Plato's Republic and Nolan's Gotham, Part III

[I have a theory that Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Trilogy is influenced to some degree by Plato’s Republic. At the least, the two texts would make for good conversation partners. Plato draws correspondences between the just or unjust city and the just or unjust soul, and the films are as much about the struggle for justice in Gotham City as they are about Bruce Wayne’s struggle to become a just man. In this series of posts, I point out some potential links between the book and the films that occurred to me while re-reading Republic recently.]

Third, is Gotham City’s descent from order to chaos over the course of the three films a reflection of Socrates’ theory of how the ideal kallipolis can devolve into a tyranny? 

In Republic Book VIII, Socrates says there are five kinds of cities. His ideal, healthy city is the kallipolis ruled by an aristocracy of one or more wisdom-loving philosopher-kings. The other four are each “diseased cities,” diseased because they are ruled by leaders who love or live for something other than wisdom (p. 214 in the 1992 Grube & Reeves translation). They are the timocracy, in which the leaders love honor most of all; the oligarchy, in which the leaders love money and how it satisfies their necessary appetites; the democracy, in which the people use their liberty to follow their unnecessary appetites; and the tyranny, in which the city is terrorized by someone who is himself tyrannized by his own lawless appetites. Plato puts the five cities in this order because, as his Socrates sees it, the kallipolis—kind of like the nuclear bomb in The Dark Knight Rises—“must decay” sooner or later (216). The kallipolis will fall, not to external enemies, but to “civil war breaking out within the ruling group itself” (215). It will corrode from within. First, it will regress to a timocracy, which will then turn into an oligarchy, and so on.

I think that Gotham City reflects all five types of cities at different points in The Dark Knight Trilogy, and in this same order.

First, in the flashbacks of Batman Begins, Gotham is like the wisdom-loving aristocracy—or at least, it’s trying to be. Although he isn’t the mayor, the aristocratic Thomas Wayne is the spiritual leader of the city. He uses his billions to better the city and—like the philosopher-king compelled to go back down into the cave—he doesn’t sit idly by enjoying his privileges in his mansion on a hilltop outside the city, but works as a doctor in the city. That’s appropriate given how Plato portrays cities as either sick or healthy, and good rulers as good physicians. Thomas Wayne is seeking to find a way to cure Gotham’s citizens, both physically as individuals and economically as a whole, and he seems to be having some success—until he is killed by one of the very people he is trying to help. Then, just as the aristocrat’s son can become a timocrat if he sees how the love of wisdom seemed to fail his father, Bruce grows up to be someone more likely to jump into a fight to defend his honor than engage in philosophical inquiry. He drops out of college and tries to avenge his father.

Following Thomas Wayne’s death, the Gotham City of Batman Begins is a timocracy in that it is caught in a constant tug-of-war between two groups of people who are governed by codes of honor: the police and the Falcone crime family. On the one side, Commissioner Loeb hates Batman because, as a vigilante, he makes him look bad—that is, causes him to lose honor. Batman succeeding where the police have failed shows them to be too corrupt or inept to be the guardians of the city. On the other side, Falcone says to Bruce, “Yeah, you got spirit, kid. I'll give you that. More than your old man, anyway.” It is the people who are led by the spirited element of the tripartite soul who are most concerned with honor. 

Then, in The Dark Knight, Gotham City is more like an oligarchy. In the iconic bank heist opening, the banker allied with the mob tells the robbers that “criminals in this town used to believe in things. Honor. Respect.” Instead, as the Joker puts it to a mobster later in the film, “All you care about is money.” Indeed, much of the film is about money. Batman, Jim Gordon, and Harvey Dent are trying to cut off the mob’s sources of funding and put its leaders in prison on charges of racketeering. The mob hires the Joker to help them get their money back. A police officer’s debts drive her to betray Dent and Rachel.

The oligarchy continues into The Dark Knight Rises, although under a different guise. The money-laundering mob has been defeated, but now the great conflict in Gotham is between the haves and have-nots, which finally boils over into an open war. Bane deposes the oligarchy French Revolution-style—recall that the ending of the film quotes from A Tale of Two Cities—and he tells the downtrodden masses, “we give it back to you, the people. Gotham is yours. None shall interfere. Do as you please.” This sounds a lot like what Socrates says of citizens in the democracy: “each of them will arrange his own life in whatever manner pleases him” (227).

But, as Batman and his allies know, Bane’s Gotham isn’t really free. It is under the sway of whoever is holding the trigger to the nuclear bomb that is carted around the city. That person turns out to be the daughter of Henri Ducard, Batman’s nemesis in the first film, and all her actions are controlled by the all-consuming desire to finish his mission of destroying the city. Gotham is under her tyranny, and she herself is a slave to her own wrath and warped understanding of “true justice.” 

If this reading is correct, Gotham City would seem to worse off at the end of the trilogy than at the beginning. Ominously, Plato only portrays how a kallipolis can be lost, not how it can be gained, as if there were no way back from the brink of tyranny’s destruction. I’m going to think on that problem a bit more and return later with a fourth and final post in this series.