The Politics of Batman

I haven't seen it yet, but I would like to remind everyone that it's a movie. About a guy who puts on a bat-shape rubber suit to fight crime against a guy who puts on face paint. I think ezra covered this ground eloquently last year when Transformers came out.

Comments

[Shock Mouse]

I find this overanalysis particularly silly when the movie outright tells you what it's philosophy is: there is a 5 minute discussion about how Batman is like a Tyrant elected by Rome, that sometimes saves the city and sometimes becomes Caeser. People from Batman to Gordon to Dent to the Joker continue to repeat this line of thought, including the explicit moral of the movie "Die and be a hero, or live long enough to be a villain."

Whether we agree with this moral, or whether art even has business telling the real world how to act, is up for debate. But the moral behind the movie is really damn explicit.

[Stephen]

But the moral behind the movie is really damn explicit.

You apparently don't have a deep yearning for your extremist political worldview to be validated by the people you claim, at every opportunity, to abhor.

[MR Bill]

We live in a time when there a 'legal theorists' of a Unitary Authority: by their measure, Caligula was merely exercising his 'unitary authority'. And we may read history and conclude that the tyrants or Augustus really didn't save Rome, just transformed it.
It's just nuts to try to piece out a political theory based on fiction, although it happens all the time. Scalia has referred to the show '24 Hours'. The "Green Lantern" theory of warfare is much in evidence.
I blame it on Reagan, mistaking his movies for WWII experience...
Although there was that 'little lady who wrote the book that started the great war'...