dafox wrote:I'm sure you guys all know this but The Dark Knight's themes are heavily tied into Christianity. Batman's moral code, Bruce's humility, and charity. Also The Joker is just like the Devil and I don't think I have to explain why but when the Joker tempts Batman by trying to get Batman to kill him throughout the film is just like how Satan tempted Jesus. Both Batman and Jesus ultimately resisted corruption and they both give hope to the people who believe in them. Not to mention Batman and religion have to deal with perfection like self discipline. Then again everything is tied into morality meaning religion as well. But I am a Christian as well as a Nolan and Batman fanatic so....
IN GOD, CHRISTOPHER NOLAN, AND BATMAN I TRUST :goNF: .... but mostly God
prince0gotham wrote:But there are religious motifs in any movie. The fact that the guy's wrong about that meaning Inception is about religion is a different story.
True. I should have edited motifs to agenda, or motive.
You guys are arguing against Nolan at this point. Nolan has publicly stated that he has a "sincere interpretation" in which the significance of the ending is that Cobb walks away from the spinning top. He has also explicitly stated that the sandcastles on the beach (as distinct from those on the cliff) represent limbo.
Skeptics would also be well-served to note the way similar symbolism resurfaces in the Batman films, particularly in the association between water and the subconscious (fear, in this case), in the presentation of the children in the garden as a sort of lost paradise from which Bruce Wayne "falls", and of course in those very concepts of "falling" and "rising" which - like it or not - carries obvious religious associations in the Western literary tradition.
I think it's interesting that the film sets up Arthur -- the rationalist -- as the one who doesn't believe that Inception is possible. If the film is really about faith, we can and should read things like the elephant speech as fairly straightforward commentary on the limits of rationality. And then it hardly seems accidental that it is the creative and emotive Eames who confirms that Inception is possible, or that Cobb's failure to shoot Mal in the fortress level is presented to us as a failure of ratiocination ("how do you know" he asks Ariadne).
Without Nolan commenting on this explicitly it's possible that all of this stuff could be coincidental. But there are a lot of coincidences and they align with a very straightforward reading of the film. Coupled with the very heavy symbolism in and the raw intelligence of all of Nolan's scripts since The Prestige, and the statistical improbability of stuff like both children (and only the children) being named randomly after biblical apostles and it seems like an uphill struggle to suggest this is all coincidental.
as well as a Nolan and Batman fanatic so....
