The Batman massacre was the work of a deranged mind. But I’d argue the film and a new play in London both warn how the West may be reverting to the dark days of the Thirties
AT THE heart of one of the world’s great financial capitals, the Stock Exchange is under siege. As masked men brandish assault weapons, terrified bankers run for cover. While the politicians wring their hands and the police are reduced to impotent captives, mobs rampage through the streets, looting the homes of the rich minority. Inspired by the anti-capitalist slogans of a brutal demagogue, the raiders smash and burn, literally tearing the fine clothes from their victims’ backs.
At hastily inspired People’s Courts, the financial elite faces the justice of the mob. As crowds scream with envy and hatred, the death sentences are handed down.
It sounds like something from the French Revolution, or like an anarchist’s fantasy of the world after the financial crash.
But this nightmare scenario comes from the plot of the new Batman blockbuster, The Dark Knight Rises, which has now been dragged so brutally into the headlines by the horrific carnage in Denver.
Clearly, the shooting of at least 12 innocent Americans on Thursday night was the result of a single, deranged mind.
But I would argue that — in an age when newspapers and television are dominated by outrage at bankers’ greed, the occupation of major financial centres by protesters and riots on the streets of Europe’s capitals — this Hollywood blockbuster has a frightening relevance that has little to do with the terrible crimes of a lone lunatic.
And the film’s British writer- director, Christopher Nolan, is not alone in giving artistic expression to the moral and political crisis threatening the West.
This week’s other big opening was the National Theatre’s brilliant new production of Shakespeare’s play Timon Of Athens, presented against a background of avarice and corruption in the City of London.
Like Batman’s alter ego Bruce Wayne, this modern-day Timon is a rich philanthropist who moves effortlessly through a world of gallery openings, society parties and fancy banquets.
He spends money like water — only to find his friends deserting him when the cash runs out.
Having fled into the wilderness, Timon finds himself in a world of angry havenots, who, in the National Theatre’s production, are depicted as sinister, hoodie-wearing Occupy protesters.
In scenes that uncannily mirror the plot of the new Batman movie, the mob storms the city of Athens.
THE 99 per cent, it seems, will have their revenge on the tiny elite who held them down. Only a few years ago, productions like these would have felt strident and exaggerated. In the summer of 2012, however, they feel shockingly timely.
Thanks to the impact of endless scandals, the reputation of our political and financial elites has sunk to an all-time low.
For the first time since the Hungry Thirties, capitalism itself is in danger of becoming a dirty word.
Indeed, the very fact that the National Theatre has revived Timon Of Athens is highly revealing. Often regarded as one of Shakespeare’s most obscure plays, it is rarely seen on a major stage.
Yet with its withering indictment of the culture of wealth, Timon was Karl Marx’s favourite play.
And with university courses on Marxism reportedly booming, it is no wonder the National Theatre’s director Nicholas Hytner thought it was time to revive it.
The enormous success of The Dark Knight Rises, too, tells a wider story.
Batman’s creator, the comicbook artist Bob Kane, devised him as a masked billionaire vigilante, cleaning up the streets by brute force.
And given that his adversaries are a motley variety of underclass criminals, hoodlums, terrorists and anarchists, it is easy to see why many critics see Batman as that rare thing — a truly conservative hero.
Above all, Batman was a creation of the late-Thirties — an age when capitalism seemed to have broken down, democracy was embattled, and much of Europe had fallen to the twin totalitarian causes of fascism and Communism.
During the post-war decades, the character’s appeal waned.
Life was good, the Western world was booming, and the idea of a black- clad vigilante, prowling the underworld of Gotham City, seemed faintly ludicrous. But it is not surprising that Batman’s popularity has revived.
The fears that stalked the land in the Thirties — economic breakdown, social unrest, political extremism and violent revolution — are frighteningly similar to the anxieties that haunt us now.
Indeed, what happened during that dark decade is a terrifying reminder of what can happen when the hopes of a generation are broken on the wheel of economic depression.
The horrors of the Third Reich, where Hitler and his collaborators built the bloodiest and most barbaric regime the world has ever known, are well known.
But it is worth remembering that in the citadels of Western democracy, too, thousands of people were tempted by the false idols of demagoguery and extremism. At the very moment that Bob Kane and his contemporaries were devising children’s superheroes such as Batman and Superman, one in five Americans was out of work. Thousands of banks had collapsed, a million people were evicted from their farms and the stock market lost 90 per cent of its value.
Every week, tens of millions of Americans tuned in to hear the crude rants of the Catholic ‘radio priest’ Charles Coughlin, one of the most popular celebrities of the day, who claimed that Jews, Wall Street bankers and Bolshevik activists were plotting to undermine the American dream.
Even in Britain, the tone of political life became more extreme: more violent, even.
Incredible as it may sound today, thousands of supposedly intelligent people genuinely thought that Stalin’s brutal regime in the Soviet Union represented the future of humanity.
In 1934, one Piccadilly club hosted a glamorous white-tie dinner on the theme ‘We-have-Been-to-russia’, with speakers
lining up to applaud the inevitable victory of Communism over capitalism.
