2003, p. 22). The hyperreality of the twin towers collapse as represented by the media has become such an integral part of the collective urban psyche that imagining disaster in Hollywood movies post 9/11 has had to be more breathtakingly and responsibly envisioned.

Even though informed scholarly debates have marked the 9/11 discourse in books, journals and communication media, its reflection on agencies bearing popular culture has not been examined to a great extent. Hollywood movies are potent instruments not only for the circulation of popular culture, but also for reflecting the contemporary political, socio-cultural scenario. Post 9/11, Western nations, especially the United States, have had to live with the reality of the Ground Zero situation, ‘war on terror’ as well as various apocalyptic ‘clash of civilizations’ pronouncements (see Huntington 1997). In such a fraught, traumatic moment, representations of disaster in Hollywood movies have perhaps been, more or less, mediated by the 9/11 event. In a way it can be said that the ‘reel’ (depiction of disaster in films) inspired the ‘real’ (9/11) but the effect of the real was so traumatic that imagination of disaster in the reel had to be rethought through the imagery of the real. This could, in a way, account for Nolan’s understated, cerebral take on a superhero franchise, shorn of the genre’s spectacular pretensions. It is as if after this event, representations of disaster in Hollywood blockbusters had to be sombre, more scaled-down. Prior to this event, the trend of disaster movies in the 1980s and 1990s primarily focused on humans’ perceptions of threat due to war, for instance, Apocalypse Now (1979), The Thin Red Line (1998) and Saving Private Ryan (1998), from aliens and asteroids in films such as Independence Day, Men In Black (1997) and Species (1995), from natural attacks both elemental (such as, tornadoes and volcanoes) as in Twister (1996), Volcano (1997) and 2012 and animals, such as, in Jaws (1975) and The Birds (1963), from genetically linked mutations seen in Jurassic Park (1993), The Lost World (1997) and Godzilla, from technology, such as, The Day after Tomorrow (2004) and The Matrix (1999) as well as from metropolitan disasters seen in Die Hard 2 (1990), Armageddon (1998) and Deep Impact (1998). The common factor binding these movies was humans (generally American) fighting against hostile (mostly non-human) forces, and eventually overcoming the odds. But after this event, which could be considered the moment of rupture, representations of disaster has become much more nuanced—the anxiety of influence of the ‘real’ event perhaps playing in the filmmakers’ imagination. Nolan’s The Dark Knight trilogy too appears to correspond to the post-9/11 treatment of disaster, much removed from the pyrotechnical visions of someone like Roland Emmerich (Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow) or Michael Bay (Armageddon). But, as already indicated, his idea of disaster is enmeshed with the anarchic world view and the trilogy presents, as proposed earlier, three different typologies of anarchy that make for a very interesting analysis.

Anarchy as Cleansing

Nolan’s first of the trilogy, Batman Begins, can be termed as an ‘origin’ saga. This movie traces the traumatic story of Bruce Wayne and his transformation into a symbol of Gotham’s protector. But what is of greater import here is the way the narrative appears to tend towards anarchy as a mode of cleansing the corpulent order. This idea finds expression in arch-villain Henri Ducard’s remark: ‘Cities like Gotham are in their death throes—chaotic, grotesque. Beyond saving’ (Batman Begins). Such an ominous pronouncement leads to the idea of cleansing as the only way of ushering in a new order. Therefore, the motif of disaster in Batman Begins appears to be ‘anarchy-as-cleansing’ and this idea gets corroboration in the Zen-master Ra’s al Ghul’s attempt at ideologically brainwashing Wayne into accepting his anarchist position. He says:

You [Wayne] yourself are a victim of Gotham’s decay. That is why you came here, and that is why you must go back. You will assume the mantle of your birthright. As Gotham’s favoured son you will be ideally placed… to destroy the city… When Gotham falls, the other cities will follow in short order. Nature’s balance will be restored and man will finally return to solitude. (Batman Begins)

