The Dark Knight in Three Phases

This isn't a review; so if that's what you're looking for, go somewhere else. (Preferably to a theater, where you can buy a ticket to see The Dark Knight.) Nor is this a critical analysis, although that's closer. I think the best term for it would be a "response" to The Dark Knight--if only because that's a very general, almost meaningless term. This is my attempt to engage the film on level beyond "holy fuck, that was awesome" (although that is a perfectly legitimate response, and one I agree with completely). In case you haven't gotten the hint yet, there be spoilers ahead.

I'm going to delineate three phases I went through with The Dark Knight. I didn't actually go through three distinct phases--as with everything, these categories and definitions and limitations are mere approximations of the true, gradual, undefinable, limitless experience--but they're useful for what I want to do here, so bear with me.

The first phase, beginning shortly after the film started and continuing for several hours after walking out the theater, was the "holy fuck, that was awesome" phase. I sat in my car with a huge grin on my face, incapable of being distracted or annoyed by anything, completely overcome with joy at the experience of the film. I went straight from the movie to a party with many people who had seen just seen it that day or the night before (this was the Friday it was released) and spent a lot of time discussing the general awesomeness of the film as well as specific moments. (The scene where the Joker makes the pencil disappear seemed to be a favorite. I agree.)

The second phase, in which I first started to really think about what the film actually said, began to some extent also while I was still watching the movie, but it didn't really take hold until the initial high wore off some hours later. In talking with other people about the film--an important part of any real response to anything, I think--I realized that most people found the Joker absolutely terrifying. I agreed that Ledger's performance was amazing, and added that the Joker's writing was as well, but I wasn't terrified by him, exactly. I couldn't quite say it at the time (as in, I literally was unable to say it, not that I wouldn't say it), but the truth was that I liked the Joker. Not as in liked him as a villain, but as in liked him better as a person than Batman or Dent or Gordon.

Yes, the Joker is a monster and a mass-murderer. And as a pacifist I'm even more horrified by that than most people. But what I found much more terrifying than any of the Joker's actions in the movie was the conclusion. Gordon and Batman agree to cover up Dent's transformation into Two-Face, culminating with an official funeral that extolls Dent as a marvelous, God-given hero unfairly taken from the city's people by evil men, even as Batman, the real savior, is forced on the run. Gordon and Batman decide, without any input from anyone else, that to reveal the truth about Dent would destroy the morale of the population and prevent Gotham City from ever being saved. In essence, what they decide is, the people of Gotham City can't handle the truth!

Colonel Jessup (Jack Nicholson) in A Few Good Men (1992).
The character famous for stating that line is the villain of that film and rightly so. I don't mean to say that Batman and Gordon are villains, or that the Joker is a hero (far from either). However, to me, what they do is nonetheless profoundly wrong. Batman and Gordon, without input from anyone else, decide the fate of the entire population of Gotham City--originally a pastiche of New York City, in the new films based on Chicago, but either way a population of millions. Of course, as a vigilante, this is not a new idea to Batman. The essence of a vigilante is a person who takes the fates of others into their own hands without anyone giving their consent to do so. (Which is why I find superhero stories fascinating: they're always about vigilantes, which makes everything they do, to my eyes, wrong. And yet they're worshipped not just as heroes, but as beyond normal heroes, as superheroes.)

The Joker does worse things, of course. He kills people, which affects a person's fate a great deal more than lying to them does (although to believe that in all the fighting he does Batman never kills anyone is something of a stretch, and perhaps the one great lie of superheroes that this movie maintains. I suppose we'll have to wait for Watchmen to see that torn down.) And Batman never pretends that he's trying to protect anything other than people's lives: the film's emphasis that Batman is not a hero is not a joke or modesty or irony or anything other than simple truth.

But in the Joker's speeches there is, to my ears, more truth than in the entire rest of the film combined. When the Joker speaks of people's reliance on "the plan", their calm composure even in the face of absolute destruction as long as it has been foretold in advance, their stubborn insistence on loyalty to institutionalized structures even when those structures are blatantly corrupt and damaging, there are no lies that come from his mouth. When he speaks of himself as "an agent of chaos", he is absolutely honest about what his purpose in life is--to destroy and bring about change. (I think that destruction is in fact the opposite of change, because everything is always changing, no matter how much we try to stop them, except in death, but that's a digression I won't get into.) During his interrogation the Joker comes across as positively Nietzschean when he explains that he's not insane, just "ahead of the curve", having already realized the futility of conventional life; and to an extent the Joker could be compared to Nietzsche's oft-demonized Übermensch, in the sense of the man who destroys the rules of conventional society so that he can build anew from the ashes.

