JHK reviews The Dark Knight

Dark (K)Night

After reading this you may know why people might say he's a cranky crank. Perhaps he is more interested in criticizing our political economy than in giving a review of The Dark Knight, and this affects his interpretation. (It makes one ask if he's ever seen a comic book superhero movie before. What would he think of Iron Man?) Or is there some merit to what he says?

By the way, forget about God here or anything that even remotely smacks of an oppositional notion to evil. All that's back on the cutting room floor somewhere (if it even got that far). And I say this as a non-religious person. But the absence of any possible idea of redemption for the human spirit is impressive. In the world of "the Batman," humanity at its very best is capable only of being confused about itself. This is perhaps an interesting new form of dramaturgy -- instead of good-versus-evil you only get befuddlement-versus-evil. Goodness has lost its way in the dark night of the American psyche, as might be understandable considering the nation of louts, liars, grifters, bullies, meth freaks, harpies, and tattooed creeps we have become. The best we can bring to this predicament is the low-grade pop therapy that passes for thinking nowadays in educated circles. Any consideration of the heroic is off the menu here. We can't ask that much of ourselves. It's too difficult to imagine. Meanwhile, The People -- that is, the citizens of Gotham City -- literally banish even the possibility of heroism from town at the end of the movie -- they take an axe to it! -- perhaps indicating that they deserve whatever befalls them or, shall I say, "us."

Compare it with Steven Greydanus's review:

Heroes may not be untarnished, but heroism is still possible. Good guys may bend or break the rules, but they may also be willing to fall on their swords for the greater good, to take a hit for something they believe in. A single quasi-messianic figure may inevitably let down those who put their hopes in him. Yet even when all seems lost, people may still do the right thing, taking their last recourse in prayer rather than in Nietzschean ruthlessness. It may be a mistake to believe in Harvey Dent. But I want to believe in the best of The Dark Knight, and back that against the darkness.

From JHK's post last week, The Coming Re-becoming:

The tattoo quotient among both men and women there is impressive. In the days when the Harmony Mill was built, only South Seas cannibals and sailors wore tattoos. You wonder: are tattoos now the only way left for this class of Americans to assert their selfhood? And what exactly are they proclaiming? I am a warrior. Or is it: I am a television (I display pictures, too) !? The expanding class of the poor-and-idle has been remarkably passive in the face of their dwindling prospects. Perhaps they passed the point years ago (a generation or two ago!) when there was any sense of sequential improvement for the family's station-in-life. The destiny of their everyday lives must seem totally beyond their control. They are subject to the fate of distant corporations who sell the staple corn-syrup byproducts and gasoline on which daily life is based. Where government is concerned, they are all potential victims of Katrina-ism, awaiting their own personal disaster.

And there's this 'gem':

Hopelessness infects this landscape like a miasma. Whatever young adults remain in these places are not thinking about a plausible future, only looking to complete their full array of tattoos and lose themselves in raptures of sex, methedrine, and video aggression.

Some accuse Kunstler and others of wanting the bad peak oil scenarios to happen, because they want one way of life to be replaced by another. It's not a wholly unfair criticism of Kunstler, though I think he would prefer a more pleasant transition.

The sclerosis of American life is shocking. If you go further north up the Hudson River, to Fort Edward and Hudson Falls, you'll see a nation that seems ready to crawl off and die. There, it appears too far gone to even put up a proxy fight on a video screen. Frankly, I don't want that version of America to survive -- the America of chain stores, and muscle cars, and grown men obsessed with video games, drugs, and pornography, and women decorated like cannibals, and the vast, crushing purposelessness of it all. I have no doubt we're heading into a convulsion that will wring much of this junk and dross into the backwaters of history. We're capable of being something better than this, of putting our time on earth to better use, including a more respectful treatment of the land we inhabit. This year and the next will be the years of letting go, and out of that we'll commence a re-becoming.

Kunstler just doesn't think we have what it takes to work for that sort of peaceful transition. Look at the presidential campaign--who is really discussing about the tough questions with the American people? Neither candidate. Those who are caught up in Obama adulation need to wake up and realize he's an empty suit.