| Popis: |
This Chapter argues that Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight ‘makes strange’ the traditional readings of the superhero genre discussed in Chapter 1, providing a critique of their underlying visions of legality. In particular, the film encompasses a reflection on the nature of law in what Giorgio Agamben refers to as the ‘state of exception’. It works through the different visions of legality and justice presented by each of the villains—the Joker’s conservative vision of law as founded on violence; Harvey ‘Two-Face’ Dent’s taking of a procedural form of justice in the toss of the coin—before making a particular claim: that Batman is a typology of Christ. This is not in the mode of sacrifice that the traditional saviour mode of the superhero encounters but is because of a specific refusal of the heroic framework and the hero-myth. That is, Batman’s concluding actions in The Dark Knight, ‘saving’ Dent, encompass a form of atonement and a Christological foregrounding of community based on trust and forgiveness. In this way, Batman’s actions are grounded in a form of compassion that does not seek a retributive justice but enact a form of preventative violence founded in love. |
