Andrew Klavan had a truly batshit (that’s a pun, there won’t be more) editorial in the Wall Street Journal over the weekend in which he argued that The Dark Knight vindicates the Bush administration as noble heroes, left to defend a world that doesn’t understand them. It’s absurd on its face, of course- Batman is a fictional vigilante who stalks around at night and punches out bad guys in his pajamas, while George W Bush was elected to serve a nation by its people. The two aren’t comparable on any terms. But you call the Joker a terrorist in the script, and people like Klavan rush to put on their thinking caps and explain how George Bush is just like Batman. It gets really dumb, though, once he starts asking rhetorical questions about liberal Hollywood. I’m feeling charitable today, and I’ll help him out:
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?
There’s no need to "put on a mask" if your point is to explore the complexities of a situation. If you want to examine the military policy in the Iraq war, you don’t need to re-shoot Star Wars from a viewpoint that’s critical of the Jedi council’s tactics against the Sith. You can just set the damn thing in Baghdad. But if you want to claim that Lyndie England was a hero and George W Bush is the bravest man to ever walk the face of the planet Earth, you need a lot of layers of allegory for people to not laugh (or spit) in your face.
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"?
Because the idea that those values can be determined without any messy moral ambiguities only exist in worlds created by people who are specifically trying to have easily identifiable good guys and bad guys. You have to create a world in which the right-wing "reality" applies. It’s easy to know who the bad guys are in Lord of the Rings because they’re orcs led by a giant evil eye. It’s easy to know who the villain is in Spider-Man 3 because he’s named Venom and wears an evil black costume. If the world actually worked that way, then right-wingers would be welcome to make their films as direct and realistic as they liked.
The answers to these questions seem to me to be embedded in the story of "The Dark Knight" itself: Doing what’s right is hard, and speaking the truth is dangerous. Many have been abhorred for it, some killed, one crucified.
Don’t look now, but I think that this guy just made the claim that the first person to make a film in which George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld personally beat up Saddam Hussein will be the next Jesus.
Leftists frequently complain that right-wing morality is simplistic. Morality is relative, they say; nuanced, complex. They’re wrong, of course, even on their own terms.
And for evidence, witness how successful caped vigilantes have been at protecting major world cities from supervillains.
The true complexity arises when we must defend these values in a world that does not universally embrace them — when we reach the place where 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.
What’s awesome about statements like this is that, when you decide that intolerance, unkindness, and hate are useful tools for a better world, you become indistinguishable from those who use them for purposes you don’t find quite so noble.
It’s almost like you become two-faced, using your unambiguous moral certainty that you’re doing the right thing to commit unspeakable acts. I don’t know if this guy actually watched the whole thing, but the self-righteous, unquestioning character convinced of his own goodness is Harvey Dent, not Bruce Wayne. And dude, I’m pretty sure he was a bad guy.
(cross-posted to www.dansolomon.com)
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The difference between Batman and the Bush administration is that Batman fixes his mistakes one way or another, and most importantly takes responcibilty for them.
I just appreciate the analogy because Batman’s one rule – the rule Joker repeatedly, sadistically, tries to make him break over and over again – is never to commit murder. And George Bush has people wantonly tortured and killed by the truckload.
At the most generous, I’d compare Bush to Commissioner Gordon. A man trying to do the right thing, but surrounded by vipers and turn-coats who eventually turn his own best intentions against him. That’s at the absolute far end of generosity. A more apt analogy wouldn’t place Bush anywhere in the Batman universe, simply because there’s no falling-upwards rewarding incompetency dynamic anywhere in the comic book world that mirrors the insanity of politics in the real.
The whole argument is absurd. Even the movie insists that the true hero of the piece is Harvey Dent, regardless of his fall from grace. There’s no way a vigilante like Batman could or should be elected into the White House because the last thing the world needs is a vigilante in the White House.
No. We need more unimpeachable Harvey Dents in office. Courageous intelligent people who know right from wrong and do the right thing no matter what, barring severe head trauma, really disgusting CGI graphics, and insanity.
What does he mean “ONE crusified”? I was sure there were at least a few more at the time…
Salieri,
Those pundits throw in a Jesus reference whenever possible even if it doesn’t fit the context. It kinda sounds like Stalin logic “A single death is a tragedy, are million deaths is a statistic. ” I mean, if you have more then one martyr the whole idea or sacrafice for the greater good goes out the window and becomes nothing more then a death cult.
A far stronger comparison would have been to say Bush was like Harvey Dent. As ladypeyton pointed out, he is the hero of the piece, but moreso, he’s an elected official who’ll do whatever it takes, isn’t afraid of the consequences, and might go off the rails a bit (which is how one might describe George Bush, were they on his side)
I’m surprised that he thinks Spider-Man 3 has some sort of conservative message. By the end of the film Peter has made peace with one of the guys who wanted to kill him (Harry Osborn) and has forgiven the guy who killed Uncle Ben (Sandman).
Wouldn’t your average conservative call Peter “soft on crime” and be disappointed that he didn’t go all Dirty Harry on both their asses?
I just can’t wait for the guy to see Watchman. Should make his head explode with the “dirty liberals” tarnishing his pure form of Conservative worship, if the script reamines *anything* like the book.
