Don't get me wrong, I absolutely loved this film. But when you think about it...
Batman goes after an anarchist terrorist whose out for change, citing the fact (in his scene with Two-Face) that people don't care when the lower-class or a soldier in Iraq takes it, only when the real norm is upset. In battling his foe, Batman employs surveillance technology echoing the Patriot Act, and then, in the end, decides that a lie is more important to Gotham than the truth, using himself as a scapegoat to save the city from damnation. What d'you think?
Have you perhaps considered that, while Batman's actions were pretty "Republican", that these actions were in fact wrong, even in the context of the film. Nolan's Batman's very human, and it showed. When he tortured The Joker, Rachel died. It didn't work!
And, indeed, ultimately the phone-sonar-machine-thing was also destroyed, quite rightly, by Fox.
Just because Batman acted in right-wing ways at times, it doesn't mean he was portrayed as being right (as in correct, no pun intended) or that the film was right-wing propaganda.
And, while the lying to the people of Gotham was wrong, I think that Nolan was again showing a very human Batman, a Batman who had to resort to desperate, morally- ambiguous actions in a desperate time.
That was my take, but I could just be a biased, liberal Dark Knight fanboy. Having said that, Batman would have to be pretty damn conservative. Alan Moore pretty much pointed out that superheroes were Nazis in Watchmen, and, in reality, that'd probably be the case. Nolan did strive for realism, after all.
Anyway, Nolan's far too intelligent a man to be a conservative...
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KMC Community Forums
Dark Knight: Right-Wing Propaganda?
Sep 21st, 2008 06:02 PM
