PREVIEW: Backer Bonus Ep11 The Dark Knight, Part 2
Become a backer of Daniel or Jack to get exclusive access to a new bonus episode. Becoming a patron also brings access to all other bonus episodes. Since we spent the entirety of Bonus Episode 10 moaning about the technical shortcomings of The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan's 2008 Batman vs the Joker movie, this time we - being who we are - felt the need to spend this episode moaning about the themes and politics and ideology of same. And so we did. Daniel's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper/posts Jack's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618&fan_landing=true Content Warnings. Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay independent. Patrons get exclusive access to one full extra episode a month. IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod Daniel's Twitter: @danieleharper Jack's Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_ IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1
IDSG bonus episodes are a regular extra just for Patreon backers of myself or Daniel.
Here's a preview of the new one.
You know, the whole thing of, like, we're listening in to everybody's calls.
Well, we're not storing it, so we're not really the bad guys.
But, you know, it's very clearly, I mean, it's about, like, the dragnets that were being done on people's phone calls in the US.
And by that measure around the world, by the US military, Intelligence apparatus, you know, and about those whole debates, which ran for years.
And like, basically, everybody just shrugged their shoulders when Obama was elected.
It was just like, well, I guess this is what we're doing now.
Yeah.
So, yeah, that's the thing.
Obama bequeathed the expanded programs to Trump.
Yeah.
And went after whistleblowers in like a brand new way, you know, during his term, you know, in various ways.
Yeah.
I mean, really use the, you know, some of the intelligence apparatus in ways that Bush never did.
I mean, believe me, do not let me defend George W. Bush ever for anything on this podcast or anywhere else.
That man was a fucking monster.
You know, one of the worst people of the 21st century.
Miles worse than Bush.
But there were definitely ways in which Obama, being the Liberal reformer being the one that we liked, got to do even more heinous shit just under the cloak of likability.
Yeah, sure.
Well, this is kind of a way back into the film because The plot and the concept is confused in the film, I think, because the ideology is confused.
What the film is actually saying about this is confused.
And I think what it's saying is confused because what it's doing is it's putting a kind of liberal gloss on neoconservative ideas and neoconservative propositions.
Obviously, the basic idea of sort of mass surveillance of the population Justified by, essentially, to boil it right down, by, you know, the extraordinary threat of terrorism.
That's what's happening in this.
You have the extraordinary threat of the Joker.
Extraordinary times, extraordinary threats.
Extraordinary threats call for extraordinary measures.
So you have to sacrifice a little bit of freedom and liberty in return for security.
This is the neoconservative argument, you know.
Yeah, sure.
You increase the the surveillance power of the state.
And, you know, if you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear.
That's that's the argument.
And that's essentially what what Batman is doing.
But at the same time, the text as a text is expressing and I think also trying to recuperate unease about that, because you have Lucius Fox there to raise the The unease, as I say, to raise the questions about it.
Lucius Fox says, this is wrong.
You know, it's too much power for one person to have.
I'll help you this once.
That's the key thing for me.
Just this one time.
Just this once and then I won't have anything to do with it.
I'll kill this baby, sir.
Yeah.
Just the one.
Only one, only one Omala, are we going to be?
Exactly, that's what I was going to say.
Yeah, that immediately cedes to the neoconservative position, because it's always just this once, there's always another Uh, we've got to do something.
And so just this once, you know, maybe last time it was a disaster, but don't live in the past.
There's this new situation.
We've got to do something now.
It's, you know, Gaddafi on his way to Benghazi.
Okay.
Iraq was a disaster, but what about, what do we do now?
So this time we, we, we have to do it again.
And it's always We've got to do something.
And it's always, this is an extraordinary threat.
And it's always justice once.
This is the way in which you get, essentially, this is the way in which you get liberal interventionism ideologically.
It's how you get liberal interventionism as a form of collaboration with neoconservatism, neoconservative imperialism.
Yeah.
So so the film through and I think what the film thinks it's doing, so to speak, is posing the question.
It thinks it's being sort of nuanced and complex and just posing these these naughty questions for people to ponder.
But and it does this repeatedly.
What it's actually doing is posing the question and then without realizing that it's doing it, or at least without admitting that it's doing it, it's just answering it in favor of authoritarian power.
Right.
Well, and there's there's a there's a there's a kind of I don't want to say hidden, but, you know, something that I'd like to pull on right here.
There's always this idea that, you know, it's explicitly stated in the in the film, you know, that, you know, Lucius Fox says, you know, no man should have this power.
I'm going to say no person, but it's like no man.
There's a clear gender thing that always goes underneath these things.
Right.
Which we talked about a bit in the last one about Maggie Gyllenhaal being like just asked to do nothing effectively.
Before being classically fringed.
Before being murdered.
Right.
Yeah.
No.
Yeah.
No.
But there's always this, there's this thing of like, no man should have this power.
No man can be responsible with it.
