I want to like Lupe Fiasco’s “Bitch Bad,” on the grounds that I like Lupe Fiasco himself, and because I, like many female hip-hop listeners, would be happy to find articulate male allies in the genre:

There are a lot of things that are off about the song. Its chorus hook, “Bitch bad, woman good / Lady better, they misunderstood,” sounds like remedial English, which whether it’s directed at women who apply the word to themselves or the men who sling it around, sounds exhaustingly condescending. In The Atlantic, Mychal Denzel Smith has a terrific breakdown of the song’s problematic gender politics, from the simplicity of that core heirarchy, to its unwillingness to assign men responsibility for their judgement of women.

But what irritated me about “Bitch Bad” is its desire to get credit for bringing up a provocative issue without the accompanying responsibility for calling anyone out. “Disclaimer: this rhymer, Lupe, is not usin’ ‘bitch’ as a lesson,” he rhymes, “But as a psychological weapon / To set in your mind and really mess with your conceptions / Discretions, reflections, it’s clever misdirection.” But the only meaningful discussion between “lesson” and intellectual provocation is the responsibility the speaker has for making a point at the end. Given how heavily the rest of “Bitch Bad”‘s lyrics rely on media psychology—in the verse about how girls consume media, he might as well be cribbing from the Parents’ Television Council—he’s on particularly shaky ground in terms of declaiming having any particular message. Watching him dig deeper on that insistence that he can’t be taken too seriously, telling Rolling Stone “I’m not trying to say this is what’s going to happen, or potentially what’s going to happen. Because you don’t know, the characters are fictional, based on true events. I know personally what has affected me, but that’s me personally,” is irritating.

The thing is, as a woman, Lupe Fiasco’s personal experience with the impact of the word “bitch” is nice to have on record, but his willingness to take an actual stand would be a lot more useful. I’m not really in a mood to give him credit for calling out misogyny in hip-hop if he doesn’t actually want to be seen as calling out misogyny in hip-hop. Fiasco told Rolling Stone that the album from which this song comes was inspired by James Baldwin because “he was such a powerful figure. He was a homosexual, he was an atheist, he was black, he was a writer, he was a down brother, he lived in Paris and grew up in the slums of Harlem. And he was a preacher. So he had all these things that made him Public Enemy Number One, but he was also loved and adored by the public at the same time.” But part of what made Baldwin powerful is that he took action, in his life and his art. He moved to Paris in part to escape discrimination, and wrote bluntly and frankly about discrimination against gay people in Giovanni’s Room and about American racism in essays like The Fire Next Time. His work was powerful in part because it was explicitly, courageously political, something Lupe Fiasco is apparently afraid to be.

I’m tired of this. I thought I was tired enough after watching Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises, a perfect encapsulation of how Nolan manufactures credit for alluding to big issues while preserving a critical incoherence about politics that let him avoid offending any potential customers. And I’m even more tired after a stint at the Television Critics Association where people said repeatedly that the shows they’d created had no politics. By that, they mean that their shows are not partisan, which is something I can see legitimately avoiding (though having politicians on television have no party affiliation or fake party affiliation is disingenuous). But they end up implying that they’re afraid to claim their own ideas instead. It’s okay for pop culture to have ideas. In fact, it’s necessary. And pop culture can be deeper, and riskier, and more exciting, the action and the relationships it portrays can have higher stakes, when those ideas are about how the world should be run, about what conditions are necessary for equity, and stability, and justice.

I woke up to the news this morning than 50 people had been shot by a young man at a screening of The Dark Knight Rises in Colorado, and at least twelve are dead.

Sean Collins is right that, to a certain extent, Batman is a fantasy about turning violence that is random, or in this case, unpredictable, into something that can be predicted and contained by the great efforts of a single man. Anthony Lane is correct that movies and murder have been linked before and will be linked again, though I think he is in more tenuous territory in discussing ugly threats against critics who did not like The Dark Knight Rises, which are themselves symbols of a brokenness I think fan culture has to deeply reckon with, and this act of violence. If you think The Dark Knight Rises is the greatest expression of cinema of all time, your next step is unlikely to be to kill people who, by their decision to show up for the first possible screening of the movie, give some semblance of agreeing with you.

Mostly what I feel is this: Midnight screenings are big, hyped, advertiser-driven events that have become a source of new information to feed the Hollywood data beast, by indicating how motivated audiences are to see a movie. But they’re also a product of genuine enthusiasm and an expression of collective joy. Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy has meant a lot to an enormous number of filmgoers. And as someone who writes about movies, and who cares about the big, flawed thing we call fandom, I’m saddened by someone turning that shared enthusiasm into a weapon. And even if this tragedy hadn’t happened at the premiere of one of a dwindling number of genuinely mass cultural events, I hate the idea of using an audience’s suspension of disbelief, their openness to and absorption in the spectacle unfolding before them, as cover—the gunman reportedly started shooting during a sequence involving gunfire, meaning the audience was slower to react. We are vulnerable when we go to the movies, open to fear, and love, and disgust, and rapture, surrendering our brains and hearts to someone else’s vision of the world. We don’t expect to surrender our bodies, too.

