The Ideal Anglo-American: Taking Batman Seriously
Knights against Mobsters
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I had considered writing a review of The Batman but I’m at a loss to say much of anything positive. Nor do I think the film will endure. So why talk about it at all?
Because there’s a lot to be said about its predecessor — the Dark Knight trilogy. There will be spoilers here but they should more accurately being called warnings. Don't bother with The Batman. The heuristic I now use is the following: Is this good or just expensively shot? The Batman is visually compelling but does it work emotionally? Or is it just another form of mass-produced pornography, consumed and quickly forgotten?
I did not believe “The Batman”. Its villains were oh so dated. Its victims so au courant — #StopAsianHate! Its heroes were either emo or politically correct. Jim Gordon and the mayor elect and cat woman are all uncompromising strong black Americans — just like all those strong black Americans who run the inner city of our major cities. OK. But the crime bosses? Why, they are all Italian but never Jewish and certainly not Chinese gangsters running a major city? Surely this is a fantasy. You know the new Hollywood rules: Never depict an Asian as anything other than a hero or a victim.
Much is made these days of large box offices and I wonder how much this is a reflection of jacked up prices. I paid $17 or so for a ticket at the local cinema. If you want to impress me with your box offices sales, charge a $1.
I think casting is where they went wrong. Vampiric Robert Pattinson of Twilight fame could never really compete with charming but disturbed Christian Bale, who came from American Psycho.
I turn often to the Nolan Batman franchise, far more often than I would care to admit. I used to think it was due to my childhood but I think it’s really because they have stood up to the times. I’m an adult and comfortably into my thirties, I tell myself, and yet in moments of despair I return to the Dark Knight or the Dark Knight Rises, which haven't aged at all.
Indeed when Clearview first came out, comparisons abounded between Lucius Fox’s listening devices and our facial recognition technology which had scrapped billions of photos. Our critics thought we had too much power and wanted the state to intervene. Some of these critics were well meaning but others were compromised by other actors. Always the way, I suppose.
Batman : [seeing the wall of monitors for the first time at the Applied Sciences division in Wayne Enterprises] Beautiful, isn't it?
Lucius Fox : Beautiful... unethical... dangerous. You've turned every cellphone in Gotham into a microphone.
Batman : And a high-frequency generator-receiver.
Lucius Fox : You took my sonar concept and applied it to every phone in the city. With half the city feeding you sonar, you can image all of Gotham. This is *wrong*.
Batman : I've gotta find this man, Lucius.
Lucius Fox : At what cost?
Batman : The database is null-key encrypted. It can only be accessed by one person.
Lucius Fox: This is too much power for one person.
Batman : That's why I gave it to you. Only you can use it.
Lucius Fox : Spying on 30 million people isn't part of my job description.
Read one way that scene is a critique of the Patriot Act and yet, read another way it’s a defense. The ambiguity is vintage Nolan. Was the Joker a more potent threat in the Batman universe than Saddam Hussein or al Qaeda is in our own? Obviously but Nolan lets our hero become a dark knight. Why, he’s not even a hero at all as the ending of The Dark Knight makes clear.
The Dark Knight explores the necessity of using these kinds of technologies to keep Americans safe. Batman exists in a Schmittian state of exemption and so does the sovereign. So does America.
When the Joker is apprehended Fox and Batman disable their new listening device, making us understand that sometimes extraordinary means have to be deployed in the interest of public safety. But what about the next Joker? Why leave yourself defenseless? Real life is a lot more complicated, as the latest Batman makes clear.
The latest Batman has another scene where Catwoman wears facial recognition enabled contact lenses when she infiltrates a blackmail ring of the who’s who of Gotham. Shades of Epstein?
We don’t want to have facial recognition but we sure love it in our movies. Don’t you dare use it to solve crimes, though! Don’t be like the heroes in our movies! You might violate the gangster’s privacy to drug deal in his own club!
Nolan’s Batman feels like that old WASP blue blood who signs up for a war. Bruce Wayne, with his gadgetry and investments in his beloved Gotham, smacks of John Hay Whitney, a patrician American who nevertheless joined the precursor to the CIA and became America’s first venture capitalist. Later he became Ambassador to the United Kingdom, which is sort of like the final WASP power broker form.
Yes, I turn often to the work of Nolan who remains, in my view, the bard of the Anglo-American alliance. His films are about so much more than they appear. It isn’t easy to do a blockbuster which makes you think but Nolan does it over and over again. I agree with Tom Shone in his 2020 book, The Nolan Variations: The Movies, Mysteries, and Marvels of Christopher Nolan.
Easy to enter, Nolan’s films are fiendishly difficult to exit, ramifying endlessly in your head afterward like plumes of ink in water. The film we have just seen cannot be unwatched. It isn’t even really over. In many ways, it has only just begin.
