February 22nd, 2009
Why The Dark Knight isn’t a conservative film
The post 9-11 era hasn’t been a golden age in cinema. Today’s comedies aren’t trail-blazing satires; they’re not even original. Pay for a comedy today, and chances are you’ll be throwing ten dollars at yet another stoner film or half-hearted romantic / buddy movie. Will Farrell, Owen Wilson, and Vince Vaughn have been making the same movies in different forms for over a decade. In efforts to placate America’s hyperactive sense of nostalgia, filmmakers have ceaselessly been remaking retired semi-popular shows our modern culture’s image, taking away the dated charm that made Starsky and Hutch (just to cite one example) barely palpable. Today’s most intelligent movies, the semi-independent films made in the I Heart Huckabee mold, are often enjoyable, but are also excessively subdued to the point of distaste. There’s a fine line between clever and glib, and the Parker Posey crowd reliably stumbles back and forth over it. Even our landmark epic, The Lord of the Rings, doesn’t hold a candle to The Godfather or original Star Wars trilogy.
Immersed in cinematic crap, I was beginning to worry that the millennium’s first decade of cinema would never find an identity. When our documentaries are more compelling that our fictions, our imaginations are in poor shape. One reason Americans are into short-term nostalgia is that today’s films are blandly formless. Like bad Jazz music, every wonderful effort such as Kill Bill has been drowned out in a self-indulgent sea of promising stanzas that are never fully realized. Today’s films have no coherent theme like the earnest but corny 1980’s or the colorful reactionary impulse of the 1990’s. From the style to the dialogue to most of the pop culture references, a movie filmed in 2002 is difficult to distinguish from one produced five years later. The Dark Knight may have changed all of that in 2008.
Out of a combination of apathy and frugality, I don’t see a lot of movies soon after they’re released. For example, I just saw King Kong (2005). But I loved the last Batman movie, Batman Begins, and everything I heard about the second Christian Bale effort appealed to me. It was supposed to be engaging, complex, and inconsolably bleak—it’s as if it were made with my personal cinematic tastes in mind. So last summer I stood in line for an hour with hundreds of other Southern Californians, 80% of which were likely transplants from another region. It was worth the wait plus twice the admission.
The plot was so detailed that I couldn’t give it justice without turning this into an essay, so I’ll only skim over it: The Joker runs around terrorizing Gotham in novel ways while Batman risks exhaustion trying to stop him. Several subplots complicate their efforts, which are so personal and dogged they resemble a particularly sadistic team-building retreat. Before we go much further, one thing must be said: while the film was not sexual at all, nor particularly violent, I wouldn’t take a child to it, superhero worship be damned. The characters and plot were too compellingly depressing.
As several reviewers have mentioned, the most memorable character in the Dark Knight is The Joker. I know Heath Ledger’s death must have earned him some accolades out of sympathy, but his performance was truly Oscar-worthy. The awards he’s won from this role are due to more than polite posthumous fawning. Ledger continued the tradition of memorable portrayals of the Joker, and raised the bar for future incarnations of the villain.
Batman’s alpha-nemesis has always been a product of his time. Cesar Romero was an over-the-top villain in the “BAM,” “POW,” “WHACK” Batman of the overwrought 50’s and 60’s. Jack Nicholson played a polished, charming Joker in 1989, a mechanically polished, transitional era in pop culture. In 2008, America was defined by a long-growing fetish for authenticity. Hence, Ledger’s Joker isn’t overtly powerful or strong or even unbelievably intelligent; he’s just creepy. He’s not a charmer who inspires loyal devotion, but a nerdy-voiced, greasy-haired weirdo who needs to threaten to blow himself up to survive leaving a room full of conventional thugs. The new Joker can only inspire loyalty through money, fear, and exploitation of the mentally ill. Otherwise, he’s relegated to recruiting gullible youths like a white supremacist.
Despite all of his ostensible vulnerability, Ledger’s Joker drew inspired the worst in me. I often root for the villains in movies because they’re less detestable than Hollywood’s cloying impressions of heroism (See: Revenge of the Sith). Yet I wanted Batman to use every resource he had available to kill The Joker, just to put an end to his terrorizing tactics. What makes the Joker so villainous is that he’s perfectly at ease with his violence. There is no grand motive other than to fulfill his urges. Like everyone else in America, he is simultaneously acting out and being himself. Today, nothing could be more resonant.