This consideration of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy contains mild spoilers for The Dark Knight Rises.

Halfway through Batman Begins, Alfred (Michael Caine), the Wayne family’s loyal butler, points out to Bruce (Christian Bale) that his anti-social behavior and strange injuries will invite comment, and suggests that he find a way to live a public life to minimize prying. “What does someone like me do?” Bruce asks him. “Drive sports cars. Date movie stars. Buy things that are not for sale. Who knows, Master Wayne?” Alfred tells him. Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, complete this weekend with the release of The Dark Knight Rises, has been an extended meditation on the power of symbols, the juxtaposition between fascism and anarchy, and recovery from trauma. But it’s also intermittently a story about what billionaires are for and what they do, a question The Dark Knight Rises seems to want some credit for posing, but not responsibility for actually answering.

Nolan’s vision of Gotham has always been sharply divided: we see billionaires and the very poor, but with the exception of the prisoners on the Joker’s barges or the ticketholders to the football game that Bane bombs, and the police themselves, there is no visible middle class in the city. The poor and the criminals who prey on them are often literally an underclass. In Batman Begins, district attorney Rachel Dawes (Katie Holmes) drives Bruce below an underpass to confront crime boss Carmine Falcone, telling him “They talk about the depression as if it’s over, and it’s not.” Poverty goes unseen because it is physically subterranean. In The Dark Knight Rises, an orphan who lives at the same boys home where Blake (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a young police officer who maintains his faith in Batman even as Gotham has reviled the vigilante as a criminal, grew up tells Blake that the boys who age out of the program, which has cut back on services because the Wayne Foundation’s funding has dried up, are disappearing into the sewers because “they say there’s work down there.”

While the trilogy is clear that threats to Gotham rise from that underworld, Nolan also appears significantly pessimistic about the ability of charity to permanently ameliorate the conditions that contribute to crime. “Gotham’s been good to our family. But people less fortunate than us are suffering,” Bruce’s father tells him as the family rides the monorail to their fateful night at the opera. “So we built a new, cheap public transportation system to unite the city.” That same monorail becomes the delivery weapon for Ra’s al Ghul’s weapons later in Batman Begins. In that same movie, Alfred reflects on the elder Wayne’s strategy after Bruce decides to return to Gotham, noting that “In the depression, your father nearly bankrupted Wayne Enterprises combatting poverty. He believed that his example could inspire the wealthy of Gotham to save their city.” When Bruce wants to know if the strategy worked, Alfred tells him “In a way. Their murder shocked the wealthy and the powerful into action.” When Bruce Wayne and Harvey Dent have dinner during The Dark Knight, Bruce promises Dent that “you’ll never need another cent,” after Wayne throws Dent a fundraiser. But it’s not enough to secure the fortunes of a promising politician if he goes bad. Reform is a process, not a dinner party. In The Dark Knight Rises, Bruce is bitterly critical of the approaches of those who emulated his father, complaining that the proceeds of a charity function sponsored by the investor Miranda Tate will only go to pay for a lavish spread, rather than reaching their intended recipients. “It’s about feeding the ego of whatever society hag put it on,” he tells her.
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Apparently, in The Dark Knight Rises, Catwoman “has a history of abuse and works as a stripper and is also a pickpocket.” That Catwoman is or has been an abuse victim is, of course, canonical — though she’s introduced as an amnesiac flight attendant, that is later revealed to be a cover story for her flight from an abusive husband, from whom she stole her jewelry, launching her career as a cat burglar.

I feel some ambivalence about this. Trauma is a frequent trigger for a turn to superheroics, and of course women are more likely to be subject to certain kinds of trauma than men are. But if you’re going to use trauma as a motivating factor, it’s awfully easy to fall into the trap of using it as shorthand rather than as an opportunity to tell a personalized story. And abuse victim —> stripper is an awfully cliche sort of shorthand. It also perpetuates the idea that the only reason anyone could possibly have for doing sex work is because of trauma in their past.

The key is to hit upon a certain alchemy, a combination of signifiers that will give audiences a general idea of where the story is going, while having enough specificity and idiosyncrasy that they don’t actually know where it’ll end up. I actually thought Batman Returns did quite a nice job with this, using workplace harassment and violence instead of domestic violence for variation. And in the end, her murderous, electrified smooch isn’t straight retaliation, and is couched in an insight that “the law doesn’t apply to people like him, or us.” She won’t let herself get bought by the fairy tale, which by the expectations of conventional storytelling is surprising, discomfiting, and ultimately satisfying — being wrapped in cotton at Wayne Manor ultimately doesn’t satisfy her need for justice. I don’t think Nolan’s Bruce Wayne is going to get his kinky happy ending either. But it matters why that happens.