League of Shadows (TDK Trilogy) = Marxist?

[Bolshevik Sickle]

Does anyone think that Bane in the Dark Knight Rises (2012) seemed awfully similar to Vladimir Lenin?

http://static.comicvine.com/uploads/scale_medium/2/29361/2741070-bane_jpg_181056.jpg
http://media.moddb.com/images/groups/1/5/4702/Vladimir-Lenin.jpg


Both revolutionaries/anarchist.
Overthrow the rich aristocrats, and say they will take from the rich and give to poor.
Set up an authoritarian (I don't think Lenin was authoritarian, but Stalin certainly was) government to prevent any further chaos of turmoil.


I suppose you get what I'm trying to say. If I didn't know any better I would say Bane (and the League of Shadows) were definitely some kind of Marxist group.

http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20080328034234/batman/images/2/25/News-batbegins1-1.jpg

He totally looks like Lenin.


In Batman Begins (2005), the League of Shadows still seem to have a leftist agenda. I would say that in Batman Begins the League of Shadows were Anarcho-Primitivist (like the Fight Club in Fight Club). As they saw that Gotham had reached it's pinnacle, and as such grew corrupt (capitalistic), so they tried to just reverse the entire city, take out it's aristocrats (like Wayne Industries), and turn into a classless society starting from scratch.

Actually, I think this is a better way of looking at it.

Ras Al' Ghul = Vladimir Lenin

First to create the revolution. With goals of creating a classless society.

Bane = Stalin

Create a degenerated workers state in which the citizens are of equal class, but the government controls with an iron fist.


-More info in the replies

[synthesis]

I really enjoyed the new Batman movies, and Christopher Nolan is definitely in my top five list of directors working today, but those movies all struck me as pretty right-wing, for various reasons beyond just the usual "paramilitary-vigilante-colluding-with-police-to-stop-intrinsically-evil-people" stuff. (How shitty was that Kick-Ass sequel?) There are tons of little things, but there's some broader quality about the trilogy, some perspective on human nature that I can't quite put my finger on, but it really comes across to me, at the risk of hyperbole, as one step on the road to fascism.

[Danielle Ni Dhighe]

I don't think the films are right-wing or left-wing, but are a typically Hollywood mixed bag.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Does anyone think that Bane in the Dark Knight Rises (2012) seemed awfully similar to Vladimir Lenin? Well I don't think there's any allegory involved with specific revolutions or revolutionaries, but I do think the connection is that (specifically) Bane is a representation of a staw-man version of revolution/revolutionaries and social unrest. The screenwriter of that last movie is also a right-winger who wrote the dialogue in a game where the villian was a Latin American populist terrorist who was called something like "the savior of the 99%" and, like Bane, used his populist rehtoric as a con for more selfish or personal motives.

I read an interview with Nolan where they asked if he was promoting right-wing ideas by seemingly justifying domestic spying (by the "right" people) in the Dark Knight and for the apparent Occupy-esqe rehtoric in the Dark Knight Rises. He said he's basically apolitical and that they wrote the story before Occupy but it was a "happy accident". He also said he doesn't try and present one view but likes to take topical "hot-button" issues and put them into these films to add realism to the fantasy and to heighten the tension of the movie. Personally I think that's sloppy and exploitative... it's taking real issues but making them just a bit of emotional manipulation like a shot of a kitten crossing the road during a car chase to heighten the tension.

Actually I think Hollywood has been doing this with a lot of social issues when they come up in films lately - there are things like rape and so on that are brought up in really superficial ways and I think it's mearly audience manipulation, they know people feel strongly about it in real life and so it will make the viewing-experience more intense by just bringing it up (i.e. exploitation). At least the comic "The Dark Knight Returns" with some quazi-fascist sorts of things going on really went for it and pushed the underlying (fascist) tensions in vigillante crime stories.

[Red Commissar]

Bane in the movie filled the role of the populist agitator, one who was using people's anger to his own advantage. Throw on top of that the usual depictions of "revolutionary terror" In this case it was not merely just his lust for power but because he as a League of Shadows member and acting out their objective to destroy Gotham. All he did was in order to destabilize the city and create the opening the League of Shadows needed to do their deed, which they failed in the first movie. In this sense Bane got reduced to a mook by movie's end.

The League of Shadows in the comic takes two different forms. It is either a shadowy outfit (it's in the name after all) committed to ending "Human corruption" by basically destroying the world and bringing it back to a more "pure" state, or one that takes inspiration from deep green beliefs that holds all the ills of the world to be a result of industrialization. Nolan hade them take more from the former and made them even more nihilistic, making them position themselves as a force that would "cull" the Earth once it had grown out of control. It is in both the movie and the comics meant to serve as a foil to Batman, taking his cynical views on humanity to the extreme (and as such, why Ra's al-Ghul is often seen trying to recruit him to be his successor). There is nothing in the League of Shadows agenda that is remotely Marxist much less revolutionary.

