Holy Hypocrisy, Batman

How many of you are excited about the new Batman movie this week? I’m getting there. Wasn’t sure I’d see the first showing but then I found myself Saturday night watching The Dark Knight in a friend’s backyard.

He has a whole projector set-up and so we disassembled it in his basement and put it back together outside. Slices of light that ran just over each side of the screen were finally stopped by a grove of evergreen trees in the background.

I hereby confidently predict that Dark Knight Rises will shatter the current sales record for opening day box office. The number to beat is just north of $91 million for the last Harry Potter flick. I’m guessing… $110 million.

This would be welcome news because Christopher Nolan is a big budget director who takes ideas seriously. That was obvious with Inception, but Dark Knight was no less of an idea driven movie, as I argued at the time in this Guardian piece.

The article, which pissed off a few cranky lefty Brits, made the case that the film was one long brief for hypocrisy. It got a little too bogged down with rehashing plot, so let me see if I can distill it for you here.

Hypocrisy derives from acting. The hypocrite pretends to be something that he is not, for the sake of projecting a certain appearance.

This can go a couple of ways. Some people pretend to be better than they are. We usually think of specifically these people as hypocrites. A smaller subset of people pretend to be worse. These people are also hypocrites but Mark Shea has suggested the term eupocrites (“good hypocrites”) as a way of distinguishing them. Both Batman and Bruce Wayne are eupocrites. Harvey Dent, when he is still a good guy, is a hypocrite.

The Joker is an anti-hypocrite. The dead serious purpose at the root of his murderous antics is to expose the polite contradictions that hold society together. And he thinks it’s worth burning all of the Gotham to the ground, if necessary, to do so.

There’s a lot more to the piece than that, so go read it, then see The Dark Knight, then get tickets for the new movie. For the midnight showing, if you want. I’ve just bought my tickets.