Did anybody else notice the strong anti-wiretapping note that Morgan Freeman’s character hits in Dark Knight? I thought it was an interesting moment in a vigilante movie. I won’t spoil the scene for those of you who haven’t seen the movie yet, but Freeman’s character basically says he won’t stay as long as …. stuff … is being done. I’d love to chat with those of you who have seen the movie about this.
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That was the first thing I thought when I saw the scene. Glad I wasn’t the only one who noticed
I have to say though… are projectors really that un-cool? That setup in the room was so silly… the mounting hardware and labor to put everything together probably cost more than the LCDs.
The movie was really a propaganda film, endorsing domestic wiretapping to catch the joker ( who is now a terrorist), and plenty of torture to ’save Gotham’. I hate when good clean action drama’s get political, so this stuff basically ruined an otherwise good movie.
Morgan Freeman’s character agrees to spy on the public, ‘just this once’ and then he will resign. Already enough of a compromise to make his moral statement useless. This movie was a deep throated endorsement of the Bush administration’s abuses of authority, and an apologist for gov’ts that spy on their citizens. All this is done for the peoples own good, of course, as it always is when your rights are violated by the govt.
Is it really an endorsement? Clearly the Bush administration didn’t just use a massive digital dragnet once for one emergency situation, or even pull some superkit out of a magic satchel in a few emergencies. No, they had a system with contracts and large payments to telcos that kept a big machine of a system humming for a long time. For years.
Perhaps people who only listen to soundbites and have no interest in saving the Constitution will feel this is an endorsement of wiretapping, but what hope do we have for them anyway?
To be clear, I don’t approve of wiretapping, even in the hypothetical presented in the movie, but what was presented in the movie is also a completely different animal. Private actors who wiretap with no connection to the government have nothing to do with the 4th amendment.
Again, for me the whole scene hinges on the reaction of Freeman’s character. A full-throated endorsement of Bush-style wiretapping would have had Freeman’s character yelling “Bring ‘Em On” and sitting down at the console with no objection, or maybe presenting trying to squeeze some promise out of Batman that he’d only ever use it on terrorists, but he does neither. He tells Batman to chose between him and the device.
I think it’s also pretty clear that the device is self-destructing as Freeman’s character walks out.
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