Nolan attempted to project Ra’s al Ghul as one whose one-point agenda appeared to be destruction of all cultural/civilizational claims. He could be regarded as a Luddite informed perhaps by the revolutionary rhetoric of Carlyle or Rousseau and thereby seeking a ‘return to nature’. His cult’s propitiatory use of the esoteric ‘blue double-bloomed poppy’ that produces a hallucinogenic effect (when vapourized, becomes a source of bio-terrorism) is indicative of the 1960s ‘flower-power’ counterculture movement that again pointed to a rejection of normative societal norms, as well as embracing nature. Such a radical position is endorsed by the cult of Ra’s al Ghul, and Ducard’s remark illustrates this fact: ‘This world is run by tyrants and corrupt bureaucrats. Our code respects only the natural order of things—we’re not bound by their hypocrisy’ (Batman Begins). Wayne’s initiation into this cult needs ratification through a contract that stipulates renouncing forever the cities of man and dedicating his life to solitude. Such a pledge indicates the presence of an ethics of a return to nature, but this is possible only through planned decimation of urban spaces. Ducard, lamenting modernity’s urbanization drive, seeks nature’s embalming presence. He makes a certain ominous pronouncement:

It is not right that one must come so far to see the world as it is meant to be. Purity. Serenity…Solitude. These are the qualities we hold dear. But the important thing is whether you [Bruce] believe it…Can Gotham can be saved, or is she an ailing ancestor whose time has run? (Batman Begins)

The problem with the urban space is that it is much susceptible to covert operations on the part of a thriving corrupt underbelly that attempts to subvert the laws and claims of the state apparatus. The ones ruling the roost here, for instance, underworld mafia kingpins (like Carmine Falcone in Batman Begins and Maroni or the Chechen in The Dark Knight), become complicit with outside forces to undermine the security of their own city. In the film, Assistant District Attorney Rachel Dawes symptomatizes this urban decadence that had become pathologically endemic:

This city is rotting. Chill [Bruce’s parent’s murderer] is not the cause, he’s the effect. Corruption is killing Gotham and Chill being dead doesn’t help that it makes it worse because Falcone walks. He carries on flooding our city with crime and drugs…creating new Joe Chills… Falcone may not have killed your parents, Bruce, but he’s destroying everything they stood for. (Batman Begins)

The fact that urban lives, despite its alienating aspects, have a degree of interconnectedness make them easily vulnerable to the threat of contagion, both natural as well as human induced. This is on account of the spatial proximity, as for instance, common amenities such as water supply stored in vast reservoirs. Even the city’s sewage system tends to be elaborately networked leading to a common outlet. The fact that there tends to be a source or point of distribution of things, the threat of contamination (deliberate or accidental) is so much the greater. This has been contextualized by Thurtle and Mitchell in their article, where they have posited:

Disasters often expose how many people are actually linked together by the infrastructure. The introduction of new technological capabilities in a society requires the introduction of a package that makes possible new social linkages, but this is, at the same time, the introduction of the possibility of disaster should this package become unwrapped. (Thurtle and Mitchell 2007, p. 282)

In Batman Begins, the drug dumped into the city’s water supply is ‘like chlorine or fluoride—harmless to drink, but when breathe[d]… deadly’. It has the terrifying prospect of inducing mass hysteria if vapourized by the microwave emitter. Ducard’s purpose is ‘to watch Gotham tear itself apart through fear’. Ducard’s motive is clear when he states: ‘Gotham is just the beginning. The world will watch in terror as the greatest city falls. Anarchy and chaos will spread… mankind will ravage itself, the species will be culled and the balance of nature restored. The planet will be saved for all species’ (Batman Begins). Slavoj Žižek explains the rationale behind human’s fascination for extreme acts of cleansing. He states:

The pursuit of the Real equals total annihilation, a (self) destructive fury within which the only way to trace the distinction between the semblance and the Real is, precisely, to stage it in a fake spectacle. The fundamental illusion is here that, once the violent work of purification is done, the New Man will emerge ex nihilo, freed from the filth of the past corruption. Within this horizon, ‘really-existing men’ are reduced to the stock of raw material which can be ruthlessly exploited for the construction of the new [order]. (Žižek 2002)

This fantasy, although part of the pure real, has been enacted or staged as a masquerade/spectacle in countless numbers of disaster flicks to the extent that it can be regarded as almost banal. Susan Sontag is more forthright as she asserts:

It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular art, which allows people to cope…The films perpetuate clichés about identity, volition, power, knowledge, happiness, social consensus, guilt, responsibility which are to say the least, not serviceable in our present extremity. But collective nightmare cannot be banished by demonstrating that they are intellectually and morally, fallacious. This nightmare—the one reflected in various registers… is too close to our reality. (Sontag 1966. pp. 224–225)

