Abstract
Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy concluded Batman’s gradual ascent over Superman as America’s most popular superhero. Superman, an assimilated alien, reflected the confidence in American values that characterized the Cold War era. Batman, an alienated citizen, personifies the post-Cold War mood, marked increasingly by unease and anxiety. Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy refashions Batman for our era of “globalization”—an age where the link between truth and justice seems tenuous but the capacity to renegotiate that relationship through politics seems beyond reach. But it also suggests the limits of Batman’s crusade for “justice” without politics.
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Notes
- 1.
Bradley J. Birzer, “Heroism and Realism in Christopher Nolan’s Batman,” The American Conservative. January 8, 2018. https://www.theamericanconservative.com/archive/januaryfebruary-2018/
- 2.
David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy, (New York, Melville House, 2015), 207.
- 3.
Birzer, “Heroism and Realism.”
- 4.
Ibid. Birzer continues: “And there were no antiheroes in that cultural fare, focused on the daunting challenge of extending the essence of Western civilization to those forbidding and often dangerous lands of the Rocky Mountains and beyond.”
- 5.
Graeber, Utopia, 211.
- 6.
Herein, The Dark Knight refers to Christopher Nolan’s cinematic rendition of Batman. When referring to a particular film in Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, the full title is used. “Batman” refers to the fictional universe and mythos associated with the DC Comics franchise. “Batman” and “Dark Knight” refer interchangeably to the fictional character of Batman.
- 7.
Ibid.
- 8.
Ibid., 219. Graeber continues: “For the Left, imagination, creativity, by extension production, the power to bring new things and new social arrangements into being, is always to be celebrated. It is the source of all real value in the world. For the Right, it is dangerous; ultimately, evil. The urge to create is also a destructive urge. This kind of sensibility was rife in the popular Freudianism of the day: where the Id was the motor of the psyche, but also amoral; if really unleashed, it would lead to an orgy of destruction.”
- 9.
Ibid., 217.
- 10.
Ibid., 222.
- 11.
Birzer, “Heroism and Realism.”
- 12.
Ibid.
- 13.
Ibid.
- 14.
Graeber, Utopia, 223.
- 15.
Umberto Eco, “The Myth of Superman,” Diacritics 2, No. 1 (1972): 22.
- 16.
Bill Finger, Detective Comics, No. 33, (New York, DC Comics, 1939), 2.
- 17.
Here I refer to corrective justice rather than distributive justice.
- 18.
Quentin Skinner, “The State,” in Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Anthology, edited by Robert E. Goodin and Philip Pettit, (Malden, MA, Blackwell, 2006), 10.
- 19.
Marcel Henaff, The Price of Truth: Gift, Money and Philosophy, trans. by Jean-Louis Morhange and Anne-Marie Feenberg-Dibon, (Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, 2010), 154.
- 20.
Skinner, “The State,” 13.
- 21.
Finger, Detective Comics, 2.
- 22.
Henaff, Price, 240.
- 23.
Maximilien Robespierre, “On the Principles of Political Morality that Should Guide the National Convention in the Domestic Administration of the Republic,” in Virtue and Terror, ed. by Jean Ducange and trans. by John Howe (Brooklyn, NY, Verso, 2007), 115.
- 24.
In France, judges assign penalties. In Anglo-American courts, juries assign penalties unless a defendant forgoes a jury trial.
- 25.
Charlie Jane Anders, “Nolan’s Batman Trilogy: A Unique Achievement in Myth-Making,” io9, July 20, 2012. https://io9.gizmodo.com/5927630/nolans-batman-trilogy-a-unique-achievement-in-myth-making
- 26.
Ibid.
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Baily, A.I. (2019). Justice Unmasked. In: Picariello, D. (eds) Politics in Gotham. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05776-3_2
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