Batman and the "End of 9/11": Overcoming America's Dark Night in Gotham City

One of the "biggest" ideas of the year, according to James Fallows writing in the Atlantic Magazine, is the End of 9/11 as a metanarrative for American politics. For a growing domestic and international constituency, it is no longer tolerable for the very invocation of those events to warrant overriding every principle of American democracy. That moment of thoughtless panic has passed, and appears now to have been a dream of madness. Casting aside principles in the name of the "war on terror" -- to "work...the dark side, if you will", as Dick Cheney put it -- is now being recognized as the path to becoming the very evil we feared.

One of the most potent confirmations of this maturing zeitgeist is the overwhelmingly positive critical and public reception of Christopher Nolan's stunning new Batman film The Dark Knight , which, in its careful use of 9/11 visual tropes takes the viewer on a sometimes traumatic but ultimately redemptive and humanistic journey towards a truly post-9/11 ethic.

Many reviewers have already noted that the film is commenting on the "war on terror," and audiences were surely meant to revisit their own painful memories of 9/11 by the chilling advance posters for the film, which feature Batman standing before a skyscraper in which a gigantic flaming gash in the shape of a bat has been blasted. Cues evoking 9/11 build from the opening frames, which propel the viewer into a dark swirling cloud of smoke and then to an aerial shot flying us towards a glass building, through to a series of escalating depictions of urban chaos and destruction. Buildings implode, thousands of people flee Gotham city on foot, and at one point Batman broods in the foreground while firefighters struggle to contain fires amid twisted steel columns. Unlike any other superhero film ever made, The Dark Knight is set in a world of realism we -- sadly -- know only too well.

This realism is significantly owed to the actual urban locations of the film. Previous incarnations of Gotham City were either fascistic sets improbably dominated by statues or fanciful computer-generated creations that never succeeded in convincing us; here, the on-location shooting in downtown Chicago and Hong Kong goes a long way to grounding viewers and thereby preparing them for the moral arguments to come.

The morality play of The Dark Knight is driven by Heath Ledger's astonishing performance as the Joker, who is not so much a character as he is a force of unknowable, abstract evil. By positioning the villain this way, screenwriters Jonathan and Christopher Nolan have made the Joker the very incarnation of a Manichean view of morality: he is not an evil set apart from oneself that can be destroyed, but rather as a potentiality within oneself that must be resisted by one's predisposition for good.

What makes The Dark Knight so remarkable is that it frames this resistance to evil with nuanced debates about the natures of human moral agency and decision-making.

In an early scene, when Batman's alter-ego Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) and District Attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), discuss the merits of having one strong man take responsibility for defending society against evil, Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal) reminds them that when Rome made that choice, it resulted in a dictatorship. For all his wistful temptation for Roman absolutism, however, Dent is a morally principled man who doggedly works within the legal system to put criminals behind bars. So certain is he of his own moral compass that he makes a show of flipping a coin to make crucial decisions -- a coin which is later revealed to have two faces. Wayne admires Dent for his principled, public and fully legal stand and is himself tempted to forsake the lawless vigilantism of Batman and make Dent alone the public face of justice in Gotham.

Between the unaccountability of the Batman and the deontological morality of Dent lies the consequentialism of Commissioner James Gordon (Gary Oldman), a veteran cop whose situational judgments and actions in a corrupt, complex and dangerous environment are criticized by Dent, who once ran an Internal Affairs investigation against Gordon's precinct.

With this moral triad at its core, the film then proceeds to metaphorically -- and not so metaphorically -- demolish the methods, moral vacuity and false ontology of the "war on terror."

First, Batman practices some "enhanced interrogation techniques" on the Joker, only to learn that he was being manipulated by the Joker all along, with fatal results. Then when Bruce uses an advanced and secret project at Wayne Industries to turn every cell phone in Gotham into sonar-based surveillance devices, his partner in Bat-tech, Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman), is appalled, swearing to resign if the machine isn't destroyed. While they agree to use the mass "unwarranted wiretap" just once, successfully pinpointing the Joker and what appear to be his henchmen in a skyscraper on the waterfront, when Batman arrives in advance of the S.W.A.T. team he is horrified to discover that despite its sophistication his technology was incapable of distinguishing hostages from terrorists, something of which only human presence and judgment is capable.

Next, we see the abandonment of Dent's "constitution." The Joker destroys Harvey Dent by disfiguring him and killing Rachel. Traumatized, grieving and seeking revenge, the formerly principled Dent kills five people, including two corrupt cops, but not before flipping his lucky coin -- which by now is as burnt on one side as he is, thus surrendering all his moral choices to an external force: sheer chance.

