This is an effective visual metaphor for Jess's point.
..and I have many adjectives to prove my point.
By Jess Skinner
Author’s note: With the unprecedented public approval of The Dark Knight in mind, if you wish to comment on my derision please focus your reply with your own thoughts about the film. I’m not interested in hearing about how you think I can’t write.
Possible spoilers ahead.
The Short: The Dark Knight is ugly, and depressing. It is sadistically violent but shamelessly hides that fact through editing, to milk as much high-school money as possible. It continuously refers to the concept of morality but never talks about the subject in a way that is intelligent or challenging. It’s an hour too long, bloated by endless disposable characters and red herrings.
The Long: There’s a rule in superhero movies (or at least the ones that I have seen) that I like to call “the falling paradox.” It relies heavily on audience expectation and desire. Some explication: we expect our hero to deliver justice, to prevail, and we expect our villain to fall — to inevitably, as a symbol of evil, cease to exist. There are many moments in countless action films where either hero or villain could just shoot the other in the face and be done with it, but that can’t happen. Obviously the hero cannot die, and alas although the villain can, he cannot be directly killed by the hero. So the inevitable conclusion is hand-to-hand combat (always from a great height) until said villain loses his coordination and goes pathetically tumbling to the distant ground. Splat, end of fight, no blood on hands — ours or the hero’s. After all, no one threw him off. He just fell. This was demonstrated in the climax of Batman Begins, when the titular crusader let enemy Ducard (Liam Neeson) ride a monorail car to his pavement doom. As the thing fell from its great height, Batman slyly remarked “I won’t kill you, but I don’t have to save you” and flew away.
On to The Dark Knight, which suffers horribly because it adheres to the falling paradox at all times. In plainer English, it never steps out of a PG-13 sense of morality. Batman is “good” and does exactly what the audience wants and expects of him at all times. At a key moment, he spares a villain from the falling death, apparently because doing otherwise would be immoral. Huh? What about what happened to Ducard? The scenario is pretty much the same at the end of both films, but for the sake of philosophical contrivance, Batman cannot allow himself to do…what he already did.
His new (or, old?) foe The Joker shares this flip-flopping path of logic, alternately motivated by whatever will make the best set-piece. One minute he’s robbing a bank (an admittedly strong opening sequence), the next he’s burning a pile of money. One minute he’s making a speech about how his malevolence is instinctive, anarchic, and unplanned; the next he’s orchestrating an unbelievably contrived scheme to force one boatload of people to blow up another. If he was really as psychopathic as the film sets him up to be, or if he really just wanted to “watch the world burn” as Alfred the butler puts it, why doesn’t he just blow up both fucking boats in the first place? Because he is simultaneously disordered and meticulous. Because the filmmakers are having their cake and eating it too, substituting thematic laziness for complexity. That, my friends, is a textbook definition of pretentiousness.
Everything about The Joker — his appearance, performance, dialogue — suggests that he wandered in from a far more interesting movie. He seems capable of violating our expectations (and does so at least once, to be fair), and overcoming the confines of a summer blockbuster. His interaction with the other characters, his avoidance of clichés while the rest of the film carries on as if they’re in style, makes the performance of good and evil disturbingly lopsided. It’s like an episode of Lois and Clark co-written by Rob Zombie. Heath Ledger creates the only element of The Dark Knight that is unlike all the other Batman movies. But of course, stuffed into a box by people trying to sell Happy Meals, the true potential, the haunting evil, of both character and performance only sporadically come to the surface.
In its heavy-handed plot and dialogue, The Dark Knight continuously presents itself as a morality tale. To study such a lofty topic well would require a challenging of norms and expectations, in terms of superhero mythologies. No challenge here: Batman is always good, The Joker is always bad, and Harvey Dent is good until he gets horribly mutilated (which apparently is a lot less physically painful and inhibiting than I would have guessed) and then he’s bad.
In my consideration, I’m reminded of a proverb: a full stomach likes to preach about fasting. The Dark Knight preaches about denying the appetite for expectation, but feeds it every step of the way.
