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Books & Arts

The Dark Knight: Gotham and America’s War on Terror

by Kashish | July 2008

Clearly the most highly anticipated movie of the season, The Dark Knight is finally released this weekend with even midnight, 3AM, and 6AM shows sold out for weeks in advance across America. And if the promotional trailer was an indication of anything, it was the brilliantly intense portrayal of the Joker by Heath Ledger, the young talent who died in an accidental overdose on January 22 of this year.

A vast majority of the reviews have revolved around Ledger’s performance, rightfully so, already creating an Oscar buzz. But it has also sparked another interesting conversation. Dana Stevens wrote this for The Slate on July 17:

Nolan turns the Manichean morality of comic books—pure good vs. pure evil—into a bleak post-9/11 allegory about how terror (and, make no mistake, Heath Ledger's Joker is a terrorist) breaks down those reassuring moral categories… The long, intricately braided story that follows will include vast wiretapping networks, suicide-bomb threats, and moral clashes over torture and prisoners' rights. In short, Chris Nolan does more nuanced thinking about the war on terror than we've seen from the Bush administration in seven years. And despite a falsely heroic closing speech from Gary Oldman's character, police Lt. Jim Gordon, the movie seems to arrive at much the same conclusion about Batman as Americans have about Bush: Thanks to this guy, we're well and thoroughly screwed.

Of course, the 9/11 parallels have been buzzing around for a while now. On March 24 Martin Anderson of Den Of Geek noted this:

The whysoserious website set up to promote Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight has released a sensational new poster with a rather post-9/11 sensibility.

But not all agree to the parallels. Manohla Dargis writes this for The New York Times today:

From certain angles, the city the Joker threatens looks like New York, but it would be reductive to read the film too directly through the prism of 9/11 and its aftermath. You may flash on that day when a building collapses here in a cloud of dust, or when firemen douse some flames, but those resemblances belong more rightly to our memories than to what we see unfolding on screen. Like any number of small- and big-screen thrillers, the film’s engagement with 9/11 is diffuse, more a matter of inference and ideas (chaos, fear, death) than of direct assertion. Still, that a spectacle like this even glances in that direction confirms that American movies have entered a new era of ambivalence when it comes to their heroes — or maybe just superness.

Earlier in the week, David Denby had concluded in The New Yorker:

The Dark Knight has been made in a time of terror, but it’s not fighting terror; it’s embracing and unleashing it—while making sure, with proper calculation, to set up the next installment of the corporate franchise.

Still, Dana Stevens argues in The Slate:

A colleague with whom I saw the movie felt that Nolan's use of 9/11 references was exploitive, that he was tapping into our deep cultural anxiety about terror just to spice up his blockbuster. After a second viewing, I vigorously disagree. The exploitation would be there even if Nolan didn't care about thinking through 9/11 for its own sake, and he clearly does.

So as I was saying, Hollywood… Wait, Dana Stevens got a second viewing of the movie already? Not all critics are created equal. Hmph!

Comments

August 2nd, 2008

1 | JACK:

RIP Ledger!

August 7th, 2008

2 | KaBOOM POW:

http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_072508/content/01125114.guest.html

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