A movie that blasts all thought away

Sorry, I didn't want the walls to be knocked down by the score and the sound fx of "The Dark Knight Rises" so I turned down the volume and I may have missed some of the Shakespearean dialogue and the Aristotelian wisdom that may have passed between Christian Bale and Anne Hathaway, or between Christian and butler Alfred/Michael Caine - but I still got enough from the movie - who wouldn't? The Nolans' Dark Knight Rises is what it is: the polar opposite of the kind of low-key low-budget no-stars on location interior indie social drama or foreign psychodrama that I usually watch. The characters are, uh, cartoons - and the plot is idiotic, requiring more suspension (of disbelief) than the Verrazzano Bridge - and yet, hey, it's a DC Comic. It's just plain entertainment, pure and simple, and you know what on it's own terms it's a damn good movie. In a way, it's what American cinema does and always has done best: tremendous effects, edge-of-the-seat chases and predicaments, high, brassy, overdone, too big, too long, way too loud - but you totally get your money's worth, with too many great scenes to tabulate: the plane hijacking at the outset, the imploding city (especially at the football stadium, the endless motorcycle chase, the Wall Street heist, the climb out of the dungeon, the dead-man's-float through the sewers, and others. No one will ever believe Bale is a tough guy or Hathaway's a bone-breaker, but that's part of the fun of it. The villain, Bane, is suitably creepy and menacing, talking through that insect-like proboscis he's got affixed to his face (a page from Blue Velvet, magnified a thousand-fold). When I step back for a moment from the loud entertainment, a few things do bother me: what's with the total desexualization of Caine? Can't the butler have a life, too? And what's with the attacks on Wall Street and on the wealthy dwellers of Gotham/Manhattan, with its French Revolution-like trials and executions? Is there a hidden message that the Army of Shadows, or whatever it's called, that wants to destroy civilization, is the rising "47 percent," clamoring for "class warfare"? Is this movie on some level the revenge, or the fantasy revenge, of the Romney Republicans? I know that's a subliminal message at best (or worst), but it's something I couldn't help think about in the midst of the mind-numbing blasts of sound in this movie that's really meant to blast all thought away.