In The Dark Knight, the latest film featuring Christian Bale’s best attempts at a WWE-Smackdown! voice, the Joker’s greatest asset seems to be his ability to escape from any plot hole, no matter how large.
Want to threaten a meeting of the city’s top crime bosses? Just walk right in the back door. Feel like shooting rockets at police wagons and taking officers hostage? It’s ok—none of them will shoot back! Want to assassinate the mayor by posing as a member of his honor guard? No problem—policeman apparently have no idea what their peers look like, nor are they suspicious of people whose scars match those of the madman terrorizing the city.
For that matter, looking to kill the commissioner of police? Just sneak into his office off-camera. This same tactic can be used to load hospitals, ferries and abandoned warehouses with hundreds of barrels of explosives. It also comes in handy for leaving Bruce Wayne’s penthouse after Batman throws himself out the window. (“What’s that? Batman jumped out the window, leaving us alone in a room full of people we were terrorizing? Well, we might as well just take off then…”)
Of course, matters are eased somewhat for the Joker in that Batman, the World’s Greatest Detective, doesn’t really do any detective work. Sure, there’s a scene where he rigs up a magic-laser bullet-shooting system to dubiously reconstruct fingerprints, but other than that, he’s largely reactive, showing up just in time to glower over the latest mound of bodies. (Or, in the case of Harvey Dent, stand by idly while his face smolders. What, no fire extinguisher in the utility belt?)
The Dark Knight isn’t entirely a bad movie. There’s lots of action and yelling—well done, if a bit relentless. It doesn’t hesitate to sacrifice its protagonists. Indeed, the film is relentlessly dark, which many reviewers seem to have confused for gravitas and deeper meaning. The film does struggle to encompass contemporary debates on civil liberties and terrorism, but the result is one big muddle, offering the take-away of “It’s ok if Batman does it.”
The movie leaves its ideas dangling from the same kind of ledges Batman frequents, repeating platitudes about “the hero we need versus the hero we deserve” without ever bothering to clearly elucidate the distinction. What is the distinction? It’s the same old tough-guy mythologizing about being willing to do “whatever it takes,” whether that’s illegally kidnapping people from their homes, tossing thugs off balconies to make them talk or using technology to spy on an entire city without its knowledge.
Sure, some reservations are offered—only on the last point, it should be noted—but there’s never any ultimate denunciation of what Batman’s done, no indication he overstepped his bounds. Even Alfred, the voice of reason, tries to comfort the vigilante with a tone-deaf anecdote about literally burning down a forest in order to save it.
Alfred Pennyworth: When I was in Burma, a long time ago, my friends and I were working for the local Government. They were trying to buy the loyalty of tribal leaders, bribing them with precious stones. But their caravans were being raided in a forest north of Rangoon by a bandit. We were asked to take care of the problem, so we started looking for the stones. But after six months, we couldn’t find anyone who had traded with him. One day I found a child playing with a ruby as big as a tangerine. The bandit had been throwing the stones away.
Bruce Wayne: Then why steal them?
Alfred Pennyworth: Because he thought it was good sport. Because some men aren’t looking for anything logical, like money. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.
[later in the film]
Bruce Wayne: Did you ever catch that bandit in Burma?
Alfred Pennyworth: Eventually, yes.
Bruce Wayne: How?
Alfred Pennyworth: …we burned the forest down.
This bewildering anecdote makes clear the Dark Knight’s limitations. The film, like much of its audience, is incapable of engaging real-world motivations. Maybe the man in question—the terrorist—objects to “grand game” attempts to bribe his leaders. Maybe he disdains the notion of outsiders using their clout to establish control. But these notions aren’t even considered. Instead, everyone is comfortably a crook or an anarchist. Their points of view don’t need to be considered; all steps taken to curtail them are justified.
In this way, the Joker’s an easy foil; Heath Ledger inhabits the role, making him a casual ghoul, a presence that’s wholly invested in random destruction. Those parallels don’t carry over to the world we live in. What made the Joker anyway? That question goes unanswered. Indeed, it’s assumed to be unanswerable, carrying the same sad resonance of “Why do they hate us?”
If only every society were lucky enough to have an incorruptible strongman—then we’d really be able to sleep at night, the Dark Knight tell us. Maybe outside the context of the past eight years, this naïveté would be acceptable. But we aren’t lucky enough, and we never will be, and thus a movie hailed for its maturity ends up being far more childish than its four-color origins.
