“To Veil the Threat of Terror”: 1 Law and the Other’s Question in The Dark Knight Rises

Abstract

This article explores the post-911 climate of security and the fear and paranoia the hidden face has revealed about Western vulnerability. The article contends that what underpins the preoccupation with the veiled woman is a desire to know and the anxiety of never knowing, what Jacques Lacan calls the Other’s question, the Other’s jouissance. What does the Other desire? This is a question that can never be known but belief in the law’s promise of security offers symbolic refuge. The article explores the Other’s question through the relationship between Western anxiety of the hidden face, and the promise of satisfying answers in the father-like hero and the imperative for law and order, in Christopher Nolan’s film The Dark Knight Rises. The film depicts post-911 security concerns in the conflict between masked villains threatening to destroy Gotham city’s legal and cultural order with another law, which tap into a climate of Islamophobia of Muslims as hidden enemies who threaten to dissolve the civilizational security of “our way of life.”