Sorry for the double post but I just thought of something else. Peter did go all Dirty Harry on both guys earlier in the movie, which is more of a neo-con “show them no mercy” approach. He did that, of course, when he was being influenced by the symbiote. It’s made very clear that the symbiote is evil and that it makes Peter do bad things, not good things.
So for a guy like Klavan to watch Spider-Man 3 and consider it some sort of endorsement of his world view, he would have to get the impression that the film ended right after the fight in Harry’s apartment or something. Maybe he hallucinated credits.
Dude, that last paragraph is freakin’ GOLD. You win forever.
I disagree with the end of TDK anyway. But I have major problems with the Harvey Dent/Two-Face character (it’s not evil or good, it’s evil or inaction) so I guess my opinion shouldn’t count.
the conservative values that power our defense — values like morality, faith, self-sacrifice and the nobility of fighting for the right
Since when was self-sacrifice something that the Bush administration valued? The most he’s sacrificed was having to give up golf.
And if you have to ask why the idea that “faith” helps to “power [ones] defense” only appears in fantasy, then you’re probably living in one.
Yes, the message of The Dark Knight is that Batman’s methods are liek totally awesoem against terrorist threats that replace old mafia-style criminals in response to his vigilante methods, and that we should never ever trust the brown people in the orange Gitmo jumpsuits. FULL OF WIN
This seems oddly appropriate. Who said it, Batman or Bush? http://youtube.com/watch?v=XPugAcQILRY
I do love the idea that “morality, faith, and self-sacrifice” are purely conservative values. And then they try to claim Lord of the Rings (Gandalf represents the magic of supply-side economics) and Spider-Man 3 (Spider-Man represents Reagan, who fought Venom (communism) even when the Daily Bugle (liberals) tried to label him a criminal (Iran-Contra scandal). Also, Reagan had spider-sense (Alzheimers)) as conservative films. It reminds me of the National Review’s “Top 50 Conservative Rock Songs,” in which the National Review claimed that being anti-authoritarian was a conservative value, so therefore The Clash, The Sex Pistols, The Ramones, Bob Dylan (He’s on the list like four times), The Offspring, Aerosmith (They claimed that “Janie’s Got A Gun” was a pro-gun rights song), and a variety of others were conservative rockers.
If the Republican administration, and specifically George, is Two-Face, does that make 9/11 their transformation scene, when a horrific event drives them to become insane and irrational, yet still convinced of their rightness?
I bet Christopher and Jonathan Nolan would be surprised to find out they were writing about conservative values.
It’s funny, because the whole time I was reading this, I was thinking, “If there’s any conservative analogy in ‘The Dark Knight’, it’s Harvey Dent, the guy who starts out as a stand-up law-and-order type guy, but who goes gradually and progressively batshit insane the longer he has to fight the terrorists, until by the end he’s threatening to shoot little kids and fighting Batman, while letting the Joker go when he has him right there.”
And then, Bam! That’s where you went at the end. Not sure if we’re both geniuses, or if it’s just blatantly obvious to anyone who isn’t a right-wing nutjob.
Trying to find deep allegorical meaning in movies always makes my head hurt, because there tend to be all kinds of other interpretations that are contrary to the stated ones. And what you said too. Guh.
… I really need to go see that movie.
Rawrasaur, I like the middle-aged guy with the glasses in that video. 😀
And if you have to ask why the idea that “faith” helps to “power [ones] defense” only appears in fantasy, then you’re probably living in one.
Dunno. Things like faith seem awfully uniting and dividing. Easy to make it an us/them thing when they call God a different name and don’t eat delicious bacon or something. Heck, even when God’s got the same name there’s plenty of stuff to fight about.
Appeals to religious beliefs might not work as well as they used to, but the world isn’t 110% atheist yet.
A particularly cynical comedian once commented on the Protestant/Catholic violence in Ireland as follows:
“In the absence of Jews, Blacks and Mexicans, humanity will improvise.”
I don’t think faith is a uniting or dividing. I think that humans are just lazy, egoist creatures that fear things unlike themselves. If it wasn’t faith, or god, or tasty bacon, it’d be skin and eye colour, or geographic origin.
You know, the funny thing is, looking at the Dark Knight, I was always kind of unnerved by Harvey Dent even from the start.
Maybe it’s because I knew he’d turn into Two-Face, but still, looking at his Caesar discussion and willingness to arrest people when he doesn’t have evidence to convict, because it’ll get them off the streets for a while? Creepy as hell.
Maybe it’s just me, because everyone else seems to think he was a stand-up joe.
I totally agree with what I am reading that Harvey Dent is the representation of religous-right values, and not so much conservative because he actualy believes what he says. He first walks a road of good intentions which eventual winds into revenge, and when in difficult situations leaves too much up to faith/chance with his coin.
This was the first I heard of the article by Klavan. I agree. He is pretty batshit. While you took on the rhetorical questions, I tried to take on the rest of that godawful article. Could he have whined a bit more at the end there?
Anyway, here’s mine:
http://adamanthenes.blogspot.com/2008/07/andrew-klavan-misses-point-why-dark.html
Thought you might like to see what you inspired.
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