Dark Knight for Conservatives

Andrew Klavan says the latest Batman movie takes a conservative viewpoint. Batman confronts the terrorists in the only terms they understand, and Batman is vilified for it. Sound familiar?

I have not seen “The Dark Knight” because the nearest theater is 50 miles away and I have to have a pretty good reason to make the trek. I do that for the Met Opera productions, but I can postpone seeing most Hollywood releases until Netflix makes them available. Of course, many Hollywood releases can be postponed indefinitely if not forever.

Klavan reiterates a point that we have taken up before (e.g., here and here): why does Hollywood insist on promoting a losing point of view – a view that promotes losing the war and that results in losing money?

[T]ime after time, left-wing films about the war on terror – films like “In The Valley of Elah,” “Rendition” and “Redacted” – which preach moral equivalence and advocate surrender, that disrespect the military and their mission, that seem unable to distinguish the difference between America and Islamo-fascism, have bombed more spectacularly than Operation Shock and Awe.

In contrast, “The Dark Knight” is making a fortune. Klavan also notes that Hollywood offers the conservative viewpoint only when it is disguised or sugar-coated in some way.

Why is it then that left-wingers feel free to make their films direct and realistic, whereas Hollywood conservatives have to put on a mask in order to speak what they know to be the truth? Why is it, indeed, that the conservative values that power our defense – values like morality, faith, self-sacrifice and the nobility of fighting for the right – only appear in fantasy or comic-inspired films like “300,” “Lord of the Rings,” “Narnia,” “Spiderman 3” and now “The Dark Knight”?

I think Chesterton came up with part of the answer quite a while back in Orthodoxy.

My first and last philosophy, that which I believe in with unbroken certainty, I learnt in the nursery. I generally learnt it from a nurse; that is, from the solemn and star-appointed priestess at once of democracy and tradition. The things I believed most then, the things I believe most now, are the things called fairy tales. They seem to me to be the entirely reasonable things. They are not fantasies: compared with them other things are fantastic. Compared with them religion and rationalism are both abnormal, though religion is abnormally right and rationalism abnormally wrong. Fairyland is nothing but the sunny country of common sense. It is not earth that judges heaven, but heaven that judges earth; so for me at least it was not earth that criticised elfland, but elfland that criticised the earth. I knew the magic beanstalk before I had tasted beans; I was sure of the Man in the Moon before I was certain of the moon.

When Hollywood makes a realistic film about the war on terror, the values vanish, and moral equivalence takes its place. As Chesterton would say, the rational approach is abnormally wrong.

Klavan concludes with what we all know but often choose to ignore: Doing what is right is difficult. And he highlights the distinction between those who recognize the moral complexity in doing right and those who merely profess an easy morality while doing nothing.

When heroes arise who take those difficult duties on themselves, it is tempting for the rest of us to turn our backs on them, to vilify them in order to protect our own appearance of righteousness. We prosecute and execrate the violent soldier or the cruel interrogator in order to parade ourselves as paragons of the peaceful values they preserve. As Gary Oldman’s Commissioner Gordon says of the hated and hunted Batman, “He has to run away – because we have to chase him.