For those unfamiliar with the plot, the movie is about a nerdy teenager named Dave who decides to become a superhero, because hey, no one else is doing it. So he gets himself a wetsuit and a couple of batons, sets out to fight crime, and promptly gets himself knifed and hit by a car, in rapid succession. Luckily for Dave, things begin to look up once he gets out of the hospital.

While he’s attempting to defend a man against a brutal gang beating, someone films the incident and slaps it on YouTube. Suddenly, Dave (styling himself “Kick-Ass”) is an internet phenomenon, and taking superhero requests via email daily. When the crime he’s fighting becomes increasingly more mob-related and Dave begins to get over his head, he teams up with Hit-Girl and Big Daddy, a father-daughter duo of fellow (albeit much more accomplished) superheroes.

And that’s about it. There’s also a back story about Dave trying to score with the girl of his dreams by pretending he’s gay, but that’s not central to what I want to talk about.

On the one hand, the movie’s ridiculously entertaining. The characters are engaging, the writing is snappy and funny, and there’s a good ol’ moral undertone about standing up and doing the right thing.

On the other hand, um, the “heroes” kill all the bad guys. And not just in self-defense. There is at least one scene where a villain is brutally executed by the so-called good guys, despite the fact that he has cooperated with them and he is helpless to do any more harm. Furthermore, the protagonists seem to actually enjoy disposing of their enemies in this way. Big Daddy in particular makes it clear that his is primarily a mission of vengeance against the crime lord who framed him.

True, Kick-Ass himself doesn’t do all that much killing. He gives the crooks a good beating – and receives one in turn – but he doesn’t kill them. Still, it’s made pretty clear that he admires and even envies Hit-Girl and Big Daddy their ability to slaughter criminals so efficiently, and we the audience are never made to wonder whether his admiration may be misplaced. In the whole movie there is never any moment where the rightness of this brutal style of vigilante justice is questioned.

Am I taking this whole issue too seriously? It’s possible. But I would argue that the movie is not taking the issue seriously enough, dishing up sadistic bloodshed as entertainment, passing it off as morally acceptable (even applaudable), and all the while never breaking the comedic, light-hearted tone. It genuinely bothers me, because there is so much about this movie that I love, and for the first forty-five minutes I had virtually no complaints. (There were some technical flaws later on that annoyed me, but my complaints in that department are comparatively minor.)

I’m glad for a movie that upholds ordinary citizens standing up for what’s right, but if barbaric vigilante executions (and taking pleasure in them) are supposed to be “what’s right,” I can’t in good conscience give the movie credit for any kind of moral backbone.

I recently saw two excellent new films: Ponyo and District 9. Excellent, but very different, as anyone will be able to see. And yet, after seeing Ponyo (which I saw after District 9), I couldn’t help but notice an element common to both films: that of the character who becomes “something halfways,” a figure somewhere in between two different peoples which have a less than peaceful coexistence. It’s this common theme which I want to discuss here. (Warning: spoilers will almost inevitably follow.)

In District 9, aliens have landed in South Africa and, unable to repair their ship, have been relegated to refugee camps. After thirty years, tensions are high. The aliens are dissatisfied with their slummy accommodations, and the South African humans are sick of having the troublesome “prawns,” as they are derogatorily nicknamed, living on the edge of Johannesburg. It is decided by the MNU (Multi-National United), therefore, that the aliens should be relocated farther away from the city, into what amounts to be little more than a concentration camp.

The man in charge of evicting these 1.8 million aliens is Wikus Van De Merwe, and he does not gain our sympathy early on. He treats the aliens with contempt, tricking the majority into giving up their rights and complying, and coercing the few smart ones to do likewise by means of implied threats. In short, despite what his position should require, he appears one of the least likely candidates to become any kind of real “mediator” between humanity and the “prawns.”

And yet, that is exactly what he becomes, albeit very unwillingly. After an accident with a mysterious alien chemical, he finds to his horror that he is slowly metamorphosing into one of the aliens. Hounded by MNU agents (who plan to harvest what they view as no more than a genetic anomaly), Wikus is forced to flee all human contact and take refuge in the one place his persecuters will never find him — and also, incidentally, the one place where he would least like to be: the alien slums. He descends from his place of prominence and lives among the prawns like one of them. He eventually even teams up with one of the smarter ones he so recently threatened and evicted.

