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TechnoratiThomas de Zengotita, in his book Mediated: How the Media Shapes Your World and the Way You Live in It, argues that we are in the age of the twilight of the heroes. In a relativistic world, heroes begin to look arrogant. As de Zengotita notes, “Who do they think they are?” If everyone is “special” in his or her own way, why should anyone be “more special” than anyone else? Why should any other person’s morality trump my morality? What makes the great thinkers' thoughts so “great” anyway? One way to assure their death is, at every turn, to try to chop them down to size. To de Zengotita, this represents an attractive outcome. He believes that local heroes will come to replace great heroes. What he fails to understand, and what philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue understood completely, is that it is the culture’s stories of great heroes that inspire the actions of others. Take that inspiration away and the world is likely to look very different in a few short years.
In an early scene, a copycat Batman questions the right of the genuine article to fight crime while denying others the right to do the same. Batman has been successful in cleaning up the streets of Gotham. But when The Joker demands that the Batman be unmasked or else many people will die, in a heartbeat the citizens who have thrived under the Batman’s protection are screaming for his arrest. Heroes traditionally embody a sense of ideals that people, even if they cannot emulate them perfectly, still value. But in a relativistic world we find ourselves paradoxically wanting a hero, while simultaneously rejecting the morality that makes heroes possible.
Inexplicable Shock
In The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis described our current predicament well: “And all the time – such is the great tragi-comedy of our situation – we continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible...In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.”
"The Dark Knight" does our culture a great favor. It uses a popular media format, fictional film, to magnify our culture and reveal its unsettling end. The Joker is a type of Nietzschean Superman – a person whose word is law, and the undoing of all other laws. To those who would reject the notion of The Joker as the natural end state of moral relativism, what objection could be raised? Without any transcendent morality to which a culture can call upon to judge actions, we would be bereft of any means of calling those who would do evil into account. We would lack the vocabulary to even call their deeds evil.
But like Scrooge, visiting his own grave with the ghost of Christmas future, our culture's end is not yet etched in stone. "The Dark Knight" provides for us a cautionary tale, but not one entirely without hope. It is possible for our culture to tumble into anarchy and chaos. We can even choose to act surprised when it does. But no amount of exclamation will save us. The message of "The Dark Knight" is that each of us needs to respond to the challenge to be the kind of person who is committed to discovering the right thing, and then doing it – not furtively in the darkness – but fully in the light of day.
Marc T. Newman, PhD., is the president of MovieMinistry.com, an organization that provides sermon and teaching illustrations, Bible studies and discussion cards, drawn from popular film, and helps the Church use movies to reach out to others and connect with people. Dr. Newman is an associate professor in the School of Communication and the Arts at Regent University. Requests for media interviews, or reprints of this article, can be made to marc@movieministry.com.
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