The Dark Knight Rises

The press is picking up for the ever imminent release of the end of a legend, The Dark Knight Rises and there is a new trailer out that will make you very excited!

Christopher Nolan entered this franchise in 2005 with the release of Batman Begins. Nolan took Batman into ever darker territory as he explored the making of this legend. Tim Burton directed both Batman and Batman Returns in the early 1990’s and created a dark, troubled Gotham with a mysterious and dark vigilante. Burton created a Batman that expressed deep anxieties and fears, but Nolan takes it one step further. Nolan manages to do this alongside grounding Batman, ever more, into our reality.

In The Dark Knight Batman faces his oldest nemesis, The Joker, as in Batman directed by Burton. However, Nolan creates a Joker that is particularly unstable and psychotic, more so than Jack Nicholson’s performance. Heath Ledger creates a man who has been engulfed into psychosis and, therefore, has no reasoning to his actions. This leads you to wonder what Nolan has done with the character of Bane in the ultimate end to this legend.

The Batman films that Nolan has directed are based on identity, as Batman states in Batman Begins:

“It is not what is inside you, but what you do that defines who you are.”

Despite not containing the overtly campness that the 1960’s TV Shows and the two films directed by Joel Schumacher, Batman Forever and Batman and Robin, did, Batman still offers those queer possibilities, in the sense in which he goes against the essentialist and patriarchal norms, because he is a hyper-masculine symbol, he has no parents, he works on the outside of the law and has no jurisdiction. Batman proves that identity is not fixed, whether it is concerning gender or sexuality, but that, rather, identity is fluid, non-essential and a performance, much like putting on a mask…

I will not bore you with an in-depth reading into the Batman films, but just be aware that the dark symbol of the bat represents a lot more, as it foregrounds the darkest anxieties in our society, mainly revolving around masculinity. Batman illustrates how the subject is never complete or coherent, as a subject is continually becoming, continually negotiating within itself between reality and fantasy. The films play with this idea through the split identity and the constant ‘putting on’ of identities in the form of costumes. The superhero genre is a cultural phenomenon as genre is a cultural construct.

Batman is, by far, the most interesting of all superheroes and I am excited to see what Nolan has done with him next.

I am also intrigued to see what has become of Catwoman. Michelle Pfeiffer gave us an ironically feminist performance in Batman Returns and so I am intrigued as to whether Ann Hathaway has followed in her footsteps.

The Dark Knight is due out on 20^th July.