Ponyo, by contrast, offers a much more innocent vision, but one nonetheless centred around humans and a people alien to them. The latest from Japanese animator extraordinaire Hiyao Miyazaki, this tale concerns a boy, Sosuke, who finds a human-faced fish, Ponyo. Ponyo’s love for Sosuke compels her to transform herself into a human, contrary to the wishes of her father, Fujimoto, who, while once human himself, gave up his humanity to live in the ocean among the sea creatures.

Ponyo becomes the link between the humans and the life of the ocean, the humans who largely do not believe in the magic of the ocean, and the life of the ocean (represented by Ponyo’s father) which has largely given up on humans as disgustingly hopeless. And yet, through Ponyo’s decision to be human, and the love between her and Sosuke, both peoples’ conventions and assumptions are challenged, and as they are gently guided by a greater, beneficent force, they take the first steps towards reconciliation with each other.

There are key differences between the two stories, of course, even as regards their depiction of “mediators.” Ponyo’s choice to become human is completely willing, motivated by her prior love, whereas Wikus has his transformation thrust upon him, and it is through it that he comes to love the aliens. Related to this is the approach each film takes in presenting its protagonist: Ponyo has our sympathies from the start, whereas Wikus definitely does not, only becoming more sympathetic in our eyes as his transformation (both inward and outward) progresses.

And yet the result is ultimately the same: both characters willingly choose to give up something of what they had before and fully take on the nature of the other people, all because of the love they have developed for it.

It would be a stretch to call either character a “Christ figure,” even in a purely literary sense. Ponyo’s love is childlike, but many of her actions and choices in pursuit of this love are decidedly childish. Wikus, likewise, has a his fair share of character flaws, most of which are blatantly obvious to us from when we first meet him (indeed, it is one of District 9‘s greater merits that it can make such a visibly unheroic and contemptible figure into a believable protagonist), and he resists his status as “intermediate” for most of the film.

Still, both characters and their transformations point inescapably to the truth of the Incarnation, the ultimate example of an individual bringing two conflicting sides together by taking on the nature of the other side, solely motivated by his love for that people. These characters and their transformations resonate with us because they are reflections of this truth, the truth not only of the fact of the Incarnation, but of the innate weirdness of the Incarnation. Seeing the transformation of Ponyo, we may be a bit surprised or interested, as we might be seeing anything else as unusual as a fish transforming into a girl. Seeing the transformation of Wikus, we are shocked, unsettled, and possibly even genuinely disturbed.

Why then do we so often take the Incarnation for granted, a transformation made all the more utterly weird by the fact that it was not simply an instance of a creature becoming another creature, but of God becoming a creature in the fullest sense? And why, when we are moved by the childlike devotion of Ponyo to Sosuke, or the willingness of Wikus to give up everything he had so that the aliens might be saved, are we not constantly moved by Christ’s choice to not only descend from heaven and take on the nature of a servant, but also to be disgracefully killed in such a form, and indeed, by the very people he gave up everything to save?

[Note on content: Ponyo is essentially appropriate for all ages, but District 9 earns its R rating for pervasive coarse language; gory violence, as various characters are blown up by alien weaponry; intense, frightening and disturbing situations, sexual references; and drug content.)

This problem was very similar to one plaguing the Harry Potter books towards the end of the series, something I can best describe as an attempt first to take characters and elements originally created for a whimsical story, perhaps even something like a faerie-tale, and then to fit them into what is clearly intended to be a grand, mythic narrative. (This phenomenon is also observable in the recent film adaptations of the The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and Prince Caspian.)  And the problem, of course, is that this simply does not work. Taking plot elements and characters intended for one genre and trying to make them work in another is, in general, a bad idea (unless the goal is surrealism).

I think this device almost works in the Harry Potter books, which I attribute to the facts that the crossover is being attempted by the author who created the characters in the first place, and also because mythic structure into which they are being forced is a true myth, in terms of narrative (not simply a big battle featuring characters who speak pompously about destiny and address all their superiors as “my lord”).

Burton’s Alice in Wonderland and the Narnia movies, however, are not really myths underneath their belligerent exteriors. They’re examples of formula writing: people fight, the protagonists have to decide whether to do the right thing or the wrong thing, people around them tell them to do the right thing, the protagonists angst, the protagonists decide to do the right thing (or what the screenwriter thinks is the right thing). There are none of the complexities or underlying moral, philosophical, and theological ideas that make the great works of mythic literature truly great; works such as The Iliad, The Odyssey, Beowulf, Paradise Lost, even The Divine Comedy… and, of course, The Bible – and more recent works such as The Lord of the Rings and Watership Down.

