We are pleased to open the LOLjoker contest. Send your LOLjokers to sheely AT overthinkingit DOT com before Midnight EDT on Sunday, August 3, 2008. To one grand prize winner we’ll give away a vintage batman t-shirt and a guest spot on our next podcast.

Rules and guidelines »

Over the past two weeks, much digital ink has been spilled about the political meanings and messages embedded in The Dark Knight. In this particular corner of the intertubes, considerable (over)thought has gone into dissecting the layers of philosophy in the film. However, looking closely at the intersection of the two reveals that the filmmakers pose some very important questions that probe the very nature and origins of social and political order.

No spoilers here, so read on, even if you haven’t seen the film yet.

JK!

Words only after the jump, so if you’re just here for the LOLJoker, read no further…

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[Mark Lee has been responsible for many of the memorable graphics on the site, including another inspired movie poster for Michael Bay's Ouija. We're glad to welcome him as a regular contributor, rock prodigy, and raconteur. —Ed.]

Credit goes to Matt Belinkie for the concept, but from there, my strange powers of Photoshop and the Rhys men’s suave charm did the rest.

“Haha, now I REALLY want to know what The Dark Knight has to do with Schopenhauer.”
-mlawski

Alright. You asked for it.

Mlawski’s own fine post on utilitarianism and The Dark Knight, “The Philosophy of Batman” inspired me — can we delve deeper into the philosophy at the heart of The Dark Knight? I figured I’d go to the well and hash out some German philosophy for this one, partially because I thought it fit, and partially because, like Bruce Wayne, I’m just that crazy.

Now, that time is upon us, and you can decide whether or not I was wise.

Find out about more about the WIll-to-Batman and the Will-to-Joker, after the jump –

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In many cases, a movie’s soundtrack is just another piece of its marketing campaign. But occasionally, a song from a film actually becomes more popular than the film itself. Here are eight you can probably sing from memory (whether you want to admit it or not), from movies you’ve probably never heard of. Consider this a spoiler alert - if you read the name of a film and don’t want the plot described, just skip to the next one.

(NOTE: For a song to qualify, it has to have originally been released as part of a soundtrack. And I decided to stick to movies from the 60’s onward. Otherwise, this list might be all Gershwin and Porter.)

Let’s count ‘em down… more »

THERE ARE HUGE THE DARK KNIGHT SPOILERS IN THIS POST. BE WARNED!

I WILL ALSO PUT A RANDOM STEVEN SEAGAL MOVIE SPOILER AT THE END OF THIS POST. GET EXCITED!

If you’ve seen it, you’ve talked about it. Maybe you cringed. Maybe you cried out. Maybe it totally surprised you, or maybe, like me, you’d heard a little bit about it, but when it actually happened, it still surprised you, and you still cringed, and maybe you still cried out a bit, but you’d rather not draw attention to that, so you won’t mention it except in your blog.

Because, sure, Christopher Nolan’s latest Batman film is a dark and compelling exploration of the moral hazards of political necessity. It’s a brave reinvention of the superhero genre. It’s a Boffo Box-office Breaking Batnanza (as Variety might put it if they felt feisty).

But mostly, it’s two-and-a-half hour framing device for a really disturbing scene with a pencil.

You know it’s true. Find out what makes the Joker’s pencil so magical after the jump —

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I’m a two-blog man now.

As some of you know, I write and produce Hotnewz.tv, the best darn news show for college kids on the web. We recently started a blog where we talk about some of our favorite segments. After the jump is something I wrote for it, on the enigma that is Andrew WK. more »

(There Will Be Spoilers)

Christopher Nolan didn’t major in philosophy in college (or “read philosophy at University,” as the case may be), but he evidently has some familiarity with the subject.  How do I know?  Well, both of his two Batman films thus far have featured famous philosophical thought experiments.

In Batman Begins, we have the well-known trolley experiment, in which a person must imagine that s/he is on a trolley that is barreling down the tracks towards five people (or babies, depending on if your ethics professor is more or less of a sadist) who are tied onto the tracks.  The imaginer can then either imagine that s/he pulls a lever, switching the trolley onto another track that only has one person (or baby) tied to it, or that s/he does nothing, allowing the trolley to kill the aforementioned five.  The utilitarian will say, “I switch the trolley to the new track, because it’s better to kill one person than to kill five.”  The non-utilitarian will say, “I leave the trolley to kill the five, because at least then I am not morally at fault.”  The main ethical question is: “Is there a difference between killing a person and letting a person die?” more »

“Da Game is to be told, not to be sold.”
— Snoop Dogg, 14th Annual Conference
on Hip Hop Securitization

In 2003, I identified what I believed to be a speculative bubble for bling bling — the shine, the scrilla, the ostentatious displays of wealth that reinforced and promoted hip hop record sales.

At its heart, the Bling Bubble was a case of overleveraging; even the Ruffest of Ryders and Biggest of Tymers found themselves deep in debt, but still pulling out all the stops, even as record gas prices force them to keep only a quarter tank of gas in their new E-class —

The global Cash Money crisis begins, after the jump —

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Hendrik Herzberg, who is some sort of editor at The New Yorker (though that shadowy cabal never ever publishes a masthead, so aside from Remnick, it’s kind of unclear what everyone does), and my very, very favorite political columnist in Talk of the Town—I read him and Anthony Lane (and anything by Louis Menand) even when I don’t have time to do anything but look at the cartoons and recycle—has responded to the on- and off-line media generally shitting itself over the recent Obama cover.

He takes a couple pot-shots at the OTI demo, viz.:

As David Remnick and others (me, for example) have been pointing out every chance we get, the target of Barry Blitt’s image was not the Obamas. The target was the grotesque pack of lies about the Obamas that have been widely disseminated, not only by marginal right-wing Web sites and sicko viral e-mail campaigns but also by such nominally respectable outfits as Fox News.

That is the part that a lot of people—sophisticated people, non-irony-challenged people, people who watch Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert without a trace of bafflement [That's us! —Ed.]—fail to “get.”

The whole thing is worth a read, because he dissects, in a clearheaded way, the alarmist (and, in his view, condescending) hand-wringing that the cover provokes.

He actually addresses a point made in the comments on Stokes’s post about this—the difficulty of making jokes about Obama, or, in an unfortunate, non-equivalent restatement, whether Obama can “take a joke.”

His rationale, that Obama is not the target of the joke so that it’s really not forhim to take it well or not, is over-nice and a little disingenuous, and I don’t buy it. It’s like calling someone fat and then claiming you were satirizing the nation’s obesity problem.