A few weeks ago I saw The Dark Knight for a second time (in Imax, no less -- and totally worth it). Though I didn’t think so highly of it at first, it has really grown on me, like no popular movie has in a long time. I realized that it really is an epic fantasy of heroism for a post 9-11 world and I’m inspired to write about it.
There is an inchoate, but pervasive fear right now that the country is spinning out of control… and that its just going to get worse. We live with war, terrorism, corruption, environmental and economic decay. We’ve lost faith in government’s ability to conduct war, rescue its citizens from natural disasters, and prevent financial failure. Every year there is some new moral line that we feel we had to cross, lines such as torture and illegal surveillance. We’ve lost faith that the world is going to get better. It might feel like the only sane thing to do is look out for just yourself. What other option is there when fundamental certainties in life no longer seem so certain? The people out in the world still fighting the good fight, selflessly attempting to bring order against all odds are few and far between, fighting a holding action at best, or doomed to total failure at worst. Even General Petraeus has succeeded in Iraq beyond everyone’s expectations, but says that the gains are reversible and that he himself will never claim to have achieved victory.
This picture I paint is an exaggeration of what life is really like, but I don’t think it’s an exaggeration of the zeitgeist – what it feels like to live in the first decade of the twenty-first century. It is this world that The Dark Knight captures so well. (Danger: spoilers ahead!) When the story begins, Gotham City is finally being brought under control by the Batman. He and Lieutenant Gordon are putting pressure on the Gotham’s criminals and finally bringing some order to a hellish place. But, with the Joker comes a new element of arbitrariness, perversity and disorder: He robs criminals of their own money and then goes into business with them; he kills city officials to for sport; he switches the addresses where Rachel Dawes and Harvey Dent are being held, knowing that Batman will go after Harvey thinking its Rachel. As he says, he is a an “agent of chaos.” Batman is the Joker’s opposite. He fights to preserve civilization, not just save people’s lives. As a creature fighting in a very tough world he has only one principle, but he does have it: he refuses to kill. (It’s ironic that he is presented as an agent of civilization even when he is beating up criminals – a mild form of torture, effectively – but that’s a topic for another time.)
Within these two characters the stage is set for a fight over the nature of humanity and society and over its future. The fight is played out in two ways: through the city at large and through Harvey Dent. The Joker creates situations where both will have their character tested to the extreme. For him, moral principles are merely facades. When the façade comes down, people are vicious animals and will tear each other up. “The only sensible way to live in this world is without rules,” he says. What will Harvey do once he learns that he has lost everything? How will the civilians and prisoners in the ferryboats respond to the trap the Joker has set? And, will the Batman have to violate his own rule in order to save the city? The Joker poses a moral dilemma for Batman to answer: do we throw out our principles and reveal them to be a lie? Or do we keep them and lose our lives and the lives of the people we love?
The people of the city answer first. When each group in the ferryboats is given the option to save itself by killing the other group, neither is able to do it. The moral price they would pay would be too high. The Joker is wrong: humanity (at least, these people) really believes in its principles to its core.
But Harvey Dent represents the other side of the dilemma, and this is what makes The Dark Knight great. Harvey is the “white knight,” the hope Gotham has for a future of a genuine order that doesn’t require Batman the outsider to maintain. But hope is destroyed. He loses Rachel and becomes Two-Face. He becomes a cop-killer and nearly kills Gordon’s family. Batman is able to stop him, but not before his moral corruption is complete and he falls to his death. In Harvey’s case, the Joker was right: The mask fell and there was a monster underneath.
But then the Batman solves the problem in a way that both supports and subtly undermines society’s principles. Batman takes on Harvey’s crimes as his own. He becomes hunted by the police. He goes from being someone on the edge of society – not fully accepted, but still tolerated – to become a true outsider. And the way he does it is through a lie: He lets the city believe that he killed Harvey’s victims, ruining his own reputation to protect Harvey’s. And this is what is interesting about the movie. The movie does give you the standard Hollywood moral comforts: By not blowing up the boats humanity is shown to be basically good; the Batman destroys his Big Brother-like cell-phone surveillance system and rejects that kind of absolute power. But, underneath these comforts is a disturbing truth, that the person Gotham believes is a hero is actually a killer. The stability of the city rests on a lie. Its necessary – the world wouldn’t survive knowing the truth. But how stable is civilization if it needs to be preserved that way?
And that leads us to our world. In the movie order rests on an incorruptible champion who is willing to take on the lie, to do whatever it takes. In real life we know things might not turn out so well: People do sometimes show themselves to be vicious animals; The Bush Administration is listening in to our phone calls, keeping US citizens prisoner and using torture. In real life there is no Batman that society can throw all of its moral problems onto. There is only us. In real life, the failure of civilization is a real possibility.
In the end The Dark Knight remains a pop culture fantasy. The Batman will always be there, watching over us, unwavering, seeking nothing for himself, always ready to make the decisions that no one else can make and then take all the consequences onto himself. But the movie is too wise to not at least suggest the shaky ground our world rests on. It’s this moral sophistication that makes the The Dark Knight so interesting and raises it to a place where it can called something very rare: a giant Hollywood blockbuster that truly speaks to our times.
(Btw, I just bought the soundtrack on iTunes. I recommend it to anyone. It completely rocks.)
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