analysis - Were parts of The Dark Knight Rises a commentary on the Occupy movement? - Movies & TV

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A fair amount of the second
act of The Dark Knight Rises has a class warfare plotline. This is
foreshadowed in the trailers with Selina Kyle's "there's a storm coming" monologue. Some
of the verbiage and themes of this portion of the film seem to mirror the href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupy_movement">Occupy
Movement, and I wanted to know if this was on
purpose.

Did the writers of The Dark
Knight Rises purposefully model this plotline on the Occupy
Movement, or were they pulling from some other source?

Answer

In an interview with Rolling
Stone, director href="http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/news/christopher-nolan-dark-knight-rises-isn-t-political-20120720">Christopher
Nolan insists his film is
apolitical:

In the new movie, you have Bane more or less trick Gotham's 99
percent
into rising up against the rich – is that intended as an
anti-Occupy

Wall Street statement?

I've had as many conversations with people
who
have seen the film the other way round. We throw a lot of
things
against the wall to see if it sticks. We put a lot of
interesting
questions in the air, but that's simply a backdrop for the story.
What
we're really trying to do is show the cracks of society, show
the
conflicts that somebody would try to wedge open. We're going to
get
wildly different interpretations of what the film is supporting
and
not supporting, but it's not doing any of those things. It's
just

telling a story. If you're saying, “Have you made a film
that's
supposed to be criticizing the Occupy Wall Street movement?” –
well,
obviously, that's not true.

But the movie certainly suggests that there's a great danger
of
populist movements being pushed too far.

If the populist movement is

manipulated by somebody who is evil, that surely is a criticism of the
evil
person. You could also say the conditions the evil person is


exploiting are problematic and should be
addressed.