The Dark Knight

Written by:  Jonathan and Christopher Nolan

Directed by: Christopher Nolan

Let me begin this review by recalling that, as I was waiting for the “Dark Knight” to begin I found myself watching the trailer for “The Day the Earth Stood Still” I could not help compare the tone and promised content of that soon to be released movie with its illustrious predecessor and wondering what it was about today’s cinema that led to the differences.  The earlier movie was released in 1951, when the Cold War had suddenly become very hot.  Blood was being shed in large quantities in Korea.  The Iron Curtain had well and truly descended across Europe and the Berlin Airlift was a recent memory.  The Soviet Union was now an Atomic power.  Armageddon seemed very close.  Other movies of the age, by way of metaphor or allegory,  seemed to reflect feelings of paranoia and fear.  And yet here was a movie that directly dealt with the fear of a world-wide conflagration but did so in a way that reflected both faith and hope.

The Christian parallels are almost too obvious to avoid.  It is the story of a gentle man who comes from the heavens preaching peace.  He is misunderstood and rejected by those in power so he goes among the ordinary people – under the name of Carpenter of you please – before being killed.  He then rises from the dead and ascends back into the heavens.  But before he does so he confronts the world with the alternatives of life or death, giving us the power of choice between them  but also leaving a group of followers behind to help convince the world about the right choice to make. 

It is of course unfair to compare this original with a successor I have not seen, simply based on the trailer.  But I could not help but contrast the tone of that trailer to that of the 1951 movie.  It promised something much darker – both physically and thematically.  Hope and faith seem to be replaced by threat and fear.  And surely that does seem to reflect the predominant mood of the cinema of our times.  It’s prevailing attitude is one of cynicism  and distrust.  It’s language is one of confrontation.  Power and control are the answer to problems. Competition, self-interest and the survival of the fittest is the order of the day.  Altruism, co-operation, even a sense of a shared humanity that can reach across differences – all seem lost.

So, it was with a resigned feeling that I settled down to watch “The Dark Knight” fully expecting another chapter of grim, hate and fear filled anti-human movies that seem to be such a feature of the modern cinema.  Imagine my surprise then when what I actually saw was a movie that sought to reinforced a belief in people while at the same time obviously holding no illusions about their fallibility.

Another thing that surprised me was some of the thematic parallels that could be drawn between it and the series ANGEL.  In “The Dark Knight” we have our very own version of the vampires we find in ANGEL – the soulless vector of absolute evil, without any meaningful connection to humanity and  from whom nothing about people or the human condition can be learned.  I am of course speaking about the Joker.  Throughout the movie an interesting parallel is drawn between him and a pack of Rottweiler dogs.  At one point he says of himself:

            "I'm a dog chasing cars. I wouldn't know what to do with one if I caught it."

And at times he behaves just like a mad dog in its viciousness and randomness; for example when he emerges from the crashed truck he used to try to seize Harvey Dent and in the final confrontation with Batman in the reconstructed building.

Throughout the movie, it is made clear to us that the Joker represents something new, something chilling.  The story begins with a bank robbery but as it unfolds, we learn that each of the participants has been tempted into turning on the others to get a larger share of the loot.   At the end only the mastermind – the Joker - is left.  He escapes with the loot but it isn’t money he is after, as he later demonstrates when he destroys all the mob’s money.  It is something altogether more visceral.

The stock in trade of many a modern  movie is to try to get the audience to understand or even sympathize with a villain (as indeed the writers do here in the case of Harvey Dent) by showing us why he changed.  We can thereby understand the psychology of the person and get a glimpse of his humanity while at the same time seeing his evil. At one point the Joker seems to open up and share a story about his childhood and the reason why he got his scars.  On the face of it this might explain why he became such a twisted individual.  But then later he tells a completely different story about how he got his scars, this time one involving his wife.  And later still he seems about to give a third version.  By now we realize that he is completely insincere.  The truth is that the Joker and his motivations are unknown, perhaps even unknowable.  He is simply, as he puts it himself, an agent of chaos.  Until now everyone, even the criminals, played by some sort of rules.  They used to believe in honor or respect.  Batman and his success against them pushed them into becoming more violent, more extreme in response.  But the Joker is different.  Alfred recounts a story about his time in Burma when he was trying to bribe a bandit to prevent his raids. But the bandit simply tossed the bribes away and Alfred began to realize:

“Some men don’t want anything logical.  They can’t be bought, bullied or reasoned with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.”

