THE DARK KNIGHT
I was not expecting this. When I saw the trailer, I expected a film that would glory in the iconic struggle between Batman and the Joker. I was looking forward to this. But I didn’t get it. I got something way better.
When it first came out, Batman Begins was inevitably compared to Tim Burton’s Batman, which was widely regarded to be the finest Batfilm before director Christopher Nolan’s film. Thus it’s inevitable that The Dark Knight will be compared to its predecessor, and I’m certainly not one to break the pattern. Batman Begins was a very fine movie, and there are very few ways that Nolan could have made it better. What puts The Dark Knight on a higher level than Batman Begins is not the quality of the film-making, or that it hits closer to the target than Batman Begins; it is that the intensity and the scope of its vision is far broader and more powerful than Batman Begins. Batman Begins was an origins film, and you can’t introduce new complexities or developments in an origins film without the danger of the film feeling rushed — not the way you can with later installments. Batman Begins was about the genesis of Batman, and the journey Bruce Wayne went on in becoming Batman. Batman was the focus. All other characters were secondary. The villains were well-done and interesting, but they remained secondary characters, and they were significant only in terms of how they related or reacted to Batman/Bruce.
The Joker is no such supporting character. There were three main villains in Batman Begins, and they all worked off each other. There is no plurality of villains in The Dark Knight. There is one villain, and he is the Joker. There are subordinate villains, but they are only “allowed” to be villains in the context of the story because they are associated with or came to be because of the Joker in some way. This being the case, the Joker has to be an extremely strong character to carry all the weight of the “shadow” archetype, and Heath Ledger rises to the task. His performance does not simply make the Joker the greatest villain in comic book movie history; it makes him one of the greatest villains in movie history, period. As I watched him, it only occurred to me once that it was Heath Ledger behind the face paint, and even then, it was only a factual connection; it didn’t click for me. It still doesn’t. Ledger’s performance is mind-boggling.
In many ways, the Joker and Batman are very alike. “You’re a freak… like me,” as the Joker observes of his nemesis. The Joker’s is a kind Batman has never encountered before; likewise, the Joker has never encountered anyone like Batman before. Nobody, including the Joker, knows who Batman is, and nobody, including Batman, knows who the Joker is. They wear masks, and they break the rules that other criminals and heroes play by. “I don’t have the luxury of friends,” as Batman said in the first film, and the same is said of the Joker here. Batman clashes with the Joker as he will with no other villain, simply because of all his the villains in the Batman mythos, the Joker is most like Batman and he is also the least like Batman. He is least like him because the Joker is utterly depraved. There is no possibility for redemption in him. The fact that he is a villain has no basis in understandable human failings; it comes from an insatiable desire to cause chaos. The Joker is not after anything. His atrocities have no object. He has no development. His character does not change.
This is what makes him so dangerous to Batman; Batman has never fought his kind or even believed such a criminal could exist. “A criminal is not complicated,” Ducard told him in Begins, and it is echoed by Bruce to Alfred (another priceless performance by Michael Caine) here. On the contrary, as Alfred shows him, Bruce does not fully understand his opponent. In Begins, the villains, even the guys at the top, were basic: Ra’s al Ghul was a villain out of a misdirected ideology, and Falcone and Scarecrow were motivated by greed. Batman gets more of each kind in this film, but he is also forced to react to new levels of human evil which he has not encountered before. And as we see, the shock is almost too much for him. He almost gives in.
This idea is neatly symbolized in the recurring motif of dogs (I’ll explore this in a bit more depth later, but right now I’ll just draw attention to one aspect of it). Dogs were virtually non-existent in the first film, but as we learn in Batman’s opening scene, they are one of the few things that can bite through his suit and seriously hurt him, similar to the way the Joker penetrates Batman’s conventions and truly shakes him. In response, Batman builds himself a new suit (or rather, gets Fox, played by the incomparable Morgan Freeman, to build him a new suit) which is more flexible and allows him to be quicker and more agile but also makes him even more vulnerable than he was before. Similarly, Batman responds to the new threats by going places he never has before — literally. He travels to Hong Kong to retrieve a runaway conspirator with the mob. He builds a device that lets him spy on all of Gotham simultaneously. And he’s even harsher, sometimes brutal with the criminals he interrogates. Just as his new suit’s flexibility makes him vulnerable to attack, so this new power makes him more vulnerable to corruption. He’s toeing a fine line here. But as Batman shows us, and as the Joker himself admits, “You are truly incorruptible.”
