This is a good movie, because it presents a self-critical picture of the united $tates as depicted in Gotham City, the setting of the television series "Batman." Readers of MIM see various contemporary events symbolized in the movie.

We see the National Security Agency (NSA) represented when a city employee is in charge of surveilling all the people in the city via sonar.

The FBI shows up as missing targets and actually endangering innocent people; local police throughout are bought off or intimidated by the mafia. The city attorney with the most courage to face off against the mafia--a "white knight"--ends up going on a rampage of torture and killing. He was the best that Gotham had to offer. The rest are even more prone to corruption.

Senator Patrick Leahy shows up to tell the "Joker" that Gotham will stand up to thugs. The question arises who the thugs are. They could be Bush or Osama Bin Laden or a combination.

As in "Starship Troopers," in most movies and videogames we Amerikans have a simple racist theme where the object is to kill as many of the other side as possible, because there is straight-forward good and evil. "Dark Knight" is better, because it goes deeper.

Deeper movies seem to require brilliant villains, and in this the "Joker" excels. The Joker says that unlike the others in the movie, he has no "schemes" or goals. He obtains half the city's money only to turn around and burn it. In contrast, revolutionaries and mobsters alike would distribute the money toward some goal.

The public is clamoring against "terrorists," but we would say that a "Joker" character with no goals is a product of affluenza. It is unlikely that people from countries that have much striving to do will produce terrorists like the "Joker." It may look that way only because a society sick with affluenza does not recognize the goals of poorer peoples (and the fact that those goals are enunciated by rich people who are leaders of poor people does not change the fact of where those goals came from).

Affluenza is that listlessness and purposelessness that arises from having had money a long time. To be sure, the "Joker" is good at stealing money. He is the top rank crook among crooks, but he has reached a point where his work is an art for its own sake. Bush with his emphasis on persynal loyalty might not be the perfect background for the Joker character, who is an above-it-all kind of villain.

What "Dark Knight" offers that MIM has not emphasized as much is the role of the mafia. Batman really becomes necessary mostly because he has the drive but is relatively uncorrupted. However, even Batman does end up carrying out illegal interrogations and torture.

At the end of the movie, Batman serves as a vigilante who takes the fall for government employee misdeeds. The people should have rose up to overthrow capitalism and eliminate cash so that a mafia could not exist, so that there would be no motivations possible for the huge corruption of the government seen in "Dark Knight." Instead, Gotham City kept capitalism and affluenza and created vigilante-to -government relations as a shortcut.

"Dark Knight" is almost a self-critical movie. It is an admission of the existence of and hankering for para-military government where vigilantes work in coordination with the government. In real life, we might suspect organizations with heavy governmental ties could fulfill the role of a Batman--organizations such as "Satanists," the "Revolutionary Communist Party" or the LaRouchies for instance. We would rule out the LaRouche supporters, because Batman works covertly. Despite Batman's covert crimes, the city attorney says that the current government is not good enough to try him. There is only "sucks" and "sucks less," which is why the title of the movie is in that artistic tradition where Batman is no beacon of light and virtue like Luke Skywalker. Fortunately, the movie title is not racist in this context, because the alternatives to Batman are no better.