Batman's 'Dark Knight' Reflects Cheney Policy

Washington Independent:

The thought of Vice President Dick Cheney in a form-fitting bat costume might be too much for most people to bear. But the concepts of security and danger presented in Christopher Nolan's new Batman epic, "The Dark Knight," align so perfectly with those of the Office of the Vice President that David Addington, Cheney's chief of staff and former legal counsel, might be an uncredited script doctor.

Insofar as it's possible to view an action movie that had the biggest three-day-opening in cinematic history as a comment on the current national-security debate, "The Dark Knight" weighs in strongly on the side of the Bush administration. Confronting the Joker, a nihilistic enemy whose motives are both unexplained and beside the point, the Batman faces his biggest dilemma yet: whether to abuse his power in order to save Gotham City. Again and again in the movie, the Batman's moral hand-wringing results in the deaths of innocents. Only by becoming like the monster he must vanquish can Batman secure a victory that even he understands is Pyrrhic.

Read the whole story: Washington Independent

Comments

[perk]

Now that is funny. Thank God for satirical publications like HuffPost, a nice respite from the real world of politics and war and money.

[ecotopian]

You know, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and a movie is just entertainment.

[Grannysue]

Cheney's grim reaper constume must be at the cleaners!

[commissaris]

This movie was about NOT stooping to the level of your enemy, about rule of law and a code of ethics and honor, a moral line which you will not cross, concepts Cheney has chosen to ignore. Without some sort of moral center chaos and mere anarchy reign. Cheney is undoubtedly the Joker - highly intelligent, sneaky, manipulative, grandiose and thoroughly unprincipled.

[robbor]

our present day joker, Al Qaeda, would vaporize overnight if:

1] we eliminate using oil

2] raise the standard of living and educate the masses in the middle east.

people become happy when their basic needs are met

[Pdubya]

close...

1 - eliminate the federal reserve which creates fiat currencies and inflationary bubbles and bursts

2 - got the hell out of the middle east

[davidly]

...especially if we'd stop calling them Al Qaeda.

[DennyCrane]

Also, the Joker is this movie has no motives at all besides creating chaos. In the real world, terrorists do have motives. Despite Bush's BS about how they hate us for our freedom, what they really hate us for is our foreign policy. They hate for sticking our nose in their business and for setting up our bases on their holy land. As realistic as The Dark Knight tries to be, I can't see a character like The Joker in real life.

[StephenJK]

You can't see a character like The Joker in real life? You've GOT to be joking.

[DennyCrane]

Anyone who thinks this movie was trying to endorse the Bush administration's approach to fighting terrorism completely missed the point of the movie. If anything, the movie is condemning it. We see Batman, a character who starts off with the best of intentions, crossing the line. That's why the movie is so daring. It's not afraid to paint its hero as anti-hero. Batman is not supposed to be admired or be a role model for kids. This new series is commenting on how easy it is for good people to go bad.

[NewArtz]

I see The Joker, and his chaotic pace as more resembling the onslought of the neocon rebellion from a reasoned advance of civilization. The end justifies the means, but I don't see that the end of the neocon rebellion is anything more than the chaos of a less civilized world. They and the terrorists have become one. The Batman represents our own sense of heroic action now stained by the neocon fanatacism. The cynical views we behold are demoralizing. The Batman cannot be the hero unitl his heroic actions are not biased by the instability of Bruce Wayne. Bruce's lovelife is already lost, but he's unaware. It is the Batman who goes first to rescue Dent to save the city from corruption. Bruce Wayne would have made the other choice only to find his loved one loved the one he lost to save her. It's called tragedy, but ulitmately Bruce did not give up the Batman because he no longer was distracted by hopeless romance. (Bruce gets all he wants, I'm sure). Anyway I have my opinion about who the Joker and Batman represent.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5BpLAZj7Yw

[martinchill]

"Confronting a nihilistic enemy whose motives are both unexplained and beside the point"

that line, taken out of context, might possibly be analogous to cheney's policy - of creating a false enemy in order to drum up business for the war machine.

otherwise, others point out correctly that you don't know jack about batman.

