Colin Goh and Woo Yen Yen

The following was published in the Sunday Times on 27 July 2008:
Sunday Times 27 July 2008
George W. Bat?
by Colin Goh

Maybe it was because I’d just seen the Oscar-winning documentary, ‘Taxi to the Dark Side’, that my perception of the superhero blockbuster ‘The Dark Knight’ was a little coloured.

‘Taxi to the Dark Side’ is about an innocent Afghan taxi driver who was tortured to death by US forces at Bagram Air Base. The film then proceeds to question the efficacy of the Bush administration’s policy on torture and interrogation in their so-called war on terror.

Meanwhile, ‘The Dark Knight’ is about a lunatic terrorist and the extra-judicial measures taken to stop him.

Like every comic geek out there, I’d been dying to watch the latest Batman movie, and the advance buzz was certainly terrific. There is certainly much to be admired in ‘The Dark Knight’.  There were many highly inventive action sequences, two of which caused audible gasps from the audience on the night I went to see the film: one involved the jack-knifing of a truck, and the other, a simple pencil.

All the raves about the late Heath Ledger’s creepy re-imagining of the Joker are also completely justified. (Though I did keep waiting for him to tell Batman, “I wish I knew how to quit you.” C’mon, you tell me that two guys in fancy dress wrestling with each other isn’t a little, ahem, ‘Brokebat Mountain’.)

Christopher Nolan certainly deserves credit for taking a hoary old superhero franchise and taking it in a surprising direction. It’s become fairly standard for today’s superheroes to be saddled with some tragic baggage that audiences can empathise with: Spider-Man loses a loved one when he has a moral lapse, Iron Man questions his complicity in the military industrial complex, the Hulk has his Freudian moments, Superman realises he can never fit in, and the X-Men are persecuted for being “different”.  Nolan, however, goes the extra mile, and makes the entire film a commentary on America’s post-9/11 paranoia.

Don’t tell me it’s “just” a story. There are too many analogues between the film’s scenes and today’s headlines.  A nihilistic psychopath who, in the words of Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman), just wants “to watch the world burn” – Osama bin Joker, anybody?  A hero who breaches international law to apprehend a foreign national (our very own Chin Han, no less), uses excessive force to coerce information, employs wiretapping technology to eavesdrop on citizens, and is willing to take the bad press because he knows, deep down, that he’s right… did someone say “George W. Bat”?

To be fair, Nolan tries to present some nuance: Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman) does take Batman (Christian Bale) to task for his breach of civil liberties, and (spoiler alert) Bats is left at the end of the film with his girlfriend, reputation, and hopes of retiring all dead. Not a happy ending by any measure. But he’s still a hero, albeit an unfairly tarnished one.  And that’s problematic.

‘Taxi to the Dark Side’ and ‘The Dark Knight’ are both explorations of what to do when faced with the possibility of imminent, catastrophic attacks.

Supporters of the Bush administration have long used the hypothetical ticking time bomb scenario to justify breaching the Geneva Convention amongst other legal norms – what we Singaporeans would call a ‘boh pian’ scenario, i.e. there’s some joker out there about to kill people, so we all ‘boh pian’ have to break laws in order to stop him.

But what ‘Taxi’ shows is that this emotionally-appealing hypothetical is a smokescreen, distracting people from more fundamental and difficult questions about policy reform, whether to do with intelligence, economics, foreign relations or law. The fact is, Al Qaeda is not the Joker, we’re not living in a comic book world, and there are always choices.

I’m not usually an uptight tut-tutting type, but hearing the audience, who were mostly young people, cheer at the end of ‘Dark Knight’ did make me wonder what they were cheering for. Don’t misunderstand me – go ahead and see ‘The Dark Knight’, and let your kids see it too.  The film does raise many good questions, even if its answers are less than satisfactory.

But I think it’s important to also try to watch and read other more nuanced evaluations of the film’s fundamental premise, especially if we’re to avoid more failed policies that only breed more violence.  So I highly recommend watching films like ‘Taxi to the Dark Side’, ‘Standard Operating Procedure’ and ‘No End in Sight’. (Film distributors, please help!)

They’ll show that the better alternative to trusting dark knights is for all of us to shine a light.

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