But it is in the film's gut-wrenching climax that reveals the supposed existential crisis of the "war on terror" for the cruel and dehumanizing proposition it is.

Fleeing the chaos of Gotham city, two crowded ferries break down in the harbor: one filled with ordinary citizens, the other with convicts clad in Guantanomo-esque orange suits. Each ship's crew discovers the boats are filled with explosives, as well as provided with a gift-wrapped detonator. Over the intercom, the Joker reveals the nature of his "social experiment": the detonators are for the other ship's bombs. If the passengers don't blow up the other ship, he'll blow up both of them at midnight.

For 15 agonizing minutes, the passengers argue amongst themselves and the ship's authorities, who are themselves paralyzed but increasingly tempted to destroy their sister ships. The prison ship is held in particular contempt by some of the passengers, who argue that the men on that boat "made their choice" of lawlessness and may therefore be sacrificed -- in other words, it is best to kill them over there before they kill us over here. Unable to make the final fatal decision, the authorities on both boats abdicate responsibility and turn the detonators over to their passengers -- who ultimately refuse to kill out of fear. In the end, the simple recognition of shared humanity and the insistence on retaining one's own moral agency are shown to be the most heroic acts of all.

At the same time, however, Gotham City's moral leaders are undone. Dent is killed by Batman, who then convinces Gordon that, to preserve Gotham's "constitution" -- the public image of Dent and all he stood for -- Batman and all he stands for must instead accept culpability for Dent's crimes. Unilateral, lawless and unaccountable vigilantism are now publicly discredited. The final scenes of the film show Fox turning his back on and walking away from the machinery of surveillance while Batman flees into the night, chased by police and dogs. Gordon, surrounded by press and members of the public then grimly takes an axe to the bat-beacon, cutting off the state's recourse to vigilantism.

Without either Dent or Batman to intervene on their behalf, Gordon and all of Gotham -- and by extension, the audience -- are left to face a complex, dangerous and interconnected world as a community of individual moral agents, guided by Dent's principles of law, fairness and justice -- as well as their own reclaimed humanism. Even in the face of incomprehensible, implacable evil, The Dark Knight reminds us that these are our only anchors, for without them we betray both them and ourselves.

America may still have that chance. At the moment, however, its Constitution has been mauled, and politicians of both parties long ago surrendered their capacities to stop an illegal war and the looting of the nation's wealth. Now, however, The Dark Knight warns against both abandoning our principles out of fear, grief and hatred, as well as abdicating our moral agency to external authorities -- both of which comprised the hallmark moral syndrome of the years following 9/11.

That audiences and critics have embraced this film gives one hope that the days of uncritically turning to leaders promising to save us from our fears are at an end. As James Fallows says, the 9/11 era is over.

We are all Gothamites now.

Comments

[Michael Dudley]

(The following was received anonymously by the author via email, and posted here with the correspondent's permission)

I read your article on Alternet about how Batman is supposedly anti-war on terror, or for that matter, anti-war/unilateralism/power at all. I saw the movie and came away from it considering it the most conservative movie since Dirty Harry.

Consider the following:

-The dangers of befriending enemies for the sake of feeling better about a situation (the mob helping Joker)

-The hefty consequences of a foolish self-imposed guilt complex ("I'm no longer Batman anymore" and then Gotham suffers)

-Power being ugly or beautiful depending on who is holding it, in
absolute and not relative terms (the scene with the two boats and the
two detonators, Harvey's image to the city, Morgan Freeman's cell phone
camera and his breathtakingly Washingtonian/Cincinnatus-like
dismemberment of it once it served its purpose)

-Deception for the greater good (Turning over Harvey to the good face
rather than the bad one for the sake of Gotham's survival and Batman
taking the fall for him)

-Vengeance versus justice (Harvey becomes Two-Face)

-Rifts between friendship and loyalty to the mission (Batman and Gordon
putting the mission first, Two-Face putting friendship first, and
previously the "Dark Knight" of Gotham helping the "White Knight" of
Gotham)

-The limited sustainability of a strong-man rule like that of Batman's
versus that of a united community under the more legitimate GPD ("You
either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the
villain")

I suppose if it was true that Batman's "unilateralism" was the problem then he wouldn't have ended up being the main reason why Gotham was saved - regardless of his vilifying or not. In fact, the city's ire toward Batman toward the end might as well be a conservative feeling about America's role in the world - knowing you're good, but being hated by all for doing the heavy lifting. And Morgan Freeman would probably have just left the computer alone, since according to liberals, surveillance would never be justified ever, not even for one time.