Christian Bale also puts in a good performance, as well as one my favorite actors, Aaron Eckhart, who took on the movie’s most difficult role by portraying a realistic goody-good in Harvey Dent. But as deep and complex as The Dark Knight is, the movie isn’t as good as Batman Begins for one reason: Batman Begins didn’t have a fascistic undertone. To understand what I mean, we must discuss the script’s treatment of the aforementioned Mr. Dent.
In juxtaposition to The Joker’s self-indulgent anarchy, Dent is an idealistic Gotham city attorney. Like Rudy Giuliani, he spends his time persecuting the mob and ignoring death threats. Unlike Rudy Giuliani, Dent is presented as a lofty paragon, a spotless human being cosmopolitan women like Rachel Dawes (played by Maggie Gyllenhaal) want to marry. As the story progresses, Dent finds himself entangled in The Joker’s feud with Batman, and by the end, The Joker has him kidnapped along with Rachel. Dent, tied to a chair in a room full of 55-gallon drums full of explosive liquids, is told by the love of his life over speakerphone (she’s tied up at another location just like his) that she’ll marry him. Dent tells her that she’s going to be o.k., but soon his brand-new fiancée is blown up and half of his face is burnt off as Batman inadvertently saves him instead of Rachel.
Thus Harvey the light-bearer, whose self-sacrificial dedication to law and order couldn’t save the person closest to him, becomes Two-Face, a psychopath who decides whether his victims live or die based on a coin flip. Embittered and driven, Harvey embarks on a quest to confront everyone who could possibly be held culpable for Rachel’s death (except for The Joker, who convinces Harvey he’s just a loon who can’t be held responsible for his crimes, sort of like the way America is blamed for Islamic terrorism). This includes not only the corrupt officials who sold him and Ms. Dawes out to the mob (which contracted The Joker) but also Commissioner Gordon for tolerating so much corruption in his own office. Two-face even threatens to kill Gordon’s pre-teen son, forcing Batman to kill Gotham’s former golden boy.
While all of this is disturbing on some level, none of it is as depressing as the way Batman decides to deal with Dent’s death. Because Dent’s crimes toward the end of his life could compromise the cases he made against hundreds of criminals, Batman decides to whitewash Dent’s final hours by all but forcing Police Commissioner Gordon to lie and say Batman committed all of Harvey Dent’s murders and then killed Dent in cold blood. All because Batman decided that instead of the truth, Gotham “needs a real hero.” The movie ends with a disgusting press conference, where Gordon plays his part and presents the whole of Dent’s life as heroic. To be consistent, the next Batman movie will be required to have Che Guevara-like murals of Dent spray-painted on all the brick buildings.
The movie didn’t have to end this way. It could have been handled in a manner similar to this: Batman, acknowledging that Dent had it in him to kidnap the police commissioner’s family and almost kill a child, allows Commissioner Gordon to tell the public the truth: Gotham’s white knight was overwhelmed by The Joker’s devilish ability to justify bad behavior. Dent was constantly burdened by death threats, the love of his life was murdered, and half of his face had been burnt off. None of that excuses the crimes he committed in the last hours of his life, but neither does it erase his past good deeds. We still have Batman, but let Harvey’s story remind us that to truly keep Gotham afloat, we must remain vigilant against not only Gotham’s criminals, who we are in the middle of a virtual war against, but our own dark urges, which we can control. Yes, we may have to try a few cases again, but that’s a consequence of having rule of law as opposed to a police state.
But the end of the Dark Knight isn’t as nearly thoughtful. Instead, Batman takes the blame for Dent’s crimes, unnecessarily inhibiting his own ability to confront evil. He initiated dishonesty on the part of Gotham City’s law enforcement. Yet for all of that, the only thing Batman accomplished was to make himself feel better by bearing someone else’s guilt. Oh, and he compromised his future crime-fighting endeavors by turning an entire city against its most powerful hero, who’s too afraid of being held to unrealistic standards. What’s so conservative about that?
The Dark Knight has been mistakenly characterized as a right-wing fantasy. While it’s refreshingly devoid of liberal moralizing, and even includes scenes where Batman beats The Joker during interrogation and commits one-time surveillance on his entire city, a vigilante’s disregard for legal protocol is not exactly uncommon in crime-fighting movies. This film actually has little to say about the children of Russell Kirk. More than anything, the Dark Knight is not some godforsaken political commentary, but the best movie of its era, an unmatched product of its time in terms of quality and the public’s positive reception to it. But perhaps I’m overestimating Ledger’s performance; it could never be as creepy as real life, where tens of millions saw a movie, yet no one seemed to notice its implicit approval of whitewashing a political figure’s sins for the greater good.
Cross-posted at 