This is notable, because in the Begins Batman showed that he had not yet risen to this level. He was not yet incorruptible. He had discovered compassion, true, and had learned mercy, but not grace; that is, he passively refrained from killing his enemies, but he had not yet come to the point where he would actively save them. This was brought home particularly in the scene where he says to one criminal, “I won’t kill you… but I don’t have to save you.” It was a flaw he had not overcome. But in The Dark Knight, he overcomes it. The criminals may descend even deeper into depravity, but Batman rises above them, and shows that he is capable of grace as well as mercy. It’s a subtle development and one that’s easy to miss, but it’s there.
This leads into the film’s exploration of human nature in general, which, in addition to the Dark Knight and the Ace of Knaves, revolves around Harvey Dent (a surprising turn by Aaron Eckhart), Gotham’s new DA who later becomes Two-Face. Dent, on the one hand, is ready to believe in humanity’s goodness. He believes it is possible to clean up Gotham, he believes that it can be done without serious losses, and he believes the people of Gotham will rise to the occasion. The flip-side is the Joker, who believes that underneath, people are all scum like him, and here the dog motif comes into play again. The Joker compares himself to “a dog chasing cars: I wouldn’t know what to do with one if I caught it!” He later has an uncooperative mobster cut up and fed to his dogs (off-screen). Dogs (at least, in the film) do not know true loyalty. They appear to serve certain sets of rules and purposes, but in reality, they will attack their masters just as readily as their supposed enemies, given the chance. This is clearly how the Joker views people: “When the chips are down… these people will eat each other,” he tells Batman, and tries to prove it as well, in a climax frighteningly reminiscent of present-day terrorist set-ups. The fact is that neither of them is wholly correct, though neither of them is wholly wrong, either. Even Gotham’s best, its paramount of virtue and goodness, its “White Knight” can fall to the level of the criminals he sought to eradicate, and even the criminals he put behind bars can rise above their base natures and become heroes, and the film shows both situations.
The Joker unwittingly casts some light on this paradox while casually talking to a cop about why he uses knives. He explains that he likes to see people die slowly because, according to him, that “in their last moments, people show you who they really are.” (And indeed, when the Joker himself is placed in such a situation, he shows this to be true, though perhaps not in a way we would expect). The inference here is that when people are placed under extreme pressure, they will display what they are really like. Some criminals will experience this kind of pressure, and show their hidden good because of it.
When Dent experiences this pressure, on the other hand, he can’t stand it, and succumbs to evil. Throughout the film, Dent carries his father’s “lucky coin”, which he habitually flips to determine his course of action in serious moral issues. He is criticized by both Rachel (Maggie Gyllenhaal, taking over magnificently from Katie Holmes) and Batman for this flippancy (no pun intended), but he later reveals that the coin’s two sides both show “heads”, and thus, when he flips his coin and assigns a moral decision to “heads”, he is committing unavoidably to that choice. His supposed habit of leaving things to chance is really a display of his belief in moral absolutes; a subtle but particularly relevant detail of this symbolism is the fact that, in the shot where we learn the coin’s true nature, the phrase “IN GOD WE TRUST” is clearly visible on both sides.
But something happens, and we see that his moral resolve was clearly not deep enough to survive a traumatic experience, an experience which (quite literally) reveals his previously hidden evil side. The experience leads him to question and ultimately abandon his belief in absolutes. He replaces it instead with the belief that the world is governed by chance and this change is symbolized by the damage to his lucky coin; one side is irreparably burned, turning his lucky coin into just another coin with two different sides. But he doesn’t cease his habit of tossing the coin to supposedly determine the outcome in serious moral situations; the difference now is that he is truly determining his actions by chance.
