There's an hilarious op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today by Andrew Klavan suggesting that the Dark Knight is nothing but a thinly veiled tribute to the Bush administration. As The Hater points out, Mr. Klavan has to stretch pretty far to make the connection, with his best evidence being that the bat signal looks kind of like a W. He also makes the entirely specious comparison that lefty documentaries against the war have made far less money than this supposed paean to the right-wing and organized murder. Because documentaries always out-gain giant summer blockbusters, you know.
But even beyond his flawed logic and gargled tones (you see, it's hard to understand someone when they're so busy fellating the president), the analogy simply doesn't work. After all, Batman actively refuses to kill his enemies, because he knows that as soon as he does, he's no better than they are. The whole movie is set up to deliver the message that no matter how capricious or cruel your enemies are, if you abandon your morals in fighting them, you've already lost. The only times in the movie when the bad guys actually win are those times when the heroes stoop to their level, which is exactly what those bad guys want in the first place. You know, like when a certain Reagan-funded billionaire pays some people to crash planes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon in order to provoke a war which recruits him thousands of new allies after the inevitable imperialist backlash.
But hey, far be it from me to suggest the Wall Street Journal has some sort of editorial bias that might blind them to the obvious morals of the film...
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