The Dark Knight

I just got back from seeing the Dark Knight. It was far better than Hellboy 2, having the breadth, heft, and sense it lacked. A little too mythopoetic, but then that is what Batman is now. Even so, the final scene of voluntary sacrifice is new and powerful. Another remarkable display of dramatic reach in a genre of pure spectacle.

The Joker remains a frustrating embodiment of 20th century contradictions. Though I have not read the early Joker stories, it appears he was a murderer, but that Batman pursued him to the death. Though the Joker proved in later stories to survive each apparent death, Batman had still shown himself willing to fight it out to the only possible end, other than the commercially dull ending of state execution that capture would have meant. Then the comic book code set in and he only pulled capers, which only a highly confident society would consider reasonably repaid with death. After the CCA would have allowed him to be killed, those opinion-makers who are meant when people say "society changed its mind" had rejected the death penalty. From then on, Batman and the Joker have been entoiled in a bad 7th grade ethics question and a perpetual will-he-or-won't-he conflict between Batman's oath to defend the innocent and his inexplicable--except by the zeitgeist--unwillingness to kill off the chief threat to the innocent.

Batman should kill him. For that matter, any one of the policemen in the movie should shoot him on sight. Is it really so hard, so morally fraught, to kill someone who will, with perfect certainty, murder throughout the rest of his life? There is no slippery slope here; would it progress from permitting the killing of those who murder thousands to those who murder mere hundreds, and thence by degree until it was permitted to kill jaywalkers? The putative dilemma is only the boundless self-righteousness of an individual conscience satisfying itself at the expense of thousands. Of course it is just a story, but when it is repeated so many times to such success, it is hard not to think it has laid hold of some favorite delusion of the times. A time, after all, in which "Not in my name" passes for a meaningful, or even relevant, response to a war.