Film unmasks Bush as the real Batman
By Andrew Bolt
July 30, 2008 07:24am
Article from: Herald Sun
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FINALLY Hollywood makes a film that says US President George W. Bush was right.
But director Christopher Nolan had to disguise it a little, so journalists wouldn't freak and the film's more fashionable stars wouldn't walk.
So he hides Bush in a cape. He even sticks a mask on him, with pointy ears for some reason.
Sure, when the terrified citizens of Gotham City scream for Bush to come save them, Nolan has them shine a great W in the night sky, but he blurs it so it looks more like a bird.
Or a bat, perhaps.
And he has them call their hero not Mr Bush, of course, or even "Mr President", but . . . Batman.
And what do you know.
Bush may be one of the most despised presidents in American history, but this movie of his struggle is now smashing all box-office records.
Critics weep, audiences swoon - and suddenly the world sees Bush's agonising dilemma and sympathises with what it had been taught so long to despise.
Well, "taught" isn't actually the exact word.
As this superb Batman retelling, The Dark Knight, makes clear, its subject is a weakness that runs instinctively through us - to hate a hero who, in saving us, exposes our fears, prods our weaknesses, calls from us more than we want to give, or can.
And how we resent a hero who must shake our world in order to save it, or brings alive that maxim of George Orwell that so implicates us in our preening piety: "Good people sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."
(Alert! Alert! Spoilers ahead. Do not read on if you plan to see the film.)
This is The Dark Knight's theme. See how Bush - oops, I mean Batman - must time and again compromise his values, and ours, to save his city from far greater evils.
And see how Nolan, who wrote the script with his younger brother Jonathan, empathises with him every time - as does the audience in the wide-eyed dark.
How many examples do you want?
There's the scene at the police station in which Batman tortures Heath Ledger's sensationally vivid Joker - trying to cave in his face rather than simply, say, waterboarding him, as the CIA did to three of al-Qaida's most senior commanders.
The audience understands.
Batman has resorted to the last hope to make this terrorist squeal, because only the Joker has the information the police need to save two goodies who have just minutes left to live.
Of course, Batman is considerate enough to first jam shut the cell door with a chair, which means Commissioner Gordon and the police - who were watching through a one-way window - can rush to stop this terrible infringement of a prisoner's human rights yet still conveniently fail to break in.
This helps them to preserve their purity while still getting from Batman the addresses they so gratefully grab with their clean hands.
Note well this detail. We can pose as pure because harder men do what we need to keep safe - so safe, that we can afford to later despise them for it.
See it again when Bush - damn, I did it again - Batman, I mean, bugs every phone in the city to identify the whereabouts of the Joker, hoping to stop him before he blows up a shipload of civilians.
His techno-whiz, Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman), is almost as horrified as a New York Times reporter told that Bush wants to wiretap the international calls of terror suspects.
"This is wrong," he editorialises. "Spying on 30 million people isn't part of my job description."
What a wonderful conscience. How brightly that man's halo will shine when the fighting is done, and the human rights seminars begin in the campuses of cities made secure.
But, of course, even Lucius, thrust not into a newspaper office but into a position of responsibility where he must choose urgently between moralising or saving lives on a ticking time-bomb of a ship, chooses to help Batman bug just seconds after declaring it "wrong". For the record.
It's the choice the audience always knew he'd make, and would have despised him for dodging.
But the residents of Gotham? They soon end up hating Batman.
If he hadn't gone after the Joker so hard, they cry, maybe the Joker wouldn't have blown up their hospital, or planted bombs on ships, or killed so many soldiers, or flown aeroplanes into office towers, or blown up a Bali bar, or . . . sorry, have I confused fact with fiction, again?
Anyway, the citizens hate Batman, especially once they are safe, for disturbing their sense of order, and violating their nice rules for defining their goodness - rules that are less useful for defying the evil of men who, Batman's philosopher-butler Alfred says, "just want to watch the world burn".
And they hate him also as many Europeans hate Bush, for showing that what protects their world are not ultimately the laws they pass, but a violence that intimidates them, because they cannot match it.
They hate him as many once hated Ronald Reagan for defying a Soviet Union they feared would fight back.
They hate him as Melbourne University's hand-washing Professor Tony Coady, for one, can now afford to hate the men who dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, deploring this war-ending attack as "an act of terrorism far greater than any single act of terrorism since by non-state actors".
This hatred is the burden that Batman accepts - and which The Dark Knight explains better than the comics did.
When Batman doubts the good he had done, Alfred urges strength: "Endure, Master, endure. Take it. They'll hate you for it, but that is the point of Batman. He can make the choice that no one else can make - the right choice."
Batman does not need, and cannot get, the soaring opinion polls and flattering media coverage of a hero.
He must instead be not only the citizens' saviour, but its scapegoat for its anxiety over what it took to save them.
As Commissioner Gordon says, in reluctantly branding Batman an outlaw: "We'll hunt him because he can take it. Because he's not a hero. He's a silent guardian, a watchful protector . . . a dark knight."
Mind you, the same excuses for violence, and for defying the public's will, is used by vigilantes and tyrants. And Nolan is so careful to sugar his pill that some critics, and not only of the Left, have taken his film as an attack on Bush instead.
Take Variety.com's deputy editor, Anne Thompson, who seizes on the scene in which the Joker taunts Batman: "What would I do without you? You complete me . . . To them (the public) you're just a freak. Like me."
Concludes Thompson: "The film-making suggests the Joker has, like a Shakespearean fool on PCP, hit on a harsh truth: Batman has more in common with his killer-clown foe than with the normal people he means to protect. So should we conclude The Dark Knight argues that Bush and bin Laden are two sides of the same coin?"
Answer: are you kidding? In fact, the Joker is saying that without Batman's great good to oppose, his great evil would never be realised in its horrific glory.
It would be like Hitler being allowed to exterminate nothing more than mosquitoes. Who'd care?
What's more, Batman clearly has more in common with the people he tries to protect than does the Joker with people he tries to destroy, or the audience wouldn't be cheering him, and the next film in the series wouldn't be Batman III but The Joker II.
No, the cinema audience understands what the Gotham citizens do not - Batman's dilemma and the awesome imperatives of responsibility. And they are with him, not his critics.
So why don't Americans in particular leave the movie cheering Bush as they cheered Batman?
Because in leaving the cinema they stopped being that audience and re-entered their own real Gotham City - with a real Batman they once more feel driven to hate for all the hard things he's had to do to protect them.
They have become the citizens of Gotham they were watching just minutes before with contempt.
But Bush would understand. As Alfred says: "He's not being a hero. He's being something more."
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,24100318-5007146,00.html#
