Dark Knight of the Soul
Oct 20th, 2008 by John Murphy
The Dark Knight (2008)
directed by Christopher Nolan
reviewed by John Murphy
“The night is always darkest just before the dawn,” says Harvey Dent, District Attorney of that embattered metropolis, Gotham City. The dawn seems distant yet. Only a faint sliver of light lines the horizon in The Dark Knight; a bruising, brooding masterpiece that remaps the landscape of the superhero movie. Director Christopher Nolan, who re-energized a flabby franchise three years ago with his lean-and-mean origin story, Batman Begins, steers the series into deeper, darker waters in the second installment.
Gotham City, that crime-ridden jungle of concrete, steel, and glass, of sharp planes and jagged shadows, needs a hero. Batman works in close collusion with local law enforcement, especially Lieutenant Gordon (Gary Oldman), but his public relations is suffering — Gothamites are beginning to wonder if the Caped Crusader isn’t little more than a masked vigilante. Enter District Attorney Harvey Dent, nick-named ‘the White Knight’, the visible face of good: sandy-haired, blue-eyed, square-jawed, and handsomely careworn, played by Aaron Eckhart as the noble public servant Batman (for whom shadows and subterfuge are personal and professional necessities) seems to envy.
Dent has an ambitious strategy for combatting the Mob in Gotham. The mob, desperate and disorganized, play a Wild Card — you probably know who I mean. He’s a lone Wolf in a purple suit and powdery make-up. The Joker is his calling card.
Rumors of a posthumous Oscar for Heath Ledger are more than lip-service to a talented actor who self-destructed at a tragically young age. His bold and uncompromising interpretation of the iconic comic-book character kicks vicious. Unlike Jack Nicholson’s diabolical dandy, Ledger’s Joker is a greasy-haired, pancake-faced paranoid-schiz terrorist, cunning and cruel in his madness. With his sideways lurch, hunched-up shoulders, and gruesomely smeared leer, he is the most disturbing villain since Anton Chiggurh’s sleepy-eyed, pageboy-topped fatalist in No Country for Old Men. Like Chiggurh, the Joker is a force of chaos and disorder; an invasive, discomforting specter. Notice how his ultimate target is not Batman — with whom the Joker shares certain pathological traits — but Harvey Dent, the incorruptible White Knight of Gotham City.
The Joker is determined to prove that conventional society thinly veils essential human savagery. Nolan has given us a villain for our times: this Joker is a terrorist. He recalls a character in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, written a hundred years ago, who says: “A bomb outrage to have any influence on public opinion now must go beyond the intention of vengeance or terrorism. It must be purely destructive. You anarchists should make it clear that you are perfectly determined to make a clean sweep of the whole social creation.”
Comic books seem less a stylistic touchstone for Nolan than novels. The Dark Knight has the rich, layered complexity of a James Ellroy crime epic, featuring complicated heroes facing thorny moral dilemmas. Thematically, Nolan poses a similar question to No Country for Old Men: how does a good man fight a new strain of evil that is incomprehensible and all-encompassing? Like the two magician nemeses of The Prestige, Batman and Joker are locked in a battle of wills, but Batman is handicapped by his sense of fair play and moral order. The Joker knows no such checks on his behavior. His cruelty has the quality of a malicious child at play, a sense of inventiveness in the service of destruction.
There is a danger in making the Joker’s agent provocateur persona too rock-star charismatic. Nolan, a prose filmmaker of uncanny technical expertise, allows himself a moment of visual poetry in a shot of the Joker leaning out of a fast-moving car, eyes closed, hair blowing in the wind, as the city flows behind him in an impressionistic blur of neon. Is the Joker the only free character in the film? That’s how he views himself. He burns the mountainous pile of money the Mob pays him for the capture as a gesture of his independence.
Himself an amoral loner, the Joker wants to bring others down to his level. He designs scenarios to reinforce his belief that humans are savage, cruel animals. He is like a walking philosophy problem: if the woman you love and the man you see as society’s hope for the future are simultaneously in mortal danger, who would you choose to save? Or again: If two ferries full of people (one full of convicts) were both rigged with explosives, and each ferry was given a detonator — would one boatload of people choose to destroy the other out of self-preservation?
Nolan refuses to provide a pat, Freudian explanation for the Joker. In mockery of that kind of common-denominator storytelling, Nolan has the Joker offer conflicting accounts of how he came to be scarred. His history doesn’t matter. He is pure Id, existing only to destroy. He wants to unmoor society from its foundations.
With the success of The Lord of the Rings trilogy and the whip-smart Bourne franchise, art and commerce are no longer strange Hollywood bedfellows. A summer popcorn movie about a caped crusader has tapped deep thematic veins: faith versus nihilism, hope versus despair, order versus chaos. It’s this knight’s dark night of the soul: bleak and disturbing, but not without answers.
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