“Because superheroes stand in for failed institutions, they can assume the moral authority of those institutions and act on behalf of the State with force that falls well beyond ordinary legal and ethical boundaries.”
“But Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy proves to be an exception. The trilogy probes the question of what gives Bruce Wayne the moral authority to become Batman, an outlaw who is permitted to break the law “in the name of the law.” It’s a story of the tit-for-tat escalation of violence created when criminals and rule-bending authorities collide, which begins with vigilantism but ultimately leads to terrorism, impunity, and war. Remove the fantastic superhero elements and the high-concept action scenes, and what is left is a surprisingly complex exploration of the nature of war, justice, and authority in the postmodern era — an extended allegory of America and American leadership during the War on Terror.”
“Batman’s violence counters the violence of organized crime but raises the stakes by marrying it to a symbol for criminals to fear. The combination of violence and fear is only effective in reestablishing law and order, however, when they have the implicit endorsement of the justice system.”
“Publicly, of course, the police pursue the Batman as a criminal, but in secret the authorities work with him. Because of this tacit endorsement, we can’t think of the Batman’s activities as merely illegal. They are extralegal — he is an agent of the law working outside of the law.”
“Gotham retaliates not by purging itself of its corruption but by secretly relying on Batman to go even further outside the law to enforce order. This introduces to the landscape a previously unknown outside space, where actions are neither legal nor illegal — a new extralegal territory, provided it remains hidden, allows society’s political authority to act outside of its own rules in order to sustain those rules. But the territory, being new, is not fully understood by the people who act there.”
“Platonic ideals like liberty and democracy can’t speak for themselves, so power speaks on their behalf.”
“The Dark Knight turns the neoconservative ideology back on itself, revealing how merely opening up an extralegal territory of the Batman is enough to erode the moral authority that justifies not only Batman but also the justice system that uses him.”
“Increased surveillance and encroachment of privacy rights are often the earliest of the extreme measures taken in states of exception. At the eulogy for the police commissioner killed by the Joker, the mayor reminds the public, “vigilance is the price of safety.” This is a perversion of the famous maxim “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty” that neocons and pundits repeated to rally support for the conferral of new powers on authorities and new limits on civilian privacy rights under the Patriot Act. Replacing the word “liberty” with “safety” in such a jarring fashion forces the tradeoff to the forefront of our consciousness. It also brings to mind a statement attributed to Benjamin Franklin: “They who can give up liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.””
“Plato argued in the Republic that certain foundational myths, or “noble lies” (γενναῖον ψεῦδος, gennaion pseudos), were necessary in order for the members of society to set aside their individual interest and act in a way that orders and advances the community as a whole. Noble lies typically took the form of a belief in something that was either unknowable or demonstrably false, like a mythical national origin story or a privileged relationship to some ideal Truth or Justice.”
“The reason the Joker offers to end his reign of terror if the Batman turns himself in is because this unmasking will publicly expose the noble lie.”
“by making Batman the villain who killed the hero Harvey Dent, Gotham could pass the Dent Act, thereby capturing within the boundaries of law and order Batman’s formerly extralegal powers.”
“In the Dark Knight Rises, the question is posed again: who will fight for society’s survival? This time we get the right answer: the people. And that’s the meaning of the allegory of the Dark Knight trilogy. Whatever problems society has, the solutions are never to be found in some imagined “out there” where we can simultaneously hide the truth and hide from it. There is no outside we can escape to. No superheroes to save us or mythologies to shield us. If the system is broken, it only gets fixed from within. By us.”