Dark Knight = Delightfully Cloudy Morals, With a 10% Chance of Misgivings

I have a habit of seeing movies way after their original release dates, and such is the case with Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight. But I saw it in IMAX! Doesn’t that count for something?

Anyway, I found the movie really gripping. If you read this blog regularly and know the kind of things I like in a story, that probably isn’t surprising, but bear with me. (Please?) I mean, I saw Batman Begins (rented it from iTunes just last week… oh, iTunes. Dear Apple, if I’m ever found one day attached to my keyboard and screen, having merged with my computer to become one symbiotic organism, it will be entirely *your* fault.), and, while it was OK, it wasn’t anything to write home about. The reason? Well, Batman was all super-cool and angsty and whatnot, but Ra’s al Gul wasn’t too scary, and, although Cillian Murphy is frighteningly pretty, the Scarecrow is just ho-hum. In other words, an action film is only as exciting as its villain.

Which is why The Dark Knight is darn near electrifying.

Despite the hype surrounding the late Heath Ledger’s performance, I was worried that I wouldn’t find it all that scary. I mean, come on, look at the ads: he still looks like a person – a person in bad clown make-up, but, nonetheless, a person. Boy, was I wrong. Ledger’s Joker is possibly the most terrifying character I have encountered onscreen in a good long while. He deserves to be right next to Captain Vidal on my list of all-time villains.

In The Dark Knight, the Joker is scary because he can and will do anything, just because. He has no rules – no game plan guiding his moves, no goals he’s trying to reach, no deep needs or wants that shape his crimes. The only thing he needs is not to need anything. Throughout the film, characters build up a picture of him as a dog that can only be leashed or let loose, but not changed and not stopped.

But wait, there’s more! He’s brilliantly intelligent – all his schemes have at least one or two twists, so that whatever your initial impression, even if you’ve seen through that initial first layer of deceit, there’s still an unexpected surprise waiting to spring. He’s fearless – when other characters beat him up or try to kill him, he just laughs and thrives on his own pain. He’s perceptive – no other characters escape his incisive portrait of their deepest fears and desires. Basically, there is nothing you can do to stop this guy except physically overpower him. And even then, he might trick you into letting him go.

In comparison, Two-Face, who is the closest thing the film has to another outright villain, pales in pure freak-out wattage. But that’s OK. The filmmakers have wisely made the choice to treat Two-Face a little differently. In some ways, they’ve made him the anti-Joker. The Joker is a force of nature; Two-Face is painfully, passionately human, and we get to know him intimately as a character before there’s even a hint of villainy*. The Joker is bent on sowing chaos and destruction; even as a villain, Two-Face is committed above all to fairness and justice. The scarred half of Two-Face’s face is a little difficult to watch, but I think the design perfectly expresses the idea behind the character: what lives underneath the facade of justice being done, what makes that justice move and grimace and smile is as horrifying in itself as the criminals it punishes.

Between the Joker and Two-Face, it’s difficult to imagine how there’s room for Batman in this film. And, truth be told, Christian Bale does get a little squeezed out between his two costars. Three costars, actually, with Gary Oldman doing a compelling and possibly thankless job as Lieutenant Gordon, a virtuous family man who just wants to make Gotham safe for his kids. Batman is most fascinating in this film when he’s Bruce Wayne and we get to watch him let his emotions show or put a thin veneer of “playboy” over his ticking-time-bomb vigilante insides. As Batman, his chief interesting feature is the way he makes the audience feel. Even when he’s doing something we know is wrong, we’re rooting for him because he’s the only guy who might take down these psychos, no matter how he does it; even when we’re disgusted with him, we still hope he’ll show up in the nick of time to save us.

In spite of the cool dynamics, I have to admit this movie was thematically hazy. To be sure, it radios its philosophical territory crystal-clear: how far past the accepted moral boundaries is one permitted to go in order to nullify the threat of evil? But the conclusion is far from clear: on one hand, Two-Face is wrong to murder those he considers responsible for a horrible crime done to him (but is he wrong to murder, or is he just wrong in that he’s blaming the wrong people?). On the other, it’s OK for Batman to

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kill Two-Face. It’s wrong for Bruce Wayne to hijack the mobile phone conversations of every Gotham resident – but we see that, if he hadn’t, many innocent people would have died. Even Gordon gets in the act: it’s wrong to pull a Sherlock-Holmes-at-Reichenbach without telling your wife and kids, but, if Gordon hadn’t, they’d never have caught the Joker.

I guess this is basically *the* moral problem of superhero stories: it’s not OK to do something wrong. But it has to be OK if you need to do it to fight people who are unquestionably wrong. It’s wrong to lie, but a superhero has to lie to hide his/her identity in order to fight crime without endangering loved ones. It’s wrong to take the law into your own hands, but a superhero has to because the law is incompetent or incapable. The trouble is, quis custodiet ipsos custodes: who can tell all-powerful superheroes when they’re unquestionably wrong?

The fact that The Dark Knight is sort of Diet Watchmen isn’t its only problem. For crying out loud, Hollywood, do we really need another stereotypical Asian male who’s good at “calculating”? Do we really need an extremely morally ambiguous scene in which our hero goes to Hong Kong and imposes his country’s American laws on Chinese citizens? Even if it is the only way to “nail” the mob? Do we need a boat full of mostly white “innocent citizens” engaged in a lethal prisoners’ dilemma with a boat full of convicts which seems to be composed of a much higher percentage of people of colour**? No – no, we clearly do not.

We also do not need the only female characters in the film being either corrupt schemers or perpetual damsels in distress. We don’t need those women to have meaning only in their relations with the men in their lives. There is way more than enough (read: more than none) sexism and racism in contemporary movies already, and, while their embedded presence is par for the course, especially in action movies , I’m especially disappointed to see them in what is otherwise such a thoughtful script***.

There’s also the strange moral (with which I don’t quite agree) that it’s better to lie to someone to make them feel better than to tell them the truth if it makes them suffer. Alfred decides to burn the letter that might shatter Bruce Wayne’s world; the survivors decide to preserve the image of a fallen comrade at the expense of one still living so the people of Gotham will have a symbol for goodness. Why, it’s never really clear. The reason I don’t like endings like this (or stories where one character makes another forget what happened for that character’s “own good” – Stephen and Paul in Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising sequence; muggles and Hermione’s parents in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series) is because it basically boils down to the character in power – the one who knows the secret or who has the power to induce amnesia – deciding for the second character that he or she can’t handle the truth. I guess it boils down to which matters more: what’s actually real or what you think is real. And what “real” means. And stuff like that. Which is why I’m going to end this paragraph before it turns into Philosophy 101. But I still feel really uncomfortable with the idea that it’s OK to keep information from people as long as you do it for their own good.

In conclusion, while The Dark Knight is in some ways deeply flawed, and in others unintentionally morally ambiguous, it’s still a tremendously gripping and moderately intelligent movie. Some main characters seem to die and others really do; we’re never really sure whether Batman will be able to pull himself back from the chasm the Joker has laid out before his feet. And, no matter how hard you try, you won’t be able to stop yourself from being dragged in with him.

* I do wonder how the film must have played for someone unfamiliar with Batman villains – who didn’t know Two-Face’s original identity – rather than someone like me who knew a particular character was doomed the moment he stepped onto the screen.

** Yeah, yeah, I know the guy on the boat of prisoners eventually comes off as more moral than the guy on the boat of citizens, but that doesn’t negate my point.

*** And of course, it makes me worry about my own work. Do I come off any better? What is there that I’m too blind to see in my own writing?