I've always felt that there were anti-state undertones with Batman. Not just in the Nolan movies, but even with the Batman story in general.Batman is a guy who grows up in a city that is completely corrupt, and who realizes that the way to fix it is by working outside of the system; not within it. The police are portrayed as being corrupt or incompetent. This is brought up a lot in The Dark Knight Rises. I'm assuming everyone reading this thread has seen the movie and it's okay to talk spoilers. In TDKR, we're introduced to a character named John Blake, who we find out at the end of the movie is a reimagination of Robin. At the beginning of the movie, Blake is a cop. He's portrayed as being optomistic that he can work as a cop to make the city better. There are several moments in the movie where Blake noticably realizes that the system is what's preventing him from doing the right thing.
At one point, Commissioner Gordon flat out says to Blake, "There's a point far out there, when the structures fail you. When the rules aren't weapons anymore, they're shackles, letting the bad guy get ahead." Gordon is blatantly telling Blake that we will never be able to accomplish anything by working within the system; that, not only will the system not help him change anything, but that it will actively deter him from doing so.Later in the movie, we see John Blake literally throw away his gun. This is him realizing that the gun(the state) is not the answer. From this point forward, we mostly see Blake working alone, and later with Batman. We don't see him working with the police anymore.At the end of the movie, Gordon asks Blake if he's sure that he can't convince him to stay on the force. This is when we find out that Blake has officially quit being a cop. Blake says something like, "Remember what you told me about the rules being shackles." He explicitly states that he's come to the conclusion that he can never accomplish anything by working within the system. It's at this point that we find out that his first name is "Robin", but he goes by "John", and that Batman has left him directions to the Batcave, indicating that Batman has chosen Blake as his successor. The movie ends with Blake entering the Batcave, indicating that he has chosen to follow Batman's path of working outside the system.I believe that John Blake is the character who the audience is supposed to relate to. At the beginning of the movie he's a statist who believes that he can make things better by working within the state. By the end of the movie, he realizes that the state is the problem, and explicitly denounces it.I apologize if I've repeated anything that's already been said. I just sort of skimmed through most of the other posts.
