Bane is the name of the villain in the upcoming Batman installation, “The Dark Knight Rises,” and Bain Capital is the name of the controversial venture capital company once headed by Mitt Romney. Some people apparently think the same names are not a coincidence.
Some conservatives are saying that the villain was selected as a dig at Romney and his work at Bain, which has a history of closing down companies it acquires and sending jobs overseas.
Leading the charge, not surprisingly, is Rush Limbaugh. On his radio show Limbaugh pushed the Bane and Bain conspiracy, suggesting that the villain was selected on purpose to create a negative association for Romney, CBS News reported.
“Do you think that it is accidental, that the name of the really vicious, fire-breathing, four-eyed, whatever-it-is villain in this movie is named Bane?” Limbaugh said on his show.
But the film does have some political messages, CBS News notes. In one scene Bruce Wayne, the billionaire who is secretly Batman, is warned by a woman that there’s “a storm coming” for people who “live so large and leave so little for the rest of us.”
Christopher Nolan, director of “The Dark Knight Rises,” said the movie does have some messages about the nation’s economic climate. He told Entertainment Weekly:
The notion of economic fairness creeps into the film, and the reason is twofold: One, Bruce Wayne is a billionaire. It has to be addressed. We’ve never done that before. But two, there are a lot of things in life, and economics is one of them, where we have to take a lot of what we’re told on trust, because most of us feel like we don’t have the analytical tools to know what’s going on. So in making a movie about dishonesty, really, it’s one of the things we think about.
It’s unlikely that the Bane and Bain connection is intentional. The Bane villain first appeared in Batman comics in the early 1990s, and the character was selected as the focus of “The Dark Knight Rises” before Romney even won the Republican primary.
Some democrats are even conceding that the film’s economic themes and the Bane and Bain connection could hurt Romney, intentional or not.
“I wouldn’t usually say I agree with Rush Limbaugh, but if the Bain attack becomes a Bane caricature in a cartoon, in a popular movie, the Obama campaign couldn’t be happier,” Democratic strategist Michael Meehan told CBS News.
Do you think the Bane and Bain connection was intentional?
Seriously? Rush Limbaugh is probably the most idiotic of all the shock jocks on the radio today. The man doesn't even seem to think before he speaks. If he did, he'd have realized that Bane was a character created in 1993. How would three writers (of COMIC BOOKS, no less) know that a former founder of an equity company would 10 years later run on the conservative ballot for the Presidential office? What a fool…
Also, to Nathan Francis, the writer of this article who even poses the question that hints that the similarity of names could be intentional, why even ask that?
I saw this yesterday and my mind assploded. People lean on this guy for political opinion. Scary.
There was similar upheaval when Two Towers came out after 9/11, and there were accusations the film was capitalizing on the attack
There are 3 kinds of people in the world: Those that contribute, those that hang back, and those that take away. Some people will find any excuse to complain…
Actually only 2 types of people in the world. Those who pee in pools and those who say they have never peed in the pool. I actually like Rush's political opinion on the most part. But like Mark Levin the most.
Adam,
You're falling into the trap of most Limbaugh critics- listening to the distortions that media reports rather than listening to what he actually said. Limbaugh never claimed that the comic book writers or the film makers had Romney or Bain Capital in mind when they came up with Bane. In fact, he recognized that they did not. He said that liberals would jump on the name similarity as an opportunity to draw a correlation and attack Romney. Be aware of how the media reports anything regarding Rush Limbaugh, because it probably will not be accurate. The main reason that so many reasonable people think he is an idiot, bigot, hate monger, etc, is because they listen to what the media REPORTS that he said rather than listening to what he actually says