Batman and the ethics of violence

Christopher Nolan's latest Batman film, The Dark Knight, has caused quite a stir. Last week's Sunday Times carried a piece about the level of complaints because of its violent content, then came Iain Duncan Smith and now Camila Batmanghelidjh in The Independent on Sunday.

All the criticisms centre around the contention that film violence leads to real violence. This argument isn't new. When Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange was released the newspapers ran a story about a homeless man being beaten to death. Ergo, the film was the cause.

There have been a log of studies about the impact of screen violence on children but none, or at least none that I am aware, on the impact of other things that happen in films.

At this point I should declare several interests. When I was a child I read the Batman comics. I also watched a lot of war films, crime films and Westerns. I have never owned a gun or committed a violent act. I have always wondered if people truly believe that removing violence from films and TV shows would mean less violence in society. If this is the case, how do people explain the activities of the Vikings? And finally, I think The Dark Knight is an exceptionally good film.

A Hollywood film that uses a comic-book hero, or anti-hero in Batman's case, to deal with the 'war on terror', the misuse of power by the State and the utter pointlessness of violence is something to at least be taken notice of. Film critics have talked about Heath Ledger's performance and the cinematic merits of the movie, so I won't repeat those here.

What particularly grabbed my attention was the battle between two very distinct ideas. One is a value system that says yes to humanity. Interestingly, this isn't represented by Batman but ordinary people. They are the ones who are forced to confront the other idea. That idea is represented by the Joker. He makes them face death and offerss them survival. Survivial, that is, at a cost.

The catch being that they must kill others to live. If they refuse to act, they will all die anyway. The Joker thinks the decision is obvious. But the people don't. They hold on to an ethical code that says we must say no to destruction and cruelty, we must die for the sake of our values because that is the only way to defeat the pointlessness and chaos that the Joker is offering Gotham City.

The character of Batman is very close to John Wayne's Ethan Edwards in The Searchers. Edwards can never be part of civilisation but for civilisation to exist it needs him. Batman is an outcast and the end sequence has an echo of the ending to Ford's masterpiece. Which is why Batman is to some extent an anti-hero and why the battle isn't strictly between him and Joker.

In The Uses of Enchantment, Bruno Bettelheim argued that fairy stories were brutal and violent for a reason. Children needed to work out their anxiety, feelings of rage and confusion through these cruel stories of wicked stepmothers, evil witches and predatory wolves. He was saddened that, over time, the stories had been tamed and lost their graphic violence. If one accepts Bettelheim's argument, then The Dark Knight is a film that children should see and not one that should be hidden from them.