This is indeed to confront us with a truly terrifying evil.  And it is on the response of people to evil that the “Dark Knight” dwells. The Joker poses questions and gives our protagonists choices.  And it is how they answer those questions and make those choices that the movie is really interested in rather than the nihilism that lies at the heart of the Joker.  Here too we see an echo of ANGEL – the interest of the writers lying not in absolute evil but rather in the way that fallible human beings with their dual nature react to it and themselves fall into evil.

Let us start our examination of this question with Harvey Dent.  His story is about the dualism of humanity – the corruptibility of even the best of us.  As we have already seen, he and Batman went after the mob.  All they succeeded in doing was driving them into the hands of the joker.   And that foreshadows the corruption of Harvey himself.  Nevertheless, throughout the movie he is referred to as “the White Knight” – an obvious contrast to Batman as the Dark Knight.  He is personally a very decent man: honest, brave and determined.  More importantly, he is a man who works through the system – seeking both law and justice.  He is therefore the opposite of the Joker, symbolized by his habit of flipping a coin to help him make important decisions.  We see that the coin is in fact two headed so Dent’s habit is actually a rejection of chance and emphasises that his actions are always ordered. And unlike Batman he is not compromised in his methods.  He work openly without a mask and through the law.   He is therefore someone whom the people can look up to and trust – unlike Batman who must work in the shadows.  “I believe in Harvey Dent” therefore becomes the central plank of public confidence.  He is the hope that things can get better.

In his work Harvey wins the trust both of Batman and Lt Gordon. And in turn he learns to trust them.  So much so that when, in response to the Joker’s threats, the public demands to know Batman’s identity,  Harvey attempts to persuade the press and police not to give in to their fear.  He argues that Batman is a vigilante but that the people of Gotham should hold him accountable. This stance in fact sums Harvey up – he sees order and justice in alliance, aiming towards the same end.  However, the people are so overcome with fear that there is no reasoning with them.  So, knowing that Batman will surrender himself, Harvey announces that he is the Batman, and gets handcuffed and taken away.

But then Rachel dies and so in a moral sense does Harvey, leaving behind only Two Face.  He had never been perfect.  As we have seen, under pressure, he distrusted others.  He also at one point became quite violent in interrogating a prisoner.  And even though he considered Batman a vigilante, he was prepared to use him to strike at the enemy.  So, we are aware that even Harvey is capable of wrongdoing.  Nevertheless Harvey’s world was built on order and underlying this order was the assumption that  it would somehow deliver justice.  But as the Joker made clear in his speech to Harvey at the hospital, he brought chaos in opposition to the order.  He showed it was impossible to control events and it was this impossible effort, this scheming, that actually killed Rachel.  When people had order they could tolerate any injustice.  It was chaos that frightened them.  The Joker maintained that chaos was fair in the sense that whatever evil happened was random.  Here he was trying to subvert Harvey’s whole belief system by making order and justice incompatible with one another and pretending that chaos was a sort of justice.  But in reality randomness is the enemy of justice.  People do not get what they deserve.  Bad things happen to good people.  It was therefore essentially a malign state.  Nevertheless the Joker appears to have convinced Harvey that it was the natural and inevitable state of things.   In his bitterness and anger his faith in order and therefore his faith in justice itself is shattered  and he becomes in his own turn an agent of chaos.  His two headed coin, once the symbol of a rational mind which controlled all his actions, now becomes the symbol of the randomness of fate,  just as he sees Rachel’s death as the random workings of this malign world.  Whether someone lived or died was decided on a turn of a coin.  One corrupt cop lived; another died.  All at random.  And Harvey was prepared even to kill a little boy on an equally random chance.  So, devoid of his sense of order, Harvey descends into injustice and evil.