Apparently I’m not alone. Collectively Nolan’s films have grossed over $4.7 billion, making him the most financially successful British filmmaker.
I have some theories about what each film is about. (Then again, don’t we all?) His Dunkirk is really about Brexit while Interstellar is about the perils of failing to invest in the latest science to make life work here rather than among the stars. There’s Memento, the dangers of not knowing your history, and Tenet, about a British-American alliance to stop an impending environmental calamity.
I look forward to his film done without Warner Brothers, of course, which is about the Manhattan Project. Not at all a timely subject when we are at risk once more of nuking ourselves! Or when there’s a mad rush to get one up on one another in a never ending arm race.
Nolan’s departure from Warner Brothers heralded its turn toward a dangerous globalist mush, a turn prefigured by the sexual blackmail and compromising of its CEO, Kevin Tsujihara, by Australian billionaire fail son James Packer, Israeli spy Arnon Milchan and future Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin. I suspect that this gambit was done to remove Tsujihara altogether and to take over the billion dollar plus machine. The Lego Batman franchise (Mnuchin-produced) that most of the verbal passwords they use are "Iron Man Sucks” but one gets the feeling that it’s all fixed on some level.
Qui bono, of course. Or should I say Xi bono? The new book, Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy, argues that China has more or less taken over Hollywood and that that takeover is part of a large effort to control the cultural conversation.
As Warner Brothers was taken over by Chisrael — we lost some of the Anglo-American touches which made The Dark Knight trilogy work. It was far better — and more revelatory of the times — when there was a Chinese oligarch criminal running from Batman and Batman went all the way to Hong Kong to arrest him.
The Chinese are starting to learn how to run soft power initiatives and they’ve done it by taking over the Marvel and DC universes. Contrast that with the Russians who are seemingly out of favor everywhere. Try to boycott Russian products. It’s easy. Chinese? Well that’s interesting. What even is a product “Made in China” anyway when China puts so much money into venture capital firms?
In the waning days of Stan Lee’s life Lee worried about being taken advantage of, a process that ended with Israeli-American billionaire Ike Perlmutter ultimately taking over and then getting removed once Disney had its way. There are many rabbit holes to pursue with Perlmutter.
The Chinese are now cutting out the middle man through America and pitching their films direct while blocking out the Spider Mans of the world. (Spiderman, like Superman, is the Jewish super hero — neurotic as compared to foreign and omnicompetent.) Spiderman is not allowed in China now that Xi wants to keep out naughty influences.
If you look closely you’ll notice that they are doing the very same thing to Silicon Valley and that’s why so many of them have decamped to Miami. There is no need for them anymore. Good luck, Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the moral center of both the Marvel and DC is a man without powers (Iron Man and Batman). Both men, made newly relevant in our terrorist times, bend the rules to protect America. In our feudal time, a billionaire is really an oligarch but he might also be a knight. At least that’s the hope. We lack a knight’s code for billionaires. It’ll have to be written.
A friend of mine interviewed another friend of mine who happens to be a billionaire. The two of them, both being relatively young, discussed what we all discuss when we are honest with one another — pop culture and the memes. There’s a meme traveling around about Batman and billionaires and how there are so many billionaires and not one of them had decided to become Batman (or Iron Man for that matter.) My billionaire friend seemed upset and didn’t quite want to be a vigilante despite his admiration. He had too much respect for law and order.
But the Batman trope is one hat billionaires have played with, naturally. Erik Prince, Mike Goguen, and Elon Musk have all made a claim of being a real life Batman. Musk even appeared in Iron Man.
That, too, is an intellectual cul de sac.
I am not persuaded that we need billionaires to save us — only the best tools. Billionaires have a role to play in financing the development of this technology, to be sure, but relying on the wealthy alone to solve problems will never get very far. It’s up to each of us to work on important, meaningful things which make the world better off.
My full tech portfolio is necessarily somewhat opaque so you may have to trust me on this but I do think that it is possible to build technologies which objectively make the world a better place.
In the early days of Clearview I worked to solve crimes, as crazy as that sounds. I’d wake up in the morning, pour a cup of tea, and then search for whatever crime footage from local news. I’d run the photo through Clearview and then I’d call in the tip and sure enough, the perp would end up getting arrested. In one case I was even offered prize money but I declined. The job done well was its own reward.
I’ve always liked Q from James Bond. Or Alfred or Lucius Fox from the Batman world. Private men, quietly doing their duty without fanfare. They “have a job to do,” as Nolan put it in Dunkirk, in exploring the every day Brits who came across the Channel to rescue their boys.
Technology isn’t about addicting you to your seven deadly sins with Chinese cash as Jeffrey Epstein pal and coinvestor Reid Hoffman would have you believe but about quietly, patiently working in teams to do the right thing — to make life more tolerable, more livable.
Technology, in other words, is about making is so that you don’t need dark knights. but faithful servants.