About That Dark Knight

While I'm still digesting The Dark Knight (I need to see it again), I wanted to put my thoughts up before I don't care about it anymore; after all, it is just a movie.

The conservative meme, that Bush is Batman, is disingenuous and foolish, at best:

Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past.

Riiight. Unlike Bush, Batman wasn't interested in having people think that what he was doing was right, he wanted everyone to believe in someone else (Harvey Dent), so that he could finally stop being Batman. Bush loves being Bush, and he wants everyone else to love him, too.

And it seemed to me that throughout the whole movie, Batman was reluctant and ashamed to be doing what he was doing. If there was any Bush-like character in the film, it was Harvey Dent, you know, the one everyone believed to be a hero, but was actually completely overcome by darkness.

The film also makes a point about the nature of evil and chaos. Conservatives lamely hitch themselves to the idea that one must abandon certain liberties and interrupt democracy to defeat evil, as evidenced by Batman's surveillance system and Dent's comments in the restaurant in the film's beginning, respectively. But in the end, the filmmakers glibly prove that no matter how far you go above the law, chaos and terror will always win. The great white knight, Dent, was ultimately corrupted.

And in a not so subtle critique of our government, the movie ends with the entire country being lied to. A false hero is served up on a platter, giving everyone the misconception that hope and faith have triumphed.

On the flip side, goodness does play a role in The Dark Knight. Look at what the people on those two boats did. Pretty cool.

By the way, did anyone else notice that on the "good people" boat, when they took that vote, the tally was (correct me if I'm wrong) 296 for blowing up the prisoner boat and 140 against? Talk about a "prisoner's dilemma."

But look at the numbers:

296 + 140 = 436.

Is it a coincidence that there were 436 votes on that boat?

435 members of the House +
1 President Of The United States =

436.

Is it a representation of the American people? Is this the way we would vote (296 vs. 140) if faced with such a moral question? I guess Senators don't count, though.

I did love the movie, by the way. It can certainly be interpreted allegorically or metaphorically but, like Wall-E, isn't everything driven by the love story? It's the most common undercurrent in almost every film. Without Rachel Dawes, what motivation, what plot, and what character flaws and development would there have been? Every turn and every conflict was borne from Batman and Dent's relationship with Rachel.

And no, sorry, Rachel is not Laura Bush.