And so we come to the final main theme of the film: the complexity of morality. The Joker imposes moral dilemmas unlike anything Batman or the city of Gotham has experienced before, and Batman certainly stumbles — but never falls. He always holds onto his faith in absolutes, defying the amorality of the Joker and the nihilism of Two-Face. Never does he indicate where his sense of morality comes from — perhaps, like Hellboy, he still isn’t sure. But he does inescapably point to it when, in the final moments, he takes the sins of another on himself and suffers the condemnation of the law. He becomes the saviour Gotham truly needs, rather than the “White Knight” they want.
It will be argued that his decision is unethical, that he is deceiving the people simply to cater to Gotham’s emotional infancy. True, the decision is regrettable. But the alternative is even more so, and sometimes the only right choice is to choose the lesser of two evils. On the other hand, if that logic was extended to the Joker’s set-up with the two ferries, wouldn’t that entail the destruction of one of them? In reality, though, the situation is a flawed analogy, as such a decision by the people on the ferries would be tainted by their own interests, while Batman’s decision is anything but.
And after all, Batman does not want the people of Gotham to place their faith in Harvey Dent so much as in the ideal, the absolute that Dent stood for in the eyes of the people. And even though Dent fell, such faith is still not misplaced, for the people of Gotham still have their hero, they still have their one man who will stand for justice. He isn’t someone they are ready to believe in yet. But the fact is that they need — we need — a hero like Batman. In time, the people of Gotham will cry out for him, like the Israelites in the Old Testament, or Joey in the final moments of Shane (a scene that’s echoed towards the end of The Dark Knight). And Batman will wait for them, he’ll protect them, and he’ll take their insults and scorn all the time. He’s a man rejected by the people, condemned by the law for crimes he did not commit, yet a man who chose all this, and still resolved to save the people who scorned him. Sound familiar? The fact is that while Batman never states where his morality comes from, the symbol he becomes proclaims it.
In the end, all these themes can be shown to have something in common, and that is the contrast between two alternatives, be they aspects of human nature, moral choices, sides of a coin, or Batman and the Joker. The film, as I mentioned before, does not glory in the clash between the Caped Crusader and the Clown Prince of Crime. But it does make this relationship the crux of the film. A wise move; a film with this many characters, this many back stories, this many relationships developments, and thematic symbols, would implode without an incredibly powerful core. Batman and the Joker create that core because they are really two sides of the same coin (“You complete me,” is the Joker’s tongue-in cheek comment): human nature, wherein is contained the potential for the greatest good and the most despicable evil.
***
I suppose I should take a moment to drive home the fact that this is not a film for children. The first one was dark, but this one seriously toes the line between PG-13 and R. I would not let children under 12 view it. It is dark, violent, and disturbing, even for adults.
That said, it will be interesting to see where Nolan goes with the third (and, unless they renegotiate the contract, the last) installment. Batman Begins seemed to be inspired by a variety of origins accounts; The Dark Knight takes its main inspiration from The Long Halloween, one of the more legendary storylines in the mythos. One notable element present in The Long Halloween who has not made an appearance in the film yet is the character of Catwoman, so perhaps Nolan will continue the storyline and introduce her in round 3.\
Or maybe they’ll choose to take the story in yet another different direction; it’s hard to say whether Two-Face will be back or not, and the Joker will certainly have to be out of it for a while, what with Ledger’s untimely demise (I trust Nolan to be smart enough not to try to replace Ledger), so it could be we’re in for some more villains. I personally would love to see a rendition of Bane on-screen, and the logical storyline to tackle in that case would be the origin of Bane, the breaking of the Bat, and Azrael taking up the mantle of the Bat… the other storyline I’d be interested to see explored is No Man’s Land. I guess I’ll just have to wait. But at least I know the franchise is in good hands, as Nolan has proved for the second time.
