Batman carries on beginning in ... The Dark Knight

Sorry to beat a dead horse but every dramatic hero since the Enlightenment has been free of the normal rules that apply to you and me, by dint of either their profession (cop, private investigator, nobleman, spy, etc) or their criminality (mafiosi, man-on-the-run, etc). It's an interesting rut that Western dramatic writing has gotten itself into, that we can't imagine the sort of heroism we aspire to other than being embodied by someone to whom the normal rules don't apply. Batman is in the basic Scarlet Pimpernel / Zorro mold, a nobleman who disguises himself not so much as to not be caught by the law (since by being noble he is somewhat above the law anyway), but so as to retain his special position in society (and thereby continue his heroic tasks)

Dave Kehr again:

Both the ferry boat and the wrong-rescue scenes are typical of “The Dark Knight”’s strategy of setting up impossible, “Sophie’s Choice”-like moral dilemmas for its hero, and then resolving them through sleight-of-hand: in a bit of reverse racism, a scary-looking black man steps up to make the tough moral choice that a wimpy-looking white guy is unable to handle; Batman arrives to rescue his girl friend, only to find that the Joker has betrayed him (!) and switched locations. In both cases the hero gets to look fine and noble while he wrestles with issues that are then resolved with no moral cost to him. I agree that the movie is not triumphalist, but triumphalism is hardly in style at this point in time. Instead, it substitutes the dark romanticism of the misunderstood outsider, who takes on the sins of the community the better to redeem the poor saps who will remain forever ungrateful to him — a slight improvement over a ticker tape parade finale, but still a self-flattering, adolescent notion.

difference being, in real life you have to decide whether or not you trust a vigilante, and wonder what his reasons are.

batman is just a comic book hero, and we know he's the good guy. i don't think the parallel holds up.

he used the term "reverse racism" = don't listen to a thing the guy says

Batman arrives to rescue his girl friend, only to find that the Joker has betrayed him (!)

is this what happened? maybe i got jumbled, i thought the point was that Batman chose Dent

In real life you have to decide whether or not you trust the rules, too.

I said it could be read as a rather sympathetic critique of post-9/ll government overreach in my review. Didn't take that line of thinking as far as Kehr.

x-post

Hand's writing is so good.

batman seemed kind of fat and super slow in this. especially when the whole first movie was about how batman is a ninja. he really needs to go up a size in that mask

the audience in my theatre cheered when gordon reappeared - in this world, the heroes are celebrated just for *surviving*. I guess I'm getting kind of meta about this, but that seems like a low point for comic book heroics. so it's kind of hard to read tdk as a triumphant celebration of bush policies. have the ostensible good guys (and the audience by proxy) ever been so sadistically thrashed during a comic book movie? does anyone walk out of the theatre upbeat + feeling good about the state of gotham (or the world)?

would love to see an HBO gotham mcu series, so long as there are super-villains

max, have you read Gotham Central? if not, you would probably like it!

It took me a while to figure out that wasn't Renee Montoya tagging along with Gordon all the time.

have the ostensible good guys (and the audience by proxy) ever been so sadistically thrashed during a comic book movie?

It's difficult to think of any action movie in the last 15-20 years where the hero isn't beaten and bloodied by the end of it. We seem to need our heroes punished, with marks all over their bodies.

Thanks, pinefox.

In real life you have to decide whether or not you trust the rules, too.

Kerm, 22 July 2008 14:45 (20 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

nope. in real life you have to wonder what society is going to do about the people that break/ignore them.

yeah, they didn't see her name for awhile and i was sure it was going to be montoya.

