Abstract
When Miranda Tate tells Bruce Wayne that “innocent is a strong word to throw around Gotham,” she means that in Gotham City, people often aren’t as good as we’d like them to be. She makes this comment in The Dark Knight Rises, the third film in Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, but the description captures Gotham as it’s depicted in all three films. Gotham, simply put, isn’t a very nice place.
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Notes
- 1.
All quotations from the dark knight trilogy are drawn from the films themselves, as supplemented by The Dark Knight Trilogy: The Complete Screenplays (Tuxedo Park, NY: Opus Books, 2012). I’m grateful to the University of South Carolina Sumter for providing funding toward the completion of this manuscript. Great thanks are due to my fellow panel participants at the 2018 meeting of the Southern Political Science Association, and to my colleagues at USC Sumter for their helpful comments during and after my presentation at our faculty seminar series. For their willingness to talk (and listen to me talk) about this project, I’d like to thank: Tyler Brown, Josh Houben, Kyle Kelly, Andy Kunka, Matthew Morse, Jil and Lenny Picariello, Eric Reisenauer, and the students in my Film, Politics, and Social Change class. For listening to me go on long after anyone else would have lost patience, I’m exceptionally grateful to Alex Picariello and—as always—Erin.
- 2.
Ross Douthat, “The Politics of ‘The Dark Knight Rises,’” The New York Times, July 23, 2012. https://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/23/the-politics-of-the-dark-knight-rises/
- 3.
Martin Diamond, “The Revolution of Sober Expectations,” in As Far as Republican Principles Will Admit: Essays by Martin Diamond, ed. William A. Schambra (Washington, DC: The AEI Press, 1992), 215.
- 4.
Ibid.
- 5.
Diamond, 217.
- 6.
Ibid., 223; 217.
- 7.
Diamond, 214, 221, 220.
- 8.
“No. 51,” in The Federalist Papers, ed. Clinton Rossiter (New York: Signet, 2003), 319.
- 9.
Ibid., “No. 15,” 106.
- 10.
Ibid., “No. 6,” 48.
- 11.
Ibid., “No. 10,” 75; “No. 6,” 49–50.
- 12.
Ibid., “No. 51,” 321.
- 13.
Ibid., “No. 55,” 343.
- 14.
Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Robert C. Bartlett and Susan D. Collins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), Book 6, Chap. 5, 1140b25–7; 1140a26; 6, 7, 1141b8–9; 5, 6, 1141a1; 1, 3, 1094b15–16.
- 15.
Ibid., 6, 7, 1141b15–17.
- 16.
We might say that Wayne leaves his youth behind when he returns to Gotham. As Aristotle tells us, “a young person does not seem to be prudent. The cause is that prudence is also of particulars, which come to be known as a result of experience, but a young person is inexperienced: a long period of time creates experience” (6, 8, 1142a12–16).
- 17.
Alan Baily makes a similar point in “Batman: America’s Lockean Superhero,” presented at the 2014 meeting of the Southern Political Science Association.
- 18.
Douthat makes this point in “The Politics of ‘The Dark Knight Rises.’”
- 19.
This suggestion reappears later in the film, when the camera lingers on a pair of tattered American flags just before the climactic battle between Gotham’s police and the League of Shadows.
- 20.
“No. 76,” in The Federalist Papers, 456–7.
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Picariello, D.K. (2019). The Heroism of Sober Expectations. In: Picariello, D. (eds) Politics in Gotham. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05776-3_4
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