I’m really tired of the profundity of The Dark Knight, as described by the “critics” in our “media,” formerly known as The Press, as in “Who owns this press? How much will they charge to print what I want?”
The problem with The Dark Knight is, first, Frank Miller. Frank Miller is an oaf. That is, he “believes” (which, in kakaspeak, means “he has an opinion”) in the efficacy of violence, murder, torture, brutality — the whole Boy Scout oath, as revised for contemporary deployments of Boy Scouts to Baghdad and St Paul, Minnesota.
The actual problem with The Dark Knight, however, is that Batman is not a myth, it is a product, like Star Wars. Which is the “tradition” in which it follows — the tradition of the zillion-dollar B-movie intended to kill time spectacularly and make more zillions. That is the real and only “meaning” of The Dark Knight.
A myth is the distilled expression of the collective wisdom and impalpable understanding of a people and their civilization. Civilization is a prerequisite, and the problem with “American civilization” is that there isn’t any. Civilization takes a little bit longer than 516 years to create.
Further, we have precious little wisdom, none of it expressible in the money-making fashion of the spectacular. Christopher Nolan writes about “ambiguity” in the production notes for The Dark Knight, but ambiguity doesn’t make for meaning, unless it a meaning to begin with, and the ambiguity of Batman is simply a device, a teaser without a resolution, layered on like a coat of paint. The “meaning” here is injected in the mold of the DC Comics “character” — a cartoon character — the same way toothpaste fills a tube. And what squirts out of these movies when A. O. Scott and company squeeze them is a lot less useful than toothpaste, and not anywhere near as tasty.
At some point in the endless writings of Stephen King, the zillionaire hack refers to “the Frankenstein myth.” Frankenstein is a novel, and King’s comment is a complete misreading of it and of the mythical. But of course, our “culture” — which is not a culture, but an economy — also labors under the delusion that Stephen King has a profound understanding of evil. Read The Stand and you will find this understanding to consist largely of clichés from 1950s and 60s horror movies. The ability to generate frisson is not an understanding of evil. Not surprisingly, given King’s stature in our economy, we find zillions of Americans believing that al Qaeda knocked over the World Trade Center and punched a hole in the Pentagon because they are “evildoers.”
“Mr Holmes, they were the meticulous planning and hijacked airliners of a gigantic hound!”
Batman is a franchise, not a moral figure. All sorts of things can be read into the franchise. They have to be, because nothing can be read out of it. The key to meaning lies in meaning, not in vagueness (“ambiguity”) or confusion (“complexity”). The “morality” of Batman, like that of Star Wars, is the morality of commerce. If you want an example of that morality, consider the current depression we have entered in the last year — a depression triggered by greed and corruption, by lowlife businessmen calling their gambling “finance.” Batman and CDSs are about money, and nothing else; and the meaning of The Dark Knight is that it still has not displaced Star Wars as the top-grossing movie of “all time.” The key word there is gross. This stuff doesn’t mean shit. And I like Batman! (I also like barbeque, but it doesn’t mean anything either.)
To repeat: we do not have a culture or a society. We have an economy, and it is an economy of prostitution, of sensation and spectacle devoid of meaning. The American nation is a nation of whores, and the sooner we admit and accept this fact the sooner we’ll be on our way to a civilization. Not only are we whores, we’re bastard whores. We’re illegitimate. We’ve no inherent right to be here, in America. We stole America from the indigenes, and committed genocide in the course of the theft. Then, when we ran into the Pacific coastline, we committed imperialism, and we’ve been committing it ever since.
Q: What does Delta Force call Afghanistan? A: “Injun country.”
These are facts, not propositions in the kind of mouse-turd-slicing high school debate that the Republicant Party has thrived on since Richard Nixon exploited our Vietnam catastrophe into the White House in 1968. These propositions dont concern the debatable. They concern sin. Get it, Sarah? As in original sin, as in we are all born in sin, as in born on the fourth of July. The longer “Americans” — that is, white middle class people who derive their wealth and security from capitalism, together with those who lust to be like them — the longer such Americans deny these realities and cling to the delusion of their innocence, the crazier and crazier the economy gets and the more remote an “American civilization” becomes. The economy has gone crazy because it is an expression of this delusional denial, which is to say, an expression of our values.
And note in closing that an “American civilization” will not limit itself to what goes on in these United States, but will encompass America — North and South America.
is Elvis Presley passed out on the toilet from an overdose and dreaming of his experience of “In the Ghetto” as “a song with tremendous commercial potential.”