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What do Batman, the War on Terror, Heath Ledger and Guantanamo have in common?
No wonder Heath Ledger’s Joker stands out. The Dark Knight is a weird, incoherent phantasmagoria on the U.S. War on Terror, says an editorial in today’s London Guardian newspaper. (Warning: The following contains some film spoilers.)
Columnist Emily Hill outlines the popular film’s 9/11 subtext. She said the film opens with smoke billing from a steel and glass building in a Gotham City — which might as well be New York. The Joker is a terrorist who seeks only to destroy civil society. Batman is a sort of one-man U.S. war on terror.
“Batman’s anti-terror tactics are like a publicity puff in defense of American techniques at Guantanamo — especially as the Joker likes it. ‘Hit me again! I like it,’ he screams, during forcible interrogation.”
Hill said the film is a hopelessly confused mishmash - which climaxes with two boats both being rigged with explosives. One is packed with convicts, the other innocent refugees fleeing Gotham. Each boat has a detonator and can blow the other boat up at the flick of a switch. Both will blow up at midnight. The innocent citizens demand a vote and elect to blow up the other boat, but chicken out at two minutes to the hour. On the other boat, a nervous prison guard hands a big bad detainee the trigger who does “what you should have done an hour ago” - and throws it out of the window. “How perplexing,” Hill said. “Democracy won here - but it was the wrong decision, and luckily for all concerned, the results were ignored.”
In the end, the Joker’s terror is ended by Batman using mobile phone technology and sonar waves to gain God-like knowledge of the movements of the city’s 30 million or so inhabitants. “How prescient, in the age of ID cards and the surveillance society,” Hill said.
She added that: “Then, having saved Gotham from itself by enacting a Bat-focused form of one-man martial law, our hero draws down all the opprobrium — which should be rained down on the terrorists — on himself. And he is last seen running off a hounded man — rather like the soon-to-depart President Bush, whose pre-emptive strikes against Islamic targets now make him the supreme hate figure of the western world.”
Comments
By JR
August 1, 2008 4:14 PM | Link to this
Admirable try. It was a stretch at times, but ultimately you made a convincing argument. The entire premise for Batman as a character was bold foresight and prophecy about the coming of President George W. Bush, the face of evil incarnate in the modern world.