The other day, I was roundly drubbed here (see Jurrasic Batman) for suggesting that the community on the left should exert a little pressure on Hollywood for making films that can be read by the right as supporting heinous positions. Bah, humbug! said many in the comments, that's not what Batman is about! Agreed, but now there's evidence that the right is using the film just as I feared. A piece today in the WSJ proposes that
"The Dark Knight," currently breaking every box office record in history, is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. 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.
Don't get me wrong -- Andrew Klavan's "What Batman and Bush Have in Common" betrays its author as textually challenged and deranged besides. My beef was that some degree of ambiguity in the text could have been modified so that this kind of heinous read was simply not possible, but that producers and directors shied away from that knowing that they'd alienate a potential audience if they did so.
With the above, Klavan was just getting started. He goes on:
"The Dark Knight," then, is a conservative movie about the war on terror. And like another such film, last year's "300," "The Dark Knight" is making a fortune depicting the values and necessities that the Bush administration cannot seem to articulate for beans.
Bullshit, of course...but if the claim resonates with the right -- if it rallies them, then it's a threat.
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.
Oh, jesus. Literally. In the comments on my diary the other day I noted that Batman's "anti-hero" status didn't make him unsympathetic, as it probably should, because it's something he takes on himself. It's a sacrifice. That's code to the right, and Klavan knows just what to do with it. The moron.
When heroes arise who take those difficult duties on themselves, it is tempting for the rest of us to turn our backs on them, to vilify them in order to protect our own appearance of righteousness. We prosecute and execrate the violent soldier or the cruel interrogator in order to parade ourselves as paragons of the peaceful values they preserve. As Gary Oldman's Commissioner Gordon says of the hated and hunted Batman, "He has to run away -- because we have to chase him."
That's real moral complexity. And when our artistic community is ready to show that sometimes men must kill in order to preserve life; that sometimes they must violate their values in order to maintain those values; and that while movie stars may strut in the bright light of our adulation for pretending to be heroes, true heroes often must slink in the shadows, slump-shouldered and despised -- then and only then will we be able to pay President Bush his due and make good and true films about the war on terror.
The problem is this. We can fight about the text with the right -- but they're going to fight right back, because it's ambiguous. And it's that way on purpose. That's why we can read it as indicting terror, and this jackoff reads it as advocating it. When the meaning of a film is so slippery that it can bear opposite readings, it's not doing its job.
If the left is going to accept Hollywood money, I say again, we should work to ensure that it's not dollars buying a free ride when it comes time to interpret what they dump into the culture.