Saturday, July 19, 2008

Frank Miller

After seeing The Dark Knight, I spent some time looking up Frank Miller (an Ayn Rand influencee), the man who wrote the 1980s Batman graphic novels upon which DK and Batman Begins were based. He also wrote 300, which had some very heavy West vs. East, reason vs. mysticism, freedom vs. slavery themes. Anyway, he apparently has another comic coming out called "Holy Terror, Batman!" in which Batman defends Gotham City from Al-Qaeda. Miller said the book will be, "a piece of propaganda," where "Batman kicks Al Qaeda's ass." He also said this gem:

"It seems to me quite obvious that our country and the entire Western World is up against an existential foe that knows exactly what it wants... and we're behaving like a collapsing empire. Mighty cultures are almost never conquered, they crumble from within. And frankly, I think that a lot of Americans are acting like spoiled brats."

About those being fought against, Miller said "For some reason, nobody seems to be talking about who we’re up against, and the sixth century barbarism that they actually represent. These people saw people’s heads off. They enslave women, they genitally mutilate their daughters , they do not behave by any cultural norms that are sensible to us. I’m speaking into a microphone that never could have been a product of their culture, and I’m living in a city where three thousand of my neighbors were killed by thieves of airplanes they never could have built."

Good stuff. All the quotes are from here.

3 comments:

Luke Murphy said...

Wow. That was definitely Luke, not Mom.

Caleb said...

But it sounded so much like her...


Frank Miller's awesome, and TDK was awesomer. We saw it in IMAX yesterday, which was a pain in the neck (literally), but totally worth it. There was a definite undercurrent in the movie concerning not giving in to terrorists, not "letting them win" (the people on the ferries), etc. Plus it was just a really remarkable movie, all around.

Luke Murphy said...

Yeah we saw it on IMAX too. Wow. The part on the ferries was incredible.

I don't think that Miller was involved much though, other than the comic books that he wrote in the 80s.

The Joker is the worst/greatest villain I've ever seen. The ultimate nihilist.