A Legal Analysis of Dark Knight Rises' Ending

One of the appeals of Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy was its attempt to place the story of Batman in a "real-world" setting. But of course, if you look at the film too closely, it's not all that real-world (what Hollywood film is?). And now some fans who apparently have a bit of legal expertise have decided to examine the end of the trilogy, specifically the finale of The Dark Knight Rises, to see if it all adds up.

Of course, spoilers follow, in case you have somehow made it this far and not yet seen the film. But are clicking on articles about its ending.

Anyway, the main question at hand here is why would Bruce Wayne be legally declared dead at the end of the story? We obviously see (or think we see) Batman get blown to bits, but what about the missing Mr. Wayne? As far as the general public knows, Bruce did not sacrifice himself in the Bat via nuclear explosion.

As Law and the Multiverse guest blogger Mike Lee puts it, "Only four people (who aren’t talking) know his identity, and this is a man who has a habit of disappearing for nearly decades at a time. Wouldn’t you expect the courts to be a little more reticent than that, especially given that they screwed up the 'declared dead' bit in the first film?"

Using New York law as a stand-in for Gotham City, Lee asks whether or not the Wayne Estate could have Bruce declared dead without a body. New York law states that a "period of required continuous absence" of three years is necessary before someone can be declared dead. Seemed more like three days before they handed over the keys to that orphanage, right?

But! Lee adds, "Alternatively, the statute establishes that exposure 'to a specific peril of death' might suffice to establish death in absentia, even if the three-year statutory period has not yet run."

The No Man's Land-esque state that Gotham was in leading up to the end of the film could be argued as the "specific peril of death" needed to put the ghost of Bruce Wayne to bed.

"While no systematic genocide occurred in Gotham, we know that the city was overrun for several months with widespread executions, lootings, murders, and violence," continues Lee. "We also know that these incidents were focused on the wealthy such as Mr. Wayne due to Bane’s class-warfare approach. In the wake of tens of thousands of deaths, with intentional executions disproportionately focused on wealthy scions such as Bruce Wayne, I think it’s reasonable to consider Wayne to have been in 'specific peril of death'…"

At which point, Joseph Gordon-Levitt gets the Batcave! Woop!

Read the full argument at Law and the Multiverse and thanks to Slash Film and Boing Boing for pointing it out.

Talk to Senior Editor Scott Collura on Twitter at @ScottIGN, on IGN at scottcollura and on Facebook.

Source : ign[dot]com