Christian Bale is Batman in The Dark Knight

Like millions the world over, last weekend I too watched and immensely enjoyed the latest Batman movie The Dark Knight, so much so that I am going to watch it again as soon as I finish writing this column. But what can one say about the film that has not been said already, in countless blogposts, listserves and discussion groups?

To begin with: the title. The title of the movie is the first one in the series which does not have the name of the superhero in it. It also echoes the four-book miniseries The Dark Knight Returns, written and drawn in 1986 by Frank Miller. In that book, Bruce Wayne lives pretty much in retirement, and has to drag his somewhat creaking body out to battle the terrifying Mutants gang. But he finds that Gotham City is no longer enamoured of its caped crusader: in the new climate of repressive political correctness, Batman is branded a psychopath and menace to society and has to go underground to avoid arrest and trial by television.

There are echoes of this idea in the film as well. Historically, most of the caped crusaders originated just before the Second World War and there was an element of naive fantasy in the way they administered a rough and ready justice. They were vigilantes to begin with, but the politics of the Cold War years turned them into superheroes. We often tend to lump the two categories, but it is helpful to see the vigilante and superhero as the respective local and global manifestations of a common impulse. Batman’s beat is strictly Gotham City and nothing else — he is in fact a rather reluctant vigilante, and seems to be driven almost exclusively by the need to avenge his slain parents. Significantly, the everyday persona he chooses is that of a reclusive tycoon, Bruce Wayne.

Superman, on the other hand, has a beat which stretches from Metropolis to Moscow, and sometimes beyond it. Unlike Batman, he has no qualms at all about the role he is expected to play in a bipolar world. In The Dark Knight Returns, he is a key element of President Reagan’s foreign policy and even intercepts a Soviet missile. But the success of Batman’s old-fashioned methods of quelling crime proves so embarrassing to White House that Superman is sent to take Batman down. In this unequal battle, Batman all but accuses Superman of selling out to the Reagan regime. The sequel, The Dark Knight Strikes Again, also contains caricatures of several prominent members of the first administration of George W. Bush, including John Ashcroft, Ari Fleischer and Donald Rumsfeld. The president is in fact revealed to actually be a hologram controlled by Lex Luthor, who’s also an old Batman baddie.

(To be continued)

The author teaches English at Jadavpur University