In regards to my post about Miller and Nolan, Santino and I were chatting and he picked up on something which I had noticed, but didn’t want to say out-loud. I’ll let him explain it in his own words:

So. Theory.

 At the prologue screening, we got a t-shirt. It looks like this:

Now, this is a kind of stylized take on the Bane mask in Nolan’s movie. (They also had a stylized take on the Batman logo; I didn’t get that one.) But it reminded me of something else. I was thinking, thinking, let it go, got back to thinking … and then it hit me:

That’s not the best image from the book, but it’s the best one I found on Google Image. (I think the image that it most resembles is about midway down page 99 of the 10th anniversary paperback edition of The Dark Knight Returns.) Point is: It looks like the mutant leader.

So let’s consider what we know:

I’m glad to see that someone else has done a frame-by-frame review of the DKR trailer. In so doing, Gamma Squad makes a really, really awesome catch: The pearl necklace Selina Kyle tries on is the pearl necklace from Crime Alley.

In all the run up to DKR, it never occurred to me that Nolan might use Selina Kyle as an actual villain.

Hotness.

For no particular reason I’ve been re-reading Frank Miller’s Batman stuff–Year One, his Christmas one-shot, and Dark Knight Returns. A couple thoughts occur to me:

1) What none of the Nancy’s reading Frank Miller out of the comics A-list last month bothered to do was grapple with this: His writing in Year One and Dark Knight Returns is probably the the signal achievement in comics since Schuster and Siegel decided to come up with an all-powerful super man. Miller’s writing is breathtakingly confident, beautifully lean, honed to within an inch of its life. Go back and look at some of those pages and you’ll be blown away by how wonderfully they hold up. But they weren’t just the best pair of books in the history of the medium–they were the most influential, too. It is impossible to conceive of what the world of comics would look like today without them.

2) One of the interesting aspects of Nolan’s Batman movies is how he takes bits and pieces of comics and uses them in the construction of his own ideas. His Joker was taken from Brian Azzarello, for instance. He takes the final moment of Batman Begins from the last page of Miller’s Year One. There’s a shot in the new Dark Knight Rises trailer from Knightfall. He’s really mined the source material, but in the very best sense. Because he’s not recycling them–he’s using them to explore his own Big Ideas.

3) So what’s the Big Idea in DKR? That’s what I’m most interested in and I’m guessing we can find out once we know the answer to the following question: What does Bane want?

But in the meantime, I’ll hazard a guess. TDK was a movie about the liberal order, and what happens when it encounters an illiberal threat from the outside. I wonder if the Occupy Wall Street theme shown in the new trailer, and Bane’s talk about “the fire” rising, means that Dark Knight Rises will be about the liberal order confronting an illiberal threat from within.

Galley Friend B.W. sends along this totally intriguing little essay suggesting that Chris Nolan must kill Bruce Wayne at the end of Dark Knight Rises. It reminds me of the literary alchemy debates whirling around the final Harry Potter book. I’m not sure I’m convinced at the idea that Nolan is making dual trilogies, but I think it’s nearly accepted wisdom that he likes to structure his films like magic tricks. (Sorry, illusions. A trick is something a whore does for money. Or candy.)

The Joseph Gordon-Levitt angle feels completely plausible.

I guess so. Anne Hathaway (Havoc) and Tom Hardy (Layercake) have been cast for The Dark Knight Rises.

Speaking only for myself, I have absolutely no need of a sequel–or maybe even another Batman movie–after TDK. It’s a nearly perfect movie that is an absolutely perfect distillation of the character. If Warner and Nolan want to tell another story, good for them. But whatever follows TDK is going to be like giving us a movie about the adventures Rick and Renault have after the plane takes off. That Rick & Renault movie might be really great. But it ain’t going to be Casafuckingblanca.

Also, the only good thing about Catwoman’s presence, from a story perspective, is that it means Nolan is turning away from Talia A’gul, who is one of the biggest mistakes in the Batman mythology.

I’m actually more bullish on the idea of Bane who, as written, was pretty interesting–a much more cerebral villain than you might otherwise guess.

Even so. If this movie had to be done, it seemed like a city-wide war between the Mutant Gang and the Sons of Batman was the most promising ground.

Exit question: What’s the over-under on number of Dark Knight posts between now and July 2012? 250?

The good news is, the months between now and Dark Knight Rises are going to fly by.