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Cory Massimino and Trevor Burrus join the show to discuss whether or not Batman is a hero.
Christopher Nolan’s Batman operates within the state in a very strange way. Nolan believes that his trilogy of movies are actually each in their own genre. Batman Begins is a classic origin story broken down in three parts. The Dark Knight exists as a crime movie with the Joker as a terrorist who seeks chaos. The Dark Knight Rises is an epic film with a militaristic enemy.
How are the Joker and Bane different? How do the villains in Nolan’s Batman trilogy enhance the movies?
Trevor Burrus was a research fellow in the Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies and editor-in-chief of the Cato Supreme Court Review. His research interests include constitutional law, civil and criminal law, legal and political philosophy, legal history, and the interface between science and public policy.
He is the editor of A Conspiracy against Obamacare (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and Deep Commitments: The Past, Present, and Future of Religious Liberty (Cato, 2017). Burrus holds a BA in philosophy from the University of Colorado at Boulder and a JD from the University of Denver Sturm College of Law. He also contributed a chapter to Libertarianism.org’s Visions of Liberty.
Natalie Dowzicky is managing editor of video and podcasts at Reason.
In addition to her work with Reason, she is the blog editor at America’s Future. In 2019, she completed the Writing Fellows program run by America’s Future and received their Rising Star award. In 2020, she completed Atlas Networks’ Leader Lab where she won the John Blundell Elevator Pitch competition.
Previously, she was the manager of Libertarianism.org, a project of the Cato Institute, and a co-host of the popular culture and politics podcast, Pop & Locke.
Dowzicky is a graduate of the University of Richmond where she studied leadership and Latin American studies. She grew up outside of Philadelphia, but currently lives in Arlington, Virginia.
Landry Ayres was a senior producer at Libertarianism.org. He produced Free Thoughts, Building Tomorrow, The Pursuit, Portraits of Liberty, and he cohosted Pop & Locke. He also produced the Cato Institute’s Power Problems and Unintended Consequences podcasts. He received his BA in communication with a concentration in media production and criticism, as well as his MA in health communication, from George Mason University. He has produced audio for Audible, SXSW, and WNYC’s Radiolab.