Batman is not charming. He isn’t popular, partly because he’s a zealot and partly because he doesn’t bother to explain himself to the press. He is independently wealthy, having spent years as the head of an industrial company. His methods are disturbing, his operations bathed in darkness. He is misunderstood, mistrusted, endlessly pursued by the attack dogs of the night. He is not a hero.
And he lives in an undisclosed location.
Isn’t it obvious? Batman is Dick Cheney with hair.
“The Dark Knight” and “Batman Begins” don’t ignore the dilemmas of realpolitik but plunge you into them. Unlike the “Spider-Man” or “Superman” movies or the Keaton/Kilmer/Clooney series of increasingly fey Batman extravaganzas, the two superb Christopher Nolan films stand up as drama for adults, not fantasy for middle schoolers.
The real-world parallels are everywhere. Start with the Joker, a man who is not interested in amassing a fortune or any other goal. The Joker takes hostages, blows up a hospital and scares civilians to turn them against Batman. He sends regular dispatches on his activities to TV news, which immensely aids his cause even as it criticizes Batman.
“Look what I did to this city with a few drums of gas and a couple of bullets,” the Joker says, bragging about the relative ease of being a terrorist in an open society in which anyone can walk into a hospital or drive a truck through a tunnel. The Joker shares al Qaeda’s taste in weaponry, activating an IED with a cell phone to blow up a police station and favoring blades over firearms. “Do you wanna know why I use a knife?” he says. “Guns are too quick. You can’t savor all the little emotions.” The calm, technocratic Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman) is to Batman what Colin Powell was to Dick Cheney – old colleagues with the same goals but major points of disagreement. Fox is cautious, unexcitable, reluctant to break any rules. “This is wrong,” he tells Batman. “Spying on 30 million people isn’t part of my job description.” At issue is Batman’s plan to track criminals by monitoring the signals from everyone’s cell phone, without their knowledge or permission from any authority. But the city is about to explode, and Batman has no time for red tape. So Fox, denouncing the surveillance as “unethical” and “dangerous,” threatens to resign.
Alfred (Michael Caine) is a bit like Batman’s Rumsfeld. Like Alfred, Rumsfeld showed the younger man the ropes (Cheney’s first big job was as assistant to Rumsfeld in the Nixon administration) then became his fiercely loyal employee (or yes man, depending on your point of view). Alfred tells a story about how he once hunted a bandit in the wilds of Burma. To catch him, Alfred says, “We burned the forest down.” Alfred’s role is to punch through his boss’s reluctance and encourage him to be extreme, even as citizens at a press conference wail, “Things are worse than ever.” They are singing from the Joker’s hymn to chaos. “They’ll cast you out like a leper,” he warns Batman.
Batman, the public thinks, should turn himself in. A harsh stance toward terrorists merely antagonizes them, enhances their recruiting and brings us down to their moral level, doesn’t it?
When Batman doubts himself, Alfred encourages him: “Endure, Master, endure. Take it. They’ll hate you for it but that’s the point of Batman. He can make the choice that no one else can make – the right choice.” As if shrugging off this year’s public-mood polls, Alfred says, “Things are always going to get worse before they get better.” There’s a weariness, a sense of a long war, that is central to “The Dark Knight.” Cops get mowed down in the movie, just as US soldiers get killed overseas, and Gotham begins to grasp at any option that seems like an alternative to endless conflict. Taking the fight to the enemy comes to seem hopelessly rigid. But Batman is insistent: “The Joker cannot win,” he declares.
Several times, the movie makes the case that only those who die young can truly be heroes. By hanging around (Cheney has worked in four different administrations) you automatically become a villain in the public eye. But the ability to take abuse without complaining defines Batman. He is content to lurk in the shadows getting blamed for everything while his boss, Commissioner Gordon, tries to manage all of the personalities in his department and provide a public face for Gotham crime-fighting. Smiling for the cameras doesn’t interest Batman. If people hate him, he’s okay with that. “He’s not being a hero,” Alfred says. “He’s being something more.” Someday President Obama is going to be standing on the White House roof projecting the Halliburton logo into the sky.