You might wanna check the comments in the link before you respond. Dave Kehr:

“The Dark Knight” is “Dirty Harry” stripped of Don Siegel’s ambivalence and ambiguity. Here again, one madman (Christian Bale’s Batman/Clint Eastwood’s Harry) is posited as the only effective way of combating another (Heath Ledger’s Joker/Andy Robinson’s Scorpio). The two figures are identified as morally equivalent (”You complete me,” says Ledger to Bale, nastily referencing “Jerry Maguire”), but where Siegel’s camera literally recoils in horror at the moment Harry leaps into madness (when he steps on Scorpio’s wound in the football stadium), Nolan seems to embrace, and even romanticize, his hero’s obsessive, abusive behavior. Is the Dark Knight just George Bush with a better outfit, demanding that he be allowed all of the available “tools” to combat terrorism, even if they include torture and eavesdropping? Like Bush, Batman has his own warrantless wiretapping program, but Nolan is kind enough to assure us that, once his goal is accomplished, the superhero will blow it up. Is he suggesting that we can count on the Dark President to do the same?

http://www.davekehr.com/?p=59

-- Dr Morbius, Tuesday, July 22, 2008 10:27 AM (54 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

did this guy just call obama "the dark president"???

Like Bush, Batman has his own warrantless wiretapping program

morbz is obsessed with obama saying as president he'd scrap the fisa stuff he voted for

those aren't morbz' words. He's quoting Dave Kehr.

I have no idea who Dave Kehr is or if he's obsessed with Obama and FISA.

It's difficult to think of any action movie in the last 15-20 years where the hero isn't beaten and bloodied by the end of it. We seem to need our heroes punished, with marks all over their bodies.

like a passion play?

I liked how the Joker was a Satanic kind of figure...his only goal seemed to be bringing out the chaos and rage inside normally virtuous people. It's made quite clear in the movie that he "wins" so long as you stoop to his level--and while this isn't profound or anything I hardly see how it could be seen as a endorsement of Bush-style anti-terrorism policies.

http://www.darrenlester.co.uk/images/jpg/emperor3.jpg

which is precisely why batman is "hunted" and dent is lionized--Batman doesn't believe in his own methods!

x-post- haha!

have the ostensible good guys (and the audience by proxy) ever been so sadistically thrashed during a comic book movie?

It's difficult to think of any action movie in the last 15-20 years where the hero isn't beaten and bloodied by the end of it. We seem to need our heroes punished, with marks all over their bodies.

but it's more than just rambo getting a christ-like set of cinematic bruises. besides the physical abuse there are rafts of emotional and mental torments in tdk, the pervasive hopelessness, the poisoning of the innocents.

more anecdote: the woman sitting next to me had her head buried in her hands when twoface was tormenting gordon's family - never saw that at screenings of xmen or hellboy.

i thought the point was that Batman chose Dent

-- goole, Tuesday, July 22, 2008 9:41 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Link

me too

well he yells "rachel!" when joker tells him the locations, etc, so you can take it either way. I felt like he was going for rachel.

I thought gordon asks batman who is he going to save as he's running out the door and batman says rachel. gordon then heads out to save dent. but the joker swapped the addresses on them.

I think that is correct - it must be.

I understand how people want to read allegorical comments on geopolitics into films like this, but somehow I find that a dubious exercise.

ah so.

missed that.

> I understand how people want to read allegorical comments on geopolitics into films like this, but somehow I find that a dubious exercise.

If we don't, it's just the latest version of "Driving Fast With Guns" and our egos won't permit us to believe we'd really go for that shit.

made in china lulz no thanks

i thought the same thing at first but the whole scene is dent being a totally and completely over the top grandstanding politician, in which case.. makes sense to say that, obnoxious as it is

I agree with a great deal of what Edward III says upthread, not least about '37th kindapping' - excess: precisely.

I don't understand his comment 'made in china lulz'.

I also don't think I can agree that the spectacle of the hospital blowing up was delightful. I think it is disturbing and sad. Just writing the words 'hospital blowing up', and picturing it again, troubles me so. It feels so terrible, wanton and wrong. Yes, the film was showing wanton wrong. But I don't think that can be delightful.

i really need to see this again, especially the bit about saving harvey or rachel! i thought it was a head-fake of the movie to let us believe batman was after rachel, and really picking dent, not a trick of the joker's. hmmmm

im agree it's dubious to read geopolitical allegories into the movie...it's definitely to ascribe real-world political opinions to it as well.

that kidnapping scene is interesting....esp if goole is correct, which I think he might be (regardless, batman did choose). Makes one think that if Batman was on one of the boats he wouldn't have had any trouble pushing the button.

definitely dubious, that is.

So how does Christian Bale getting arrested for assaulting his mom and sis play into your analysis?

