We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars

Rating: 9/10 (9 April 2011)

Several years ago, there was a cause celebre in Taiwan: the daughter of a celebrity was kidnapped ,some of her fingers was cut and sent to her mother in envelope for the extortion. The girl was raped and ,haplessly, brutally killed. Her mother suffered tremendously from the excruciating incident and eventually become an advocate of execution for giving the justice to whose family endured the same agony. But is it the justice?
In Batman Begins (2005), a laudable franchise of Christopher Nolan, the parents of the protagonist Bruce Wayne was killed inadvertently in front of him when he was just a child. Since that time, there had been a great loathe in his mind and he never stopped thinking about killing the murderer. Finally, the criminal was shoot, but it was not done by Wayne. After that, Wayne was self-exiled and wandering around the world of criminals. When he finally got the power to castigate the criminal and asked to kill him without mercy, he refused.
"I'm not an executioner," said Mr. Wayne. In the end, he perceived the line between fighting against injustice and vengeance.
The man who killed his parents may be desperate by the stricken-poverty; the felons of the cause celebre in Taiwan may suffer from the severe mental illness. The execution may not help anything, it is just one way of revenge. What we need to care is not just about executing the guilty people, but what causes those criminals, for instance, the paucity of better public welfare, the corruption of the government creating a huge gap between wealthy people and indigent ones, the education system which ignores the awkward students, etc.
Mr. Wayne, or later we called Batman, returned to save his city Gotham City from the sinister power. He did not punished the drug dealer or the thieves on the street, instead of it, he tried to figured out who was corrupting the city and caused those miserable people to do the nasty things to survive. Gotham was corrupting and was controlled by the mafia. The city was corrupting, the businessmen corrupted, the judges corrupted, the police corrupted and even the mayor corrupted. It was too dangerous to reveal the truth, only few of them are brave enough to do so. However, even if there was only one or two intrepid men in the city, there was the hope. One of them was the Batman.
The world is rotten and is falling apart; there is the Iraq War and the Libya War which just started currently; many people are still suffering form the corruption of the government and the crazy politicians are ubiquitous! We may not need to be the Batman, but we can have a bat symbol in our mind, the incorruptible symbol that always concerns the injustice in the society.
"It's not who you are underneath, but what you do that defines you."said Rachel the girl that Batman loved.
If we can not only have discerning eyes on what the government is doing and what it is happening in the society, but also try to do something, our world would still have the hope.
Batman Begins is much more than a Hollywood action-movie cliché, but a song of chivalry.
"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars," the line of Oscar Wilde just keeps reverberating in my mind.