hernaniste:

On the émeute and the lower mine in TDKR.

There’s been a lot of talk about the latest Batman movie and the imagery that it borrows from nightmarish interpretations of the French Revolution.  And yes, a lot of it could’ve passed for Thomas Carlyle’s wet dream, but the riffing on A Tale of Two Cities was far less interesting for me than looking at the movie’s Hugolian themes.  As much as the film ends up being pretty darn anti-populist, there’s a lot in it that I think Hugo would’ve been on board with.

First off, holy cow do we get imagines of the émeute, Hugo’s negative, selfish “revolution.”  After seeing the June Days of ’48, Hugo was very wary of what the lower classes would do if allowed to indulge in unchecked rioting.  Hugo is of course more sympathetic about those who, in desperation, revolt for selfish reasons, but the film does acknowledge that ~the mob~ does have some real motivation; there’s incredible economic disparity and the imbalance can’t persist.  The uprising is wrong because it’s motivated by individual gain (wrapped up in flimsy left-y rhetoric), but its causes are legitimate.

But more interestingly, Bane and co. like to go on about the fact that they are a “reckoning,” a near-inevitable punishment that the city has brought on itself.  And ho boy is that Patron-Minette.  In the “Mines and Miners” chapters, Hugo goes on about how the evil underworld that so blights the existence of decent folk is society’s self-inflicted ailment.  When people systematically forget the least of these, then the wounds fester and violent crime bubbles up from the sewers.  The dehumanized products of the underworld “have two mothers, both step-mothers, ignorance and misery.”  We as a society could get rid of such crime if only we had the good sense, compassion, and will:

Read More

Pretty cool stuff linking Hugo to TDKR.

1. kayla-bird likes this
2. jayjubes likes this
3. irisistable reblogged this from hernaniste and added:

   Pretty cool stuff linking Hugo to TDKR.

4. jennykucab likes this
5. verit likes this
6. adenydd likes this
7. corinthes reblogged this from hernaniste and added:

   Yes! TDKR as a whole is so dedicated to the unerring preservation of institutions that any Hugolian parallels are really...

8. hernaniste posted this