Batman, in contrast, was always a much more morally ambiguous figure.  The title more or less gives this point away anyway.   He operates not in court rooms during the day but in underground car parks at night – the very places where the evil ones themselves lurk.  His answer to them is to use their own weapons – violence – against them.  And in a nice piece of foreshadowing he is injured by the mad dogs used by the gangsters.  Alfred even warns him to know his own limits – to know how far he can go without being fatally compromised by the thing which he is fighting.  As I have already said, an illustration of Batman’s duality is the way that he can, in defiance of law and order, achieve that which Harvey cannot when he captures Lau and brings him back from Hong Kong.

Regardless of his methods, however, Batman is acting for the right reasons not only to bring a fugitive to justice but to prevent an even greater danger.  And he does so in support of Harvey even though he has every reason to be jealous of him on a personal level because of their rivalry over Rachel.  He even throws a fundraiser for Harvey.  We also become aware that Batman, while a figure outside the law, has his own code.  He will not kill - even when the Joker is almost literally begging for it.  He captures him instead.  Nowhere is this balance between the dark knight on the one hand and the genuine hero on the other more clearly seen than in the way he deploys advanced technology against the Joker and Harvey. A sort of 'cell phone sonar' technology somehow turns every single cell phone in Gotham into a sonar device, giving him the opportunity to spy on everyone in the city. He even asks Lucius Fox in to monitor the device and give him updates on the Joker's location, in effect compromising even the moral center of his whole organization.    Fox is appalled that Batman would use his technology to spy on the citizens of Gotham and only reluctantly agrees to help.  But once the sonar has done its work it self-destructs, much to Fox’s relief.  Batman only crosses the line to the extent that it was absolutely necessary.

Of course the truly heroic side of Batman comes out when the Joker threatens innocents.  Then Batman is prepared to sacrifice himself for them.  This sense of self-sacrifice is something that joins both him and Harvey before the latter’s transformation into two-face.  It is a consciousness that someone else is more important – not you.  As Alfred explains to Rachel even when Batman, in the end, lets Harvey take the fall for him it is because he is allowing himself to be something else besides a hero, mainly a figure outside of the system that the people can both turn to or blame in times of need, that Batman can 'take it".   In other words he is putting what others need before what it is most comfortable for him to do.  And the important thing here is that this is Batman’s credo before Rachel’s death and remains his credo afterwards.  Rather than reveal the truth about Harvey and destroy the faith that people have in him (an issue we will return to shortly) Batman takes the blame and once again adopts the persona of Dark Knight.  But it is the former White Knight who really deserves this moniker.  Before Rachel’s death, as I have said, he too seemed to be prepared to put the citizens of Gotham first, even to the point of risking his own life in adopting the identity of Batman.  But when someone so important to him as Rachel died then this selflessness vanished.   His view of the world and his own sense of morality were ultimately reshaped by his own first person singular perspective on things.  It was because of the way events impacted on him that he suddenly saw the world as being a very different place.  The contrast between his self-centeredness and Batman’s selflessness is complete.  And here too we have another echo of ANGEL.  The ultimate source of human evil-doing lies in an over-developed sense of self and in contrast it is a consciousness of others that keeps people on the right side of the line.

But the contrast between these two principal figures in the movie is not the whole story; and perhaps not even the most important part of it.  Always in the background and at one point memorably coming to the fore were the ordinary citizens of Gotham who just as in Julius Caesar collectively became a character in the piece in their own right.  They too exhibited the duality of human nature in full.  From the young cop who was prepared to kill Reese because he feared for the wife he loved to the ridiculous Batman wannabes.  They imitate the Dark Knight’s dubious methods and they are resentful when he treats them with disrespect.  But they are also given a dignity.  When the Joker captures one of them, he asks him why he dresses like Batman, he replies:

            "He's a symbol... that we don't have to be afraid of scum like you."

