Ideologically unsound
Apart from Heath Ledger's updating of Andy Serkis' Gollum from
The Lord of the Rings, Christopher Nolan's Bat-sequel was hotly-tipped for its core War-on-Terror metaphor; confronted with the cartoon equivalent of a bin Laden (or Mumbai suicide attacker), American audiences applauded torture - Bale's Boredman..er
..Batman dropping Eric Roberts off of a fire escape in order to break his legs and cuffing the Joker about in a police interrogation room - and warrantless wiretapping all the while rooting for more more more murder and mayhem from Ledger's necro-pornographer. It was an odd dichotomy that I think says something either about our inability to grasp Nolan's central conceit or his inability to articulate it in a clear enough fashion. I get the sense that
The Dark Knight's makers, unlike, say, the producers of
24, don't approve of the outgoing (how sweet it is) Bush administration's extralegal tactics; however, nothing in the film apart from a few weak-kneed mumblings from Morgan Freeman's character - here, as always, the voice of moral authority - communicates any type of counterpoint. Batman's brutality and illicit surveillance lead to the capture of the Joker before he can murder another clutch of innocent civilians, the apotheosis of the so-called "ticking time bomb" scenario that occurs only in
24 writers' meetings, Dick Cheney's imagination, and Fox News' running-dog round table discussions. In other words, Mitt Romney's words, we "ought to double Guantanamo."
Ideologically unsound