* SPOILERS *
Weeelllll…
I have to disagree. Like, a lot. If you want to get picky about it, Batman is pretty much responsible for the Joker falling off that building. Joker would have been fine if Batman didn’t shoot him in the face with his shuriken thingees and then kick him off the building, so it makes sense that he would save him. You make a good point about Ducard/Ra’s in the last movie though, and to be honest leaving him on the crashing train was a very un-Batmanlike thing to do. He always tries to save everyone in the comics, no matter how scummy. Instead of griping about inconsistency on that point, I prefer to be pleased that The Dark Knight corrects his character a little.
You seem to be bringing up some rather high-concept points of contention in this movie, things about mythologies and conventional superhero themes, and I find that kind of odd…there are a lot more concrete flaws you can find in TDK, and it’s probably the least conventional superhero movie out there right now. There were certainly a few things I didn’t like about it, but the insertion of themes of morality is definitely not one of them — I think that’s what sets TDK apart from a lot of superhero films. It was a lot deeper than your standard good vs evil storyline.
You say Batman is good and Joker is evil, but I don’t think that’s the point the film was trying to make. It was more that Batman stands for order and Joker stands for chaos. These are the principles that drive them. A ‘good’ person probably wouldn’t willfully drop a man from forty feet and break his legs, for example. And Joker is a psychopath, yes, but he’s not a raving idiot. He actually has a method to his madness, which is exactly the way his character should be. Point in fact: of course he could have blown up both boats (and he would have, if Batman didn’t stop him), but he didn’t want to just blow people up. He wanted to bully a bunch of people into mass murder. He wanted to terrorize everyone. He wanted the world to see that we’re all just base animals once you strip away all the false trappings of civility.
I notice that you call him out on his ‘flip flopping logic’ and then say he’s not psychopathic enough in same paragraph. Yes, he says he’s not a planner and he keeps some money at the beginning and burns the rest. Well, I can explain that: he’s a lunatic. And he’s generally not to be trusted. His “I’m not a planner” speech wasn’t a heartfelt confession to Harvey Dent just to make him feel better. It was a calculated effort to motivate Dent into doing something horrible so he could further cut away at the hope and optimism people had in Gotham. He lied. Just like he lied about how he got his scars.
And as for the money, well, a few days prior he stole 68 million dollars, enough for pretty much anyone to operate however they pleased, so I don’t imagine he really needed another — what, half a billion dollars, judging by that pile? — to accomplish his goals.
You’re right, he is simultaneously disordered and meticulous. He’s SUPPOSED to be. He’s the Joker. A more accurate depiction of that character, I couldn’t imagine.
Anyway, those are some of my thoughts.
You make some good points. I think the Joker character is complex, and inconsistent, which would have worked if the rest of the characters didn’t seem so cliched…I don’t read comic books so I don’t really know which actions of Batman are truer to the mythology, if you say The Dark Knight does that better, well, more points to it then.
Caesar has already made a bunch of good points that I don’t want to reiterate- though I must say Batman not saving Ducard in Begins was the principle problem everyone had with that movie as far as I can tell, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that Batman doesn’t do the same thing in this film. That’s just a matter of creators listening to what the audience wants if nothing else.
So I’ll just quickly respond to some of the short: in regards to the cut away violence I keep telling my friends that that reminded me of comic book violence, a cutaway, or silouette with a sound effect written in the background. I thought it was a brilliant transfer of action from the comic to a filmic medium.
It definately is a dark disturbing movie, and in a consistant world someone would have blown up the other boat, but its that moment (and others of course) which make it a superhero movie.
An awesome super hero movie.
The Joker has a thesis about humanity that he’s trying to prove. That everyone is capable of being a murderer under the right circumstances. He has to do a certain amount of planning in an attempt to prove his argument, but he’s not a schemer for his own ends like Dent and others. It’s not that he literally needs to ’see the world burn,’ it’s that he wants to see his sick worldview confirmed.
Isaac, noooooooo…!!
