Person of Interest as Batman for a post-9/11 World and law enforcement

So, this post is just what the title says. Intro linkage is a bit sparse because I am cutting and pasting from my own rambling on FB. This was written upon re-viewing season 3 of Person of Interest. Some details I tried to be as circumspect as possible in discussing to avoid spoilers, and I am too lazy to rewrite ... but I did do it with enough detail that, if you have watched it, you know what it is.

My former roommate made the brilliant observation when, as roommates, we first got into season 1 (while season 3 was in progress), which I had not noticed, that Finch and Reese are the two sides of Batman: the active and deadly operative with nearly superhuman abilities (and calling him "the man in the suit" was a really nice touch) and the reclusive millionaire. This makes total sense because this is Jonathan Nolan fresh from writing the batman trilogy with his brother Chris. But I think it also provides a little extra opportunity for tension between those two sides (e.g., Reese trying to figure out what Finch's deal is in the first season, sort of the batman side not getting what the Wayne side is all about and being suspicious of it).

Even that decisive moment in season 3 when Simmons comes out of the shadows is an echo of the man coming out of the shadows and killing Bruce Wayne's parents, and Simmons' actions have a strong effect in the next episode (the one with the Johnny Cash version of "Hurt") of bringing out Reese's dark side, just as the man in the shadows is the trigger of Wayne's dark side.

 (Aside: my favorite shot in the Hurt episode is Shaw punching the guy in the face with the picture of Simmons such that the picture comes away smeared in blood. I take this as he is marked by blood, both in that he is a murderer and in that he is slated to die for his crimes ... I think they did this also with Turney's identification of Quinn).

(Brain Boiler: Is Carter Harvey Dent? Needing to exit before the tension destroyed her through bifurcation? I don't think these kinds of things work that tightly, but the comparison is interesting.)

Main Point:
Watching season 3 this time, it occurred to me that PoI is Batman for the real world - namely, the post-9/11 world. Even though the recent Batman trilogy could be assumed to be happening in a post-9/11 world, you could not really work that in concretely because, while it is obvious especially in Dark Knight Rises that Gotham is NYC, it is still the fictional city that stands in for it, not the real thing. PoI takes the themes and issues and character tensions of Batman and interprets them in an actual post-9/11 NYC.

The post-9/11 texture has been one of the key things that the show has been praised for since the beginning. I think it's cool that they have melded it with batman tropes ...the Nolan's really are geniuses.

Reese as Law Enforcement in a Post-9/11 world

I will throw in another Post-9/11 thing here from an FB post somewhere back along the line at the beginning of season 4. I don't feel like going back through to look that one up and I can remember the basic idea, and I don't feel like making another separate post, since this one already concerns the Post-9/11 thing.

At the beginning of season 4 , we find that the machine has given Reese the "secret identity" of being a cop. Now, this has a mechanical purpose for both the machine and the show: he has the extra resources a cop has for doing the work. But good literature is able to make its elements work well on both the mechanical level and the symbolic ... if it's good, it doesn't have to choose between overdone material credibility and cheap allegory --- it can do both material functionality and symbolic meanings without them being the negative formulations I just used of them.

On the symbolic level, Reese represents a very real question in law enforcement in the US after the two wars fought after 9/11. Many combat veterans returned from the wars disabled, but many came back physically capable and in need of work. It is always a real concern when a country has foreign war combat veterans serving in domestic law enforcement because the two things require two very different mentalities: The one whom a soldier encounters in war is the enemy; The one whom the peace officer encounters is a fellow citizen needing simply to be kept between the lines.

I'm not commenting negatively on either combat veterans or police who have maybe legitimately had to fire in real life. Combat is real, and a mentality of "execute with extreme prejudice" is unfortunately necessary, and there are also real situations faced by cops in which the antagonism displayed by some fellow citizens approaches the level of an enemy in war (they call it Chiraq for a reason). But I am noting that the residual presence of combat mentality can be problematic for "peace officers." The general tension between the two perspectives has been noted by much more knowledgeable people than myself - it is the reason that martial law is to be avoided if at all possible, so that you don't have your military filling the role of your police force (great exposition of this in the Battlestar Galactica reboot).

Reese was foreign ops all the way. His military service was Army and his intelligence service was CIA rather than FBI (if he was in England, he would have been MI6 rather than MI5). We can see the tension theme at play even before the machine puts him as a domestic law enforcement officer for his cover in season 4. There was always a tension between Carter and Reese over doing things through the law and doing things the CIA way. But especially when the machine makes Reese a cop in season 4, the issue distinctively on the page.

And on the whole "to kill or not to kill, that is the question" thing, I still get chills every time I listen to Medicine by the band Daughter (which was used for the visual storytelling at the end of the episode in which they choose not to, but Harold's relationship with the machine is damaged)

Update 10/14/15:
Just tonight I rewatched the episode in season 4 called "Pretenders" (the immediately preceding episode was call "Prophets). The Batman connection was REALLY heavy in this one, particularly with the Nolan iteration of the franchise. An imposter cop (imposter Batmans in Dark Knight) trying to fill in for a missing "man in the suit" whose disappearance (like in Dark Knight Rises) led to a rise in crime on the street going unchecked.