I understand how people want to read allegorical comments on geopolitics into films like this, but somehow I find that a dubious exercise.

films reflect the national consciousness - why is this not fair game for discussion? it's not different than talking about how easy rider, bonnie & clyde, taxi driver, etc were "of their time".

whatever you think of the quality of the movies, there's been a rash of imperfect superheroes confroting their dark sides - tdk, hancock, iron man, hulk, hellboy. I'd say america has an interesting psychological relationship to heroism at this point in time.

I'll agree we shouldn't "read into" the film tho. more like reading out of it.

the china thing was dent in the courtroom after the witness tries to shoot him, grabbing the gun and making some comment about how that particular one was made in china, and he'd have done better with made in the usa. really cheesy grandstanding

yes, i just think it's maddeningly reductive to need to interpret all narrative art (even didactic narrative art) as having pat political conclusions...like the need to rescue Dirty Harry as politically transgressive in order to make it worth seeing and thinking about.

(sorry Kehr's comment that the camera in DH "recoils in horror" just struck me as wishful thinking!)

i wish they would've shown how the witness got that gun through security.

They said it was plastic or ceramic or something, I think.

oh, i missed that.

i thought eckhart was great in that scene actually, all adrenaline and fear turning into the first stupid soundbite he could think of

I tend to view movies from two angles, the aesthetic and the sociological, and these two can (should?) be evaluated independently of each other. that is, the politics of dirty harry has no bearing on its aesthetic effectiveness, but they are both interesting to talk about.

on a related note, regarding the delightful hospital exploding - I'm a more decadent viewer than you pinefox. looking at that scene from a purely aesthetic standpoint, it gave me an imagistic headrush. of course blowing up hospitals is not a very nice thing to do, but casting such concerns at nihilist carnival rides like tdk seems ???

OK, then I liked that scene with the gun. And agree with Max's analysis of it!

This question of 'reading films politically' or whatever is a delicate one. One can start, though, by saying that there is a difference between saying Easy Rider is of its time, and saying that Batman is commentary on the ethics of counter-terrorism. It is roughly, I suppose, the difference between 'reflection' (of history) and 'intention' (of political message).

I suppose some of these pictures are indeed written with 'messages'. So why do I still have a problem with this? Maybe I don't think I quite trust them at that level. I don't think it would be safe to take our political bearings from a narrative like this. OK, nobody here wants to do that. But talking about the film's political implications feels like it might imply that.

I'm just not sure about all this. Star Wars is another interesting case - I always hated attempts to read SW politically, but then Clones / Sith felt pretty thoroughly political, whether of USA 2000s or of Vietnam when they were conceived. And I must admit, I did feel that this added to their force somehow, though it had to remain entirely unspoken to retain that force.

[casting such concerns at nihilist carnival rides like tdk seems ???]

-- I don't think I can accept this. Because the film, and talk about it, is full of talk about good and evil, values, choices, dilemmas. We seem to be interested in it on that level (and / or it seems to see itself that way). So can we then say it's a carnival ride, when something horrible happens? Isn't the horror part of the weight of the picture - part of why we (or the city) need Batman to succeed?

It's a bit like how in my first response I was going on about improbabilities, and thinking someone wld say 'hey, it's a film about a giant bat, no wonder it's improbable' - etc. That sounds right - but then, no, the film takes itself more seriously than that. And think of the time and unbelievable money involved. It doesn't then make sense to say none of this matters. If it doesn't matter we shouldn't bother with the movie at all (and many won't, and won't spend their time writing overlong thoughts like this).

legal system != justice
yeah, if that's the case and officially/unofficially they sanction some psycho vigilante instead of doing what they can to fix the legal system, that's a path that makes everything worse IMHO
(i don't know anything about the batman comics besides seeing this movie & the tim burton ones)

Don Siegel, director of Dirty Harry, made genre films with decidedly non-reactionary political allusions (eg Invasion of the Body Snatchers), and Harry is clearly a less unambiguously "heroic" figure than the Cult of Clint (and sequels) made him out to be. (His throwing his badge away at the end of the film isn't often remembered.) DH critical controversy detailed within:

http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/04/siegel.html

plz buy andwhat some remedial reading lessons, k thx