What Do You Believe In? Film Scholarship and the Cultural Politics of the Dark Knight Franchise
2013; University of California Press; Volume: 66; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1525/fq.2013.66.3.15
ISSN1533-8630
Autores Tópico(s)Media, Gender, and Advertising
ResumoAggressively hyped and weighted with feverish expectation, The Dark Knight Rises was presold not only as the event movie of 2012, but also as a heavily politicized talking point.This was underscored by two media events that emphasized the film's status as a touchstone for the cultural moment.First, in the run-up to the 2012 presidential election, the notorious right-wing talk-show host Rush Limbaugh claimed The Dark Knight Rises to be de facto pro-Democrat propaganda, alleging that the name of the film's villain, Bane (played by Tom Hardy), was too similar to that of Mitt Romney's former private capital firm-Bain Capital-to be mere coincidence.''When [voters] start paying attention to the campaign later in the year,'' Limbaugh pronounced, ''Obama and the Democrats [will] keep talking about Bain [and] . . .these people will think back to the movie.''Second, shootings at a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colorado, were enacted by a young man styling himself on the Joker (Heath Ledger) in The Dark Knight (2008), resulting in a tragedy that doubled as something of a grim metaphor for the fate of a generation doomed to be lost in the longterm socio-economic aftermath of the global economic meltdown.Tellingly, the massacre of a predominately youthful audience became synergistically incorporated into the promotional machine of The Dark Knight Rises when widely disseminated footage of millionaire actor Christian Bale, visiting survivors in the hospital, uncannily mirrored images of Bale's character, philanthropic capitalist Bruce Wayne, in Christopher Nolan's trilogy.In a characteristically flamboyant review in the New
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