I don’t want to get into a detailed discussion of what sets true myths apart from the wannabe postmodern schlock of today (I’ll save that for a later post). I don’t really even want to try to explain what characterizes a “myth” specifically (though I have provided a few criteria). It should be clear to anyone, however, that there is a world of difference between a whimsical, absurdist story like Alice in Wonderland and an epic, mythic story like The Lord of the Rings. And it should also be fairly clear that trying to combine the content of one with the outward appearance of the other and expecting a cohesive whole to emerge, is wishful thinking at best.

Recently I’ve been getting into the work of Michelangelo Antonioni, who, if not quite the polar opposite of Hitchcock, is pretty close. For some reason, though, while I do not see a lot of comparisons between the two directors, I see their names frequently appear in close proximity. It may be that each one popularized a certain genre of filmmaking: Hitchcock was the master of suspense, and Antonioni the master of alienation. It may be simply that they were two well-known directors producing their most famous work in the ’60s and ’70s. I really can’t say for sure.

This frequent association, though, has made me think about what the work of each director reveals about the other’s. Each is obviously coming from a different end of the spectrum: Hitchcock made entertaining, suspenseful movies geared to appeal to the general public, but done with a great degree of artistry and precision; while most Antonioni’s films were about the alienation of the individual in post-modern society, which made for alienating films (ironically?) and a fanbase among intellectuals, art students, and some critics.

There is one point at which the two intersect, however, because both directors made movies about photographers who inadvertently discover murders which have been committed: Hitchcock made Rear Window and Antonioni made Blowup. Both films, moreover, can be seen as metaphors for the power of film, and both also shed a great deal of light on each director’s work as a whole. (Warning: spoilers will inevitably follow.)

In Rear Window, a photographer (Jimmy Stewart) is confined to his apartment after breaking his leg. Bored out of his mind, he spends his days spying on his neighbours in the apartment block with his zoom lens. What starts out as casual voyeurism turns into a serious moral dilemma when, through his spying, he realizes that one his neighbours has murdered a woman.

As has been noted by numerous film scholars, Rear Window is very much emblematic of Hitchcock’s work. Hitchcock is a voyeur, after all, as are the audiences who adore his films: he makes films that examine the lives of others, and through the cinema screen the audiences spy on these characters for their own enjoyment. Film as a whole, indeed, is somewhat voyeuristic by nature; of course, on principle this represents no moral dilemma, as these are not real and unaware people into whose lives we are peering, but rather actors pretending to live the lives we see on the screen, and who are fully aware that they will be viewed by an audience.

Thus there is a direct connection between the photographer’s voyeuristic mode of entertaining himself and the voyeuristic nature of Hitchcock’s work. Similarly, there is a direct connection between the photographer’s inadvertent discovery of a murder, and another aspect of Hitchcock’s films: that of the moral and philosophical ideas underlying their escapist exterior. Hitchcock’s films are rife with material for discussion, after all; identity crises, moral dilemmas (such as the one I am now discussing), and social commentary abound in his work.

What Hitchcock seems to be telling us here is that what may start out as voyeurism for entertainment can lead to something far more significant – the discovery of a serious crime (and ultimately, the apprehension and arrest of said criminal) for Jimmy Stewart’s character, and the provocation of serious thought about moral and philosophical issues for us, the audience. It’s a hopeful view of the power of cinema.

The setup is similar in Antonioni’s film. Blowup is about a man photographer who appears to discover evidence of a murder while developing his film. Clearly the metaphor of Rear Window applies here; Antonioni was undoubtedly familiar with Hitchcock’s earlier film. And yet Antonioni is not simply parroting Hitchcock, because in the end of Blowup, the murder is not uncovered, justice is not served. The photographer’s claims of his discovery are meant only with apathy and disinterest, and ultimately he himself comes to question the truth of what his photographs reveal.

What Antonioni appears to be saying is that, in contrast to Hitchcock’s more optimistic view of cinema’s transformative power, people do not care about  meaning in film, and those who do will come only to question, in the face of modern society’s overwhelming apathy, whether there actually is any meaning. In fact, it could very well be argued that Antonioni is questioning his role as filmmaker in a postmodern world. Will people see the meaning in his films? Will they care about the meaning? Is there any meaning, or is he simply deceiving himself?

What is more, it seems that Antonioni is not simply questioning meaning in film, but meaning in life as a whole. In addition to the film metaphor at work in Blowup is a recurring theme of sex without intimacy. The protagonist, as a professional photographer, photographs models. He asks them to reveal themselves, to degrade themselves, and he even crawls on top of them — yet all this is simply to get the best possible shot. He remains impersonal and purely professional in his interests.

