Batman's 'Dark Knight' Reflects Cheney Policy
Joker's Senseless, Endless Violence Echoes Al Qaeda
The thought of Vice President Dick Cheney in a
form-fitting bat costume might be too much for most people to bear. But
the concepts of security and danger presented in Christopher Nolan's
new Batman epic, "The Dark Knight," align so perfectly with those of
the Office of the Vice President that David Addington, Cheney's chief
of staff and former legal counsel, might be an uncredited script doctor.
Insofar as it's possible to view an action movie that had the biggest
three-day-opening in cinematic history as a comment on the current
national-security debate, "The Dark Knight" weighs in strongly on the
side of the Bush administration. Confronting the Joker, a nihilistic
enemy whose motives are both unexplained and beside the point, the
Batman faces his biggest dilemma yet: whether to abuse his power in
order to save Gotham City. Again and again in the movie, the Batman's
moral hand-wringing results in the deaths of innocents. Only by
becoming like the monster he must vanquish can Batman secure a victory
that even he understands is Pyrrhic.
Batman, the film's hero, played by Christian Bale, sees this as a
morally devastating paradox. Dick Cheney and his ideological allies in
the Bush administration, however, clearly view this as a righteous
challenge. Cheney, Addington, Donald Rumsfeld, Alberto Gonzales, John
Yoo, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith and others can go to to this sixth
Batman movie to see, in the Joker, as played by Heath Ledger, a perfect
reflection of their view of Al Qaeda. He presents an enemy unbounded by
any scruple; striking out for no rational reason; hell-bent on causing
civilization-threatening destruction, and emboldened by any
adversaries' restraint.
President George W. Bush, as Jane Mayer of The New Yorker writes in her
recent book "The Dark Side," believed that the problem facing the U.S.
was that Osama bin Laden "didn't feel threatened" by it. Attempting to
understand Al Qaeda in order to confront it on its own terms was the
stuff of the weak and the unsure -- part of the problem, in other
words. The Bush administration instead set out, in a morally Manichean
way, to ensure that the U.S. became as fearsome as possible.
When last Nolan left the caped crusader -- in 2003's "Batman Begins" --
playboy Bruce Wayne's menacing alter ego had begun to strike fear in
the hearts of both the criminal underworld and the hopelessly corrupt
power brokers of Gotham City. The structural problems of Gotham are
exacerbated by punchable villains -- all stand-ins for fear. But the
Batman was an iron will refusing to bend to fear, a symbol of hope
emerging from the darkness, a predator upon those who prey upon the
innocent. He struck an alliance with straight-shooting police
lieutenant Jim Gordon based on their mutual incorruptibility.
[NB: Many 'Dark Knight' spoilers follow.]
"The Dark Knight" all but annihilates the premises of "Batman Begins."
In addition to the avarice of Gotham, Batman finds himself in battle
with a remorseless psychotic, the Joker. It is immediately clear that
the Joker is playing a far different game than the Batman ever
imagined. He kills erstwhile allies for pleasure, and in an exquisite
performance by the late Ledger, enjoys a sexual frisson from shattering
other people's lives. But the Joker's true motives are unexplained,
unlike those of all previous comic-book villains. He tells his victims
a story of his past abuse he suffered, but offers many permutations --
sometimes he says his father cut his face into a gruesome smile, other
times he says he did it himself -- as if to underscore the foolishness
of looking to the Joker as a reliable narrator. "Some men," says
Batman's butler Alfred, the moral center of Bruce Wayne's universe,
"just want to see the world burn."
Batman is powerless against such a villain. Faced with opportunities to
kill the Joker, Batman refuses to sacrifice his moral code -- something
the Joker exploits. Each time the Batman restrains himself, the Joker
manipulates him into making choices that result in greater
catastrophes. Most awful are the death of Rachel Dawes, Wayne's love
interest; and the related mutilation of Harvey Dent, the pure-of-heart
district attorney and symbol of Gotham's rebirth. Yet, each time, the
Joker tells the Batman that the key to beating him is to become as
nihilistic as he is.
That, in the final analysis, is what the Joker is really interested in:
to deprive Gotham of its hero, its hope, and its soul. Batman, in other
words, must "work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. We've
got to spend time in the shadows."
