/lit/ - Literature

>>12431491
i don't know if i mentioned this before, but one of the things about the Batman films was how an unspoken fidelity existed between Batman and Gordon. at some level, there is a deep affinity between Batman and Gordon, such that Gordon does not have Batman arrested. in Gotham, the existence of a billionaire vigilante never threatens the autonomy of the police services: Batman is on the side of the polis. these themes are only given a cursory treatment in the Nolan films, but they're pretty intriguing: what would happen, for instance, if random Gothamites began wearing hockey pants and carrying shotguns around, to fight crime however they saw fit? Batman, to his credit, shuts that experiment down pretty quickly.

the Joker is who he is because he's just fine with a world of anarchy, and Bane presents an even more reified form of cynicism ('Start by storming Blackgate, and freeing the oppressed!'). Bane's 'revolution' doesn't really require anything like a utopian army: it is, at bottom, a terroristic event conducted under the guise of liberation. the people of Gotham themselves are all he needs, if he can pitch their salvation to them in the right way: all they will need is the appearance of freedom, and they will devour themselves without any further instruction. this is, after all, the meaning of his own leadership of the League of Shadows: he's Gotham's reckoning. but Batman always works alone; if he has an army, it is the Gotham police department (or, in TDK, the assumption that the Everyman will not pull the trigger when given the option). and his ultimate job is to hand the role of being Batman on to the next guy.

in the Kojima-verse, the Boss is a sort of parallel meditation on this, with one caveat: to be the Boss is to fight an endless war on the behalf of no polis, but a sort of meta-polis, the city of the mercenary and permanent wanderer. such a ronin has neither home nor final form; everything is iteration, and all that is not iteration dies, or becomes monstrous. this is something that is always occluded by the appeal to Permanent Revolution, and yet is shown up time and again by the catastrophes of power seized. Gnostic Marxism is only Manichaeism; metaphysically speaking, it is territorialization on the moral plane.