In Batman Begins, the uncannily familiar and ludic scene of 9/11 is repeated in the climax when Ducard threatens to drive the monorail equipped with the microwave emitter into the Wayne Tower beneath which the main hubs of the city’s water supply rests. This would generate enough toxins to blanket the entire city and thereby cause a Holocaust-like situation. It would, in a way, simulate the kamikaze act of the terrorists manning the two flights in the twin tower episode, the essential difference being the scale of the disaster envisaged. While 9/11 was a controlled, contained disaster limited in time and place, Nolan’s perception of disaster in this film is predicated upon the notion of a complete annihilation—a structural transformation that promises to usher in a pristine natural order out of the detritus of the old. It is seen that the ideological divide between those claiming for the values of nature with those defending the claims of culture comes to a head. Here, the defenders of cultural values are embodied by the likes of Bruce Wayne, billionaire capitalists with a great deal of concern towards humanity and the welfare of their city. On a political level, it appears as if Nolan is performing a rhetorical operation where the hegemony of capitalism is not only endorsed, but valourized as the best mode of social and economic existence. Any ideology that interrogates/debunks the claims of capitalism is bad/evil, and represented as proponents of chaos. Ra’s al Ghul represents the anti-thesis of the capitalist world view and therefore he has to be demonized as a ghoul to humanity. He is projected as a bearer of obsolete/anachronistic ideologies (despotism, anarchism and communism) that do not seem to have any relevance to the rational structure of contemporary (liberal, progressive) society. What is interesting to note here is that films masked as superhero franchises (and therefore chiefly catering to the young) do play an important role in ideologically conditioning particular/targeted subject positions into accepting/internalizing a particular hegemonic world view. The task becomes easier if the other is speciously represented as threat to the stable order, bringers of chaos and destruction to the rational, public space.

Anarchy as Chaos

Nolan’s The Dark Knight treats terrorism as a sociological/pathological phenomenon. The psychopathic villain The Joker appears to be a symptom of the urban malaise afflicting alienated/fractured individuals. Even though his identity remains shrouded in mystery, partly due to his conflicting versions of himself, he seems to embody a paranoid/schizophrenic urban dweller who could be a victim of crime, child abuse, broken family, failed marriage, betrayal, insecurity, failure, among many traumatic possibilities. Even though he masterminds bank heists, and demands ransom for killing people, including Batman, money does not appear to be his prime motivation. He even stacks a 30 feet pile of dollars (a billion dollars) and sets it up in flames. His terror acts seem to be for the fun part of it, or in his own words, ‘sending a message’ (The Dark Knight). Bruce Wayne’s caretaker Alfred Truepenny sums him up well when he says: ‘Some men aren’t looking for anything logical, like money… they can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with…Some men just want to watch the world burn’ (The Dark Knight). The kind of fear-psychosis that he is able to generate is what sets him apart from the rest of the mob. When Batman demands to know The Joker’s whereabouts from mafia boss Maroni, the latter exclaims: ‘No one’s gonna tell you anything. They’re wise to your act—you got rules… the Joker, he’s got no rules. No one’s gonna cross him for you’ (The Dark Knight). He seems to be a misanthrope bent upon the destruction of Gotham merely because he detests the individualistic, materialistic, corrupt, self-centred mode of urban existence with hypocritical values attached. His face-off with Batman (reproduced verbatim) gives a pointer to his contempt towards the metropolitan sensibility:

Batman: [W]hy do you want to kill me?

The Joker: Kill you? I don’t want to kill you. What would I do without you? Go back to ripping off Mob dealers? No…you…(points) You. Complete. Me.

Batman: You’re garbage who kills for money.

The Joker: Don’t talk like one of them [indicating the police]—you’re not, even if you’d like to be. To them you’re a freak like me… they just need you right now. (He regards Batman with something approaching pity)…But as soon as they don’t, they’ll cast you out like a leper. Their morals, their code… it’s a bad joke. Dropped at the first sign of trouble. They’re only as good as the world allows them to be. You’ll see—I’ll show you… when the chips are down, these civilized people… they’ll eat each other (grins). See, I’m not a monster… I’m just ahead of the curve…You have these rules. And you think they’ll save you.

Batman: I have one rule.

The Joker: Then that’s the one you’ll have to break. To know the truth.

Batman: Which is?

