Batman

I watched 'The Dark Knight' and let me just say that it was an 'on-the-spot' decision. It is not because of the million and one reasons listed by my friends to convince me that it is a must-watch movie or how every review of this movie never fail to mention it is Heath's spectacular LAST performance as Joker, and much less because it is a superhero movie. I for one, if you were to discount my childhood naivete, do not like anything superhero. I do not know which of the two; acquiring super powers or the notion of some 'super' human saving the world sounds more absurd.Anyways, the point I am trying to make is that since I am dedicating my blog entry to a superhero movie, it must not have sucked too much.

Maybe I am thinking too much into things like how my boyfriend always says I do (and obviously he is not the only one) but I observed some pretty interesting things.

In my opinion, 9/11 brought about massive changes (to use a more ‘neutral’ word). For one, if words took part in popularity contests, the word ‘terrorists’ would probably come out tops in the post 9/11 era. Similarly, 1 and 9 would probably win the number popularity contest. Therefore it was no surprise that the word ‘terrorist’ came up in ‘The Dark Knight’ and there are no prizes for guessing who is the terrorist. Terrorism and the whole war against terror is pretty much Bush talk and I really want to pronounce all that bull. Any act of violence, 9/11 scale or not, cannot be de-politicised. In the media-centered world that we live in, 9/11 being a major media spectacle supplied the much needed political fuel for Bush to declare a war against Muslims. Of course, he sugar coated this so called just war using words like terrorism, safety and quoting the figures of innocent deaths in 9/11 and I guess it did help that everywhere in the world, all you see in the news,off-news were images of the hijacked plane crashing into the twin towers again and again. If one wants to really announce a war against terror, it would probably be the one against inequality. In a capitalistic world, the haves are constantly "terrorizing" the have-nots. One should look at figures tabulating the number of innocent deaths are there due to starvation in Africa, innocent deaths of people due to their inability to meet the barest of requirements for survival and that to me is true violence, violence way beyond the scale of 9/11.

The "heroes" of the show Harvey and Bruce, to me represented the US. Harvey plays this knight in shining armour of Gotham, full of promise to deliver the city from corrupt ruins but turns bad in the end listening to the evil joker. Gordon said," Joker has taken the best of us and turned him bad" (something like that) and to me it somehow sounds like the " The terrorist is the culprit for the rise in anti-US feelings". When Batman declared that he is going to be whatever Gotham needs, even if it means playing the bad guy, I cannot help but think that the US wants to portray themselves as the dark knight-telling people that even though the world no longer views them as the good guy, they are willing to play the bad guy for the "good" of the world.

The state of US relations with China, or to be more accurate, the state of US economic relations with China, or to be even more accurate, the state of US TRADE relations with China cannot be more explicit observable. In the movie, Bruce Wayne cautions Fox of Lau's company tremendous growth and in the end dissolved the partnership. Likewise, to me, the US seems to be cautioning the world of China's growth and portraying Lau as the baddie does seem to have a silent underlying equivalent meaning of China being the baddie. I cannot help but want to shout "sour grapes".

Another something I picked up from the movie: No one panics when everything goes according to plan but when just a small something goes wrong, the whole world goes topsy turvy. If one were to apply this to the order of the world, 9/11 would be that something that made the whole world go topsy-turvy. The world was supposed to be run smoothly with the US sitting comfortable at the altar but the jab from the planes threw them off the pedestal. First, there was slavery, then was cold war divde, now the US vs anti-US. Do we really need a system of oppression to have a 'peaceful' world?





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School has barely stared but procrastination has kicked into full swing.