Exactly What Is "Dark Knight Rises" ABOUT?

I actually didn't even realize they were still doing The MTV Movie Awards, let alone that it was tonight. Apparently, the show climaxed with yet another arrangement of footage from "The Dark Knight Rises" - mostly showing off longer takes of stuff we've seen before, but now with perhaps a little more context...


The most interesting thing, obviously, is what seems to be definitive confirmation that Catwoman ends up as a good guy (or, at least, working on Batman's side at some point) which is... whatever, let's see what they do with that. The big stack of junk blocking the tunnel, alongside the previously-seen exploding bridges, implies that Gotham City (or a portion of it) is being deliberately cut-off/"contained" from the mainland; either by Bane or maybe by the authorities in response to Bane? Now I'm wondering if some of this is being taken from the "No Man's Land" story-arc from the comics, where an Earthquake turned Gotham into an isolated, lawless island for awhile. "Escape From New York" wiht Batman? That'd work.

What continues to intrigue me (and possibly put me a bit "on edge,") is what exactly Bane is "about." He's obviously an in-name-only adaptation of the character, so there's really no way to say what his story/motivation/etc. are supposed to be. What we can tell, moreso from some earlier trailers, is that there's a heavy "class war" theme at play in the film - as far back as the first trailer we saw scruffy-looking hordes ransacking mansions, dragging well-dressed people out of hiding places and trashing what looks like a stock-exchange. In this one it looks like Bane is leading (or at least "directing") the mobs; which sets up some troubling subtext when you consider the filmmakers' (scrapped) plans to incorporate real footage of the Occupy Wall Street protests into the film.

Is that the idea? Bane/whoever else using a villainized version of OWS as a tool of societal-destruction? If so, that plus Batman as the "good" side of this starts to feel a little "iffy" to me: Batman - the ultimate one-percenter/status-quo/order-as-justice superhero - swooping in to save us from a villainized version of the Discontented Poor? Are we following up TDK's "shut up and let Bat-Rumsfeld's surveillance network protect you from The Terrorists!" with "shut up and let Bat-Trump protect you from yourselves!"?

Maybe, maybe not. It does strike me that there's something oddly "feudal" about Nolan and company's conception of Batman. It's comic book tradition for superhero's to mainly focus on a single city, both because of logistics and... well, just because; but in this series Bruce Wayne's Gotham-fixation feels a little bit less like focused-benevolence and more like protective-ownership - Gotham City as a modern-day medieval castle-town, Bruce Wayne as the Landed Noble in charge. Hell, he's even an inheritor-by-birthright of his throne; "Batman Begins" having introduced the idea that the Wayne Family has long taken up maintanence of Gotham as a pet-project.

This isn't to say that it's necessarily "wrong" for this particular film to (possibly) be working from an anti-OWS (or, at least, "cut the upper-class some slack, kids!") angle; or that it's somehow ill-advised - being pegged in some quarters as a tacit endorsement of Patriot Act overreach certainly didn't hurt it's predecessor. But it's interesting, and this being an election year you can bet it'll come up.