BATMAN: DARK KNIGHT VS. FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY’S DEMONS – Exhibit 2

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Demons essentially accomplishes that at which Christopher Nolan’s Dark Night aims but fails miserably. Where Dark Knight inhumanly forces dialogue from philosophy books into the mouths of actual, flesh-and-blood characters, Demons has characters living, enacting, embodying, and discussing philosophical ideas.

There really is no hero in Demons – which is better, or closer to reality. The whole reason it has that title is because you also might not notice the demons otherwise. By contrast, in Dark Knight, it’s just the opposite. The demons are exposed out in the open. And, in Dark Knight, the hero is just as obvious – which feeds into false fantasies. Everyone loves Dark Knight, though. And, without getting into specifics of the film, it’s difficult to connect my words to what I see in the film, to communicate what I mean.  So, I went looking for scenes that best reveal my frustration with Batman: The Dark Knight.

Exhibit 1 – linked here – was HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS AND IDEAS

Exhibit 2 – PRIVACY RIGHTS VS. THE COMMON GOOD, OR FREEDOM VS. DESPOTISM

The above image is from this scene – LINK HERE -in Batman: The Dark Knight.

“Beautiful, unethical, dangerous. You’ve turned every cell phone in Gotham into a microphone…You can image all of Gotham. This is wrong.”

Batman: “I’ve gotta find this man.”

“At what cost?…This is too much power for one person.”

– from Batman: The Dark Knight

Here, we see the philosophical question of Privacy rights vs. Public or common good displayed in a highly controlled and constructed way that is foreign to the real tensions and problems in our flesh-and-blood-lives (like, for example, why and how South Korea had a much more successful COVID response than we did here in the USA). By contrast…

The following is from Demons, by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Here, Shigalyov is one of the members of the radical liberal group. Verkhovensky is their ring leader. It being a meeting of said group, the rest of the characters mentioned are other members of the group.

The gathering silently exchanged glances. The lame teacher spitefully and enviously watched Verkhovensky. Shigalyov began to go on:

“Having devoted my energy to studying the question of the social organization of the future society which is to replace the present one, I have come to the conclusion that all creators of social systems from ancient times to our year 187- have been dreamers, tale-tellers, fools who contradicted themselves and understood precisely nothing of natural science or of that strange animal known as man. Plato, Rousseau, Fourier, aluminum columns – all this is fit perhaps for sparrows, but not for human society. But since the future social form is necessary precisely now, when we are all finally going to act, so as to stop any further thinking about it, I am suggesting my own system of world organization. Here it is!” he struck the notebook. “I wanted to explain my book to the gathering in the briefest possible way; but I see that I will have to add a great deal of verbal clarification, and therefore the whole explanation will take at least ten evenings, according to the number of chapters in my book.” (Laughter was heard.) “Besides that. I announce ahead of time that my system is not finished.” (More laughter.) “I got entangled in my own data, and my conclusion directly contradicts the original idea from which I start. Starting from unlimited freedom, I conclude with unlimited despotism. I will add, however, that apart from my solution of the social formula, there can be no other.”

The laughter was increasing more and more, but it was mostly the young and, so to speak, less initiated guests who laughed. The faces of the hostess, Liputin, and the lame teacher expressed a certain vexation.

“If you yourself weren’t able to hold your system together, and arrived at despair, what are we supposed to do?” one officer observed cautiously.

“You’re right, mister active officer,” Shigalyov turned abruptly to him, “and most of all in having used the word ‘despair.’ Yes, I kept arriving at despair; nevertheless, everything expounded in my book is irreplaceable, and there is no other way out; no one can invent anything. And so I hasten, without wasting time, to invite the whole society, having heard my book in the course of ten evenings, to state its opinion. And if the members do not want to listen to me, let us break up at the very beginning the men to occupy themselves with state service, the women to go to their kitchens, for, having rejected my book, they will find no other way out. None what-so-ever! And by losing time, they will only harm themselves, because later they will inevitably come back to the same thing.”

People began to stir. “Is he crazy, or what?” voices asked. “So it all comes down to Shigalyov’s despair,” Lyamshin concluded, “and the essential question is whether he is to be or not to be in despair?” “Shigalyov’s proximity to despair is a personal question,” the high- school boy declared.

“I suggest we vote on how far Shigalyov’s despair concerns the common cause, and along with that, whether it’s worth listening to him or not,” the officer gaily decided.

“That’s not the point here,” the lame man finally mixed in.

– From Demons, by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Part Two, With Our People, pp. 402-3

Here, Christopher Nolan supposedly puts abstract, philosophical ideas inside the mouths of actual characters. It falls dead-flat and comes across as artificial, constructed, nonsensical, and thus also without direction or purpose that we can enact or use in our actual lives. Nolan thus offers zero valuable contribution to any real question of the relationship between privacy rights and the common good. No question is ever opened. The argument remains closed, and the false, easy answer foreclosed before us is in the person of Batman. Because…he’s special? In the end, Nolan simply reinforces our current predominant framework and values, makes us wish we had Batman’s power (which, none of us do), and thus emotionally manipulates us into imagining we are making the individual, private choice to become box office consumers.

By contrast, Dostoevsky openly acknowledges the absurdity of constructing reality in the shape of an idea, and the actual, flesh-and-blood characters are left laughing and observing the insanity of it. Suddenly, our world is illuminated. We are empowered to make more sense of it, and thus also to navigate our way through it.

“Dostoevsky called the novel Demons, we would suggest, precisely because the demons in it do not appear, and the reader might otherwise overlook them. The demons are visible only in distortions of the human image, the human countenance, and their force is measurable only by the degree of the distortion.”

– Richard Pevear, foreword to Demons (p. xiv)