Bankruptcy

Success of The Dark Knight, the new Batman Movie, Indicative of Social Mood

By J. Michael McBride

I am not the first one to make the connection between social mood and the markets. As we compare the success of the recently released and morally confused Batman movie to the current state of the markets, it is possible to see that the slide in the US economy is far from over. Again, the link here is the social mood. US markets have popular movies like The Titanic, a mega hit from the 1990’s (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120338/ ). This is not an original idea – see the publication (now ceased) SocioTimes at http://www.sociotimes.com/ or the link to it from www.elliotwave.com and you will see this same idea discussed at length. The general population’s dark mood which makes a movie like Batman so popular also drives markets down. Markets are all about confidence (hence the typically optimistic talking points issued by the Federal Reserve, for example) and society’s waning confidence shows up in the success of dark movies with “heroes” who are really unclear about right and wrong. Here is a quote from a review of the new Batman:

“There's an undeniable sense of one-upmanship at work in this sleek, luxurious-looking production—a subtext of "Oh yeah? Top this." But for all The Dark Knight's occasionally bombastic excess, it sort of does top them all, and not only in star power and sheer number of things blown up. Nolan turns the Manichean morality of comic books—pure good vs. pure evil—into a bleak post-9/11 allegory about how terror (and, make no mistake, Heath Ledger's Joker is a terrorist) breaks down those reassuring moral categories.

…

A colleague with whom I saw the movie felt that Nolan's use of 9/11 references was exploitive, that he was tapping into our deep cultural anxiety about terror just to spice up his blockbuster. After a second viewing, I vigorously disagree. The use of 9/11 would be exploitive only if Nolan didn't care about thinking through 9/11 for its own sake, as he clearly does. The Dark Knight was co-scripted by Nolan and his brother Jonathan (a fiction writer who also wrote two earlier Nolan films, Memento and The Prestige). The Nolans' closing vision of the state of Gotham City—a pessimistic landscape of corruption, chaos, and fear—may not be to every viewer's taste. But at least it's a vision, one that, as Sept. 11 draws near again, looks disturbingly familiar.”

Here is a link to that review: http://www.slate.com/id/2195523/

Michael

Full post as published by Texas Lawyer Blog on July 28, 2008 (boomark / email).