SemiConscious Dot Org

On Friday night, the Special Lady Friend and I decided that we could no longer stand the shame of being the only two people in America who had not yet seen The Dark Knight. I came away from the experience deeply impressed. It’s a brilliant, dark movie, a fascinating psychological drama that explores the frightening ease with which good can be transformed into evil. At some point during the movie, each of the major characters (except, perhaps, for the brilliantly fiendish Joker) experience some sort of epiphany that they are turning into that which they most despise. Much like real life, the movie is complex and often morally ambiguous, which is makes it so compelling.

Unless, of course, you’re a Republican, in which case The Dark Knight is a parable for the war on terror with George Bush playing Batman.

You have to give credit where credit is due. Conservatives may be utterly incapable of creating memorable, challenging art themselves, but they sure are good at latching onto popular works of art, stripping them of all context, and performing Herculean feats of pretzel logic in order to shoehorn them into their stunted, backwards worldview. Hey, if they’re capable of performing the mental backflips necessary to turn The Lord of the Rings into an ideological skirmish in Our Eternal War Against Islamofascists, then The Dark Knight should be a piece of cake, right?

Apparently, any movie in which good guys defeat bad guys is actually a paean to the glories of Dear Leader. I believe there’s a term for this phenomenon…