The Dark Night
(contains spoilers)
Somewhere around the midpoint of the newly-released second installment in Director Christopher Nolan’s brilliant reimaging of the Batman film series, Gotham City DA Harvey Dent urges Gotham citizens to look at the chaos and despair around them with the mindset that it’s darkest before dawn. If this is true, even as dark as this film is, there’s probably more darkness in store for the caped crusader in chapters to come.
The film, punnishly entitled “The Dark Knight”, is dark and morose in a way befitting its title. Batman, the character, has mostly been dark and morose–his response to the depravity in the world around him is to go to his dark place and deal with it, usually with violence. Or maybe it’s his happy place, like a bat, he’s obviously most comfortable in deep, dark, quiet places.
But Batman, the movies, have always toed that line between darkness and light, they have always stayed in the mouth of the cave and never truly gone in deep without a light.
Until now.
Batman films in the pre-Nolan days were cartoonish, their characters archtypes displaying the stark difference between black and white rather than the similarities in shades of grey. Nolan eats his lunch on the greyscale. He plies his trade in a world where the moral centers are as shifty as a politician. In his non-Batman films (Memento, Insomnia, The Prestige), Nolan has made a living playing with the characters’ (and the audience’s) sense of reality. In his Batman films, especially this one, reality plays with the characters’ senses.
And so it should come as little surprise that he and his brother, who co-wrote the script, found such a worthy canvas as The Joker (and an equally worthy actor in Heath Ledger) upon which to paint their bleak and twisted tale. Ours is not to reason why The Joker menaces as he does throughout the film. The point is that he does. It doesn’t really matter how he gained his scarred visage, it only matters that he did. He’s willing to do pretty much anything to pursue his sense of what he wants out of the world. If that means vamping around in a fright wig and a nurse’s outfit so he can destroy an empty hospital, so be it. If it means lying down with the dogs in order to gain a dual sense of equality and superiority, so be it.
What’s so brilliant about this film is the greys, because the preceding can also be said (with one line uncrossed until the finale) about Nolan’s Batman. Batman and The Joker aren’t different sides of different coins, they are different sides of the same coin. But maybe sometimes they are the same side. And maybe sometimes they are different sides, with chance being the only thing that differentiates one from the other. And the same can not only be said for Batman and pious District Attorney Harvey Dent, but also for Dent and (Commissioner) James Gordon, whose own willingness (aka weakness) to look past the moral weaknesses of others leads to so much havoc in the film. Put simply, no one is ever just heads and no one is ever just tails. Everyone spends a little time face down.
But this isn’t just normal character arc stuggle here. This is the stuff of the Ancient Greeks. This is tragey writ beautifully and large with explosions to rival any in film history. It’s greek theater without the comedy masks, except for the grotesque physical one The Joker sports to mask some sort of inner pain (or does he wear it to prevent any real happiness from emerging?) What’s bold and refreshing about the choices Nolan and his actors make is exactly what makes the film unsettling. There is no happy ending, just as there’s no happy beginning, and no happy middle. In a film that begins with a bank robbery and ends with what amounts to the public crucifixion of the title character, there aren’t too many bright spots along the way. There are few daytime exteriors (a funeral parade notable among them), and even fewer moments of a sense of clam or contentedness. The whole film, and all of Gotham, is dread and foreboding.
This, of course, has to frustrate Batman. In Batman Begins, he essentially saved Gotham from complete and total annihilation. Unfortunately doing so has its consequences–saving Gotham from instant death subjects it to death of the slow and painful variety. It’s clear from the jump that saving Gotham had absolutely zero impact on curing it. What has happened instead is actually a turn for the worse. One time top-billing worthy baddie The Scarecrow is reduced to the role of glorified drug dealer, and dispatched in an ignominious way not 25 minutes into the film, never to be heard from again. That’s not to say fighting crime is easier for Batman. His old suit will no longer suffice. His old standby the Batmobile is reduced to a catastrophic mess, which he discards in a crumpled heap on a nameless city street. He needs newer gadgets to keep up with the Jokers of the world.
But that’s not all he needs. In order to keep up with The Joker, he has to dance to the circus music playing in The Joker’s mind. In Tim Burton’s world, the Joker tosses a line “Did you ever dance with the devil in the pale moonlight?” and you sense his evil. But when Batman tosses it back to him later, it’s to appear macho and ironic. In Christopher Nolan’s world, there is little room for irony because there is little understanding of what has happened and even less expectation of what was supposed to happen. It isn’t until far too late that Jim Gordon realizes that The Joker was 15 moves ahead of him, and that what appeared to be good policework was all part of a grand scheme. Reality bites, or in this case creepily shifts its tongue across its teeth. And, though it’s not revealed, you have to suspect The Joker wired the detonators on the cruise ships so that a choice to destroy the other ship actually would result in destroying your own. He played a similar morality shell game with Dawes and Dent. It isn’t about there being a right choice, it’s about not making the wrong one.
It is in this world without obvious irony that The Joker crafts his masterpiece of mayhem. And so instead of it being ironic that those who attempt to do good end up causing harm, it ends up sour serendipity, as though the outcome is both unintended and exactly what we and the characters should’ve expected to happen. Alfred, the butler, observes this to Bruce Wayne after the death of Rachel Dawes, essentially saying if you play with fire, you get burned. And, as is often observed in the film, you make your own luck. The problem is, not all luck is good. Put another way, chance favors the prepared mind, but if the mind is warped, it’s not necessarily a good chance. One can’t help but see undertones of the current political climate, especially in Iraq, in this observation. Good intentions don’t always equate to good results.
What Nolan does with our “hero” Batman, and the city the Wayne Family has championed for decades, is show how difficult it is at certain times and in certain places, even with good intentions, to do more good than harm. Batman is being impersonated by other vigilanties, lacking both his physical acumen and mental harshness. Many to most of these Batmen end up arrested or in one case murdered simply to be used in effigy. It’s as if the film is saying that once you stray from the truly straight and narrow path, you’re but one step away from the truly dark part of the forest.
This is true not only for Batman, but also for Harvey Dent, stopped from a brutal torture session he’s administering by none other than a knowing Batman. Batman’s message to Dent displays a knowledge of self and knowledge of weakness. Dent has to be the White Knight for Gotham, because Batman never will be. And without even that hint of light, there is no hope for ending the dark night and retiring The Dark Knight.
Dent, that hint of light, is snuffed out, first with fire to the face, then with a mind fuck on par with any Cold War era “reprogramming”, ultimately ending with his death. And when Dent dies a villain’s death, the only scintilla of hope remaining in Gotham lies in making Batman Public Enemy Number One. When your best hope dies and your best chance after that is casting aspersions on your other best hope, well, that’s when you know your dark night is not yet just before dawn.
And so the Dark Knight, and the dark night, live on. The question posed by Rachel Dawes in the film, one that could forever remain open ended, is whether there will ever be a point without Batman, either because the world, or Batman himself, is no longer in need. Nolan creates a world so bleak, in which good actions snowball so quickly into awful results, that it’s tough to say whether there will always be Batman because there is evil, or whether the evil will always be more desparate and depraved because there is Batman. There may be a sraight answer in Nolan’s disjointed world. But it won’t come any time soon. And while that’s bad news for Batman, that’s great news for viewers. One man’s pain is another’s pleasure. The coin has two sides.
Explore posts in the same categories: Film Criticism