On this episode of The Federalist Radio Hour, Federalist Publisher Ben Domenech joins Culture Editor Emily Jashinsky on the 13th anniversary of “The Dark Knight” to explain how the film is “one of the century’s greatest pieces of art” and analyze the parallels between situations in Gotham and the problems facing American society.
“This is a real grounded, real city, a real universe in which Batman is a fantastical element. He stands out as being something that’s very odd and uncharacteristic to the rest of the world,” Domenech said.
“I do not think it is an accident that some of the best superhero movies of the past two decades … are movies that tend to shrink down in terms of their size and do not at any point have a shining blue beam of light coming from the skies that’s going to destroy the planet. Instead, it’s much more grounded concerns about whether people live or die or crime that is happening within a cityscape. And that’s something that I think Nolan really wanted to do and he did it with a number of different characters that actually make Batman less of the main character of this story.”
“I thought what grounded the movie in a way that I hadn’t seen before…someone who is kind of caught between what they are allowed to do, what the law will allow them to do, and what they know they need to do. And that’s a tension that’s at the core of so many varieties of American film whether it be the Western or suspense movies or movies of the ’70s and the like. And that’s something that I think we really had not seen to this point within the realm of superhero films but I think we’ve seen it a lot since then,” Domenech said.
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