Explaining pro-tyranny propaganda in the Batman trilogy
In this video, Alex Jones spells out the propaganda built in to Batman Begins (2005), The Dark Knight (2008) and The Dark Knight Rises (2012).
I stopped enjoying movies around the time of the new Star Trek (2009), and I found the second Batman movie The Dark Knight to be very disturbing. Also, there was more and more torture in some action films just as in real life, so these things just became very hard to take.
To zero in on the second film, The Dark Knight (2008), Alex Jones sums it up very well. The Joker is the rebel individualist anti-establishment character who makes his own clothes and burns piles of money – but his other actions are incredibly evil (blows up hospitals). So much for being a rebel! On the other hand, the Batman is supposed to be good but justifies the invasion of everyone’s privacy through hacking into their cell phones and secretly monitoring the entire city.
Hacking in to everyone’s cell phones is totalitarian. Therefore the Dark Knight promotes totalitarianism with various justifications and hand-ringing. It’s a fact. Probably many people even noticed this but excused it.
So why even bother watching the third movie? Boycott Hollywood instead. The Batman trilogy doesn’t deserve to be rewarded.
Many people have emotionally invested since childhood in Hollywood movies and their favorite TV series and fictional characters, so they are likely to become very upset by this kind of criticism and to ridicule it. I understand.
Because of their conditioning from government and corporate sources, most people accept everything and don’t care if prisoners are being tortured by their own governments or their allies. And they’re not offended by the fact that Hollywood and governments bombard them with evil (mixed with good) to undermine human values.
As Alex mentions, if you consume entertainment without this awareness of how it is used for totalitarian manipulation, you are susceptible to it.
More information:
Boycott Hollywood, a sinister propaganda engine
Book: Propaganda by Jacques Ellul
Book: Propaganda by Edward Bernays
Book: The Fluoride Deception by Christopher Bryson includes an interview transcript with Edward Bernays.
I have a friend who says a couple of generations ago you couldn’t show “realistic” things on TV like killling the bad guy or torture or the darker things we are seeing noe in TV shows and movies… he says society’s sensitivity has changed so that we can show realistic things in movies etc…. even when I pointed out how they changed James Bond he’s saying that Bond is acting as he should realistically nnow (never mind that they’ve totally changed the character, it’s “realistic! I never liked Bond but I hate when characters become changed from who they are supposed to be!) I wonder if what my friend is calling “realistic” is really indoctrination? I know it is, but I can’t seem to explain this to him. He wants realism in fantasy all the time, for games, for mobies, for TV shows… I’ve seen over the course of my life the corruption of “good moral” fantasy into darker and darker terms… Batman never used to be this dark! Over the course of my life he changed too! Now that people see these things being done by the “protagonist” characters in the movies (“good” guys) they will accept them as “inevitable” and acceptable in real life! It’s terrible!
Yes, I noticed in one of the recent James Bond movies at the end that he was about to interrogate someone and I thought that was disturbing.