As the Bush era drags on, I seem to be developing an irrational hatred of summer blockbusters, those gas-guzzling, road-hogging, radio-blasting Hummers of the entertainment business. The fact that they get worse and worse and still make tons of money doesn’t say much for the national character. New York Times columnist Frank Rich recently conjured up an image of Americans flocking to the movies this summer to escape their woes, as if we were all dust bowl farmers hoping to banish the Great Depression from our thoughts with flickering images of Clark Gable and Mickey Mouse. But while our leaders are waging preemptive wars, torturing innocent people to death, tossing out habeas corpus, and gutting the Fourth Amendment, we probably don’t need to escape as much as the rest of the world needs to escape from us.
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The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan’s second installment in the rebooted Batman franchise, is the rare blockbuster that left me engaged and thoughtful instead of bored and bummed out. With Batman Begins (2005) Nolan shrewdly reconnected the masked superhero with his 1939 comic-book roots as a solitary, pissed-off, vaguely satanic vigilante. But the movie was too big a financial gamble to have much on its mind, aside from some psychobabble about “becoming the thing you fear the most.” Now that Warner Brothers has banked $372 million from Batman Begins, Nolan has a little more freedom to stick his neck out, and The Dark Knight achieves that unlikely alchemy when a piece of American pop culture looks deeply into the national psyche. Its moral dilemmas are perfectly fused with the amped-up action and outsize characters of a summer blockbuster, but they’re impossible to miss. Like all of us, the people of Gotham City have to protect themselves from evil without falling prey to it.
This infusion of 21st century politics makes Batman a more complicated screen hero than he’s ever been before. Only part of his might comes from his fighting skills; the other part comes from the titanic wealth and high-tech resources of Wayne Enterprises, which Wayne diverts to his secret crime-fighting project. Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman), the firm’s brilliant R&D man, comes up with all manner of cool gear for Batman, but even he balks when Wayne develops an information center that eavesdrops on every cell phone signal in Gotham. “That’s too much power for one man to have,” he tells Wayne, who doesn’t seem terribly bothered. (Patrick Leahy, one of the U.S. Senate’s most vocal opponents of telecom immunity, even turns up in a cameo, getting roughed up by the Joker at a swank fund-raiser).
Directed by Christopher Nolan Written by Jonathan and Christopher Nolan
With Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Aaron Eckhart, Michael Caine, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Gary Oldman, and Morgan Freeman
