Posted by
Far_view on Friday, July 25, 2008 12:30:17 PM
Great,
great, great opinion piece
in the Wall Street Journal by Hollywood screenwriter Andrew Klavan
outlining how the storyline in the new Batman movie, "Dark Knight" is a
parable for the war on Islamic Terror. Some key bits from the piece:
"
Like
W (G.W. Bush), Batman is vilified and despised for confronting
terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes
has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency,
certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency
is past.
And
like W, Batman understands that there is no moral equivalence between a
free society -- in which people sometimes make the wrong choices -- and
a criminal sect bent on destruction. The former must be cherished even
in its moments of folly; the latter must be hounded to the gates of Hell."
and another:
"
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."
Klavan
also goes into some detail about why the Left leaning movies such as
"In the Valley of Elah" and "Rendition" have tanked at the box office
and movies with a conservative message such as "Dark Knight" and "300"
have done so well.
Wow... what a great opinion piece.