Mystery writer Andrew Klavan has a jaw-dropping Wall Street Journal Op-Ed arguing that Batman is a metaphor for our real life superhero, George W. Bush.
Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past.
The article is a nonstop string of "he didn't really say that" moments, so let's just stick the two major flaws in Klavan's thesis. The first is that he seems to think that Batman is some kind of, I dunno, superhero. The whole point of The Dark Knight is that the very concept of superheroes is questionable at best. As Harvey Dent says, "You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain." Ironically, Klavan chastises realistic antiwar movies in which "the good guys become indistinguishable from the bad guys, and we end up denigrating the very heroes who defend us," which is pretty much what Christopher Nolan intends with Dark Knight. OK, I won't go so far as to say Nolan denigrates Batman, but surely perceptive viewers will not come away from the movie cheering him unambiguously. Frank Miller's breakthrough was to perceive the fascist undercurrents of the superhero genre. Or will Klavan see next year's Watchmen film as another celebration of Bushism?
To the extent that Batman does remains a hero despite his actions, the reason provides an answer to Klavan's central question, even if Klavan himself can't see it (his second major flaw).
Why is it then that left-wingers feel free to make their films direct and realistic, whereas Hollywood conservatives have to put on a mask in order to speak what they know to be the truth? Why is it, indeed, that the conservative values that power our defense -- values like morality, faith, self-sacrifice and the nobility of fighting for the right -- only appear in fantasy or comic-inspired films like "300," "Lord of the Rings," "Narnia," "Spiderman 3" and now "The Dark Knight"?
Klavan believes the answer is that Hollywood is too afraid to "speak plainly in the light of day," when clearly it is because fantasy is the only context in which the "heroics" of Batman and George W. Bush even remotely make sense. Spencer Ackerman explains why in a much more perceptive column on the Bush-Batman analogy (though Ackerman too confuses the depiction of a cryptofascist worldview with its endorsement).
One problem with Walzer's argument, as its many critics have noted, is that the results are still horrific -- torture, indefinite detention, assassination and other such practices incompatible with civilization. Another is that it presumes that once unlimited authorities are handed to an individual, that person can be trusted to relinquish them -- or even to determine, contrary to his or her interest, that the emergency has passed.
In the world of comic, that's easy. Batman is Batman -- he's conflicted, sure, but he's a hero. That's why in both movies, little children -- fellow incorruptibles -- are the only ones who neither fear nor hate him: they can see him as he sees himself.
But in the real world, this concept is ludicrous and anti-American.
Exactly. As Jane Mayer reminds us in The Dark Side, Seton Hall Law School analyzed the accusations made against detainees at Guantanamo Bay, the ones Donald Rumsfeld described as "the worst of the worst."
After reviewing 517 of the Guant�namo detainees� cases in depth they concluded that only 8 percent were alleged to have associated with Al Qaeda. Fifty-five percent were not alleged to have engaged in any hostile act against the United States at all, and the remainder were charged with dubious wrongdoing, including having tried to flee U.S. bombs. The overwhelming majority � all but 5 percent � had been captured by non-U.S. players, many of whom were bounty hunters.
Try to imagine a version of The Dark Knight in which 92 percent of the people who Batman beats the shit out of in his effort to get at the Joker are either demonstrably innocent or accused of vague crimes by unreliable sources (while the remaining 8 percent are not caught red-handed either). Very different movie. Also, in that hypothetical movie, Batman doesn't draw the line at killing bad guys in cold blood.
The nature of the hero is one problematic factor in Klavan's plea for a "realistic" version of the heroic terrorist-fighter movie. The nature of the villain is the other, as Thomas Garvey notes in his dismantling of The Dark Knight (I liked the film a whole lot better than he did, but his review did give me some things to think about).
Ledger's (and Nolan's) Joker has little to do with Osama bin Laden or al Qaeda, or really anything but the hermetically sealed world of adolescent angst. The terrorists America faces are not in love with "chaos" per se - they are trying to harm us for rather obvious political reasons. You may think those reasons are illegitimate, and that the murder of innocent civilians is evil - and you may feel at the same time that we have the perfect right to prop up some dictatorships in the Middle East, while overturning others; fine. But you can't pretend our terrorists appeared from nowhere, like the Joker, with no back story or history, and no formal grievances, and are simply maniacally bent on destroying "our way of life."
Finally, I can't resist pointing out my favorite of Klavan's incidental idiocies: "Doing what's right is hard, and speaking the truth is dangerous. Many have been abhorred for it, some killed, one crucified."
Funny, I can't recall the section of the Gospels where Jesus says "we must be intolerant in order to defend tolerance, or unkind in order to defend kindness, or hateful in order to defend what we love." It must be somewhere in there next to all that "love your enemies" and "turn the other cheek" crap. Truly, it takes a special kind of chutzpah to enlist a man who was tortured to death in defense of torture.
Update: Of course that would make Harvey Dent Obama