The Joker: The only sensible way to live in this world is without rules. (The Dark Knight)

Thus, The Joker appears to be the bringer of anarchy as chaos for the sake of chaos. The rational state apparatus and its plans, laws, schemes, rules etc. mis/recognized as legitimate and ‘right’ by ideologically conditioned subjects, are openly flouted by the ‘irrational’ villain whose motiveless malignancy does not seem to have much logic in terms of the structure of rational dimension, and therefore he is termed as a ‘freak’. He is a proponent of chaos insofar as he believes it to be the counter-hegemonic practice against the passive, neutral, hypocritical rational apparatus in which the subjects (of Gotham, and the rest of the world) were constituted. His philosophy is inclined towards the anarchic, and therefore his ludic pyrotechnics borders on the irrational. He states: ‘Introduce a little anarchy, you upset the established order and everything becomes chaos. I’m an agent of chaos. And you know the thing about chaos… It’s fair’ (The Dark Knight). His final game is what he terms as a ‘social experiment’. He plants two powerful bombs in two ferry boats, one bearing apprehended criminals while the other bears innocent civilians, and gives them the choice to blow the other through the gift-wrapped detonators he presents to both. In case they failed to act, he threatens to blow both at the stroke of midnight. If one of the ferry took the bait and blew up the other, he would let them live. He is sure that the evil which lies within human beings would eventually compel them to take a selfish decision. His misanthropic bent of mind is suggestive of the cynical world view that many have begun to adopt in the contemporary industrialized society. Thus, Nolan’s portrayal of The Joker as a proponent of chaos and anarchy seems to reflect Ra’s al Ghul’s world view. Yet there is a fundamental difference of motive—in the case of the former, it is destroying culture in order to restore nature’s balance, while in the case of the latter, it is to prove humanity’s inherent capacity for evil. In Baudrillard’s terminology, both would exemplify the face of ‘new terrorism’ which implies

A new form of action that plays the game, solely with the aim of disrupting its. Not only do they not play fair, since they put their own deaths into play—to which there is no possible response—but they have taken over all the weapons of the dominant power. Money and stock-market speculation, computer technology and aeronautics, spectacle and the media networks—they have assimilated everything of modernity and globalism, without changing their goal, which is to destroy that power. (Baudrillard 2002, p. 19)

Such a form of terrorism is palpable also in The Dark Knight Rises where Bane’s terrorizing of Gotham city involves his encroachment and appropriation of the city’s underground sewage system, usurping state power and eventually reducing Gotham into a failed state. Therefore, the plausibility/verisimilitude characterizing Nolan’s visualization of Gotham as a metropolis fraught with symptoms of urban decay, and continually threatened with disruption by outside forces (aided and abetted from within) stands as a reminder of the simulated 9/11 terror attack. The fact that cities are made the target of attack could be due to generating maximum awareness about one’s stated ideological position insofar as cities are overcrowded with people, where acts of terrorism become easy to carry out. The essential difference between Nolan’s representation of disaster from that of Burton’s or Schumacher’s rests principally on the temporal dimension, that is, whether they are placed pre- or post-9/11. After the event, the visualization of human-constituted disaster would be disposed to an ethnocentric and ideological world view. It is here that the politics of binaries begin to be erected.

In the case of The Joker in The Dark Knight, the source of evil seems to be embedded within. The Joker stands as a metaphor of urban dweller’s fraught psychological condition that has the potential to generate entropy for the mere purpose of ‘expressing’ themselves. The source of evil in this case, lies within. The Joker’s success in transforming Harvey Dent from Gotham’s only hope (the White Knight) into a vengeful Janus-headed Two-Face(d) acting on pure chance (decisions being determined by coin-flipping) exemplifies his philosophy. In the case of The Joker, not only are we uncertain about his real identity, but his motive for creating terror in Gotham is not exactly known. He is a paranoid schizophrenic, symptomatizing urban decadence, but the source of which is not revealed, even though sexual abuse and mutilation (observed in his facial disfigurement) are not ruled out. The conflicting stories of his facial mutilation into a coarse perpetual grin hints at abuse and betrayal, and the trauma suffered could be the cause of The Joker’s psychologically unstable condition. Having said that, the fact that his real name is never mentioned and his face smeared with garish paint to conceal his identity/ethnicity, he seems to embody one that could be termed as a stateless citizen.

