Metaphorical aspects of Darkman?

[smiley]

(hope it's okay for me to start threads around here -- just figured I'd try to keep the conversations going)

I was thinking about a lot of the things in Darkman the movie, and for the most part it seems like a pretty simple piece of entertainment. I enjoy it for its action and unique twists on a hero's (or anti-hero, as some people say) overall situation. For the most part, it's little more than a slightly cheesy popcorn flick that was a result of Sam Raimi not getting a hold of the rights to The Shadow. Yet it interests me to imagine what some of the things about Darkman (or any part of the story, for that matter) could mean in a metaphorical sense. What do you make of Westlake's life, abilities, disabilities, enemies, opinions, and little tid bits scattered throughout the script?

[Vigilante]

Welcome to the board!

Threre are plenty of them:

To begin with, Westlake was a former "youngster" of the '80ies generation, he growed up in the Eighties. So the movie underlined the abrupt passage from the polite and careless Eighties to the darker and "grunge" Nineties - Westlake was almost an embodyment of such incredible transition.

Then, in my mind, Darkman has some twisted charisma and personality, wherever Westlake is almost insipid as person. So do you need to *NOT* have a face in order to "flesh-out" your persona and found your real self?

-----> plenty of them.

[smiley]

admin said:

Welcome to the board!

....So do you need to *NOT* have a face in order to "flesh-out" your persona and found your real self?

Good to be here. ;D

I see your point there. The line "What is it about the dark? What secret does it hold?" probably reflects how in the "dark" (not having a face/being a nobody/completely isolated from other peoples' perceptions of you) gives your psyche the freedom to roam itself without so much consideration to others' opinions and observations of you. At the end of the movie, Darkman ended up seeing himself for the "monster" that was truly inside of him the whole time. But no matter what he would've seen in this metaphorical no-face mirror, it could've only come to him when his old (and socially structured) identity was destroyed and he was forced to face what he was apart from society's/his own loved ones' view of him. So the "dark" actually becomes a sort of new light for him.

Also, I think the whole using his enemies faces against them reflected on *their* human nature as well. To be able to penetrate into their criminal world by temprorarily stealing their identites was a kind of irony -- their bad deeds and greediness coming back to bite them in their hineys, so to speak. Not to mention the underlying moral of the story (shown in it's climax on the high steel): Is there any such thing as a lesser evil, and which is worse, a "corporate" sense of tainted power driven by the "bigger picture" or a personal drive for revenge and percieved justice?

Like you said, there's a bunch of them, but I figured I'd slip a few out there off that top of my head.