But nowhere do we see this duality more evident than on the two ferry boats.  Here we see each side faced with a choice – kill or be killed.  Moreover, the ferryboat full of the “innocent” citizens can allow themselves a veneer of moral superiority.  “We aren’t criminals.  They had their chance and blew it.”  This is to deny the humanity of those on the other (especially the prisoner’s) boat.  It is to put ourselves first – and others nowhere, just like Two Face.  But in the end quite independently both sets of passengers realize that they cannot do this.  They chose the right, regardless of cost to themselves because they recognize in each other fellow human beings and they cannot simply sacrifice them for their own safety. 

But the writers seem to say that this sense of decency is a fragile thing.  The best of the citizenry is seen from their support of their white knight – “I believe in Harvey Dent”.  But if they found out the truth about him, how might that damage them?  That is why Batman and Gordon hid the truth.  Again we are conscious of the duality inherent in that decision.  The voters are deceived but for a good cause.    From all of this we recognize that none of us are perfect.  We break rules and sometimes (as in the way that Batman helped create the Joker) the consequences are dire.  But the best of us face up to the consequences and accept responsibility for what we have done, placing others first.  Others, even good people cannot do so.  They place the responsibility for what goes wrong on others and they think ultimately only of themselves requiring those others then to pay the price for their actions.

What is good about this is that it doesn’t spare us the evil.  We are given depravity in full measure.  It is remorseless but also in a way capricious.  We are never sure who is going to be its victim: the cops who just happened to have Harvey and Dent as part of their name?  The random guest at Bruce Wayne’s fundraiser.  People ill in hospital or even just trying to use a ferry.  And that makes it even more frightening.  But dark as the movie is, it never descends into nihilism.  There is a moral heart to it.  There are real dilemmas to be faced and choices have consequences.  But our heroes always try to make the right choices, mo matter how flawed their judgment is.  And we are always left with a sense of sympathy and understanding for them in their dilemmas.  And that, in particular, is what makes the film a true tragedy.  In my reviews of ANGEL I have discussed Greek tragedy extensively.  I will not repeat myself here except to say this.  Harvey was a good and worthy man who could have achieved a great deal.  He suffered a trial by fire.  And that fire consumed him.  Even as we watched what almost seemed the inevitability of his downfall we sympathized with him and wished it could be different.  But at the same time his fate helped bring us a new understanding and appreciation of things.  Ultimately Harvey could not live by his convictions.  And in some ways Batman could not do so either.  He remained in the shadows – a vigilante and not someone who could operate in the light and according to law.  He was not someone that the people could therefore really believe in.  But even as he accepted his limitations, Batman validated those convictions and held them up to us as worthy of our support.  He saw that the people did need someone like Harvey to believe in.  The contrast between him and Harvey therefore reinforced the importance of those convictions.  Order and justice are important things to strive for, even when we trip just as we reach for them.  And therein lies the power of “Dark Knight”.  Which brings me back to where I came in.  All too often we see movies which are relentlessly nihilistic.  They believe in nothing except possibly that might is right.  Human life is disposable.  And certainly no interest is displayed in the human potential for good.  Instead  we are shown doubt and cynicism.  No-one believes in anything.  Well here we are invited to believe in something.  And, here let me go back to "The Day the Earth Stood Still."  There is no doubt but that the "Dark Knight" is the darker movie.  In the 1951 version human decency is taken as a given rather than hanging on by its fingertips.  The menace which faces the earth while implacable is almost akin to the divine wrath of God rather than a vicious twisted evil.  Nevertheless in "the Dark Knight" just as in the 1951 movie even as we are  being made fully conscious of the existence of evil and human failings and the way that evil exploits it, we are also invited to believe that human beings can and do chose the right even in the face of that evil and all of those failings.  And for that vote of confidence in humanity we should be grateful