"In order to grow your audience, you must betray their expectations." Or, how The Dark Knight Rises should have ended.

SPOILERS AHOY. ABANDON SHIP, ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE.

This movie is obsessed with symbolism. Lives shits eats breathes symbolism, and one of the biggest pieces of symbolism is the mask - who wears them and how, what they mean, what they protect. We are hit over the head with this symbolism, and most of all, that Bruce Wayne wears the mask because it doesn’t matter who Batman is, because Batman can be anyone. Batman is a symbol, not a person. And we get that, finally, at the very end of the movie when John Blake Dick GraysonRobin is bequeathed the cave. 

That should have happened sooner. And this is not just me being bitter that “Aw, nuts, I wanted to see Joe Gordon-Levitt in a superhero costume,” even if that is also part of it. This is the riskier storytelling choice. And it would have made the symbolism of the movie a lot stronger. 

Bruce Wayne is down in the bottom of the pit. Bruce Wayne has a goddamn death wish, has always had a death wish, is climbing the walls of the pit because he thinks the fact that he has a death wish makes him stronger because he’s not afraid of death. And it’s great that he learns you have to fear death if you want to live. But Bruce Wayne’s fatal flaw is that he doesn’t fear death. He doesn’t fear death, but at the same time, he has immortality granted to him by the story, because there’s still an hour left in the movie and he’s the goddamn Batman. So there’s no tension at all - you know he’ll make it out of that pit.

So, Bruce Wayne is climbing that goddamn pit. And he gets the clue that you have to climb without the rope in order to make it out. And he climbs without the rope, totally exposed. And he falls, because sometimes just wanting to get out of the pit is not enough to get you out of the pit. Sometimes a grown man can’t do what a five-year-old girl can.

Bruce Wayne falls, and he dies, and there is an hour left of the movie.

Back in Gotham City, Robin Blake confronts Gordon about the fact that he is a lying, useless fuck who let Batman take the fall for Harvey Dent. He loses faith in the man he looks up to, his hero, his boss, his father figure. He’s fiddling with some nondescript piece of black and blue fabric. 

Bane announces that Bruce Wayne, that Batman, is dead. It is the darkest hour. No one is going to save Gotham City now. 

And then we see Robin Blake and that nondescript piece of fabric again - it’s a batsuit! Robin Blake puts on a goddamn bat costume with that Nightwing logo he’s been drawing all over the city, and he’s Batman, because it doesn’t matter who Batman is as long as there is a Batman. Batman’s a symbol, not a character. And he hooks up with Fox and Catwoman and Alfred and they realize the autopilot is fixed and they storm the city and from there it’s pretty much the same but with less shitty pacing, and except Bruce Wayne is dead and stays dead because sometimes, heroes have fatal flaws. Sometimes the young guns have to stand up and take the lead.

The scene with Bruce and Selena at the cafe just seemed like such a total cop-out and it made the emotional bottom drop right out. If this is a movie about masks and Batman being a symbol and how anyone can be Batman, let it be that movie. If this is a movie deconstructing the personal sacrifices required to be a superhero, let it be that movie. If this is a movie where Batman and Catwoman get a tacked-on happy ending because early test audience didn’t like him staying dead, then you will never make filmgoers expand their horizons. It’s a tame ending. It’s a safe ending. Bane promised revolution - bring it.