Page - 100 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 03/01

100 | Simon Philipp Born www.jrfm.eu 2017, 3/1, 75–104 in The Dark Knight (2008), Nolan demonstrates his deep passion for fiction- ality and storytelling as he exposes the duality of good and evil as a key rhetoric in the narrative of a society that uses these terms to justify its actions. On the surface, the Joker incarnates the enemy image of a terrorist, as he is represent- ed as a resourceful force of destruction that cannot be negotiated with, a mad man determined to watch the world burn. his real intensions, however, are to face Gotham’s inhabitants with their own viciousness, which primarily resides in their utilitarian ethics of “scheming”. for him, cops and criminals behave the same, for they are enslaved to the selfish object of their plan. In his sadistic games of life and death, he confronts the people of Gotham with the “logic of their scheming taken to its end point”, but also “provides an opportunity for them to break out of calculation”.60 so the Joker’s evil is actually the basis for the hero’s ethics. Ultimately, The Dark Knight (2008) is not about the nature of evil, but about the way it is fought by the good. Does Batman make the right decision? Are his means just? Reflecting America’s ongoing War on Terror, the movie refuses to give an unequivocal answer. instead, the movie implies a shift- ing, fluid moral universe where the characters embody contradictory, unstable positions.61 Because of this complexity, some interpreted the movie as praise for Bush’s conservative policies, where the boundaries of civil rights were pushed in order to “deal with an emergency”.62 Others, however, saw Batman’s use of torture and a problematic surveillance technology as critique of the Bush regime.63 from reactionary to subversive, the movie’s political message above all lies in “the blurring of boundaries” and “instability of oppositions”,64 favor- ing ambiguity over simplistic duality. tim Burton and Christopher Nolan persuasively question the clear separation of good and evil as well as their ontological statuses. they unmask them as ideological attributions often misused for propaganda, as makeshift explana- tory patterns for complex human behavior. Consequently, their Batman movies exhibit that the struggle between good and evil is fought not externally, but internally. Moving from the subject of morality to a broader scale, the dispute between contrary principles articulates the antagonistic tendencies in the in- dividual, which are constantly fighting.65 There the fictional representations of good and evil function as interchangeable metaphors for the many dichotomies that define human nature, whether in the conflict between individuality and conformity, inside and outside, normal and abnormal (Batman Returns, 1992) 60 McGowan 2012, 141. 61 Brooker 2012, 204–207. 62 Klavan 2008. 63 ip 2011, 229. 64 Brooker 2012, 207. 65 see hickethier 2008, 238.