Batman: The Dark Knight, the necessary lie of power
example · film: The Dark Knight ·
retold in 3 talks
In The Dark Knight, Batman discovers the heroic District Attorney is a murderer, conceals this from the public, and takes the crime upon himself to preserve popular faith in authority. Žižek reads this as Bush-era ideological message: sustaining collective belief in power requires a constitutive lie.
≤2000talks it is told in, per year2026
As told 3
“Die Botschaft des Films ist: Um Volkes Glauben an die Macht aufrecht zu erhalten, brauchen wir eine Lüge. Das ist das Bush-Ära-Prinzip.”
“this idea we need a lie to save the system. This is very dangerous message this need of a lie”
“Batman decides to take the murders upon himself because it would have been too demoralizing for the public. The necessity of a lie to save the dignity of the public authority system.”
What it carries
one story, many jobs: the ideas this anecdote is deployed to argue, one tally mark per use (an idea page shows the same relation from the other end, as its shelf of stories)
contents · one story, 3 jobsuses
the big Other
×2
cinema as field of ideological struggle
×1
fetishist disavowal
×1
Its cast and sources
populated by
Newt Gingrich2Helena Bonham Carter1Mikhail Khodorkovsky1Mikhail Berezovsky1Howard Dean1John Kerry1Golda Meir2Dick Cheney2
alongside works
Every retelling 3
In The Dark Knight, Batman discovers the heroic District Attorney is a murderer, conceals this from the public, and takes the crime upon himself to preserve popular faith in authority. Žižek reads this as Bush-era ideological message: sustaining collective belief in power requires a constitutive lie., illustrating cinema as ideology in its pure/clinical state,ideology,the big Other
In The Dark Knight, when the admired district attorney is revealed to be a murderer, Batman heroically takes the crimes upon himself so that the public's moral foundations are not shaken. Žižek reads this as ideology at its purest: the system requires a lie to sustain itself., illustrating ideology,the big Other,noble lie
At the end of The Dark Knight, Batman takes the murders of a corrupt district attorney upon himself to preserve public faith in authority, Žižek reads this as pure ideology: the necessity of a founding lie to sustain the social order, echoing Stalinist logic and John Ford., illustrating ideology's necessity of a lie,fetishist split,contemporary ideology