Dark Batman
by Spencer Warren
Issue 114 - August 20, 2008

Little could Bob Kane, the creator of the Batman comic strip in 1939, have imagined how his simple tales of the dark superhero would become inflated more than half a century later into blockbuster movies featuring scenes of mayhem beyond his wildest dreams. In those days children and young teenagers read the comic strips with the elemental pictures; today their adult grandchildren and their children flock to the movies to be inundated nonstop for two hours or more by speeding chases and collisions; daredevil escape after daredevil escape; one explosion louder and more lethal, igniting a bigger fireball, than the one before; and by shattering windows and collapsing office towers and hospitals. Killing is heaped upon more killing. Given the record-setting box-office of the latest Batman movie, The Dark Knight, it appears that what was intended for juveniles in the 1930s, ‘40s and ’50s has become mainstream. Chalk this movie up as another example of our cultural decline.

The movie is not viewed this way by some leading critics, it goes almost without saying. Time, Rolling Stone and the New York Times, to name a few, find profound moral conflict in the epic struggle between Batman/Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale), who is troubled that he is seen as a vigilante, and the uniquely evil Joker. (The latter is most effectively played to the last drop with vivid smacking of his blood-red – and bloodied -- lips by the late Heath Ledger). The Joker is a combination of Osama bin Laden’s dreams of mass destruction (all of Gotham) and Quentin Tarantino’s (Kill Bill, Pulp Fiction) nihilistic mania for cinematic killing done with “imagination.” Thus, the Joker prefers knives to guns: knives are his scalpel, shall we say.

Yet the examples of profundity found by such critics are merely single lines sprinkled here and there, evidently to make the film seem “significant.” In violation of the basics of screenwriting 101, they are not dramatized story lines, which would reduce time for all the mayhem. Just about everyone who enjoys the film most likely does so for its rapid-fire action and pulp characters. Nevertheless, Richard Corliss of Time finds the movie “turns pulp into dark poetry.” Corliss also writes that the transformation of the heroic District Attorney, Harvey Dent/Two Face (Aaron Eckhart), into another wanton mass killer after the police rescue him from the Joker’s murder scheme but fail to save the life of his girlfriend, Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal) “has the poignance of class tragedy,” though what class has to do with it Corliss does not explain. It does not occur to him that the plot reversal for Harvey, which also comes after one side of his face is horribly disfigured courtesy of the Joker (the make-up department has a field day in grossing out the audience with Harvey’s new mouth, now filling two levels of his face), is just another contrivance to pile on more bloodshed and add the macabre disfigurement. It also allows young director Chris Nolan and his co-screenwriter brother, Jonathan, to add a scene where the deranged Harvey, now Two Face, threatens first the wife and then the little son of the stalwart detective Lt. Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman) with a gun to their heads, the rest of the family watching in terror.

This sort of sadistic exploitation, not to mention all the other violence and the extremely malign character of the Joker, did not prevent the film earning a PG-13 rating, which permits children under age 13 to attend the movie without an accompanying parent or adult guardian. The difference from PG is only that parents are urged to investigate the film more carefully. Once again we see the ratings system works not to protect children but as a cover for the greed of the motion picture industry as it dumps ever more sewage into society.

Rolling Stone, an organ of the counter-culture, finds the movie portrays “essentials of the human condition” and is “haunting and visionary,” which is quite a feat for a movie whose characters are made of cardboard. And that media leader of Cultural Marxism, the New York Times, enthuses that the film is filled with “thrilling moments of pure cinema,” as critic Manohla Dargis writes. The Times’s radical agenda is made apparent in the first paragraph: the Batman superhero is now made “postheroic” “largely by embracing an ambivalence.” Here is the radical left’s post-modernist cultural agenda of relativism – there are no truths, but only ambiguity, except, of course, where “diversity” and “multiculturalism” (the “multi-cult”), and the evils of the U.S. and the West generally, are concerned. Ms. Dargis immediately goes on to give away the left’s anti-American aims by writing with approval that Batman’s new ambivalence shows that “truth, justice and the American way don’t cut it any more.” Here she is dismissing the famous ethos of Superman, the comic book hero who preceded Batman. Is there a greater pop culture symbol of objective good – “truth, justice and the American way” --than Superman? For the left, Superman must be relegated to the past as out-dated.

Thus, puffing up this juvenile razzle-dazzle action movie by attributing to it pretentious, deep meaning advances the left’s anti-American, anti-tradition agenda. In truth, however, the ambiguity belongs to the left, which lays some of the fault for the 9/11 attack (the Joker is frequently called a terrorist in the film), as well as just about every other wrong in the world, on the U.S. If the U.S. were not at some fault at least, it would mean we were unambiguously better than our enemies. The left can’t allow that, for it would make us superior to, and thus not equal to, certain others in the world. Such “equality” is a basic precept of Cultural Marxists. (For another example of left-wing “ambiguity,” see Clint Eastwood’s historical travesties about World War II, Flags of our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima, which draw moral equivalence between the U.S. and our barbaric Japanese enemy. See my review essays at here and here.)

Further, Ms. Dargis even identifies personally with the Joker’s nihilistic evil. (The left prides itself on always being contrarian, which it thinks makes it superior to the rest of us, with our outdated conventions born of prejudice or male domination.) Thus, she ends her review writing that “it is hard not to fall for a film that makes room for a shot of the Joker leaning out the window of a stolen police car and laughing into the wind, the city’s colored lights gleaming behind him like jewels. He’s just a clown in black velvet, but he’s also some kind of masterpiece.” This “masterpiece,” the Joker, is trying to overthrow civilized order from the platform of a police car, a symbol of lawful authority. Here, in a movie review, we see how the left’s contrarianism typically turns into an embrace of nihilism: anything that is the enemy of my enemy is my friend, shall we say.

Just as the Nolans sprinkle a little superficial moral ambiguity on their confection, they also add some topical relevance for the politically minded. Thus, the Gotham authorities and Batman often complain they have to abide by rules, unlike the terrorist Joker. The scientist behind Batman’s technological weapons, Dr. Fox (the always superb and weighty Morgan Freeman), has qualms about Batman’s new inspiration that will allow him to know everything that is going on in Gotham all the time. No one man should have such power, Dr. Fox insists, in an apparent swipe at the Patriot Act.

The Dark Knight, like much in contemporary entertainment, exemplifies a society much of which thrives on excess, having thrown off the bad old concept of self-discipline, of orderliness. Thus, in addition to the film’s endless violence, it builds up to its climax a bit more than halfway through its two and a half hours, then pulls a reversal (via a bomb that has been surgically placed in the stomach of one of the Joker’s gang) that allows all the mayhem to proceed as anti-climax for perhaps another forty minutes. This is self-defeating, even taking the film on its own terms. It is more of a cinematic special effects construction project that exploits the audience than an entertainment like, say, the self-aware, not too serious Steven Spielberg Indiana Jones movies – which are suitable for children under age 13.

This movie is just a waste of one’s time. It lacks soul and is not healthy entertainment, especially for teenagers and children.

Spencer Warren is ConservativeBattleline's media critic.