Bane From 'The Dark Knight Rises': Does He Hold a Deep Political Message?

All sorts of crazy theories are flying around this week about the villain in the latest Batman movie, Bane from “The Dark Knight Rises.” First, Rush Limbaugh alleged that director Christopher Nolan chose the evil genius with venomous veins, Bane, as a metaphor for Mitt Romney’s company Bain Capital. Rush has since denied that he was accusing the Batman gang of some decades-old comic conspiracy, but the backlash has hit hard for the radio host.


And Rush isn’t the only one throwing around conspiracy theories. Occupy Wall Street protester Harrison Schultz wrote an op-ed for the Daily Beast comparing Bane’s Revolution to the Occupy Movement. Of course, this film has been in the works for years, long before anyone occupied anything. And Bane has been a villain in the comic series since the mid-nineties, just as Mitt was entering the political arena and more than a decade before he had presidential aspirations.

So if Nolan and his co-writers had some big political conspiracy in mind, they must have had a clairvoyant on their team. Nolan told ABC News, “We try to be sincere about writing situations that would frighten us, that would concern us, things that I suppose we absorb from the world around us. We never want to be overtly political in any sense.” So what do you think: Does Bane hold a deep political message?