Columns

If this keeps up 2012 could be remembered as the year of the “Batman election”. Instead of simply going to the cinema to watch a maladjusted billionaire get beaten to a pulp by a fruitily gurgling beefcake and leaving seven hours later pining for plot structure and Michelle Pfeiffer, we have to witness The Cinematic Event of the Year™ get pumped into a white leather sphere, adorned with black pentagons, and kicked around a field by a group of maladjusted millionaires while fruitily gurgling journos commentate with inordinate levels of excitement about Team Liberal’s intricate passing triangles and Team Conservative’s lumpen long-ball prowess.

It all started, as many insane things do, with Rush Limbaugh, that seething mass of crank and spittle-fleck crazy. On his radio show on July 17, Limbaugh accused The Dark Knight Rises of being a re-election ploy for Obama, on the basis that the villain’s name, Bane, sounded like Bain Capital, Romney’s former company and current headache. Never mind that Bane first appeared in Batman comics in 1993, or that the storyline for Rises was roughly complete by the end of 2008, or that “bane” is already a word in the English language (along with “rush,” which means “to move very quickly from one point to another, often in an illogical or arbitrary manner”).

So the left metaphor’d straight back. Catherine Shoard, film editor for The Guardian and the kind of meekly apologetic middle-class liberal you’d expect to find donating alms to an impoverished reformed criminal called Knife, suggested later that day that Batman is actually a champion of the wish-fulfilment and self-righteousness of the wealthy, a “benevolent, bad-ass billionaire” who dishes it out to Gotham’s scheming anarchist rabble-rousers and malcontent proles. Boom.

Then on July 20, there was the tragic shooting at the film’s premier screening in Aurora, Colorado, in which 12 died and 59 were wounded. Predictably, the shooting has reignited the debate over gun control in a country in which 89 people per day die in firearm-related incidents (let that sink in for a moment – 89 every day). Just as predictably, while the left has argued that this highlights the need for stricter gun controls so that, for instance, mentally unstable people can’t go out and buy automatic weapons over the counter, the right has accused the left of “politicising” a tragedy – as though this defensive tactic isn’t itself an example of politicisation, a blatant grab for the moral high ground.

It’s ironic that Batman should be at the centre of this debate. Batman has a code. As he tells that-actress-who-isn’t-Michelle-Pfeiffer’s Catwoman during the film, “No guns. No killing.” If only that were the message Americans were listening to.