Big Batman Weekend

Well, Batman blew the doors off all the records this weekend. $155 million in the opening weekend put it atop of Spiderman 3, which previously held the spot for highest gross in an opening weekend, and already puts the Batman sequel at 75% of the predecessor, Batman Begins, entire reveues after only a few days. With very little else on the summer horizon, this is most likely to be a big movie. And for basic, popcorn intensive summer blockbuster material, the movie was complex, serious, and tragic. Doug Jones argues that it's basically propoganda for imperialism. Maybe, though he omits Batman's unwillingness to make wiretapping a permanent Batcave policy when he tells Lucius Fox to do it only once, and then destroy the equipment. Nevertheless, I'm in a heated fight within my soul whether or not to cut out from work today at see it once again.

If you really want to see a movie that feels like propaganda for the war on terror, then check out seasons 1-2 of Battlestar Galactica. Wow. It's not just some abstract allegory, either. I'm saying, it reads like a play-by-play rehashing of the Bush administration, with the first two seasons being almost explicitly pro-Bush. My wife thinks I'm crazy, but when Gaius Baltar attacked President Rosyln for using fear of the Cylons recurring attack in her re-election campaign, he says she is trying to use fear tactics for her own political campaign. It's a pro-military, pro-executive branch story so far, in which the human race is under constant attack from a race of monotheist radicals.

I think these stories, like Batman, 24, and BSG are good for the public square. I think, though, that they do for one side of the war that conservatives have always criticized extremely liberalized stories of doing for the other side of the war. By giving a nuanced perspective of a pro-war perspective, and therefore humanizing it deeply, we can't just use our ideology's jingo phrases to attack. And it's much easier to be radical when you can view your opponents as dangerously naive warmongers, or dangerously naive pacifists.