Vigilantism of the Few and the Many; the Darkness of Democracy in The Dark Knight

[john_b_cannon]

I've been meaning to write something of a review of The Dark Knight in this blog for a while.  Over the last two days I have had two occasions to recount my analysis verbally to friends, and they have looked at me as if I'm ... saying something complicated or strange.  I think my analysis is actually kind of cultural-studies-101, so I won't be

Comments

mandatory manicheanism

[anonymous]

very interesting thoughts here, thanks. i'm wondering whether a film like TDK can allow itself to even hint at a type of moral force that works in and through a collectivity -- a batman-inspired (?), bottom-up, crime-fighting, justice-seeking, strength-in-numbers emergence, so to speak. the few pathetic copy-bat vigilantes in TDK don't count, obviously, although there's a guy fawkes moment, if you will. the morphology of the superhero-tale is too strict and inflexible to account for constellations that go beyond a basic manichean setup, a kind of proxy war that hinges on two schematic figures/avatars (and their helpers, and in-between anomalies like two-face) that we get to observe and evaluate from a distance. never mind the nuances, conflicts, gradations of meaning, ambivalences, cultural fantasies & politico-libidinal-aesthetic desires that good genre movies manage to manifest: in a superhero movie, we will never see articulations of collective solidarity, of mass mobilization in the service of morality or righteousness. because that would negate the whole genre's condition of possibility. because, as you write, the condition of "exhaustion, fear, indecision, and guilt" on a mass level is precisely what leads to the birth of someone like batman in the first place.

Re: mandatory manicheanism

[john_b_cannon]

This is an interesting point. Of course, Spiderman wants to have it both ways - the crowds matter very much ideologically, but they don't matter "historically," since they are ultimately helpless before the baddies and only the superhero can make history. This is where a movie like V for Vendetta, speaking of Guy Fawkes, is a step outside the superhero genre, in that the superhero's exemplary action opens the door for others and in fact ushers himself off the stage of history. Of course one could reduce this to a not-very-plausible "propaganda of the deed" politics, but still an interesting intervention into the genre.