Well, you know that I posted some of my opinions about this movie over at CraigsHappyPlace.Blogspot.com, but to address your comments: I’m not sure that your analysis of the movie is entirely fair. I don’t think that the movie presents itself as deep social commentary/satire, even if that’s how the media is trying to frame it. That was certainly not my expectation of the movie. In fact, what my expectation was, and what I appreciated about the movie, is that it took itself seriously. This is not to say that it was devoid of plot holes or frighteningly realistic. However, even the Tim Burton series of “darker” Batman films was a little too liberal with the subject matter and always, especially in the third and fourth films, seemed to be giving a sidelong wink at the camp version of Batman from the 60s. Also, you object to the film espousing “tough guy mythologizing” but in fact, much of what Batman IS is tough guy mythology. As much as he is a Detective, he is the every man who just isn’t going to take it any more, who is going to protect those who can’t protect themselves and who is going to put the fear in criminals that a criminal put in that little boy who saw his parents murdered. I don’t feel the movie lost sight of that. This Dark Knight, while not perfect, makes a concerted and in many ways I think successful, attempt to humanize these characters, and that’s something that I appreciated.
I concede that my response to the movie might be hopelessly muddled with the critical response I perceived before I saw it. Going into the theater, much of what I’d read implied the film engaged the security-vs-liberty dilemma of the “War on Terror,” and I was hoping for a big statement there.
Still, the film doesn’t help itself by sort of engaging these issues in a half-assed way. Extraordinary rendition and torture, unfortunately, have real-world parallels in American policy that muddle their presentation in film in a way that didn’t exist when the first Batman came out. I admit to being shell-shocked by the past eight years, but I can’t watch an instance of torture or strong-arming on screen–particularly by a protagonist–without thinking of Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib.
Throw in Alfred’s WTF-speech about burning down the forest in order to save it, and I thought the movie came off as clueless about the vary issues it sought to parallel. Maybe, as you say, the movie wasn’t really looking to comment on these issues, but given our recent past, the commentary is there, like it or not.
Even aside from political points, the plot holes really frustrated me. Seriously, nobody shoots at the Joker?
Finally, you’re right about Batman representing tough-guy mythology, although that’s always tempered with a hardcore, uncompromising sense of justice. For that reason, I think it will be better to have him at odds with the police force in the next movie; then his methods can be seen as his own. Still, he’s a pretty impotent tough guy here. Few people are saved by his actions, and when he’s given a chance to finally take down the Joker, he crashes into a truck wreck and almost gets killed. Good job, Bats!
“The Batman does not kill.” You read that a lot in the comics. However, he also doesn’t wimp out. He also doesn’t bore you to death (as I mentioned in my blog ;-D http://thegreatcorrupter.blogspot.com/).
I do think James’ complaints are relevant because the movie and the media spent inordinate amounts of time braying about how THIS was the definitive, be-all, end-all superhero movie. But Spiderman 2 did this and a whole lot better. So did X-Men and X2. Even X3, which was dark (and muddled), had less plotting issues than The Dark Knight.
Knowing nothing about the Joker’s origins doesn’t make him mysterious. It makes him merely weird. No one ever shooting at the bad guys other than the one bank guy who was with the Mob is ridiculous. I agree again that the plot holes were large enough to drive a semi through.
The romantic subplot was tired. Batman’s better when his love interest is a villainess, not a drip. And, really, no one, Batman in particular, bothers to tell Harvey that they were, in fact, trying to save Rachel not him, and the Joker tricked them? This matters because it’s why Harvey flips into Two-Face, but no one protests that Bats intended to save the girl…why?
And no one, Batman in particular, figured OUT that the Joker was lying about who was where? Mr. Detective who’d just figured out the Joker had switched hostages for thugs didn’t say to himself, “You know, the Joker knows I’m in love Rachel, since he saw me leap off a roof to save her. Perhaps he’s not telling me the truth about who’s stashed in which about-to-explode warehouse.” No, instead he believes the Joker, after what seems like a long time of falling for the Joker’s tricks.
I could go on and on. The best superhero movie ever this was not.
As I said, “World’s Greatest Detective,” my ass!
LOL. Yeah. I still maintain that the BEST Batman movie was the animated one, “Batman and the Mask of the Phantasm”. That movie had it all.