Along with Alan Moore’s peerless Watchmen, what totally impressed me about The Dark Knight (and to be fair unsettled the pants off me) is how so much of the politics of the book is so hyper-relevant right now. Both the books came out in the Eighties, bang in the middle of the deeply divisive and paranoid reigns of Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr. in the
There are some unforgettable images in the book, like the intrusive TV media that makes it it’s business to pry everywhere. In the many violent clashes between the savage old Batman (Bruce Wayne’s pushing 60) and his adversaries, the TV and its vacuous talking heads reducing everything to talking points, jostling for that breaking news story. I was reminded of our own illustrious media coverage of the Mumbai attacks. The city slickers aren’t spared either. There’s one obnoxious minor character, an ad executive, who keeps cropping up throughout the narrative, doing and saying some heinous things and then saying he’s not to blame. Who’s to blame then? Why, the government, other people, minorities, everyone else. Again compare that to the urban protestors in many of our cities who’ve been threatening not to pay taxes and urging the government to bomb
Nor are the politicians spared either. There’s the caricature
But the scariest are the superheroes themselves. While the Batman is consumed with rage and frustration and acts like the creepy control freak vigilante he is, Superman has bought his peace with the repressive government by becoming a weapon of war, albeit one with a conscience. Alan Moore investigates a similar theme- and in many ways does it better- in The Watchmen, but here Miller is dealing with real, mainstream comic book heroes, which makes the book pretty cutting edge.
Finally there are some unforgettable images- of the Joker coming out of catatonia (a series of six panels where he sees the Batman on a TV screen, his expression changing from a bland, dead expression to the murderous grin we all know so well), of an aged Batman almost suffering from a cardiac arrest, of a nightmarish nuclear strike and finally a plane crashing into a skyscraper. Spooky.
1 comment:
Have you read Batman:Year One?
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