
After I left the theater, I kind of felt like the kid at the end of the movie. “Why is Batman running away? He didn’t do anything wrong.” That naivety of a little kid not understanding why the hero isn’t really the hero overwhelmed me hours after walking out of the theater. I guess that’s the sign of a really good movie, even though it made me feel like shit.
I like movies for escapism, especially a movie about a guy called Batman. I would like to see a simple good vs. evil conflict. I would like to see a guy called Batman kicking ass, riding his motorcycle up the side of a building, turning around and stopping on a dime. Although I got treated to that one awesome moment, the rest of the film was a deep, dark view into the psyche of Western civilization, the terrors we face and how we’re dealing with them.
When Alfred said, “You have to stand up to terrorists, even though everyone will hate you for it,” I saw it as a deliberate and loaded metaphor. The Joker as Al Qaeda, Batman as America. From that point on, I knew this film wasn’t going to be a delightful romp featuring Batman simply kicking lots of ass.
What this film said to me was this: America wants to be the hero and defeat the terrorists. America wants to “put a boot up their ass” (Toby Keith). We want to see that story play out. Simple! But in real life, as this complicated film points out, it’s not that simple. We have resorted to breaking our own laws. We wiretap, we torture. Sure, we want to be like Dent. We want to be pure and incorruptible. But even Dent became corrupt, as was the Joker’s (terrorist’s) plan all along…
Maybe I’m reading too much into a film about a guy in a bat suit chasing a clown. But there were too many metaphors in this film for America’s handling of the very real, very frightening threat of terrorism. Batman wiretapped phones and found the terrorist. He became the Caesar of Gotham. He lived long enough to watch himself become evil. The Joker was caught, but the Joker made his point. You can’t fight him without sinking to his level. He is not just the agent of chaos, he is more distinctly the agent of corruption. The Joker, arguably, won.
So if this film is any reflection of Western civilization’s true psyche, we might elect ourselves another Caesar to fight the hordes outside the walls of our Rome, as discussed early in the film by Dent, Dawes, Wayne and a Russian dancer; a Caesar who holds all the power and makes all the decisions “temporarily” (a hundred years?) in the empire’s time of need. Yes, we might elect another Bush.
Then again, like the everyman characters on the ferries, we could all refuse to push the button, refuse to play the terrorists’ game…even though that would do nothing to ensure our survival. That would be an act of faith.
An act of hope.