The Dark Shrub

Like millions of other people this past weekend, I went to see “The Dark Knight” at the Uptown on Saturday morning (special note for those in DC – the early morning show at the Uptown is a tremendous bargain at only $6, no one is there, and they don’t give you any grief about bringing in a cup of Starbucks from next door). Heath Ledger’s performance is as remarkable as they say – anyone who has seen any of his prior roles will fully appreciate the way in which he utterly transformed himself for this role – and the whole look and feel of the movie is nothing short of awesome. The movie is super long, but well worth seeing.

There is, however, a strangely dichotomous subtext to the film. On one hand, the movie could well have been written by Darth Cheney and Turdblossom Rove, with President Bush and Company as “the Batman.” This subtext plays out as follows: the evils that we, the citizens of Gotham City, are facing are so extreme that we must resort to acting outside of the law in order to combat them. The laws and the judicial system are so weak (so weak that they cannot even protect their own from harm), so ineffectual, so susceptible to corruption that we must seek our heroes elsewhere. We must disregard the laws, operate in secret, and utilize patently illegal technology that unavoidably happens to spy upon the personal communications of all citizens. Only through vigilantism and unlawful measures can we hope to combat the terrorists, who are agents of chaos and who have no motive other than “to watch the world burn.”

On the other hand, an integral part of the story pits the normal citizenry of Gotham City against the orange jump suited prisoners in a moral showdown. Without spoiling too much of the movie (although I am certain that most every contributor to and reader of this blog has already seen the film at least twice), suffice it to say that the convicted criminals in their orange jumpsuits come off as the more moral of the two groups, and that the only reason that the general population does the right thing is because it is too weak in the knees to pull the trigger. I’m surprised that this thinly veiled praise for moral purity of the jihadists and critique of the U.S. doesn’t already have JJV frothing at the mouth.

With this muddled subtext, how apropos that this Batman film serves as the creation myth of the super-villain “Two Face.”