The Dark Knight: The Denial Of Our Times

Several weeks ago I wrote a post about how much I admired The Dark Knight’s moral sophistication, calling it a, “blockbuster that truly speaks to our times.” But in the September 20th Times there was an op-ed by the novelist Jonathan Lethem that had different take on the movie. Lethem had heard that it was the summer movie everyone had to see, and even more, understand. But, after seeing it he didn’t feel like he was enriched. Instead he felt demoralized and brutalized. The movie was saying something about our times, yes, but what he saw was moral defeatism and denial, not sophistication:

In its narrative gaps, its false depths leading nowhere in particular, its bogus grief over stakeless destruction and faked death, “The Dark Knight” echoes a civil discourse strained to helplessness by panic, overreaction and cultivated grievance. I began to feel this Batman wears his mask because he fears he’s a fake — and the story of his inauthenticity, the possibility of his unmasking, counts for more than any hope he offers of deliverance from evil.

Behind the morality tale of the Batman versus the Joker, in it’s hidden assumptions, lied difficult, but real truths about ourselves, truths that we have conveniently been able to keep from looking at too directly. (On a side point I want to bring up a completely different point: why is it that for some writers it’s almost mandatory to write in a way that is so oblique that you have to read something three times to fully get it? It’s like a prerequisite for being taken seriously as a writer: don’t write anything with directness or implicity!)

Though I still really like The Dark Knight – I do think it deals in concepts seldom seen in mainstream movies, captures the feeling of a world on the brink of chaos held together by one man, and has some great action set pieces – Lethem made me see that there was a lot that I unthinkingly glossed over.

In my post I argued that Batman represents the forces of not just humanity, but of civilization, fighting against the anarchy and barbarism of the Joker. Batman may cross many lines, but there is one he will not cross: he won’t kill. In his total adherence to this rule, he represents the civilizing force of moral principle. But, is that one rule enough for him to legitimately be our savior and standard-bearer? All the other morally questionable, or downright immoral things he does really don’t matter? Batman kidnaps a Chinese citizen, drops a mobster from a fire escape, beats up the Joker once he’s been, and uses an all-encompassing surveillance system that I think I can safely say is Dick Cheney’s ultimate wet dream.

But… in the last eight years we’ve done all these things! Renditions? Check. Illegal surveillance? Check. Torture? Check. The reality the movie doesn’t confront us with is that our government, our representatives, have done all these things in the War on Terror. The audience is asked to go along with questionable actions without making us ask any of the questions.

This was Lethem’s insight. What The Dark Knight does, and what is so troubling, is it takes all this for granted. We, the audience, accept that Batman is going to have to do these things. In Gotham, criminals rule the streets and the police are mostly corrupt. What else is he going to do? And for us, it’s the same: To question torture, rendition or surveillance too much is to either be un-American (if you’re on the right) or naïve (if you’re on the left). It’s either, “sometimes you have to do terrible things because the people we fight are inhuman monsters,” or, “of course the government is going to do these terrible things, the people who run it are monsters.” Things we used to think abhorrent are now accepted, either enthusiastically or grudgingly, and we just assume that’s the way it is. What else are we going to do?

The movie is able to get away with all this by presenting us with the fantasy of the incorruptible hero. Batman cannot be bought, doubts himself, is forced into crossing lines, relinquishes excessive power, and is even willing to become a social outcast if that’s what it takes. But, in real life, the Bush Administration can be bought, never doubts itself, crosses lines by choice, doesn’t relinquish power and scapegoats anyone but itself. Who doubts that in real-life Batman would have killed the Joker? And yet we keep our eyes shut so we don’t have to admit that our leaders are far from heros. The Dark Knight is a movie of our times, very much so, only in a much more profoundly troubling way than I first realized. It is part of the denial, the cognitive dissonance of our times, where every time some new revelation comes out we just barrel on through it, hoping that it will all be over soon. All we really seem to want to do is put the Bush years, with all the moral compromises they’ve implicated us in, behind us.

At the end of The Dark Knight, Harvey Dent, Gotham’s D.A. and hope for the future, has become a murderer. Batman protects his reputation with a lie: he killed Harvey’s victims. He does this because society wouldn’t be able to handle it if it found out the truth -- everything would fall apart. But, does this really make sense? Dent’s image is that powerful that without him Gotham City just devolves into a lawless mob? In my earlier post I called this detail the saving grace of the movie, and I think it’s so interesting that it still is, to an extent – it points to the underlying fragility of the movie’s argument. But it also points to something else, and is Batman’s dirty little secret: He really doesn’t have any faith in humanity. He doesn’t think that the truth about Dent can be explained to the city and that it will be accepted. Apparently, the citizens of Gotham were able to avoid the temptation to blow up a boat full of hardened criminals in order to save themselves, yet they’ll fall into hopeless despair if they learn that a good man was driven mad by the loss of the woman he loved. Ultimately, the Batmans of the world, the Bushes and Cheney’s, don’t have any faith in ourselves. More importantly, the blanket of comforting denial that the movie wraps us in shows us that, for now, neither do we.