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Okay, I'll admit it. I really am looking forward to watching "The Dark Knight." I've heard so much about Heath Ledger's role as the Joker, so much about the issues the film raises. And then I read Margie Haack's post and it just sealed the deal for me. The Dostoevesky quote was icing on the cake....At the end of the Dark Knight I was left in want of a hero large enough to make life meaningful again, someone who could bring light to the set, who could heal the lives ruined by injustice, crime, ambition, violence. The Batman, the faltering, finite hero we love, disappears into the night still determined to try to fix the world, but everyone, including him, knows how impossible and grievous this calling will be.
The movie underscores how hopeless this task for human heroes – to heal the earth of all its injustices, to offer choice even to The Jokers of the world. We wait for consummation, like Simeon the priest waited for the Consolation of Israel. Dostoevsky describes it perfectly in The Brothers Karamazov:
I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world’s finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, of all the blood that they’ve shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened.
Read her whole review here. While you are at it, bookmark Dennis & Margie Haack's amazing site called Ransom Fellowship, a great analysis of pop culture from an informed Biblical worldview.
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