Cinematic Optimism? – The Dark Knight, Milk
The very first Culture Warrior article I posted was an endorsement 2008 as a year of deceiving
cinematic optimism, and since so many months have passed I have to relent and admit that, with the benefit of hindsight, I was probably wrong.
In order to form my thesis, I had to ignore the film which contained the most permeating influence of the decade, a big-budget Hollywood film of astounding, possibly unprecedented nihilism as a product of such an industry. It’s the most obvious film to mention on this list, but one cannot properly assess this decade in cinema without
acknowledging the huge role The Dark Knight played within it. Not only was it a gigantic cultural event among cinemagoers, cinephiles, and fans (there were probably more Jokers during Halloween 2008 than there were *****-in-Boxes at Halloween 2007), but this movie contained hauntingly apparent reverberations of the outside world, from the presence of an unstoppable, impossible-to-understand destructive force committing acts of terrorism to Batman going all Patriot Act on everybody’s ass in the third act. The Dark Knight contains the pessimism of decade’s end in direct opposition to the protective optimism Spider-Man represented in its beginning.
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