Anarchy as Emancipation

The final part of the trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises, tries to take the notion of anarchy to its apocalyptic end. Here, anarchy seems to imply the dissolution of not merely the urban space, but also its privileged political–economic mode of existence, that is, liberal capitalism. Such is embodied by the rhetoric of Bane, whose anarchist revolution promises emancipation to the masses through the usurpation of state power, starting with the occupation of the Gotham stock exchange. This finds ample resonance with the 2011 ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement, a contemporary phenomenon that stands as a trope of capitalism’s failure to redress social inequality. The film’s allusion to this event perhaps hints at the lacunae inherent in this system, and the fear of its overhaul through counter-hegemonic operations that might take an anarchic turn. Continental history is replete with such examples, and the characterization of Bane as an anti-establishment rabble-rouser appears to be a metaphorical parallel. What makes The Dark Knight Rises a fitting finale to The Dark Knight Trilogy is the return to the theme of anarchy explored in the origin saga (Batman Begins). But the notion of cleansing is supplemented by a pseudo-emancipatory drive that could be considered as Bane’s instilling of false consciousness among the reified denizens. The anarchist strategy of destruction of all state apparatuses (that includes releasing prisoners from jails, destroying the legal apparatus, removal of the political class, among others) is planned through nuclear terrorism. Here, the politics of representation functions in such a way as to place the West on the left side of the Western binary system, while relegating the other (proponents of presumably non-Western values) on the right side. Bane’s communist-type revolution seems to be waged not actually to redress the exploitation of the proletariat, but to generate a utopian illusion of social equality through the destruction of the capitalist state apparatus, and then destroying Gotham altogether. He tells Bruce:

As I terrorize Gotham, I will feed its people hope to poison their souls. I will let them believe they can survive so that you can watch them clamber over each other to stay in the sun… You will watch as I torture an entire city to cause you pain you thought you could never feel again. Then, when you have truly understood the depths of your failure, we will fulfill Ra’s al Ghul’s destiny. We will destroy Gotham. (The Dark Knight Rises)

Here, anarchy is deployed not as praxis for the emancipation of the reified category, but for generating the illusion of emancipation as well as collective ownership of the means of production/consumption for the lumpen proletariat. This deception is perhaps the standard alibi offered by the advocates of the capitalist mode of economy to undermine the commitment of those adopting the alternative position. In that sense, Bane has to stand for values that are regressive, dishonest and authoritarian. When asked to reveal his identity, Bane is clever enough to place himself in the category of the exploited, and state: ‘We are nothing. We are the dirt beneath your feet. And no one cared who I was until I put on the Mask’ (The Dark Knight Rises). He considers his mission a necessary evil insofar as it would signal the end of a diseased, corrupt capitalist order to be constituted by a new one. He works up mob frenzy by demanding ‘the resignations of all the liars… and the corrupt’ (The Dark Knight Rises). He further declares: ‘We take Gotham from the corrupt. The rich. The oppressors of generations who’ve kept you down with the myth of opportunity. And we give it to you, the people. Gotham is yours—none shall interfere. Do as you please!’ (The Dark Knight Rises). Bane appears an anarchic rabble-rouser in the line of Robespierre whose storming of Blackgate Penitentiary and releasing the prisoners appears as a contemporary allegory of what the latter did during the time of French Revolution, that is, inciting the mob to storm the Bastille. Bane’s modus operandi is similar:

[S]tart by storming Blackgate and freeing the oppressed… Step forward, those who would serve… The powerful will be ripped from their decadent nests…and cast into the cold world the rest of us have known and endured…Courts will be convened…The spoils will be enjoyed…Blood will be shed. (The Dark Knight Rises)

The envisioning of such a dystopian state of affairs is part of the complicity that Western decadent society has forged with the forces opposed to it. Disaster movies, by iterating those fear by means of the ‘logic of the anomalous’ (Thurtle and Mitchell 2007, p. 267), perhaps raise important issues for the dominant against their aggrandizing hegemonic operations that stand to undermine their own stability. In Nolan’s Batman trilogy, this dialogic imagination finds ample resonance.

