Batman, Captain America, and the War on Terror

Art and life mirror each other all the time.  Fictional "technology" has inspired a number of scientists, entrepreneurs, and inventors; and countless works of fiction have been based on actual historical events.  This blog entry will focus on one ongoing event that has exerted significant influence on American policies since 2001.  That event, obviously, is the War on Terror; and two movies which incorporated aspects of the War on Terror in their plots are The Dark Knight and Captain America: The Winter Soldier.

First, let's look at The Dark Knight.  There are two parts of the movie that resemble American war-fighting methods.  Toward the middle of the movie, Batman abducts Lau, a criminal organization's accountant, from Hong Kong.  (Side note: Batman escapes using a CIA-designed personnel recovery system.)  Batman's escape strategy is bolder and more dramatic, but it is virtually identical to a controversial (and in many countries, illegal) counter-terrorism tactic called extraordinary rendition.  The big difference is that instead of being dragged back to Gotham, the prisoner gets delivered to a secret prison in a country where cruel treatment is acceptable. 

The next incident in The Dark Knight that parallels the War on Terror occurs toward the film's end.  Batman uses his corporation's resources to access every cell phone in Gotham, in order to find the Joker.  This also resembled an American government tactic for fighting the War on Terror, although the general public wouldn't learn about the government's mass surveillance programs until about five years after The Dark Knight premiered.

Now, let's look at Captain America.  The central conflict is that Hydra (doesn't that just sound like an evil organization?) has infiltrated S.H.I.E.L.D and plans to use its helicarriers (which make AC-130s look like BB guns) to eliminate Hydra's adversaries.  A Hydra scientist invented a mathematical equation that could identify which people might oppose Hydra; while the helicarriers acted as a high-altitude sniper rifle, and had the advantage of being out of range of antiaircraft weapons.  In many ways, Hydra's master plan is like America's criteria for deciding who ends up on the receiving end of a drone strike.  It's called a "signature strike", and here's a good definition courtesy of Foreign Policy magazine's Dan DeLuce and Paul McLeary:

"Signature strikes were first used during George W. Bush’s administration, and the name refers to the fact that the targets — by virtue of their ages, actions, and locations inside countries known to house terrorist operatives — bear the “signature” of militant activity. U.S. intelligence and defense officials believe the strikes have inflicted heavy damage on al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. But critics say the rules for the drone strikes against large numbers of military-age men are too vague and carry an unacceptably high risk of killing innocent civilians who have no connection to any terrorist plot."

I want to bring up one other point to tie this back to political theory.  Both movies hint at the moral and philosophical conflict of freedom vs security.  That dilemma is something else that comes up a lot in real life.  The Founding Fathers leaned heavily toward the "freedom" side of the scale, especially when it came to restricting government power, and it's pretty noticeable in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, as well as writings many of them left behind.  The back-and-forth debate between security and liberty still goes on, and probably will continue for many decades.  And the secretive organization that promotes iron-fisted control is usually the villain in both works of fiction (SPECTRE, The Galactic Empire, Cobra, Hydra) and in the history books (the Gestapo, the KGB, just about any secret police force).