(I replied to this email with a comment to the effect that I didn't understand how these depictions were particularly "conservative." The correspondent wrote back:)

Let me be more clear. The way that it was 'conservative' in terms of war and peace and not merely the preservations of tradition is particularly the Bruce Wayne scene where he says 'I am no longer Batman.' He puts away his suit, discards his equipment, and ignores Alfred's advice that his temper tantrum won't make anything better. He attempts to reconcile himself with society, only to see society destroying itself due to Batman's absence. The Police use the bat signal, but to no avail, so there's no hope of making anything better. Things don't get any better until the 'unlawful vigilante' Batman shelves his guilt and returns to once again fight crime.

This is a major, unmistakable stab at modern Western leftism. The basis of leftism's global views in Western civilization is that we are bad, and we do bad things, therefore to make things better, we should act less and allow the other mechanisms of the world to do their work, and hopefully things will be made better by other cultures who do not share the sins and flaws of ours. The right's criticism towards this is that any lessening of American power, unilateral or not, will lead to more chaos in the world by those who do not share the same value system that the West does. This scene where Bruce Wayne goes through the self-imposed guilt complex causing Gotham more pain than it had when he was present must certainly be a parallel to the Iraq dilemma, or a stab at increasing isolationist tendencies in society today. There is simply no way to look at this scene in an apolitical lens, at least not in the times we are living in.

There is also the theme that 'you either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.' But Batman doesn't allow this to cloud his judgment in the end, realizing that either what has to be done has to be done, or the Joker wins.

I consider myself a moderate conservative, and I think it's pretty trite of you to talk about 'Bush and co.' Come on. That's so 2004 and you know it. Who's 'co' now? Gates? Rice? Mukasey? The current 'Bush and co' is watered down and is nothing like Bush's first term, where so many people like yourself said that Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Perle were part of some cabal to control the Bush Admin. to their own ends. What happened instead is that all those people retired, and the presidency has term limits. So spare me the alarmism.

If you want to track assaults on the U.S. constitution, you would do better to examine the American political left. I count four amendments in the Bill of Rights they want to do away with completely. The first amendment, by limiting talk radio and classifying anything they want "hate speech" and thus illegal; The second amendment, by declaring it extinct through pure politics and not interpretation; and the ninth and tenth amendments, which specifically grant state governments certain rights. Given the recent decision in Louisiana pushed through by liberal judges on the Supreme Court, it's not hard to see that the people bringing America tyranny are those one the political left, not the right. The political movement with an agenda to get judges in the Supreme Court to 'modify' the constitution is not the right, but the left and I am fairly certain we will see my words vindicated someday. Perhaps Bush Derangement Syndrome prevents Canadians from seeing this now, but if they were to put that aside and do a close examination of how both political sides in America view the constitution, it seems impossible that someone could say the 'right' is more dangerous to the constitution than the left simply because of its support of the Patriot Act and it's refusal to support detainee rights for non-citizens. Those are undeniably national security based stances, as opposed to the left's stances on the constitution, which are purely political and ideological.

If you want to debate the legitimacy of wartime actions, that is another story. But what we know is that America's first three presidents were all founding fathers, and all of them enacted some sort of short-term abridge to liberty for the sake of security. Jefferson also did not pursue a declaration of war to fight the Barbary wars, a fact that kind of stares down all the Ron Paul rebels who claim that it's "illegal" to fight a war without a declaration. These actions, despite what may be found on brainyquote, are more or less a signature by the founding fathers onto the idea that the Constitution is not a suicide pact. It is regrettable, however, that the label 'unconstitutional' is now simply just a whip that is cracked toward anyone who does not agree with another's views, all thanks to the Ron Paul phenomenon, a gang of 18-24 year olds who probably don't even have a copy of their country's most important document.

We can debate the legitimacy of war as a response to terrorism to kingdom come as many have done over the past 7 years, but for me, I don't feel it's necessary, because we have already seen what the domestic crime model of anti-terrorism is - it catches terrorists after the targets are blown up. The current policy, even if you disagree with it, has caught or killed terrorists before they could act. It would not be a 'tougher' response to simply sit in ones borders and do nothing about the havens which some of these groups operate in, and despite James Fallows, it seems that neither candidate in the 2008 election is willing to go back to that domestic crime model.

[Tom from Virginia Beach]

"Batman and the "End of 9/11": Overcoming America's Dark Night in Gotham City"

Michael - Totally awesome awesome article!! Everyone who has watched the Dark Knight should read it. Half of the people in America are still not able to see the big picture. The big picture is we have gone against the core values that we have cherished over the last 200 years. It's the laws and ideas written in the Constitution that make us great. Unlike the dark knight, we have thrown our principles in the garbage.

It's time for us to go back in the opposite direction with President Obama.