Kill the Batman
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KILL THE BATMAN
By Daren Foster
Summer draws to a close. The nights grow chillier and get darker sooner. Is that a hint of colour in those leaves? There is talk of pennant races. That was Labour Day I just caught in the rear-view mirror, wasn’t it. Damn. Playtime’s over.
I guess I have to roll up my sleeves, put my nose to the grindstone and start acting like an adult again. Hunker down and return to doing stuff grown-ups do like watching TV and going to the movies. Ahh, the burden of responsibility is sometimes too much to bear.
After a period of semi self-imposed exile, I decided that it was time to wade back into the pop culture waters that I have swum in for too many years to count. Living high-and-dry for awhile had been refreshing, invigorating even, but like all novel things, the zazz of it couldn’t last. Like Grease’s Danny Zuko and Sandy Olsson, a summer fling couldn’t translate into a long-term relationship. (It turned colder--that’s where it ends/I told her we’d still be friends). Or could it? There, that feels better.
Traveling off the beaten path might make for an easy transition back into real life. A low key flick to stimulate the critical juices and knock off the mental rust would do the trick. Something crisp, fresh and challenging without being too taxing.
The Dark Knight. Apparently, it’s generated a little bit of buzz over the last couple months. Maybe a couple of you have seen it.
For those who haven’t, allow me to provide a quick synopsis. An obscenely wealthy man who watched the brutal murder of his parents dresses up in a bat suit and patrols the night time streets of Gotham--
With the gazillion dollars this thing has made, there is now officially no end in sight to the comic book trend in Hollywood, is there. We are doomed to an unrelenting wave of genetically mutated men in capes and tights saving a world that doesn’t deserve to be saved from crazed villains with scarred psyches bearing a serious misanthropic grudge. Sequels, prequels, Begins and Returns, ad infinitum, ad nauseam, amen.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that, in principle. Popcorn
Apparently nowadays purveyors of pulp aren’t happy simply entertaining the masses. They want to be taken seriously, mixing high gloss pyrotechnics with high-minded artistic sensibilities; equal parts Michael Bay and Ingmar Bergman. Not content with big bucks and fawning adoration, they want MoMA retrospectives to boot.
What I do not want when I go to see Batman is a bunch of philosophizing and theorizing, especially of the sophomoric, I-just-read-Ayn-Rand kind. The Dark Knight is a summer blockbuster and all that entails. It is not a grad school dissertation. If it were, it’d be laughed out of the committee room. Brawn not brains is the franchise’s meat and potatoes. That’s nothing to be ashamed of. The fact the filmmakers don’t accept this is the shameful aspect. 
The Dark Knight is a full-blown post-9/11 movie and is not shy in exploiting the fact. One of the earliest shots has the camera zooming in on a collision course with a towering skyscraper, only to have the windows explode outward just at the moment of impact as the bad guys are actually inside the building rather than outside, flying a plane into it. This should’ve served as a warning that the film was going to brazenly raise the spectre of 9/11 without seriously addressing any of its wider implications.
Structurally, The Dark Knight is just a successive series of ticking bomb scenarios. You know the old trope apologists of torture use to justify the practice. If someone knows the location of a bomb that is going to explode and kill thousands of people, it’s OK to torture them to get the information and save everyone. Sound familiar? Batman worries about the kind of vigilante he’ll become if he tortures The Joker but while he’s in custody, Batman beats the crap out of him anyway -- to only moderate success. Sound familiar? I didn’t want to get my hands dirty but the bad guy left me no choice.
Ditto illegal wiretapping. Only if we use it to protect people. And only the once. You want a penetrating explanation of why bad guys do the bad things they do? Because some people just want to see the world burn don’t you know. Because they’re c-r-a-z-y. (Try saying that without the Homer Simpson inflection.)
Just by bringing up such topical and salient ideas, those responsible for this take on Batman want to be invited to sit at the grown-up’s table. You see, this isn’t just any old comic book movie. The thing is, you can teach a parakeet to say the words terrorism, surveillance, anarchy but if you demand a full-fledged definition from the bird, well, that would just be silly.
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