The action scenes are my main complaint about TDK (and Batman Begins). They’re an improvement on BB because it doesn’t look like the cameraman was having a seizure during filming action scenes on TDK, but the way the action scenes were directed were sooooo boring to me.
Every time there’s a fight, the cameraman was way too close so that it was impossible to get any kind of big picture as to what was going on. Batman was always dispatching someone who I didn’t even know was there in the first place. So it got really tedious. There was no depiction of any obstacle that Batman had to overcome before he already overcame it, you know? So every fight scene that I saw was just like, “Okay, this is just random snapshots of Batman punching people that appear out of nowhere, can we speed things along to the part where he wins?”
Ever see Enter The Dragon? There’s a scene where Bruce Lee is kicking the crap out of forty people, and the camera zooms right in on him, so much so that his fists are flying off-screen and striking unseen enemies. It was kinda like that.
Oh hey, I just re-read your comment and realized I’m completely commenting on something you didn’t actually say. Well, that’s smart. Um, well since I’ve written all that crap above, might as well leave it in there. To respond to what you ACTUALLY said, the cut-away violence didn’t bother me too much…probably cuts they had to make to maintain a PG rating. That happens to pretty much every summer movie; the director has a vision, the studio forces them to cut the movie down to a PG rating so they can make as much money as possible (see Hancock, for example).
Geeks.
Ah, yes. I had a feeling this article would cause a shitstorm, an impressively civilshit storm. Even “geeks” is pretty neutral.
I’m of the Bat-camp that thinks this is a very good movie, and a super-amazing Batman movie. For me, the real test of a good movie is if I can turn off all of my “I’m looking for holes” academic brain and be lost in the story. For about a full hour of this film I just kept thinking “What the hell is the Joker going to do next? Holy shit, this is exciting.” To create a villain that has you guessing that much is a thing of beauty and there is no way the hero can be that interesting.
To be fair, I think Bale did a good job trying to make Bruce Wayne/Batman’s take on this as interesting as possible, but he doesn’t get the full character you might like to see.
There is a problem though, that this is a violent picture, even if there is no blood or swears, that is heavily marketed towards children. I remember when I saw the 1989 Batman in theatres, I wanted to leave towards the end because I was scared but my mom wouldn’t let me because she was having too good a time.
If I had kids now, history would have replayed itself.
Ha ha @ Eva.
To Jess: The movie-Joker is much more well-prepared than the comic book Joker. The Joker always has a plan, but his impulsivity and insanity usually contribute to his downfall. In the movie, he was TOO smart, I thought, but still really true to the character. The Joker is Batman’s greatest villain and he should always one-up him at least once or twice during each encounter.
Anyhoo, thanks for the reply.
I’m with Miles. Upon rehash, yes, this movie had a lot of holes, and the moments where it was a serious drama made it much harder to enjoy the superhero-toned scenes (oh, those boats), but I hardly noticed while watching. I was just swept up in the complex plot, and admittedly I was hanging on every word. This is coming from that jerk who laughed and laughed through all the serious scenes in every Spiderman film.
Rachel, so it was you!! At the Spider-Man movies.
Caesar, I was all set to go, “but I didn’t say anything about the fight scenes…” and then you caught yourself for me.
As long as we’re talking about the fight scenes, I think everyone will agree that they’re way better than in Begins- so as long as they keep getting better, I won’t complain.
I will say the fighting was simple, but Batman was powerful taking guys down with a single hard hit. So, if a fight scene lasts too long with Batman around, that’s when there’s a problem.
I’m glad you guys didn’t take that the wrong way. :) I in fact did enjoy the film, unlike Jessie. It had it’s problems, but over all I found it enjoyable. I will probably continue to go about seeing anything Christian Bale develops in the near future.
The outcome of the ferry scenario seems to be one of those things you either buy or you don’t, depending on what you bring to the table. I’d go so far as to suggest this may have been part of Nolan’s point — if you wind up not buying it, it puts you in the position of saying the Joker’s right.
Richard