Batman and Empire

A non-standard film review of The Dark Knight..

Few movies have been so adept at providing easy metaphors for their own incompetence. But The Dark Knight, while doing this, eagerly does more: it presents itself as not just a comic book movie (though it is decidedly that); it is also an allegory, as thick as the Divine Comedy, for the present condition of America's debilitated relationship to the world.

It makes some interesting points, basically arguing that a lot of what happens in the movie (I think most of us have seen) has clear parallels in America's international relations, particularly the "War on Terror". I didn't really think about it this way, though I did notice (and feel a bit uncomfortable) by the use of the word "terrorist" to describe the Joker in the film...

To fight anarchy is to lose one's bearings, and to move one's own soul dangerously close to evil. Ah, but such is the price of superhero-dom—or, as The Dark Knight would also like us to believe, the War on Terror. The Joker is repeatedly referred to as a "terrorist," and he is made to resemble the men and women the United States calls terrorists. He captures police officers, tortures them, and then forces them to explain his own purpose on camera, much like the video of Daniel Pearl made by Khalid Sheikh Muhammed (KSM's video, it should be said, was more professional). The Joker's goal is to spread chaos amidst liberal civilization, to show the cultivated that their wealthy ideals can vanish when confronted by evil such as his.

And so the Joker, like other criminals in the film, is treated by Batman the way America treats terrorists: he is tortured.