In either case you can't call them Marxist or any form of leftist. Beyond Bane making some sentiments like giving power to the people or emptying the jails, it fits into the generic revolutionary mold (power to the people!) with strawmans on terror, made even more generic when it's revealed that not only were all of Bane's followers useful idiots for his own objectives, that his objective was to ultimately blow everything up basically.

In the comics Bane has always been problematic because of the way he was introduced. He was specifically created as an "anti-Batman", and to be the one villain who truly defeats Batman because he was the perfect combination of bruiser and tactician. He was born in a jail on the island of Santa Prisca (a thinly veiled reference to a caribbean banana republic ruled by military junta trope, with flavors of Cuba), serving out the sentence of his unknown father after his mother died in jail after being brutally assaulted. With this grimdark origin plus teaching himself, he becomes like Batman in a sense, and then enhanced by experiments with Venom which make him even more brutal and cunning. He instigates a prison riot, kills the warden and his guards by dumping them in the shark-infested waters where they threw his dead mother into, and leaves the island.

He goes to Gotham to destroy Batman because he had a batphobia from his jail cell. Yeah. He ends up overwhelming Batman by breaking villains out of the jails, and later breaks his back and incapacitates him. He later got his ass kicked by Batman's replacement, and from there disappeared for awhile because writers weren't sure what to do with a character who had done what every villain had failed to do, since he could not ever match that accomplishment.

Bane would resurface when the League of Shadows unleashed a bioweapon on Gotham, going so far as Ra's al-Ghul favoring him as his successor, but he got defeated by the original Batman again. After a brief detour where he tried to blow up Gotham by overloading a nuclear reactor, he got demoted to a mercenary who'd hire himself out to different crime lords.

He got a reprieve in another arc where he temporarily teams up with Batman when he tries to discover the identity of his father. Upon learning that his father could have been a visiting American doctor (which was among three different possibilities) he discovers that Thomas Wayne- Bruce Wayne's dead father- had been on the island during the rebel insurrection and could've been his father. This was not the case in the end, but instead he finds out that King Snake- another Batman villain who was introduced in the late 80s/early 90s much like Bane himself- was in fact his father. King Snake was a former British soldier-turned anti-communist paramilitary who was hired by the rebels to overthrow the Santa Priscan government. Bane ends up taking down King Snake when he tries to unleash a superweapon, mortally wounding himself in the process but Batman saves him.

King Snake as I said before was introduced in the late 80s and early 90s among other, numerous villains to the Batman rogue gallery when they were worried that they were getting stale. Most of them didn't stick and were written out one way or another- this provided a way to do so. Bane was coincidentally one of these, but was among the few to actually be kept, along with the reimagined Dr. Freeze (taking inspiration from the Batman cartoon) and Harley Quinn (imported from the cartoon).

After this Bane kind of drifts for awhile. One writer has him returning to Santa Prisca where he backs a populist, anti-American party to try and clean up the island, but it ends up getting destabilized and he leaves once again. He joins up with some villain squads like the Suicide Squad (government using villains to do wetworks in exchange for term reductions. Kind of a penal legion/ dirty dozen vibe) or the Secret Six (a mercenary group), where he also tried to kick his venom habit.

It should be mentioned that one of Bane's creator was Chuck Dixon. Dixon was one of the main Batman writers in the 90s and had a reputation for being very conservative, even by Batman's standards. Bane was created to be everything opposite of Batman in a strawman form. Dixon was let go a few years back by DC for unspecified reasons but it's largely believed that his homophobia and other shit views got too overboard and readers were being bothered by this. When Rush Limbaugh pulled his media stunt claiming that Bane was being used as an attack on Mitt Romney by way of a pun on Bain Capital, Dixon pointed out that Bane was made before this and said that Bane was opposite Romney, and stated that the occupy protestors were a more relevant comparison. He topped this off by posting a picture of Ronald Reagan superimposed on the iconic Clark Kent ripping his shirt to show the superman insignia. So his political views are pretty clear there- Bane was everything he hated.

DC did a big reset on their universe so everything's back to zero. Basic parts of Batman's background and his villain's gallery has been retained but there has already been revisions of some of his villains' backgrounds (Dr. Freeze has been affected by this). Beyond acknowledging that Bane some point in the past beat Batman, Bane has a clean slate. So he might be changed once again depending on what role he needs to fill.