There are also several scenes in which he has intercourse with a number of women, and each time, it is clear, the act means nothing particularly special to him. Here are people engaging in an inherently meaningful act – one with enormous emotional implications, if nothing else – and by going about it in such a casual, apathetic way, they have divorced it from its meaning.

Despite his public statements that modern man must abandon “outdated” morals just as he has abandoned outdated scientific principles, both in person and in his films Antonioni really suggests nothing with which man might replace these morals. Unwittingly, he shows through his work that when these morals are removed, there is only meaninglessness. Sex is meaningless, art is meaningless, life is meaningless.

The respective outlooks of Hitchcock and Antonioni thus stand in stark opposition. Hitchcock is optimistic, revealing a somewhat modernist attitude characteristic of his time (though starting to wane at that point), though more so in keeping with his Catholic faith. Antonioni, conversely, while often identified as a modernist director, belongs properly to the postmodern generation in his failure to replace “outdated” morals with anything even remotely workable. Rejecting the Christian morality that Hitchcock still upholds (though perhaps begrudgingly at times), he is forced to settle for a kind of existential uncertainty, an outlook which was very chic at the time (and to this day), but also stereotypically postmodern and unrewarding.

So far I’ve seen four films by Michelangelo Antonioni, and I don’t really feel the need to see anymore. I’ll continue to watch and rewatch the films of Alfred Hitchcock, however, for the foreseeable future.

I do not think that conversion stories, end-times scenarios, or overt moralizing are the only ways God’s truth may shine through film — indeed, it is often obscured thereby. God’s light may shine forth in such simple things as a depiction of a beautiful sunset, or the compassion with which the filmmaker views his characters. God’s light is also the light of his truth, and this may manifest itself as a bleak parable about the consequences of sin, or as a story of how Christians have fallen short. All these are examples of God’s light of which Christians may not be inclined to think positively, but there is a great deal of virtue in all of them.

All this is not to say that art is an impersonal medium, meant to convey abstract truth completely unrelated to the artist who made it. Art has the potential to be deeply personal, and in addition to caring about God’s light as it shines through art (or doesn’t shine through, depending on the work), we ought to care about what a given work of art says about the artist as a person. As Christians, it is our duty to have compassion on others and to try to understand them as individuals, and through a work of art, we may learn far more about the artist than he could tell us in words. Understanding an artist as a person, furthermore, will often help to shed light on his body of work  as a whole, which in turn can aid in our understanding the individual works as we may not have done otherwise.

What I want to get away from, however, is the modern idea that art is solely a forum for self-expression. Ingmar Bergman, in the introduction to his Four Screenplays, had something to say on the subject: “In former days the artist remained unknown and his work was to the glory of God. (…) Today the individual has become the highest form and the greatest bane of artistic creation. (…) The artist considers his isolation, his subjectivity, his individualism almost holy. Thus we finally father in one large pen, where we stand and bleat about our loneliness without listening to each other and without realizing that we are smothering each other to death.” Despite his agnosticism, Bergman believed that art should be directly connected to worship, and that this goal is higher than — though it does not exclude — the artist’s self-expression.

The ideal of art to which I constantly return is that of the religious icon. Icons are not meant to be worshiped as having worth in and of themselves; rather, they are venerated as vessels for God’s grace. Through an icon, we glimpse the glory of God – who, when he became incarnate, called himself the Light and the Truth – and we worship him. Icons are Christocentric, and only when they are misappropriated do they become idolatrous. Likewise, art is not an end in and of itself: ars non gratia artis. Rather, it should lead us to a fuller understanding of God’s truth. The iconographer is not irrelevant to the equation, but he understands, as do we, the calling he serves to paint windows into the light of God. It is only after acknowledging this purpose and subordinate to it that we may assess his work as it relates to him as an artist.

My art professor once proposed, as a possible theory of art, that the purpose of art is life. I uphold that – but only under the proper definition of “life.” The only true life is living according to one’s telos, our God-given purpose to attain to the true, beatific vision of him – or as the Westminster Catechism puts it, to glorify and enjoy him forever. The ultimate end of art – and therefore film – is to help us to truly live.

In reading through what I once had the audacity to call “reviews,” I found myself cringing at every paragraph. I’ve purged the archives (with the exception of one review, which I didn’t find cringe-worthy enough to delete), therefore, saving them for posterity’s sake, but out of the public eye.

With any luck – or grace, I should say rather – this marks the beginning of a new chapter in the life of the Moviegeist.

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.