Batty, Man

Finally saw The Dark Knight last night. My instant assessment? A dumb Hollywood action movie with lots of eye candy; improbable/implausible plot twists; labored political-philosophical musings; inadequate editing; and a beautiful, stirring final scene. Feel free to disagree--I mean, I loved The Matrix Reloaded when I first saw it.

The movie strains for relevance, but offers very little help to us in dealing with our current predicaments. The Joker (Heath Ledger, nuff respect) delights in spreading fear, killing innocents, and sowing destruction--and this all for the sport of it. He's a terrorist, get it? There's just no rhyme or reason to his appetite for destruction!

I don't see how this helps us in dealing with our current crop of bad guys, who--and maybe I'm getting stuck on labels here, but here goes--are fanatics and fundamentalists, sure, but hardly nihilists (there are certainly people who have deep and thoughtful things to say about the psychological connections or lack thereof between nihilism and terrorism, so there's a future post...). The Joker only poses interesting lessons for counterterrorism if you're one of those people who thinks it's sacrilegious even to suggest that some of the current hell Americans are catching has nothing to do with, say, the last five decades of American foreign policy.

The Dark Knight is equally sloppy--or worse, utterly cavalier--about current hot topics such as extreme rendition, torture, or random surveillance. There's a fair amount of interrogation-room-beatdown-porn (interlaced with an oddly prim aversion to slaying the main baddie), for example. At some point, the movie confronts the debate over the Bush Administration's domestic spying in the most misleading, melodramatic way: what would you do, if you were the Batman? Would you peek in on millions of Gothamites' cellphone transmissions, if doing so would help you to locate a criminal mastermind intent on sowing murder and mayhem in the next 24 hours?

Well, yeah, of course I would: how much privacy are you invading if you're simply trying to get a fix on an imminent mass murderer? ('Course, in a Hollywood movie, it's always a bad sign if you're on the other side of a moral debate with Morgan Freeman.) But that's a poor analogy to what the Bush Administration was dealing with, and how they went about doing it.

I'm boycotting Hollywood action movies for the foreseeable future. At least, that is, until I hear more about the Green Lantern's position on nuclear energy.