If you pay enough attention to both movies and politics, you might have noticed by now that the name of the asset management firm once run by Mitt Romney rhymes with the name of the villain in The Dark Knight Rises. It's not the same name, of course-- Romney's former company is called Bain, Tom Hardy's Batman character is called Bane-- but they rhyme perfectly, so much that people have been making some silly jokes on the Internet and some even sillier Photoshop.
But what can we rely on in this world if not Rush Limbaugh ruining the joke by taking it way too seriously? On his show today (via Media Matters) Limbaugh attempted to inform his viewers of the left-wing conspiracy that is The Dark Knight Rises, and how this "vicious, fire-breathing, four-eyed, whatever-it-is villain" is an attempt to bring down Mitt Romney. Yup. Take a listen for yourself below.
I don't think Limbaugh actually believes this is true, and that he doesn't understand the way that Hollywood and comics work enough to think that Bane-- a character created in 1993 by Chuck Dixon, Doug Moench and Graham nolan-- could actually be an attack on Mitt Romney. Limbaugh is an amoral rabble-rouser who will say pretty much anything that gets you talking about him, and there are probably a few dozen of his listeners who are devoted enough to actually believe Christopher Nolan is using his movie as an anti-Romney tool. If anything, this is proof that Limbaugh understands just how big The Dark Knight Rises is, and how talking about it will get him attention from all kinds of quarters that don't usually mention him-- like, well, us.
More than anything, this gets me thinking about the fascinating conversations about the political undertones in The Dark Knight, how a lot of people read it as a pro-Bush narrative ("He's the hero Gotham deserves, but not the one we need right now") in how it addressed modern terrorism. I haven't seen The Dark Knight Rises yet, so I don't know what its political implications will be-- but I'm betting they'll be a lot more interesting and nuanced than the Bain/Bane connection. Sorry, Rush Limbaugh. You're going to have to think a little harder to properly dig into this one.
