BATMAN!

Since everyone, everyone, everyone is blogging about how adverb-defyingly GOOD Batman the movie is, I would have pressured myself to differ. But, but, my blogger's honesty will not give in. Batman is a very good show. (I mean the Dark Knight.) (Spoilers ahead).

Good. Nolan is smart and savvy. Not completely, consistently so. His relative inexperience shows, I suppose, in the unnecessary audio dramaticisms in certain scenes. But there is no doubt that for someone who popularizes the dilemmas of ethics by making them an integral part of the understanding and enjoyment of the movie- from its own characters, to its implications for the audience, to the taunting means of engaging the audience itself, thereby in effect casting a mirror in its closeup shots of characters- there is little doubt that Nolan has read his canonical texts.

The movie's ethical and narrative approach is straightforward enough- we unanimously support and approve of Batman- this often in opposition to the people of Gotham City Therefore, politically placed as one of the hapless in Gotham but situationally privileged to obtain Batman's view of events, the movie can assert its points to its audience; cram out its insights in a clockwork manner.

For instance, the death of the woman as a turning point. It signals the irremediable shift from the personal to the political for Batman- he becomes the perfect political creature that the attorney Dent could never become. Dent needed a personal reward for political virtue which Batman was adept to living without. Therefore, the change in Dent. And the last straw for Batman; his 9/11 moment. Obviously, this in turn signals the shift from the focus of this superhero movie, and such movies perhaps in general, away from the personal issues of the hero to the political, and the universal, which the movie did, through the introduction of ethics, and personal/social order vs disorder.

If Batman had achieved an insight of social relevance, it could only have done so in such a fictional setting; through the beauty of superhero cinema that dispensed with the realisms of human abilities, leaving the viewer with few demands of conventional norms of human differentiation such as class. The fluidity and fragility of the upper class of Gotham is felt throughout in a way that cannot mirror the real world; this is possible due to the distortions in human ability assumed in the show. Without these fictions, the moral situations would have been difficult to imagine. The movie lends them both the weight and realism of real situations; rarely have real-world issues been made more pressing by a movie's analogies.

So. Now I suppose I know why Batman is a greater superhero than superman or spiderman.