And, a year later, a society garden fete praised the supposed triumphs of MarxistLeninism, with its principal attractions including an exhibition of ‘Soviet Embroideries and Curios’.
The Nazis, too, had plenty of admirers — most famously the former Labour minister and founder of the British Union of Fascists (BUF), Sir Oswald Mosley.
WE OFTEN tell ourselves that fascism could never have succeeded in Britain, because we are too sensible, too decent and tolerant.
Yet at its peak the BUF commanded a membership of some 50,000 people, while its antiSemitic rhetoric attracted tens of thousands of votes in the East End of London. We know now that it never became a major political force — but nobody was so sure at the time.
What rescued the British and American people from the perils of extremism was not the intervention of masked superheroes, but the sheer canniness of their political leaders.
In Britain, the Tory leader Stanley Baldwin and his Labour counterpart Ramsay MacDonald effectively joined forces, forming a National Government that calmly steered us through the stormy waters of the Great Depression, and functioned a lot better than our current bickering Coalition.
In the United States, meanwhile, the crisis threw up one of the indisputably titanic political leaders of the century, President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
His big- spending New Deal was not without its flaws, and even now historians argue about whether it accelerated or delayed economic recovery.
What is beyond doubt, though, is that Roosevelt brilliantly articulated ordinary people’s anger at the financial elites whose hubris had caused so much misery.
By speaking for the common man, this patrician politician neutralised the threat of the extremists and restored voters’ faith in mainstream democratic capitalism.
To read one of his most famous speeches is to be reminded how little things have changed.
‘ Throughout the nation, opportunity was limited by monopoly,’ Roosevelt told an audience in 1936.
‘ Individual initiative was crushed in the cogs of a great machine.
‘The field open for free business was more and more restricted. Private enterprise, indeed, became too private. It became privileged enterprise, not free enterprise.’
It would be good to hear David Cameron say something similar today. Indeed, it would be nice to hear him speak about the outrages of the bankers, the failings of the City and the decline of social responsibility in the same eloquent tones with which he promoted his Tory leadership candidacy seven years ago.
Alas, our politicians are not in Roosevelt’s league. Indeed, it is no wonder ordinary voters think that our governing elites live in a golden bubble, insulated from the anxieties that haunt the typical household.
The extravaganza of the London Olympics is a case in point.
This week brought the opening of the hated Zil lanes on the capital’s roads, set aside for the use of Olympic bigwigs, sponsors and freeloaders at the expense of London’s workers and taxpayers.
Now we learn that selected Coalition ministers — including such men of the people as David Cameron, Nick Clegg, George Osborne and Jeremy Hunt — are allowed to use them too, while Mr Average sits and stews in the lengthening traffic jams.
No wonder some people have a jaundiced view of this sporting extravaganza which has taken over our capital city. No wonder so many think the dice are loaded, the democratic system is broken and capitalism itself has become fatally skewed in favour of a tiny freeloading elite. And no wonder, either, that one line from The Dark Knight Rises has spread like wildfire across the internet:
‘You’re all going to wonder how you ever thought you could live so large,’ the Catwoman character whispers ominously, ‘and leave so little for the rest of us.’
In its way, that remark sums up precisely how many people feel. It may seem farfetched to imagine that, as in the film, anger could turn to mob rule.
But that is only because, at the moment, most people still have a stake in the existing order.
LAST summer’s riots were a terrifying reminder of the potential of violence to explode, almost without warning, onto our cities’ streets.
It has happened before; it could happen again.
Only last week, the American economist Nouriel Roubini — the man who famously predicted the credit crunch and the global financial collapse — warned that the world faces a ‘perfect storm’ in 2013, with chaos in the eurozone, a recession in the United States and war in the Middle East.
In its way, such a disaster would be as frightening as anything from a Hollywood blockbuster.
It would send ordinary families living standards’ plummeting, shatter any last vestiges of faith in the system, and give a massive boost to the thugs and fanatics of the far Right and hard Left.
In such circumstances, a film like The Dark Knight Rises would look less like an escapist fantasy, and more like a prediction of the future. Fanciful? Perhaps. But then again, perhaps not. After all, it is worth remembering that Christopher Nolan’s script was partly inspired by real historical events — the revolutions in France in 1789 and Russia in 1917, in which millions of people, frustrated by the lack of opportunities, angry at their politicians’ corruption and determined to channel their resentment into action, overthrew the existing social order.
In the Batman universe, Gotham City’s high- society politicians are a vain and pusillanimous bunch, more interested in their own careers than the greater good.
And their real- life British equivalents, to be honest, are not much better.
We desperately need our leaders to show that they understand public outrage at the bankers’ excesses, and to find a way through the nightmare that confronts us.
At the very least, they must ignore the gigantic distraction of the Olympics and concentrate on the enormous challenges ahead.
The time for burying our heads in the sand is long past. Things may get worse before they get better.
Gotham City may have its dark knight. But in the real world, we cannot rely on an eccentric billionaire in a bat costume to save us.