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| Monday, July 16, 2012 11:51 PM |
| On the Viewer - The Dark Knight |
 by Fëanor |
I reviewed The Dark Knight for Phillyist when it originally came out; you can check out that article here. My opinion of the movie hasn't changed much since then, but I do feel like I saw more in it this time.
(A note: as before, this piece is loaded with spoilers.)
The Dark Knight opens with an absolute tour de force: a brilliant bank heist engineered and executed by the Joker, who will be one of the central characters of the film. We learn from this sequence that the Joker is fearless (he's stealing from the mob), insane ("Whatever doesn't kill you makes you... stranger"), a master planner and manipulator, a loner, and he has zero (really more like negative) regard for human life. He systematically eliminates everyone who helped him pull the heist, either by personally killing them or by tricking them into killing each other. He is, as he explains to Harvey Dent later in the film, an agent of chaos, but only insofar as he produces chaos. And it's always carefully directed chaos, created through intricate planning. Although he professes to hate schemers and planners and sets himself up as their enemy and their opposite, he is in fact the master schemer of all master schemers. He is the ultimate author of every major event in the film, with only one, maybe two exceptions. He likes to tell people the story of how he got his scars, but it's a different story every time. We never learn anything about his background or his true identity. He's an enigma; a cipher; a devil.
After introducing the Joker, the movie wraps up the loose ends from Batman Begins by having Batman find and incapacitate Jonathan "Scarecrow" Crane, who has since become a (crappy) drug dealer. We also get introduced to one of the other things that Batman has inspired, besides the Joker: copycats. It's a group of regular citizens who are dressing up like Batman and fighting criminals. One of these guys asks Batman an important question: what's the difference between him and them? What gives him the right? He jokes, "I'm not wearing hockey pads," but of course there are some pretty essential differences: they don't have his resources and they don't follow his code - they have no compunction about using guns. So he ties them up and leaves them for the police right alongside the drug dealers.
Batman and Gordon meet up at the scene of Joker's bank heist, but both of them misunderstand the threat the Joker represents and dismiss him as some random crazy. Instead, they're still focused on taking down the mob once and for all. They wonder if the new D.A., Harvey Dent, can help them do it. Dent is another central character of the film. He is Gotham's White Knight, a crusader without a cape, fighting crime fearlessly, but from within the system and according to the rules. In other words, he's the hero Batman has been waiting for - the man who can take his place, and make him obsolete. If Dent succeeds and destroys organized crime in Gotham, then Bruce can retire and spend the rest of his life with Rachel - or he could if it weren't for the fact that Rachel and Dent appear to be lovers, something Bruce is just pretending isn't happening.
Dent's introductory scene is wonderful. He's cocky, fearless, clever, funny, and a bad-ass. When his star witness, who was supposed to rat on his boss, suddenly changes his story, and then pulls a gun on Dent, he slugs the guy, disarms him, and gets legitimately upset when the judge wants to halt proceedings. Dent has the same passionate, unstoppable drive to defeat crime as Batman and Gordon.
When Lau runs off to Hong Kong with the mob's money, and takes with him their best hope of defeating organized crime in Gotham, Dent and Gordon turn to Batman to do what they can't do. Because they work within the law, they can't touch Lau. But an outlaw can. It's not the first questionable thing Batman has been asked to do in pursuit of justice, and it won't be the last.
Meanwhile, the Joker has made his move. In one of the greatest scenes of the film, he walks in on a meeting of mob bosses and proposes that they hire him to eliminate their real problem: the Batman. At first they refuse, but when Batman returns Lau to Gotham to rat them all out, they get desperate and set the Joker loose. But they, like Batman, have misunderstood and underestimated the Joker. They think he's like any other criminal: that he's motivated by money. But money doesn't interest him at all. As Alfred explains, "Some men just want to watch the world burn." What the Joker wants is to poison the soul of Gotham. He wants chaos and torture and death and despair. He wants to show that no one is as good as they think they are; that when the chips are down, people are nasty and cruel at heart, and they will only act in their own self-interest, even if it means killing someone else. Batman's actions are founded on the idea that deep down, people are good, and can be saved. The Joker's actions are founded on the idea that deep down, people are evil, and aren't worth saving. The Joker is inspired and completed by the Batman. In the Batman he has found his perfect opponent in the battle for Gotham's soul.
The Joker goes about proving his terrible hypothesis via a series of cruel ethical experiments and moral challenges. He says people will die every day until Batman reveals his identity and turns himself in. And indeed the Joker does start murdering people - powerful and important people - and the police and Batman are powerless to prevent it. The Joker is always two steps ahead of them. And if Batman's code says that he must not kill, is he betraying his code through inaction? Must he give up to save lives? Alfred tells Bruce that Batman has to be strong enough and terrible enough to take this - to go on in the face of death, and not give in. But Bruce is only a man after all and decides he must give in to the Joker's demands. Dent is also beginning to snap under the pressure and starts stepping over the boundaries of the law to try to stop the Joker, even kidnapping one of the Joker's hired thugs and torturing him for information. Batman stops him, pointing out that Dent cannot do things like this. He can't stoop to the level of a criminal, or even of Batman, or all the good he's done will be swept away, and Gotham will fall back into corruption. Dent must remain clean.
