Nolan seems to romanticize Batman’s obsessive,

abusive behavior. Is the Dark Knight just George Bush

with a better outfit, demanding that he be allowed

all of the available “tools” to combat terrorism,

even if they include torture and eavesdropping?

Batman Represents the Reactionary Side

of American Culture [Source]

The reactionary is likely to start from a profound conviction of the evil of the natural man.

Instead of worrying because people do not get enough freedom, he is obsessed by the need for police — authority, discipline, order.

How else can you keep the Devil under control? - Edmund Wilson on Joseph de Maistre, 1932

“The Dark Knight” is “Dirty Harry” stripped of Don Siegel’s ambivalence and ambiguity.

Here again, one madman (Christian Bale’s Batman/Clint Eastwood’s Harry) is posited as the only effective way of combating another (Heath Ledger’s Joker/Andy Robinson’s Scorpio).

The two figures are identified as morally equivalent (”You complete me,” says Ledger to Bale, nastily referencing “Jerry Maguire”), but where Siegel’s camera literally recoils in horror at the moment Harry leaps into madness (when he steps on Scorpio’s wound in the football stadium), Nolan seems to embrace, and even romanticize, his hero’s obsessive, abusive behavior.

Is the Dark Knight just George Bush with a better outfit, demanding that he be allowed all of the available “tools” to combat terrorism, even if they include torture and eavesdropping?

Like Bush, Batman has his own warantless wiretapping program, but Nolan is kind enough to assure us that, once his goal is accomplished, the superhero will blow it up. Is he suggesting that we can count on the Dark President to do the same?

Deconstructing "The Dark Knight" [Source]

Now that "The Dark Knight" has led Hollywood to its biggest-money weekend since ... well, since the invention of the medium, not merely the backlash but the counterbacklash and I guess the counter-counterbacklash have begun.

(For the record, I'm suspicious of all claims that some new blockbuster has set a box office record. "The Dark Knight," for instance, has been released on more screens in more places -- and has arguably been more massively hyped -- than any other movie in history. How does its per-screen average, adjusted for inflation, compare with "E.T." or "Gone With the Wind"?)

Given all the reactions and abreactions to this movie, it's a damn shame how little serious debate it has sparked.

For two sterling exceptions to the rule, I'd point you to Keith Uhlich's review at House Next Door, with concomitant house-on-fire message boards, and, even more so, the discussion on critic Dave Kehr's blog [see above], a hangout for cinephiles of various stripes.

Brief spoilers are ahead; if you haven't seen "Dark Knight" yet, and care about such things, bail out now.

Kehr gets the party started by suggesting that director and co-writer Christopher Nolan has encoded some kind of war-on-terror analogy, circa 2002, in his film.

"Is the Dark Knight just George Bush with a better outfit," he inquires, "demanding that he be allowed all of the available 'tools' to combat terrorism, even if they include torture and eavesdropping?"

It's a valid interpretive issue to raise, but the fact that Kehr phrases his entire post as a series of questions indicates that he's on shaky ground.

I've never discerned the least interest in political or social issues in Nolan's work, and to quote Uhlich, "I think this is granting 'The Dark Knight' more of a concrete ideological interpretation than it deserves."

As I write this, there are more than 100 responses to Kehr's post, including some by prominent critics, film scholars, festival programmers and the like.

The result is an intriguing back-and-forth among defenders and detractors of "The Dark Knight" -- as well as a fascinating discussion of the role and limits of film criticism -- with nary a nasty epithet in sight.

Is the picture, as one poster proposes, a complex tragedy "about moral ambivalence and the impossibility of justice in America at this moment"?

Or does it tell us we "shouldn't question those who operate outside of what we consider acceptable codes of morality, but rather just shut up and trust the hero"?

Don't worry, the perspective of fans who are outraged by any pinhead-intellectual attempts to rain on the pop-culture parade does not go unrepresented, even in this rarefied zone.

"Calm down Bleeding Hearts!" one poster throws down. "It is my right as an American to like this movie."

Sorry, dude. Untrue. It's your right as a human being to seize whatever can of crap-flavored Pringles strikes your fancy from the great smorgasbord of life -- within, you know, certain mutually agreed social limits -- but being an American's got nothing to do with it.

Still, the random jingoism is suggestive. Is there some uniquely Yank quality to the irrational bile directed at the insignificant handful of commentators who, for whatever reason, have disliked what may well turn out to be the most popular motion picture in history?

And is this a new phenomenon, or only one magnified by the stupidity amplifier known as the Internet? It does not appear that Kehr, Uhlich, David Denby, David Edelstein, my colleague Stephanie Zacharek et al. are damaging the economic fortunes of Warner Bros.'

Bat-franchise too badly, and I'm guessing that Chris Nolan's ego can take it.

(Current position of "The Dark Knight" on IMDb's user-voted Top 250 list: 1.) So wherefore the thin skin, Bat-lovers?

Check those critics' comment pages: Raising even the feeblest of objections to the worldwide (and Web-wide) adulation of this murky action flick will get you not just disagreement but kilobytes of hate by the butt-load.