Look, I don't know. Maybe I am just wasting my breath. Maybe thousands before me have written about who our childhood heros really are. There are all those sarcastic lines out there in the culture since the 1960s belittling universities that grant advanced degrees for dissertations on comic books, so perhaps if I do a search of all those dissertations, I can relax and go on to another topic. Maybe it's already been said. And maybe the impulse to write about the latest Batman artifact, The Dark Knight Rises, grows out of the massacre of innocents that took place in that movie house in Colorado during a screening of the film. This story begins with my decison to go see the movie. I didn't go to be entertained since I don't find puerile, adolescent adventure films anything other than painfully long and boring. I went because I wanted to see what the heck is going on out there. By the time I had brushed off the seven-dollar popcorn crumbs, threw open the swinging doors and hit daylight, I knew I had to go into print on this one.
I thought back to the first of these Batman films that I had seen with my youngest son, then about nine years old. Every seat in the theater was filled, mostly by kids my son's age plus or minus a few years. Like many parents dutifully escorting a child to a de rigeur event, I enjoyed the inside jokes, the allusiveness of the set design, the campiness of a typical, post-modern cinema comic book aimed, I assumed, at the adults in the audience since most nine year-olds haven't yet gotten their liberal arts degrees. Yet, bereft of degrees as they may be, something happened at the end of the movie that frightened me because it proved to me they had gotten the real message while I was busy deconstructing the wall paper. Batman stands triumphant, god-like, atop a tall building while the night sky is illuminated by the projected image of the bat. In hoc signo vinces! No sooner did this tableau hit the screen than a guttural, visceral roar emerged from the gathered children. Dear God, these kids had been programmed! It was the kind of sound I associated with Hitler rallies or gatherings of some alternative quasi-religious cult. How had this happened?
Until going to see The Dark Knight Rises, I had not seen any of the other Batman films since the 1989 version I had attended with my son. Well, it is obvious that Hollywood has been hard at work keeping up with political currents over the last almost quarter century since then. The villain of TDKR is a Darth Vader simulacrum named Bane (a choice typical of the adolescent level of metaphor employed in the film) who is loosely patterned after a grungy Occupy Wall Street "terrorist." I guess the semiotics of Bruce Wayne in this context would have his nearest analogue in Michael Bloomberg, our billionaire, benevolent-despot Mayor. Actually, it would be impossible to list here all but a few of the quasi-literary allusions in TDKR, since just about everything--from the pagan chants of ersatz Carmina Burana to hokum Star Wars spiritualism and levitation--has been sunk into this production. It appears that snickering ivy league snobs, facing diminishing job opportunities in the post 2008 world, when they aren't extending the double-speak glossary for Republican politicians in Washington, are being employed as screenwriters to mess with the minds of our children. And this stuff is probably benign compared to what kids take in from video games and internet sites most adults (certainly this one) don't have a clue about.
If the years since Bush took office can be credited with one important contribution to our society, it is a blindingly bright transparency about who we really are. One by one, we are being stripped of our illusions. When the killings in Aurora took place, I am probably not alone in being reminded of H. Rap Brown's observation that "violence is as American as cherry pie." We didn't need Bush to teach us that lesson, but the suspension of our constitutional rights and the determination to make government synonymous with evil makes it a lot harder for some of us to overlook the fact that the comic book heros of our youth were basically vigilantes, not as raw as Rambo, Travis Bickle, Dirty Harry, or Charles Bronson's forgettably named Death Wish character, but who in their colorful, seemingly wholesome, other-worldly toon dimension were just as effective in getting across to us that you really can't count on government institutions like police departments to protect you from evil. In fact, you can't count on government for much of anything. True salvation comes from sources above and beyond the law.
(Which is not to say that we are not also drowning in TV cops who daily struggle against increasingly evil foes, but few would accuse even the typical Jerry Burkheimer fare, the most refined expression of the genre, of eliciting rapturous roars from their audience. Gloomy, not inspiring. The one toon cop who made it to the screen, the venerable Dick Tracy, for all the post-modern trappings of the 1990 film, could not even generate a Dick Tracy II. Interestingly, New York's finest are, after a considerable period of virtual entombment in TDKR, given their moment of glory in the film, but only after being released by our hero to take place in a full frontal assault on the Occupy Wall Street grunge-orists that depicts them as an army out of the period of Gladiator or Braveheart. I guess the writers wanted to keep the men in blue on board and thought they would enjoy the scene.)
TDKR's Bane succeeds in penetrating the New York Stock Exchange in a hail of bullets. When he has succeeded in his assault, he rises to announce that he has set the people free, put the people in power. He even establishes a court clearly meant to elicit both visually and thematically the court of Robespierre (lines from Dickens' Tale of Two Cities to follow later in the film). Having dispatched the evil empire, the right is now free to resume its apparently tireless attacks on the French Revolution, a revolution which did a bit more than spill some tea into Boston harbor.
The one saving grace in all this political stew would seem to be that--given the educational achievement of most American kids--they won't get any of the references. The danger is that the message will get through anyway. I don't want to be around when those enraptured roars I heard back in 1989 at the end of the first Batman epic are heard not in movie houses but in our streets.
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