Batman is Cheney?

Enough money and ink has been spent over that BatFlick, but now I get my say. I dug it. With some caveats.

Aside from the obvious, there is lots of interesting acting, especially when you superimpose previous roles on each actor.

Christian Bale is like Patrick Bateman had a final psychotic break into two people, the caddish yuppy and the self-righteous murdering maniac. Michael Caine is not just the stiff-upper-lip caretaker, but a cold-blooded colonial, like here (note the Burma story).

Morgan Freeman gets to play God again, but this time it's all-seeing God. A sort of "magical (technological) negro." Nestor Carbonell, in a smallish part as mayor Antonio Martinez Robert Garcia, is a combo of Richard Alpert and Antonio Villaraigosa.

Gary Oldman is oddly mild. No Sid, no Drexl Spivey, not even a little Count Dracula. But I guess with all the expressionistic performances, you need a little understatement for contrast. Maggie Gyllenhaal, alas, basically gets to be a moll, a touch of Secretary.

But there are lots of disturbing undercurrents in the movie. The Unapologetic Mexican makes a detailed and convincing case that the movie can be read as a justification of the War on Terror. I won't repeat the argument here, but it did hit a lot of points that nagged at me. Suffice it to say the movie has several actual ticking time bombs, torture (sans waterboarding) and Total Information Awareness.

The dizzying vertical vistas of Gotham and Hong Kong are really breathtaking, but in the latter, you have a clear extraordinary rendition. And what is up with Chinese becoming the villains du jour? Not just Fu Manchu stuff, but a sort of displacement of the 80s image of Japanese as financial yellow peril, a metastasized capitalism.

But I think, unlike TUM, that the movie doesn't entirely side with the righteousness of Batman's cause. The tragedy of the movie is how hard it is to not give in to fear, grief and desperation. I thought it was a meditation on the asymmetry of escalation (thanks, Chauncey) and how the powerful prefer to keep violence offstage, tip over into dehumanizing others at the slightest threat, how corruption is all about economic crisis.

To me, it doesn't just invoke post-9/11 NY and Iraq, but also Cauca, Zimbabwe, ICE raids and detentions, the Occupied Territories.

Comments

[chauncey devega]

thanks for the link.

good review by the way--it will be interesting how race will be read (or not) into the film. i actually saw a review which said that the joker was racist because he killed black people. a bit simple minded in my opinion, but there is something to the whiteness of clowns I will have to think about

[Caro]

Thanks for dropping by, Chauncey. Been digging your ghettonerd notes. I suspect the only people who'll read race into the movie are the people who read for race in all kinds of "texts."

As for the Joker, don't you think his whiteness is basically a reverse blackface? At the same time it's a mask meant to give him a new identity, it always calls attention to its artificiality and incompleteness (the way it's ragged and smears).

[chauncey devega]

It could also be the idea of "whiteness" as death which was alluded to by Dyer in his book White.

When I get a chance it would probably be productive to write a piece on the whiteness of death as applied in Batman