Saw a very scary movie today, the summer blockbuster (indeed, the second best grossing film of all time) "The Dark Knight," the latest Batman movie. I avoided seeing it this summer because I heard it was grim and took casual violence to a new extreme. But in the last week it's started to seem like I ought to see it - many of my students have and loved it, and a devastating essay in last week's Times Week in Review by Jonathan Lethem argued that it was the film of this disgraced and hopeless moment in American history. Some critics saw the film as a defense of Bushian toughness on evil; Lethem argues rather that "a morbid incoherence was the movie’s real takeaway, chaotic form its ultimate content."
If you haven't seen fit to see the movie yet, don't. It's every bit as dark as people say, and to no purpose - it's morally confused and compromised and does everything in its power to make the viewer feel compromised too. But read Lethem, who articulates with incendiary precision that the moral compromisedness the film churns in is real, it's not just a summer fling at the cineplex but USA 2008:
In its narrative gaps, its false depths leading nowhere in particular, its bogus grief over stakeless destruction and faked death, “The Dark Knight” echoes a civil discourse strained to helplessness by panic, overreaction and cultivated grievance. I began to feel this Batman wears his mask because he fears he’s a fake — and the story of his inauthenticity, the possibility of his unmasking, counts for more than any hope he offers of deliverance from evil. ...
The Joker’s paradox, of course, is the same as that of 9/11 and its long aftermath: audacious transgression ought to call out of us an equal and adamant passion for love of truth and freedom, yet the fear he inspires instead drives us deep into passivity and silence.
... our good faith with ourselves is broken, too, a cost of silencing or at best mumbling the most crucial truths. Among these, pre-eminently, is the fact that torture evaporates our every rational claim to justice, and will likely be the signature national crime of our generation — a matter in which we are, by the very definition of democracy, complicit.
There are some wan gestures toward hope in the movie - notably in a large-scale playing out of the most famous "prisoner's dilemma" - but they get lost in the darkness. Your moral instincts would be blunted by this film just as your eardrums will be brutalized into cowering submission by the deafening rhythms and grinding double base of its soundtrack. Don't see it. Don't seek yourself in it. We're better than this, we know we're capable of better.
