(via thisrecording)
I don’t completeley agree with this takedown. However, it certainly raises some interesting points about the film as pro-Dubya allegory. I think the point that it misses, however, is that the film isn’t necessarily designed to be read as a work where the good guys win. The good guys stem the tide of chaos (which their own good intentions helped set off) at the price of their own souls and the bad guys win a few converts. The fundamental victory in the story is not that the joker is captured (How many of his recruits, I wonder, are standing down or haven’t hit the streets yet?). The victory is that the citizens in the boats don’t blow each other up. It speaks to the desire in the audience to believe that maybe we are better than this, maybe we do deserve heroes who aren’t sociopaths and who don’t rig the games they claim to play on our behalf. The appeal of the Batman myth lies largeley in the fact that, underneath the armor and gadgets, he’s an ordinary human. The thing that makes The Dark Knight great, then, is that it’s key victory is one where the ordinary humans, none of them even so much as named, refuse to kill each other. The Joker and Batman deserve each other. However, the possibility that I love the movie for leaving open is that the people in the boats might not deserve either one of them.
I’m not saying he fails to make good points. All I’m saying is that I enjoyed the film, and that his final two paragraphs remind me that film criticism is not only the pinnacle of the old adage of “those who can’t, teach,” and that you apparently have to be a joyless bastard to be a semi-professional analyst of the most possibly joyous art form.
or you could always be a film critic because you can find the minutae in any film, even something that was supposed to be a passed off comic flick like TDK.
i still dislike n+1 though.