The Dark Knight Has ... "Issues"

First, love the Winged madman -- especially the Tim Burton vision. Christopher Nolan, of course, is immensely talented and "The Dark Night" delivers on so many levels -- the action sequences and a top-notch cast put this into another category, hence its $440-million-plus haul. (And firing Katie Holmes was one of the many keys.)

STILL, after seeing this movie at an IMAX screen on Saturday, one thing stood out for me -- the particular visiousness with which the Joker dispatches some of his enemies -- all of them African American.

Seriously. I'm a white dude from the burbs, and I noticed this horrible cliche. In this case, though, the most disturbing violence is always directed at blacks ... the Joker pushes one man's head into a sharp pencil, he blows up a (female) black judge, he poisons an African American cop, he shoots another man at close range with a shotgun and, lest we forget, he pushes a knife through the open mouth of a black "bad guy."

This is pretty disturbing and sad to see. Hollywood still has major issues with how it depicts blacks on film; Nolan simply puts much of them to a quick, violent death -- aside, of course, from velvet-smooth Morgan Freeman, whom everyone seems to regard (including me).

Warner Brothers should answer to how blacks were treated and or perceived in this film. This isn't an off-the-mark rant. The movie provides you a record to judge for yourself. The senseless crimes carried out by the Joker is one thing; but he seemed to save his most savagery for blacks, which mask the slightly better than average job the film does in simply showing some semblance of diversity in a large, metropolitan city like Gotham. (Remember "Minority Report," the futuristic look at city life in Washington, D.C, whch was nearly emptied of blacks?)

Anyhow, "The Dark Knight's" zillions of dollars and subsequent media lovefest has covered up a tricky little subplot that, hopefully, wasn't intentional on the part of Nolan or Warner Brothers -- but if they didn't even realize what they were doing, Hollywood has a long ways to go yet.