Be that as it may, it has to be understood that the brand of capitalism that the trilogy envisions seems to be philanthropic driven, ethically sound and ideal by Francis Fukuyama’s logic, and Wayne/Batman is, in that sense, a (dark) knight all out to defend the claims of the (capitalist) ideals he swears by. The human side of capitalism is constantly (over)emphasized. This idea is in clear evidence in this film where Bruce Wayne undertakes a free, clean nuclear energy project for entire Gotham towards a sustainable future. Even though Daggett, a capitalist shark, dismisses it off as a ‘save-the-world’ vanity project, the rhetoric of capitalist philanthropy being an undeniable fact is iterated. Wayne decides to dismantle the fusion reactor project only when he becomes aware of the threat of ‘weaponized fusion reactions’ where the power source could be used to convert it into a nuclear weapon. The fantasy of an imminent apocalypse notwithstanding, the deeper implication appears to be the propagation of the philosophy of liberal capitalism, and the idea of it being the only and most viable option for the Last Men (Fukuyama 1992). The other (Bane, for instance) will, in that sense, stand for what capitalist hegemonic operations will term as irrational, obsolete ideals whose realization would be disastrous for humanity. The politics of manufacturing fear (against the other) is an ideological tool that American disaster movies never fail to enunciate. In doing so, it again creates a binary where the good (industrial capitalist society/class) uses technology for progress/sustainability while the bad/evil (everything apart from the capitalist class) abuses it for generating chaos.

Technological Fetishism

In superhero films, the use of technology appears to also play a major role in a superhero’s transformation from an ordinary individual to one possessing superhuman attributes. In fact, most of the superheroes’ extraordinary powers are the effect of certain scientific accidents/experiments/incidents. Thurtle and Mitchell illustrate this well:

Comic-book superheroes emphasize the capacity of disaster to produce novelty. The importance of disasters is especially evident in the origin stories of superheroes. Many, if not most, superheroes are the products of unlikely industrial accidents: immersion in a vat of acid (Plastic Man); radioactive spider bite (Spider-Man); bombardment by gamma rays (Hulk); dousing with atomic waste (Daredevil); and so on. These origin stories emphasize a mode of narration that focuses on extremely anomalous events: not simply the unlikely industrial accident, but the incredibly unlikely industrial accident that enables some sort of beneficial bodily transformation. (Thurtle and Mitchell 2007, p. 283)

However, Bruce Wayne’s transformation into Batman is a little bit different in the sense that it is more technology governed. He has at his disposal the most upgraded, technologically sound weaponry, as well as an entire Research and Development wing devoted to creating these. From his peerless batsuit (made out of clear silicone over jointed armour—knife and bullet resistant) to his uber-cool batmobile, it is sophisticated technology that comes to his assistance. It can be argued that such blatant display of technological fetishism is a common phenomenon to all industrialized societies, and Nolan’s overemphasis on the technologically enabled superhero is a pointer to the value accorded by industrial society to it. But there is a flip side to it as well, and it figures as a source of threat to Western society. It is the idea that the technological means manufactured for serving the society can be manipulated by evil forces for wrong ends. Such an idea is illustrated through the microwave emitter—an industrial machine the size of a small van (Batman Begins)—and the nuclear fusion reactor (The Dark Knight Rises). In the case of the former, it had been devised by the Wayne Enterprises for assisting soldiers in desert warfare. It functioned by focusing microwaves to vapourize the enemy’s water supply. In the case of the latter, it was meant to provide free, clean sustainable energy for the entire Gotham city without generating any radiation or fossil fuels. But these falling into wrong hands (Ra’s al Ghul, Bane, Talia), become weapons of mass destruction, having the potential to undermine the city’s very existence.

Technology always has a potentially destructive side to its greatly positive/istic ends. Industrial society comes up with technological innovations meant for serving its people, but there is a fantasy of the fear for the uncanny as well associated with it which gets reflected in disaster and superhero movies, Nolan’s trilogy being no exception. Then, there is also the question of ethics involved in the way technology is used or abused. In a world getting more open sourced and transparent, the idea of privacy is becoming a thing of the past. In such a scenario, a panoptic surveillance system that can monitor a subject’s each and every move can be a source of security as well as grave threat. Ethical hacking has become the new kind of political correctness despite the undermining of a person’s/state’s privacy. The ambivalence of the matter is illustrated succinctly by Lucius Fox to Bruce: ‘You’ve turned every phone in the city into a microphone…You took my sonar concept and applied it to everybody’s phone in the City. With half the city feeding you sonar you can image all of Gotham… This is wrong…No one should have that kind of Power’ (The Dark Knight). It is, however, interesting to note that the projection of the ethical nature of capitalist industrial society rests on the fact that power is always assumed to be exercised with great responsibility, and therefore (in the film) the power over the panoptic surveillance rests on a ‘null-encrypted’ code functioning on the level of a good, rational, responsible citizen (Fox). The bad, on the other hand, exercise power without restraint, and it is mostly channelized for anarchic end. In a way, a referendum valourizing the claims of industrialized societies’ use, production, distribution of consumerist-targeted technological tools seem to be subtly propagated through the technological fetish created through the disaster/superhero movie genre, Nolan’s trilogy being no exception. But what distinguishes his cinematic world view is the mediated nature of representation that attempts to deconstruct stable binaries. Whether it is characters, cultural norms, hegemonic operations, ideological positions or technological issues, Nolan has the wonderful capacity to deconstruct the banal, normative assumptions, underpinned by ambivalence. This idea will form the concluding part of this study.