But Dent also can't let the Batman turn himself in. So he claims to be the Batman himself, in the hopes of drawing out the Joker so the real Batman can finally take him down. Dent's plan seems to work, but in fact the Joker is still two steps ahead of all of them. He planned to be captured, and meanwhile orchestrated the kidnapping of Dent and Dawes, to give Batman another terrible choice: if he can save only one of them, which one will he choose? Will it be his lover or Gotham's White Knight? Batman chooses Rachel, but the Joker has rigged the game again. Batman finds himself saving Dent instead. But in truth neither Rachel nor Dent survive the ordeal. Harvey is left mutilated inside and out by the physical and emotional trauma. Meanwhile, the Joker has escaped with Lau. He seems to have already won, but he has more games to play.
When Coleman Reese threatens to expose Batman's identity on live TV, the Joker announces that if Reese isn't dead within the hour, he will blow up a hospital. (The Joker doesn't really want Batman's identity revealed, you see; he's having too much fun with him.) It's another test, this one performed on the citizens of Gotham. Will they murder an innocent man to save their own loved ones? Indeed, a few try, but Batman and the police manage to keep Reese safe. Unfortunately, during the chaos the Joker is able to unleash something far more terrible on Gotham: the transformed Harvey Dent, who, after a short talk with the Joker, has now become the avenging Two-Face, obsessed with fairness and fate. His trick coin, which once had two heads, each identically clean and shining, was damaged in the explosion that killed Rachel. Now one side is burned and scratched, just like Harvey himself. He seeks out each of the people he feels were responsible for Rachel's death and his own destruction, and a flip of the coin decides whether they live or die.
Like Bruce, he listened as his family was killed right in front of him, and he could do nothing. Like Bruce, he was shattered by the event, and sought a mission, a way to fight back. But unfortunately for him, his mentor in that moment was the Joker, and his response to loss and crime is to blame everyone, and kill or not based on random chance.
And the Joker still isn't done! (So much happens in this movie, and there are so few pauses for breath, that it's truly exhausting - it's one of the movies few flaws.) He sets up yet another moral test for the people of Gotham. Two ferries, one loaded with prisoners, the other loaded with random citizens, each end up stranded in the harbor. Each ferry is wired to explode, and the passengers of each have the detonator for the other ferry's bomb. Both ferries will explode at midnight, unless one set of passengers decides to blow up the other ferry. Will the prisoners kill the citizens to save themselves? Will the citizens kill the prisoners to save themselves?
Desperate to find the Joker and end all this, Batman again chooses to do questionable things in his pursuit of justice, and sets up a city-wide spy network using everyone's cell phones. The technology is questionable, but the metaphor is clear: Batman will do whatever is necessary to get his man. He is no White Knight, but a Dark one.
The gambit succeeds and he finally captures the Joker. And he defeats the Joker in a larger, metaphorical sense, as well; in one of the most powerful sequences in the film, the people on the ferries choose not to kill each other. For the first time, the Joker has failed. People were better than he'd planned for. Gotham is worth saving.
But the Joker's final and worst weapon, Harvey Dent, is still on the loose, and he's kidnapped Gordon's family. As in the climax of the first film, Batman once again breaks his central code against killing to defeat the final villain. He pushes Harvey off a ledge and kills him to stop him from murdering Gordon's son. Again there are extenuating circumstances: maybe he didn't really mean to kill Harvey, only to push him out of the way, and his death was an accident. Or maybe the Joker really did win, and Batman was forced to realize that sometimes in his pursuit of justice, he will face an impossible choice, and will have to kill to stop killing. And maybe Batman can do even that, if that's what he's called upon to do.
Regardless, Dent has fallen, both literally and figuratively, and Gordon and Batman have to decide what to do about it. Batman already knows Gotham couldn't survive the blow of learning the truth about Dent's corruption. The White Knight's perfect image can't be tarnished, or all his work will have been in vain. So Batman will have to take the blame for Dent's actions, and Gordon will have to hunt him as an outlaw and a murderer. Batman becomes whatever Gotham needs him to become so that Gotham can survive. And because Batman is more than a man - because Batman is a Dark Knight, a legend - he can take it.
As I said in an earlier post, I believe the final film in the trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises, will focus on the concept of Batman being more than a man, and will ask the question, if Batman must be superhuman and immortal, than what happens if the man embodying him is defeated and incapacitated? Can Batman survive that? Can Gotham survive it? The answer would seem to be right there in the title, with a nice continuation of the falling and rising imagery that's been at the heart of all the films. But we'll see. |
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Jim Genzano's books on Goodreads