That quote, of course, is Dick Cheney's only explicit statement of purpose
to the American people about where he thought U.S. foreign policy
needed to go in the post-9/11 world, delivered on "Meet the Press" on
Sept. 16, 2001.
In the wake of that statement, Cheney and his allies created an
unprecedented architecture of institutionalized abuse. The CIA would
possess the power to kidnap suspected terrorists around the world, hold
them indefinitely in undisclosed detention facilities -- or hand them
over to partner intelligence services that use torture -- and torture
them in the name of intelligence gathering. The Pentagon would enter
the detentions business at Guantanamo Bay, freed of its obligations to
abide by the Geneva Conventions, and would take the leading role in
foreign policy by prosecuting "pre-emptive" wars of aggression and
occupation. The National Security Agency, in violation of the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act, would wiretap the communications of U.S.
persons without warrants.
Underlying these actions is a certain conception of the danger this is
designed to confront. That danger is formless, limitless,
uncontainable. Viewing civilization as inherently soft and vulnerable,
it seeks to find restraint and punish the restrainer. Its motives, and
even its capabilities, are less important than its desires for future
disaster. Erring on the side of caution is the surest path to
annihilation.
Such a threat creates an awful burden on those entrusted to protect
others. "When Cheney spoke about it on national television a few days
after the attacks," writes Ron Suskind, in his surprisingly sympathetic
book explicating Cheney's weltanschauung, "The One Percent Doctrine,"
"he had given it a note of recognition -- this is what we must do,
where we must live, like it or not."
That recognition is how Batman attempts to square his moral circle. He
creates a surveillance technology that gives him limitless power,
something that horrifies his ally Lucius Fox, and vows to destroy it
after its first use. (In the comics, it's known as the Brother Eye,
and it leads to disaster.) Only by abusing the trust of Gotham City can
Batman redeem it. But through it all, he reassures himself -- at least
implicitly -- that his awareness of his betrayal is what separates him
from the Joker: intentions. It is this, and not consequences, that
matter here. As part of his burden, he recognizes that he has become an
outlaw, and accepts the ensuing persecution from the Gotham Police
Department.
In so doing, Nolan's version of Batman is motivated by moral
philosopher Michael Walzer's "dirty hands" argument. Walzer grappled
with the problems on display in "The Dark Knight" and proposed,
in an influential 1973 essay, that the key to engaging in morally
dubious activities, like torture, during times of emergency is to
acknowledge their heinousness and, once the emergency passes, accept
legal sanction for the burden of saving the world.
One problem with Walzer's argument, as its many critics have noted, is
that the results are still horrific -- torture, indefinite detention,
assassination and other such practices incompatible with civilization.
Another is that it presumes that once unlimited authorities are handed
to an individual, that person can be trusted to relinquish them -- or
even to determine, contrary to his or her interest, that the emergency
has passed.
In the world of comic, that's easy. Batman is Batman -- he's
conflicted, sure, but he's a hero. That's why in both movies, little
children -- fellow incorruptibles -- are the only ones who neither fear
nor hate him: they can see him as he sees himself.
But in the real world, this concept is ludicrous and anti-American.
First, it presumes an absurd omnipotence that the Cheneys of the world
can even tell who is and who isn't a real threat -- a proposition
shattered by the unreality of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass
destruction and ties to Al Qaeda in 2003.
Second, it presumes that the emergency will pass at some point, though
Cheney and his allies have repeatedly said they view it as open-ended
and generational. In testimony
earlier this month to a House panel, Addington hectored members of
Congress for, in his view, suggesting that the danger from Al Qaeda had
somehow diminished after seven years of the war on terrorism. Former
Defense Secretary Rumsfeld famously dubbed it "The Long War."
Third, it gives Al Qaeda exactly what it wants -- open-ended wars of
occupation that deplete U.S. military and financial resources, increase
Muslim discontent at U.S. policy and, ultimately, makes the the world a
more dangerous place.
In "The Dark Knight Returns," the heralded 1986 graphic novel about retirement-age Batman,
the writer Frank Miller offers another explanation for the Batman's
behavior: he's a psychologically unhealthy man who cannot control
himself, and masquerades his obsessions as a pursuit of justice.
Whether Nolan will mine that storyline in a third movie remains to be
seen. Similarly, whether Cheney possesses the same degree of
self-awareness as to who he is and what he has done to America remains,
at the least, subject to debate.
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