Review - The Dark Knight

Is Batman George W Bush?

Molly and I engaged in an incredibly amateur bit of movie going when we went to see The Dark Knight. Somehow managing to arrive at the biggest box office draw in years five minutes before showtime, we scrambled around looking for adjoining seats before settling for two in the first row.

"Rats," I thought. But soon, staring up at the flickering images, half expecting to get a glimpse of Bruce Wayne’s nose-hairs, I thought this might be the appropriate way, after all, to watch such an ambitious undertaking: Batman and The Joker, two-dimensional figures looming over little ole three-dimensional me, giving true meaning to the term “larger than life.” From that angle, you can’t really see the whole screen; you're in a more powerless position, and at a greater disadvantage than normal when attempting to derive meaning from someone else’s narrative. Still, as the next 2 1/2 hours rolled by, I was engagingly confused, trying to untangle the byzantine story while also decoding  the subtext of what turned out to be a complex polemic on the most wrenching issues of the post-September 11th period.

In accomplishing this, director and screenwriter Christopher Nolan takes the very clever step of extricating the Batman mythos from under the weight of a familiarity concomitant with 70 years-worth of back-story, and placing it squarely within the realm of current events. If The Dark Knight resembles any recent pop culture phenomenon in narrative strategy, it’s the TV series “Battlestar Galactica,” which frequently incorporates moral and political questions ripped from the headlines without drawing strictly analogous parallels. In this way, The Dark Knight exploits not only the zeitgeist of raw fear that America's ongoing bout with terrorism has engendered, but also the debate over both the war in Iraq (such as it still exists) and the steps necessary to maintain security on our own shores. 

At the film's start, we see that Batman has used his off-screen time to wipe the floor with Gotham City’s organized criminal class. As the movie progresses, he makes it so difficult for the underworld to operate that the gangs turn in frustration to The Joker, a freelancer who has been stealing from them, to eliminate their nemesis. Coalescing power, The Joker then puts the city under siege, sowing chaos and destruction at will. Eventually he embarks on a series of warped sociological experiments that would make even Stanley Milgram blush, testing the relative levels of certain conflicting values in the populace (altruism vs self-preservation, trust vs paranoia, etc.) with the stakes always set at life and death. (review continued)

Comments

[Elizabeth]

Check out this review of DK: http://hubreview.blogspot.com/2008/07/unhappy-fascism-of-dark-knight.html

[Maxim]

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