Extraordinary Popular Illusions and the Sanity of Crowds
(posted by Jim Henley)
So, Batman: The Dark Knight is good, if not great. But by golly, we need to reduce it to its political subtext, darnit, or we haven’t done our jobs as pundits. I would say, it’s surprisingly friendly to anarchism. The Joker engages in massive destructions of government-supplied order, and we get to see how people react in its absence. In many cases, they react very well. (I won’t say more.) Don’t get me wrong: while there are crooked cops and corrupt officials and mobsters in bed with the law, this isn’t an “anti-government” movie per se. But there’s a gratifying absence of the old adventure-story cliche where people begin Hobbesian omni-wars the instant the police are out of action. It’s worth noting that in the previous Christopher Nolan Batman movie, there was a vox pop riot, but that was because people had been dosed with psychoactive gases.
July 19th, 2008 at 6:03 pm
Dark Knight got 94% percent at Rotten Tomatoes, with over 100 reviews in.
July 19th, 2008 at 6:27 pm
Ha. I was redundant in that last post.
July 22nd, 2008 at 4:09 pm
Oddly enough, it seems that some conservatives think that this movie reinforces their views on terrorism/surveillance. This may seem odd, but I have a guess as to why this is.
The Joker is agent of pure chaos who rejoices in destruction for its own sake and yet despite his destructive compulsions, he is competent, brilliant and devious. There is no evidence of any person remotely like the Joker ever existing in real life — except in conservative fever dreams. You see, conservatives actually believe that typical terrorists are like the Joker: omni-competent, intelligent and committed to joyous destruction of all that is good and decent.
If you believe the world is full of Jokers, then you’ll gleefully support the actual jokers (lower case) who will exploit your fears.
July 22nd, 2008 at 6:38 pm
Kurt: funny, since in the movie it takes a non-state actor to do anything about it…
They transfer Joker to the real world, but not Batman. How convenient.