10 Troubling Messages From Superhero Movies

8. Your Privacy Must Be Compromised To Stay Safe - The Dark Knight

The Dark Knight One of the sillier moments in The Dark Knight comes when Bruce (Christian Bale) informs Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman) that he has managed to turn every cell phone in Gotham into a mobile receiver capable of mapping the immediate environment around them, essentially like sonar (because he's dressed like a bat, geddit?). Daft enough though this is, the subsequent set-piece is one stuffed to the brim with ideology, when you consider that everyone in Gotham has essentially had to sacrifice the privacy of their phone calls in order to be kept safe by their self-appointed saviour. Naturally, the film is self-aware enough to note this, with Morgan Freeman bemoaning the moral turpitude of going to such drastic measures to take down The Joker, yet all Nolan's script does is lampshade this issue by mentioning it; it doesn't offer any sort of consolatory remark from Batman other than, "when we've got The Joker, you can shut it down". In an increasingly techno-centric world in which our privacy has become a hot-button issue, this is a discomforting inference, that we will have to sacrifice something as important as our own privacy - unbeknownst to us, no less - to keep terrorists at bay.
 
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Frequently sleep-deprived film addict and video game obsessive who spends more time than is healthy in darkened London screening rooms. Follow his twitter on @ShaunMunroFilm or e-mail him at shaneo632 [at] gmail.com.