Cultural Representations of "Evil" People

Belatedly this summer, I was able to catch The Dark Knight, a truly great action film which included the extras that pushed it beyond your typical Spiderman/James Bond blockbuster. It contained dynamic characters, Ledger's chilling/brilliant last role, Maggie Gyllenhaal, not one but two classic moral-compass-support-old-guys-that-everyone-loves (Alfred and Morgan Freeman's Lucius Fox), and a little bit of a social commentary of which I read way too much into. While I certainly was entertained, I have some lingering thoughts on one of the underlying commentariess Nolan's flick seemed to be gesturing at at times.

American pop culture is completely saturated with good vs evil battles. It makes me wonder where exactly is the horrible evil of postmodernism and moral relativism that everyone is afraid is destroying the world (answer: Europe). Now, I certainly do not want to deemphasize the presence of immorality and evil in the world. I may or may not be a Calvinist, so I certainly appreciate the vast depravity of humanity.

BUT I cringe at all our depictions of intrinsically evil people who are justly slain or deposed of violently by our intrinsically good hero(ine), who may or may not have any flaws of their own.
Yes, there are certainly horrific people who do horrific things intentionally and may, like the Joker, simply desire chaos and anarchy. BUT my religious beliefs require me to believe these people are not unredeemable, regardless of how corrupted they may be. They are not intrinsically evil, but are also victims of the same evil that they are dispersing. Humanity may be extremely depraved, but are also capable of redemption with a lil' divine help. - even the Joker.

To be fair to Batman, he tends to avoid killing and using guns (not like death, bullets, and people are correlated or anything). The movie also contains a "common good of humanity" and "means doesn't usually justify end" themes, so The Dark Knight is more complicated than I initially was giving it credit for. BUT, unfortunately, most of our American hero stories certainly emphasize the existence of the purely evil person who needs to be completely destroyed by the mostly good person. Perhaps this perspective helps explains our moral failure to sufficiently attempt to rehabilitate our prisoners in our over-crowded prisons.

Even beyond our pop culture, we, like most (if not all) societies have a tendency to dehumanize the enemy, the other. For example, I had the displeasure of witnessing Lions and Lambs which captured several perspectives on our present military situations. One notable perspective that was missing, of course, was that of the "Talis" or the enemy combatants that were ruthlessly killing our American heroes. I certainly do not want to defend the Taliban, but I at least want to acknowledge that they are people, they are human, however wrong they might be. The Cold War is over, most Nazis are dead, and America is not the beacon of light and goodness it was once perceived to be (but never really was to the full extent, I would argue). Ask the rest of the world, they'll tell you how little moral capital we really have left.