Klavan: Batman battles the politics of resentment

Andrew Klavan had an excellent review of "The Dark Knight Rises" in the Wall Street Journal Sunday which highlighted the latest Batman flick for its correct depiction of the depravity inherent in radical movements, including Occupy Wall Street:

Murder is the opposite of art: destructive, impoverishing, nihilistic. To discuss the act of a killer as if it had some relevance to a work of culture is to usher the age-old enemy of mankind into one of his citadels. So I will pass over the massacre in an Aurora, Colo., theater in a silence respectful toward its victims.

But the film that was playing in that theater—"The Dark Knight Rises"—deserves to be loudly celebrated as a masterful and stunningly honest work of Western popular culture.

The movie is a bold apologia for free-market capitalism; a graphic depiction of the tyranny and violence inherent in every radical leftist movement from the French Revolution to Occupy Wall Street; and a tribute to those who find redemption in the harsh circumstances of their lives rather than allow those circumstances to mire them in resentment.

None of these themes necessarily arises out of filmmaker Christopher Nolan's politics, of which I know nothing. Whatever his politics, he is an artist committed to creating, in Shakespeare's words, "abstract and brief chronicles of the time." This is where Mr. Nolan's honesty comes in.

There are, after all, no socialist filmmakers in Hollywood. There are only capitalist filmmakers (Michael Moore, for one) who make socialist films. Likewise, none of the coiffed corporate multimillionaires who anchor the network newscasts can honestly support the Occupy movement which, taken to its logical conclusion, would result in their being hanged from lampposts.

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