As Brian Winston put it on the BBC program, “I don’t think you can make a moral judgment about Riefenstahl’s work on the basis that it embodies fascist aesthetics, because I don’t think there’s any such thing. I think she stands in the mainstream of Western aesthetics, and I think that Western aesthetics can be, on occasion, fascist. That’s the problem with the whole phenomenon of fascism — that we want somehow to treat it as a virus. It isn’t; it’s part of us. It’s the dark side of the European tradition, and she represents that dark side perfectly.”

It goes on…

The reasons for such myopia, I would argue, don’t really have much to do with Riefenstahl’s international standing as an artist. Rather, they have to do with a glaring contradiction in our notions about art and politics — a contradiction that Riefenstahl’s career throws into sharp relief. To put the matter crudely, we tend to celebrate artists who have absolute, dictatorial freedom and control over their resources, and condemn politicians who pursue or achieve the same aim.

If The Dark Knight is a parable of the “war on terrorism,” it is also a parable about its dangers. Having said that, it should not be pigeonholed as simply a “progressive” or “reactionary” film—but neither does it transcend these labels. It wants to have things both ways, as when Batman builds an incredibly invasive eavesdropping device, uses it, then has it destroyed because it is too powerful.

UPDATE: On the further subject of the politicization of The Dark Knight, here’s a great write up by k-punk.

The word criticism has its root in the Greek word krinein, which means — in its most original sense — to divide or separate. It’s about sorting things out and making distinctions. Criticism is thus about doing something that is, in this era, almost impossible to do. It is difficult simply to keep up with the vast global cultural output, let alone to make determinations and judgments.

(Via 3 Quarks Daily.)