And Bruce Wayne says, well, that's why I gave it to you is, you know, because, you know, the real men of character can, can do this properly and know how to be limited in their use of it.
And ultimately, you know, this is not there.
It's not a structural problem in that we are able to build these things and we choose to build them.
We have no accountability.
To anyone around us, it's, you know, ultimately the problem with the Joker isn't that the Joker has the abilities that he does, or the problem with Batman is not that he has the abilities that he does.
The problem is that Batman isn't good enough to exercise it properly.
And the Joker is, you know, evil and chaotic and, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
The issue is always like, if we put the power in the hands of the right individual, that individual can then speak For everyone else around them, and can exercise that even when the people will make the quote-unquote wrong decision, right?
And you get that, you know, kind of over and over again.
There's this, just, I mean, very briefly, the moment with Tiny Lister, who's the African American man, the convict in the ferry boat sequence, you know.
Who, you know, comes up and he's, Tiny Lister is one of my favorite, like, he's now deceased, but he's one of my favorite character actors.
He's the president of the United States, or the president of the world, in The Fifth Element, and he has a great part in, like, a small but great part in Jackie Brown.
I mean, he's just a great character actor.
So, like, he shows up and he's, you know, like, taller, a head taller than everyone around him.
And he's this tough black criminal convict who's got, you know, tattoos and a clue of the super violent man.
And, you know, you've got, you know, a minute before, you know, you've got to either blow the other boat up or else, you know, and then he says, I'm going to do the thing you should have done 10 minutes ago.
Yeah.
Picks it up and says, you can tell him I forced it off of you with like 300 people surrounding them.
We can all testify, but you know, you can tell him I forced you, whatever.
And then he like throws it out of the boat.
And so like the idea, the thing that we're supposed to get is like, you know, this convict, he looked big and black and scary, but really we're not racist.
He's a really, he was a good man.
Ultimately, he was a better man.
Then the, you know, liberal elitists over on the other boat who were very willing to, by a vote of three to one, were totally willing to blow up the convicts, right?
But couldn't do it for, you know.
The film is so, you know, sucking its own massive progressive cock, isn't it?
Absolutely, absolutely.
But the whole thing is like, You know, despite what he looks like, he personally had the moral metal to make the right decision, as opposed to acknowledging that the issue here is this sort of like systemic problem that these kinds of situations don't exist in real life in this way.
And if they did, it would be because there was a structural issue that forced it to be this way.
And ultimately the way we solve the trolley problem is to not have the trolley have that capability, right?
We enforce safety standards on the trolley tracks, you know, like that's how we solve the problem and like forcing us down the road of like having to make that decision because ultimately it is Both choices are bad because we're not thinking of it on a systemic level.
Sorry, again, not to get too deep in my own ass on that, but this is kind of the fundamental thing that we run into over and over again in a lot of these movies.
But I think it's very, very clear here that Aaron Eckhart, Harvey Dent is the great hero.
And if he had just been able to be the DA, he could have solved all of these problems because he's the golden boy.
Et cetera, et cetera.
Right.
And the real tragedy of the film is that the Joker was so evil that he even managed to drag down this man of gold, you know?
Yeah.
And it's always about, like, if you put the right person in charge, that's ultimately how you're going to solve large social problems.
And this is, you know, very common in these things.
I mean, I'm not I don't want to, you know, tar only the Dark Knight does this, but it's very, very overt here.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, some things to come back to Morgan Freeman.
The film really has its thumb on the scales casting Morgan Freeman because, you know, it's Morgan Freeman and he's got that voice and he's got that those eyes, twinkly eyes and etc, etc.
And, you know, he's cast as like the ultimate moral authority that God, you know, ultimately, you know, he's the check on Bruce Wayne's power.
And Bruce Wayne is because Bruce Wayne is fundamentally a good guy.
He's willing to amass this gigantic authoritarian system of surveillance.
But he's also willing, you know, like Cincinnati's to to give it up because he cedes to the moral argument of of the even better man.
And of course, you know, Lucius Fox, The ultimate voice of moral authority and sanctity.
He is a corporate CEO.
Let's not forget that, you know.
The head of a massive corporation.
He accepted that role reluctantly, Jack.
If you remember Batman Begins, he's like, no, I can't possibly.
I just want to sit in my lab and do the thing, you know.
Again, it's the right person.
You find the person that doesn't want the job and you get them to do the job.
And then suddenly the system works beautifully.
And with the thing on the boats, you were saying, you know, these situations don't exist in real life.
And of course, situations like that don't exist in real life.
But of course, over the last year or so, we have seen a situation where we as a society hasn't been this stark and concentrated choice, like the choice that the Joker presents people with in the film.
But we have We've been faced with a choice, you know, about who do we prioritize?
And, you know, people in prison, which of course is fundamentally, sorry, disproportionately people of color because of institutionalized racism and systematic race-based inequality, they were just basically left to die.
COVID ran rampant through the prison system.
And so, you know, in the real world, there was none of this, oh, well, fundamentally people
