taters, anyone?

some time back, i wrote about iron man and ip man after watching the movies with my friends. having watched dark knight recently, i am reminded of them because of the similar theme of good/evil conflict and because certain traits can be observed in the eponymous characters of all the three.

in brief, then aside. i feel that dark knight has characters who are less securely on either side and, like iron man, emphasises the inescapability of the antithesis. every stalactite of good calls forth a stalagmite of bad. as to the characteristics, note again the do-it-alone spirit, dark knight bringing it to the extreme with the letting go of rachel and bearing the outlaw's burden.

brevity in those, so that i might dwell on what really caught me. essentially, what dark knight really reminded me of weren't those alpha-male, heroic figure movies, but tolkien's lord of the rings. when lucius fox shut down the computers, when alfred burned the letter, when the prisoner threw the detonator into the waters, gandalf's, galadriel's, and aragorn's rejections of the ring were re-enacted. these characters were saying no to some form of knowledge, some form of power that they deemed too heavy for a human to bear. cognizant of the limits to a man (or wizard, or elf), they chose to give up something they knew they could not live up to.

this giving up is not a shirking of responsibility, nor a weak "i can't do this". on the contrary, it is responsible to not lay hold of something which one knows is beyond one's due, and it takes a secure person to be humble enough to say "i can't do this" or "i can't have this" when faced with that which one would like to do or to have. too often, self-confidence is encouraged, humility brushed aside as weakness, though the bible says "do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgement".

when satan tempted eve to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, he said that we would "be like God" with that knowledge, and we continue to buy into that lie today. we continue to think that with knowledge comes power, comes the ability to control things; in short, with knowledge comes God-hood. but God is not just all-knowing and all-powerful; he is also all-loving. we associate God-hood with power and we forget about love, when it is that heart of absolute love that balances the might of absolute power. we are eager to build up the latter but less eager to cultivate the former. we want a power in our minds that our hearts are not ready to match.

hence, the human condition.


sometimes, you just need someone to throw the ring into the fire and the detonator into the water. you need a sam gamgee, the sort who would go "well that's all very nice but i was thinking of going home to tend my little garden and marry rose and have taters for dinner", the sort who would live in shires instead of building towers of babel or isengard.