The Magician

Rating: Null/10 (30 August 2012)

The same glum , featureless Gotham as before. Another ambiguously presented antagonist with a masterplan for world destruction. And the same questions about order and moral authority in the universe. Nothing has changed, except this has to conclude a saga so the arc has to be on a massive scale, and that means we get the same sloppily written apocalypse I encountered in the Matrix sequels. The franchise at this point is a machine whose bulk and supposed complexity far exceeds its function, with a lot of gear just for show.
The ordinary way to see these films is as opera of lush , sonorous darkness. The volume of the presentation matters, the staged environment. A different set of gears interests me though, which I believe is the gist of what the films present (and ties with other pursuits of mine).
An encounter with logic that presses against the limits of logic.
On the most obvious level, you have Batman representing order and reason and rotating antagonists who aim to dissolve that order by exploiting holes in its sustaining mechanism. Gotham stands in for the audience that stands in for how the world at large sees and is affected.
It's not quite so simple though. The deeper engine going back to Begins, is that a boy has suffered a terrible loss that makes reality concave. That means the boy will have to restore in him, by his own devices, the suddenly missing parts of a world that used to be in order, namely what the parents used to represent in his life and the world, order and goodness. That loss is given to us as a fall in a rabbit hole that, quite literally, unleashes a cloud of hallucinated images of fear that creates the batman-universe. Oh, everything that we see of that universe is supposedly 'real', but only because that is the established contract with the audience. Inbetween these films, Nolan sketched with a bit more clarity similar ideas about the concave architecture of the mind in the DiCaprio film.
In that universe, the boy has every means at his disposal to be someone else. The question that arises and creates all the friction across the trifecta of films, is whether or not he has a right to exercise volition to create and inhabit that universe that allows him to reshape himself and destiny. The means by which he is going to serve logic, the reshaping act itself, is extra-logical. And since the universe is one of juvenile - fractured - imagination, every antagonist on his path is a splintered ghost-self that he will have to rein in and control.
The quest is to defeat these extra-logical selves that reflect some aspect of Batman on the path to righteousness.
In Begins, you had the psychiatrist who controls the substance that makes you similarly hallucinate the image of fear. And you had a vigilante on his own disciplined path to righteousness.
In the second film, you had a man standing in for inherent chaos in the universe, and that man plainly reveals to the wounded boy that it doesn't matter what your story is or how freaky, since stories are inherently and demonstrably false and manipulable. It matters that you act in a way that makes the 'reasonable' world burn.
This third guy is a rehash of previous ones and again reflects our hero. He's also on a righteous mission against corruption and the 'system'. He too wants to balance the world with fire. He too has seriously bled to pull himself out of a rabbit hole. And I am writing this from a country that recently elected neo-Nazis in the parliament, some of who actually look like Bane and spout the same 'revolutionary' rhetoric against political rot, and that rhetoric that speaks of strength and cleansing has seduced a good number of fearful people. So Bane's seduction of the cinematic audience touches very close to home, very eerie.
This allows Nolan to finetune a few details about his Batman that probably bothered him as well: what if Batman went from prince to beggar, would he be the same?
The problem I have noted in the previous films remains however, and that is quite apart from the actual noise of the films. The idea is that each of these extra-logical opponent selves would stretch and expand the logical tools required by the world of the film to understand them, and that would stretch and expand our own logical tools of being able to accommodate opposite visions of the same world at once.
Nothing of the sort happens. Nothing is expanded so far as what we are called to reason with, or allowed its own unreasonable air. Nolan even attempts in the end to 'humanize' Bane, that is to reduce back to something we can safely reason with and discard.
And I believe the important lesson here is that we really do need in our reasoning tools subtle chaos like these people bring in the Batman world, and that is denied to us by Nolan's ultra-rational approach to storytelling.
Because there is subtle chaos in the universe, and the attempt to steamroll over that in the name of a tidy , explainable narrative means that we get something like the false - fabricated - narrative that opens the film after the Joker-induced chaos of the previous (Dent a hero, etc.).
And the film and trilogy does end on a solid note, with evil vanquished, with another fabricated narrative that glosses over a system that really is corrupt.
Oh, it is the best superhero franchise to date. But, quite apart from the superficial effect of 'realism', Nolan's films actually defeat the imagination. He is competent but entirely a storyteller. He simply cannot let go of having control, so that the air of the film will dictate its own motion.