The Dark Knight
Over the last two evenings, I’ve seen the second of Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies,
The Dark Knight. As I
wrote earlier, the first movie,
Batman Begins, is bad, but not horrible.
The Dark Knight is horrible. It is deeply perverted. It proves that everything I
said the morning after the Aurora massacre, without my having seen any of these movies, but based on long experience with many similar movies as well as descriptions I had read of these movies, was right. Yes, I need to qualify, and to add further dimensions and details to what I said, but my basic take, as harsh as it was on these movies and the people who approve and eagerly consume them, was correct.
It’s just as I and some commenters (such as Clark Coleman) pointed out. The Batman movies inject some apparently “moral” or “heroic” elements in the midst of horrible sadism and nihilism and vast incoherence and impossible events that no rational person could accept and crashing noise and endless meaningless whirling “action” scenes which are nothing but pure sensation without sense—and some conservatives (the latest being the incurably vulgar and immature John Podhoretz) are so imbued with the degraded pop culture of the last 20 or 30 years, so lacking in any mature perspective on art and entertainment, that they take these few “conservative” elements as meaning that the movie is “conservative.”
These conservatives need to take a good look at themselves. They need to see how their sensibility, even their reason, has been debased by the evil and dehumanizing pop culture and by their acceptance and affirmation of it. In a word, they need to repent.
- end of initial entry -
Diana M. writes:
You are not alone.
You may be interested in this article and this which are critical of the movie.
I discovered them a few months ago when I took The Dark Knight out of the library and gave up, halfway through.
Actually, I did fast forward, or whatever they call it in today’s DVD world, to the end. It was so incomprehensible, I gave up.
Obviously, the movie contains incitement to an atrocity, but there are other reasons this is a shame.
The U.S. film industry is in steep decline.
I used to like Christian Bale, and I saw The Dark Knight because I wondered what he could do with a comic book part. He’s given, in my opinion, three first-rate performances: Empire of the Sun (he was the kid, Jim Graham), Laurie in Little Women, and the lead in The Machinist (a good movie about guilt and redemption, not the sensationalistic crap it appears to be). He used to be an unusual actor with a gift for original characterizations.
But since he started the Batman franchise, he’s been an actor in decline, and is now a hack. I’ve seen some of the other stuff he’s been in, and they are all terrible. The same one-note, glum presence. I wonder if playing Batman destroyed his soul?
LA replies:
Good description: “One-note, glum presence.” His Bruce Wayne / Batman has to be one of the most unengaging lead characters in the history of movies. The friend I was watching it with called Wayne a “cipher,” and I thought that was exactly right.
The purpose of liberalism is to make people believe that life is no good; Bale/Wayne’s glum persona is an expression and result of that.
Mark P. writes:
You wrote:
Good description: “One-note, glum presence.” His Bruce Wayne / Batman has to be one of the most unengaging lead characters in the history of movies. The friend I was watching it with called Wayne a “cipher,” and I thought that was exactly right.
The purpose of liberalism is to make people believe that life is no good; Bale/Wayne’s glum persona is an expression and result of that.
I will make it even simpler. The purpose of Bale’s characterization is to bring down a white superhero. That is what Hollywood is doing with the Batman franchise. The white villain is over-the-top and a force of nature; the white hero is weak and indecisive.
I also second Diana M.’s link to the two article criticizing the Dark Knight.
Just so you are not completely disappointed, check out this link which is to The Batman animated series. See how this interpretation treats the Batman source material and how well Batman could really be done.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 01, 2012 09:36 AM | Send