Bat-lash

By Sharon McGovern

The Dark Knight is a box office phenomenon, having beat the following records:

• Biggest single day gross (66.4 million).
• Biggest opening weekend (155.34 million).
• Broke the record for days taken to reach a 200 million dollar gross.
• Broke the record for days taken to reach a 300 million dollar gross.

And it’s on track to tie Titanic, the biggest blockbuster in history. Now, the sheer profitability of a movie doesn’t necessarily speak to its merit (see Titanic), but TDK’s continuing box office appeal does seem to indicate it’s touched a nerve. Some have proposed (with justification) that the nerve is the still raw wound of September 11 and subsequent terrorist attacks, and the craving for a return to justice and order—however difficult and costly that return might be. With a plot that touches not only on ruthless attacks by a terrorist madman, but also specific references to the FISA and SWIFT surveillance programs, and how very unpopular the vigorous fight against evil can make a character, the comparison of The Dark Knight to the current administration seems clear.

• In the Wall Street Journal, author Andrew Klavan wrote about “What Bush and Batman Have in Common.”

• In “The Dark Right,” Kyle Smith argues “Batman is Cheney with hair.”

• Rush Limbaugh picked up the theme in his July 25th show, riffing on Klavan’s article without having seen the movie.

Those who noticed the resemblance but were un-thrilled by it include Spencer Ackerman in The Washington Independent (who also thought Batman “reflects Cheney policy,”), Matthew Yglesias of The Atlantic (who thinks Al Qaeda isn’t as depraved as The Joker nor anybody in the administration as noble as Batman,) and William Tripplett of Variety (who, in responding to Klavan’s article, believes Batman would never have bungled a Katrina rescue and so the parallels are ridiculous *). Vanity Fair ran a cartoon that showed George W. Bush as The Joker, but aside from assuming the villainy of both, didn’t back the image up with any examples of why they are similar.

So. A film arrives that does massive, massive business and a meme is spreading from The New York Times to Mother Jones (okay, maybe not such a stretch, but note the conservative leaning links above) that it has much in common with recent events. When compared with the miserable failure of every anti-war movie produced in the past few years (including Redacted, Stop-Loss, Grace is Gone, and on and on), do supporters of the war effort in Iraq have cause to be hopeful? Could The Dark Knight be the film that awakens Hollywood to the financial, not to mention artistic and moral possibilities of pro-war, pro-freedom, anti-terrorist movies?

Absolutely not.

Hollywood has an instinct for corruption and an inability to imitate or reward nobility in storytelling that verges on the bizarre. After Star Wars came out and was widely noted to have been ripped in essence from Joseph Campbell’s Hero of a Thousand Faces, you might wonder why the many, many movies mimicked the sets, the spaceships, and Han Solo rather than Luke Skywalker or another of those heroic faces. With the heroic quest gutted, movie after movie failed until Star Wars Rip-Off became its own laughable genre. When My Big Fat Greek Wedding became one of the most profitable movies ever, an avalanche of bride movies hit American screens; but the absence of nice characters whom you might conceivably want to know doomed most of them to obscurity. New Line followed the Christian influenced Lord of the Rings movies and The Chronicles of Narnia with the explicitly anti-Catholic The Golden Compass, which was such a disaster that the studio went under.

Therefore, conservatives, I encourage you to brace yourself for years of ever more nihilistic, cruel, and under-lit superhero movies. Without the guiding good-nature of a Sam Raimi (of Spider-Man fame) or the tough morality Christopher Nolan (of Batman Begins and The Dark Knight), or movie makers who are simply disinclined to offend (see Iron Man and Hancock), we’re in for lots of noise and bluster and special effects in the service of ambiguity at best (the Superman remake, Hellboy 2, The Fantastic Four movies, the X-Men movies, The Punisher, the two Hulks, etc.). Why should that be? Why is inspiration and heroism so difficult to find in contemporary American movies?

Maybe an exchange from The Empire Strikes Back puts it best:

Luke: Is the dark side stronger?
Yoda: No, no, no. Quicker, easier, more seductive.

Mark my words: The Dark Knight is a precedent, not a trend.


*In the Tripplett’s original article, he accused Klavan of “literal-minded density that could give right-wingers a bad name” without explaining how an analogy could be both literal and a satiric hallucination of conservatives. The line was later removed from the link above but remains on Dirty Harry’s blog.

Oh, and note: Dirty Harry’s Place is indispensable in tracking liberalism in Hollywood.