The Joker, of course, never makes it to the rebuilding part and has no interest in doing so. But the lie of the Übermensch is the idea that the new order he creates is any better, any more true or real or right than the old. And to be honest, there is a philosophical archetype the Joker embodies even more: Sisyphus, Camus's Absurdist hero. "I'm like a dog chasing a car," the Joker explains at one point: "If I ever caught one, I wouldn't know what to do with it!" Does this analogy sound closer to anything other than Sisyphus, the man who spends eternity attempting to roll a boulder up a hill, only to have it roll back to the bottom each time he nears the summit? And if Camus was right that all of us are Sisyphus, all our lives are rolling boulders (and I think he is right, more or less), then this Joker is one of the most honest characters in fiction. He's not insane--just ahead of the curve.

At left: Heath Ledger as the Joker in The Dark Knight (2008). At right: crop of Sisyphus (1920) by Franz von Stuck.
Then, when I sat down to write my review for The Dark Knight on my Facebook Flixter application (I have an unhealthy obsession with writing such reviews), the third phase of my thinking coalesced. I was troubled by my apparent siding with a mass-murderer over the do-gooding hero. And I fixated on one reference, another line by the Joker, describing his relationship with Batman: "It's like an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object." I was familiar with the paradox, and I realized that was the problem with the conflict in this film, and the reason I was so profoundly disturbed by its resolution.

The Dark Knight is a film about absolutes. The Joker, as demonstrated, represents absolute chaos--he has no purpose, no goals, no reason, no structure, no system to anything he does; he is undefinable and uncategorizable; he is simply a force, an existence, and nothing more can be said beyond that. And Batman, the key, is the opposite. He's not just a force for justice--and he really isn't a force for justice, to my mind--but the representation of absolute order. Such a classification may seem odd at first--he's a vigilante, isn't he? How can he represent order?--but I think the imposition of order is always to some degree unwanted and arbitrary. Order, structure, systems, "the plan": these are things that we are not born into but find forced onto us by others.

I don't mean to say that order, society, civilization is some entirely foreign entity or that we'd be better off without them; I think the only reason order, society, civilization, structure, systems, "the plan" has any meaning, any power over us is because we give it power. (We construct our own prisons.) What I mean to say is that, we begin without order. We begin with space and existence. For some unknown reason, we search for order, meaning, purpose, structure, a "plan"; and in searching for it, we construct it. We create what we want. It's an illusion, it's not real, it's just a fairy tale (maybe, sort-of). But to perpetuate the illusion, to maintain it, we have to impose the order everywhere. The structure has to apply to everything or it applies to nothing; if it doesn't work in one place, or one situation, we have to explain why it doesn't, with more order, more structure, another "plan".

Bruce Wayne declares in The Dark Knight that Batman "has no limits". He can't, because he is Order personified, the ultimate embodiment of the structure Bruce Wayne desires to impose on criminals, the people of Gotham City, and reality itself. He knows that reality doesn't work that way--he admits that Bruce Wayne has limits--but also understands that order is not based on reality. It's above reality and beyond it. It is what he wants it to be. And so Batman has no limits. Batman will not kill--ever. Batman will not stop--ever. And when reality threatens the Order that Batman has constructed, Batman changes reality. Harvey Dent did not murder six people including two police officers. He was not broken by the Joker. He was a hero. This is what is necessary for Order to survive. The people can't handle the truth.

The Joker is not a hero. He murders dozens of people throughout The Dark Knight, and he is dedicated to an absolute that cannot be maintained. Even if, as Alfred says, some men can't be reasoned with, some men "just want to watch the world burn", it can't be maintained. Eventually the Joker would have faltered, because all men have limits. Batman is not a hero. He is dedicated to an absolute that cannot be maintained. Eventually Bruce Wayne will falter, because all men have limits. I don't think they're villains, either; the labels "hero" and "villain" are just another false order. But I do believe that people are people, and not absolutes, not personifications, not embodiments, not anything other than simple men and women trying to make their way. ("Nothing here is what it seems. The Alliance is not some evil empire, he isn't the plucky hero, this is not the grand arena." Name that film, my favorite of all time.) And that's the real conflict at the core of The Dark Knight. That's where both Batman and the Joker go wrong. They try to be more than men, and they're not.

The resolution of a story is meant to bring about some change in the conflict. Not necessarily the good guys win, or even the bad guys win, but some kind of change in the status quo. At the end of The Dark Knight, is Bruce Wayne any more cognizant of the wrongness of what he does? I'm not sure. The recognition of his own limits and the separation of that from Batman suggests that he is, but the cover-up surrounding Dent and the concluding narration suggests otherwise. And that's what terrified me about The Dark Knight. Not the Joker, but Batman, who is just as wrong, and still free.