The Thinklings are blogging about Batman. Jared and Philip have excellent, thoughtful reviews of what apparently is an excellent, thoughtful movie.
Jared notes: “The whole thing about nihilism or whatever just isn’t in there. It’s just not. The Dark Knight is specifically about goodness and evil, virtue and ethics, individuality and the social animal. These aren’t things one has to stretch to find in the movie to make it redemptive; they are actually in the film.”
Philip writes:
This the Batman the world has been deprived of for so long by all the other attempts. Batman is not a superhero, so much as he’s the anti-anti-hero. Batman, as we fanboys know him, is a dark, conflicted character that escorts us into a journey into human nature that is so scary that we’re glad to have him as a guide, even though we know he’d never let any of us actually be friends with him. . . . This is a movie that grapples with original sin and the nature of evil. What makes us good? What makes us bad? The Joker, like Satan in the book of Job, says that good people are only good as long as the circumstances are right. But if you change their circumstances… they’ll be evil like him. His motive for his badness (and there’s A LOT of badness) seems to be to force humanity to look at itself in the mirror only to find the Joker’s face (as a symbol of evil) staring back.
My husband and I saw Dark Knight this weekend and I can say it was the first movie I have ever walked out of not sorry, even in a small way, to have wasted time or money to see. It wasn’t snide about good and evil, it took them seriously and was unrelenting in showing evil run wild.
It was also not afraid to have heroes, show their flaws but not then reduce them to the level of the villain.
The best moment for me what when a member of the mob, in custody and under threat of death, does precisely the right thing and the right moment. I should have applauded but was cowed by the idea that right should be applauded. My bad on that.
Oh, and this is the first movie I have ever attended that the audience DID applaude at the end.
And we know what Always wins