[Constantone]

Our filmic Bruce Wayne is still more hopeful than his aged Dark Knight counterpart, but the Joker he meets is the prototype of the same American model of purposeless, playful will and violence that appears in the comic (updated from the Graphic novel's punk rock/Clockwork Orange version). Wayne cannot take Ledger's measure nor find his limit. He starts out hoping DA Dent will free him from the burden of saving the city, from Batman -- even now twistintg in wrong directions. But in the end, even Dent - the best of us, the good one, the Liberal Fighter who will make it work - is defeated - taken beyond his power to comprehend or forgive.
But - outlaws aren't overmen. They have a relation to law, as Joker does not. Even the mobsters that turn Joker on Gotham have an inner law: self-interest, respect, honor, even love - their own code - lines they do not cross - so Batman in theory has no limit to Wayne, and yet Wayne DOES. As a victim of trauma, the truest of true believers, one who will bend his body, his fortune - the entire world - to his faith that good must prevail - that the world WILL be good - the little boy behind the commitment cannot permit himself no limit. He must give up everything (home, family, connection, even honor) and his phantasy savior must do anything - whatever it takes. But he must be good.

[Constantone]

From bottom to top -five comments (yes, I am a bit too into this :)
This theme is carried forward through the film. Wayne is always trying to find his own balance, some stopping place. And he cannot, because the force he faces takes him into ever deeper water till finally he must breath it. He crosses the line, acts the facist to save the city. It destroys Dent the best of them, the White Knight, but he must survive both to to defeat evil and to pay penance for his own crime.

[Constantone]

Wayne - without super power - or the illusions of omnipotent goodness that flow from it - is aged Nietschean will-master living amidst the rubble of collapsing empire and the sullied dreams of a better world. Gotham, alwasy the dark morror of bright confident metropolis. But just like the film Wayne's world was haunted not by any terror of Jacobins of some newer Reign, living to perfect their ideal man by rites of torture and holy virtue. But as in the film he must look in the eye that robust nihilism which is the dark side of American virtue - our own Overman, all meaning burned away except strength and desire, that the survival of the fittest (and by fit we always mean most appalling rather than anything apealing), that can only be taken in by the eyes, never measured - because it is a void empty. Old Wayne's response to the failure of the old gods of America's panthon is WILL and ORDER as a force of imagination. So fascism, yes. Or at least the fasces and the spectacle. Takeaway quote: 'Of course we're outlaws.We've always been outlaws.'

[mathme]

Hahah You threw me for a second-- "What does this have to do with Wayne's World?"

[Constantone]

I think he misunderstands the point of the Dark Knight. (But Joker didn't lie, actually He told the truth.)
But Batman is exactly struggling with the ethical problem of a sort of fascism - liberalsim under exteme pressure.
The original Dark Knight Returns - a seminal cultural item which redefined both the Batman and marked the move of DC to follow its maturing audience - did indeed depict an almost-fascist elder Bruce Wayne. Batman was an RFK (the Hater, as his pa described him) out to get the mob and Hoffa or Big Steal and knowing JUST how to use the aparat to do it , only to see even his hard hopes [read: illusions] burned away by the Guns of Novermber and Mephis. He is juxtaposed in the book with the coopted JFK-Captain Kirk idealism of Superman - now working for The Man [Reagan].

[Constantone]

The Dark Knight novel brilliantly contrasts the seminal events that made these two men into almost Manichean oppossites -the lessons of their childhoods: alien Clark Kent taken in, protected without a second thought by kind godfearing Kansas farmers who, though he is in fact as close to a god as can be imagined, lives a fully reconciled version of It's a Worderful Life, saving the S&L and the town from foreclosure. And wealthy young Bruce Wayne - aristocratic child of old wealth and urban noblesse oblige, who watches his parents murdered in the street - helpless to do anything. Each draws lessons.

[aztecdiva]

I have been looking for someone who will bring up the Joker's quote about chaos and fear. When the Joker is being questioned in the station he makes a statement about how the use of chaos is used to create fear in the populace. All I could think of was 9 1 1, Operation C h a os, The Repu b l i cans use of the terror threat to abuse civil liberties.

I don't know if anyone else remembers that quote in the movie, but it was so telling that statement reflected the upon the use of how the "w a r on t e r ror" had trapped Americans from questioning the methods that B u sh co has used in shaping the narrative. Did anyone who saw the movie remember that quote?