the dark knights of the ” ‘war’ on terror(ism).”
In response to the fear wrought upon it by organized crime, Gotham has come to rely on Batman as its savior. Nevertheless this reliance is, for good reason, grounded in suspicion and hesitation; Batman is, of course, a vigilante who works through extralegal means to quell illegal activities. This dynamic becomes most apparent in The Dark Knight [2008] where faced with the terror provoked by the Joker, Batman comes to equip himself with more insidious means of pursuing justice. The Joker is Terror itself: he not only evades biopolitical surveillance (by lacking the sites—somatic (fingerprints) and genetic (DNA)—from which biometric data may be extracted) but also capture within Enlightenment ontologies of the subject (by confounding epistemologies grounded in Reason). Because confrontation of the Terror that is the Joker proves impossible on the plane of Reason, it must move to the plane of violence of which Reason is supposed to rid (or so proponents of Enlightenment values tell us). In particular, the “interrogation” scene where Batman brutally beats the Joker to learn the location of the imperiled Harvey Dent and Rachel Dawes reveals the dark underside of counterterrorist efforts. 
The scene summons Jean Baudrillard’s gloss on terrorism amongst reflections on the paradox inherent to combating impending disasters: “What kind of State is that which is able to nip terrorism in the bud and eliminate it? Does it not have to equip itself with its own terrorism and in doing so simply generalize terror at all levels? What is the real price for such security and are we all seriously dreaming about this?” Accordingly, the state effectively abrogates the very order for which it is instituted, revealing, as Giorgio Agamben instructs us, that fundamental to any system of law is its own suspension.
In opposition to the display of torture on screen in The Dark Knight, we may examine the MPAA’s censorship of a promotional poster, hinting at torture (a prisoner with hands cuffed above his head covered in a burlap sack), for the film Road to Guantanamo [2005], a docudrama concerning the incarceration of three innocent Britons by the US military at Camp Delta in Guantánamo Bay.
This censorship is curious for on the one hand it calls, contra the Bush administration, the military’s detention practices “torture,” but on the other hand it believes, like the Bush administration, that torture should be concealed from public view. Perhaps Hollywood sympathizes with those forms of violence that are supposedly for pure entertainment to prevent the spaces of consumer capitalism from becoming sites of political discussion: we may sit down, shut up, and enjoy our popcorn while watching Batman brutalize the Joker, but heaven forbid we be incited to reflection on contemporary politics in the theater’s lobby.
During this “ ‘war’ on terrorism” it is certainly important for us to be aware of what films like The Dark Knight reveal about the counterterrorist tactics employed by the state and their corrosive effects. Those sacred principles illuminating the hope of democracy cast a shadow in which a multitude of practices—torture, extraordinary rendition, indefinite detention—violate those very principles. By threatening the democracy in the name of which they are enacted, these ostensibly exceptional but increasingly normalized violences visited upon “bare life,” or those who are politically disqualified yet biologically alive, call attention to the instability of our lives because individual rights fail to protect ourselves from the state’s unbridled sovereign power (this is clearly revealed by the three and a half year detention without constitutional rights of Jose Padilla, a US citizen). As Slavoj Žižek writes, “What if the true problem is not the fragile status of the excluded but, rather, the fact that, on the most elementary level, we are all ‘excluded’ in the sense that our most elementary ‘zero’ position is that of an object of biopolitics, and that possible political and citizenship rights are given to us as a secondary gesture?”
Given that our most fundamental political subjectivity is that of “bare life,” that of an “object of biopolitics,” a status enabling us to fall victim to the most grotesque forms of violence, and that countless (a term signifying both “innumerable” and “without count”) lives have been lost in the name of democracy in this “ ‘war’ on terrorism,” lassoing in our own dark knights—those equipped with the sovereign power of and by the Bush administration—is long overdue.
