Nietzschean and Christ figures

"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself." -Nietzsche

"Batman, The Dark Knight, is a morality play told by Nietzsche, wherein the only non-conflicted premier character who manages “moral” clarity is one who would be considered demented and insane in any non-Nietzschean world. When truth is arrived at in Gotham’s little Nietzschean shop of horrors it is truth that is arrived at by a will to power and the only reason that it bears any familiarity to what any non ubermensch being would understand is a sheer “accident” created by Batman’s will to power.Nolan’s film finds all of his characters except one conflicted with divided loyalties. Rachel Dawes is conflicted about love with her loyalties divided between Harvey Dent and Bruce Wayne. Harvey Dent, an ambitious District Attorney, is conflicted about career as seen by the fact that he was known as “two face” by the police force. His divided loyalties fluctuate between his own personal advance and the means by which that advance is attained. Commissioner Gordon is conflicted by loyalties to family and loyalties to work. Bruce Wayne is conflicted by identity. Only The Joker is unfamiliar with the uncertainty that being deeply internally conflicted brings. Nolan’s characters, excepting one, all seem to be in some existential internal crisis. The entrance of the Joker becomes the meaningful, and sometimes final, experience that resolves this cornucopia of internal existential crises.

[...] Batman, as the Dark Knight covenant head, by means of substitution, takes on the sins of the White Knight and so brings order to Gotham. The White Knight remains the hero but for all who can see behind the veil we know that any order or justice is based on the noble lie. The Joker has won even if only a handful of people in Gotham know it.

In this sense, Batman is a deeply cynical movie. In a culture where God is dead an optimistic cynicism used to prop up the myths that make society governable is perhaps the best we can hope for". Source: backwaterreport.com

"Somewhere in the middle of the picture Donnie Darko takes his girlfriend to the movies. They’re watching The Evil Dead, but when Donnie leaves we see that The Evil Dead is double-billed with The Last Temptation of Christ. It seems like a cheap gag of juxtaposing the sacred with the profane, but there is more method to the image. Donnie Darko reveals itself to be a loose retelling of The Last Temptation of Christ with Donnie as, of course, the Christ figure.

In the subsequent stretch of life that Frank has given him, Donnie meets his girlfriend and apparently loses his virginity to her at a Halloween party he’s thrown with his sister. There’s a genuinely, youthfully erotic moment afterwards when they walk downstairs holding hands and he gives her an open mouth kiss goodbye.) For teenage boys, the loss of virginity is often seen as proof that you’re normal. In The Last Temptation of Christ, that’s more or less the message that Jesus gets when he loses HIS virginity in his hallucinated marriage to Mary of Magdelene. The world ends, however, and Donnie decides to go back in time and relive it again. He dies, as we are lead to believe he was meant to, by being crushed with the jet engine, and the apocalypse seems to have been averted. Like Jesus, he was born a freak and he was meant to die a freak.
Frank makes an obvious Satan figure, especially the Satan as portrayed in The Last Temptation of Christ. He’s played by James Duval, an unbelievably beautiful boyish actor who is a favorite of the openly gay director Gregg Araki".
Source: cc.usu.edu

"Penn's movie ultimately redeems a tragic quest. As McCandless blazed his Huck Finn trail up and down America, devouring Jack London, Thoreau and Tolstoy, he was carving his own voracious narrative into the land. With the movie, that narrative is made flesh. Chris becomes a Christ figure, an environmental martyr. While his death was an accident (explained in a twist that should not be spoiled), he was author of his own destiny. And on film his story achieves the literary grandeur of the writing that inspired him.

Chris is a deeply moral person and carries books from Tolstoy, Jack London and Nietzsche with him.

He desperately does not want to be found by his parents, so he assumes a new identity, "Alexander Supertramp."
Source: www.newsrecord.org

Ben Foster: How did you get ready for the movie ["Alpha Dog"]?
Emile Hirsch: There's a Nietzsche book called "Human, Aft-Too-Human", which is basically a book of aphorisms. I was randomly reading it as I was preparing for the role. There was this quote that really got the whole gist of Truelove, my character. It was about humiliation and forgiveness. To me, it was the key to everything, because when someone is humiliated, an awful rage can result. It's weird playing a tough guy. What is a tough guy? Is he a tough guy because he thinks he is? How much of it is pure? And how much of it is that he's concealing something inside? In Truelove's case, I think he really is one. But I think he's also cowardly; what he ends up doing is not what a tough guy would have done. It's funny, because in earlier interviews people were asking us if we did research on the real guys our characters are based on. And in this case, I think that smart, selected research was best--too much of it can constrain you. I didn't want the facts to get in the way. So the character was purely my own invention".
Source: findarticles.com