One of my favourite movies of all time is The Dark Knight. It was released in the summer of 2008 and remains one of my most rewatched movies. I have used concepts or ideas from the movie repeatedly, such as Alfred’s line, “You spat in the faces of Gotham’s worst criminals. Didn’t you think there might be some casualties? Things were always going to get worse before they got better”, or the Joker’s, “If you’re good at something, never do it for free”, or Harvey Dent’s, “You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain”. Incredible.
And so, when the sequel to The Dark Knight, called The Dark Knight Rises, was released in 2012, I was hyped up. I remember telling friends that this could potentially be the greatest movie of all time. Yes, the Joker — played legendarily by the late Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight — would not return, but the trajectory from Batman Begins to The Dark Knight as part of that Christopher Nolan Batman trilogy seemed like it would hit a crescendo with the finale.
Or so I thought. In retrospect, if happiness is the difference between reality and expectations, and my expectations were that “This might be the greatest movie of all time”, it was exceedingly likely that the movie would let me down. And it did. There are some spoilers ahead, but in my defence, the movie came out 11 years ago and the statute of limitations on spoilers expires after five years. Everyone knows that.
My fundamental problem with the movie was that, after the gritty realism and bleak melancholia of the trilogy, where so many things had to fall apart for “good” to triumph, the ending was too neat. At the end of the movie, the villains Bane and Talia Al’Ghul were defeated. Gotham was saved. Lucius Fox got what he wanted. Alfred got what he wanted. John Blake got what he wanted. James Gordon got what he wanted. Bruce Wayne (Batman) got what he wanted. Even Selina Kyle (Catwoman) got what she wanted. How likely is this? In a world where I can suspend belief to believe that the Batman is real, I find it difficult to believe that after such an epic war/battle, all the major protagonists got, essentially, happy endings.
No one fell from grace. No one died. No one faced a moral dilemma and came out of it for the worse. In short, no one lost anything. How can you go through so much sacrifice without it having a dent on who you are? It was just too neat for me. I would have liked to have seen an ending like in The Godfather series, particularly in The Godfather Part II — Michael Corleone sitting in his cabin at Lake Tahoe, on top of the world but bitterly alone. Sure, the man got what he wanted, but not without losing a huge part of himself.
To be clear, overall, I thought the movie was very good. It just wasn’t “this is the greatest movie of all time” good. And, at least for me, it was because it failed to stick the landing. And that ended up being my main takeaway — for something to be great, it needs to stick the landing. There is a psychological phenomenon called the “peak-end rule”, in which people judge an experience largely by how they felt at its peak and at its end, rather than the average moment of the experience. It’s the equivalent of saving your KFC chicken skin for the last bite. And while The Dark Knight trilogy nailed its peak, it failed to stick its landing.
What does this have to do with anything? Well, last week, on July 27, Prime Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim launched his much-anticipated economic vision, titled, “Ekonomi Madani: Memperkasa Rakyat”. As a whole, I find the Ekonomi Madani vision to be a very welcome and much-needed frame to Malaysia’s future development path.
A common critique of economic policy is that, oftentimes, things are done in isolation and relationships between things like social protection and economic growth, for instance, are brought up in silos. But in reality, economic development is far more complex and inter-connected. As such, the prime minister’s vision does recognise the interconnectedness of economic competitiveness (the ceiling), a reasonable quality of living for all (the floor) as well as good governance and sustainability.
I find the general reform direction of the vision encouraging. We all want more robust economic growth, sound fiscal capacity, greater inclusiveness of women and labour in the economy, better governance and, especially for me, greater regionalisation of our economy. I have argued in previous articles in this newspaper that Malaysia has become somewhat of an “island” economy. When it comes to competition, if Malaysia’s largest firms primarily compete among themselves for an “island-type” market size, how productive can they actually be? Are they simply providing domestic services to an island of, say, 35 million consumers, or can they go out and compete to provide those same services to a continent of 7.5 billion people? The economic agenda to regionalise and seek markets abroad is completely necessary. We need our firms to compete regionally, if not globally.
But this is where the rubber meets the road. Even if the general reform direction is sound, the question then turns to execution. A good start — as The Dark Knight trilogy shows us — need not mean a good finish. We need to stick the landing. And this is where execution and delivery become especially important. And while the prime minister himself reiterated this point and discussed measures on government implementation, the government cannot do this alone.
Complex problems require creative solutions. And the kinds of issues that the country faces can’t be solved, however creatively, by just one entity alone. Even for the Batman, cleaning up Gotham requires cooperation with Commissioner Gordon and District Attorney Harvey Dent (up to a point, of course). It will be important for the government to become more inclusive on executing the prime minister’s vision, more broadly taking in experts and resources from the private sector, the philanthropic sector and the rakyat.
Taking it a step further, can the government be better coordinated and more willing to let go of “turf” issues? How much is it willing to redistribute and delegate power, particularly to those who have been historically underrepresented? The more groups we can include in this development journey, and the better we can coordinate among ourselves, the greater our “Collective Brain” in fulfilling the potential of our economic development journey.
As such, while I had to watch on in semi-disappointment as The Dark Knight Rises failed to stick its landing, we are not just passive observers watching a movie unfold. The economic vision the prime minister has laid out is a strong start, but it needs to stick its landing. And this is where we may, for our own parts, contribute as best as we can and demand that the government be as inclusive as possible. This is the only way for us to be on a shared journey to a shared future.