Ideological Ambivalence

Pitted against capitalism’s rampant urbanization drive that demands the brutal decimation of nature, certain ideological positions (communism, anarchism and environmentalism) have emerged that have attempted to question the logic of late capitalism’s acquisitioning drive. But this legitimate assertion is manipulated by capitalism’s propagandist machinery that generates and sustains fear among its subjected subject/s of the other’s evil designs (creating anarchy, or terror). Such seems to be Nolan’s motive as well in privileging the claims of capitalism over the other’s (projected as destructive) world view. Having said that, a certain note of ambivalence can be clearly discerned in which the claims of the other (forces operating against capitalist industrialized society) finds some condescending space. The question that arises is: does the West’s dominating impulse generate a certain element of guilt due to which they fantasize a retributive agency operating against them? Could that be the reason due to which disaster movies most often foreshadow certain anomalous events that Western society fear would come to pass? For instance, despite the Western media’s best efforts to legitimize the Gulf War and its necessity for the generation as well as preservation of liberal humanist values, voices were raised from many quarters about the war being nothing more than an instance of American neo-imperialism at work. The political economy of war waged for the purpose of serving the dominant’s vested interests (penetration into markets, acquisition of oil wells by force) was a strategy that could not be hidden for long despite the West’s spin doctors working overtime to spin a convincing rhetorical yarn. Disaster movies may perhaps be assumed to be an externalization of the imminent and inevitable fear of retribution felt by Western industrialized society from the other for the wrongs committed to serve the former’s economic interests. Therefore, a note of ideological ambivalence is perceptible here, for instance, in Batman Begins, Ra’s al Ghul’s mission to destroy Gotham is assumed to be founded on an ethical rationale. It is preservation of nature against the claims of rampant industrialization and urbanization with its attendant ills. He could, in fact, be regarded as an environmental activist who dedicates his life for the cause of restoring the natural balance.

The fact that industrialized society does not have a convincing alibi to legitimize their brutal defiling of nature, the guilt they suffer from gets an externalized projection through the imagining of a cataclysm. Baudrillard examines this phenomenon in the case of 9/11 terror:

The fact that we have dreamt of this event, that everyone without exception has dreamt of it—because no one can avoid dreaming of the destruction of any power that has become hegemonic to this degree—is unacceptable to the Western moral conscience. Yet it is a fact, and one which can indeed be measured by the emotive violence of all that has been said and written in an effort to dispel it.

At a pinch, we can say that they did it, but we wished for it. If this is not taken into account, the event loses any symbolic dimension. It becomes a pure accident, a purely arbitrary act, the murderous phantasmagoria of a few fanatics, and all that would then remain would be to eliminate them. Now we know very well that this is not how it is. Which explains all the counterphobic ravings about exorcising evil: it is because it is there, everywhere, like an obscure object of desire. Without this deep-seated complicity, the event would not have had the resonance it has. (Baudrillard 2002, pp. 5–6)

Such complicity is evident in The Dark Knight where The Joker’s diatribe against industrialized society’s reified, dehumanized and interpellated subjects seem to be suggestive of a commentary upon humanity’s fallen condition. The source of his misanthropy lies there, and his random acts of playful terrorism a testament of his hatred against a sub-human race of urban city slickers. Even Bane’s communist-type revolution in The Dark Knight Rises is presumably raised to redress the proletarian issue. His storming of Blackgate Penitentiary as well as occupying the Gotham stock exchange are acts that, though seemingly anarchic and reprehensible in terms of the imagery evoked, are again pointers to the deep-seated complicity (or sado-masochistic yearnings) on the part of reified subjectivities (that includes the audience) to fantasize the realization of such events. The fact that it is so perhaps explains for the enormous popularity of the disaster movie genre, Nolan’s The Dark Knight trilogy included.