The Dark Knight
2008
dir. Christopher Nolan

"Who are those clowns?"
- John Ritter, Real Men

"Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken."
- Tyler Durden, Fight Club

"Hope: it is the quintessential human delusion."
- The Architect, The Matrix Reloaded

"They say people don't believe in heroes anymore? Well, damn them! You and me, Max, we're gonna give them back their heroes!"
- Fifi, Mad Max

Spoiler Alert: this review contains significant plot spoilers.

It was one of those bizarre guilty thoughts one has in the face of unimaginable tragedy. I thought to myself, on September 11, 2001, how fortunate it was that Fight Club had already been made into a movie.

There was no way that kind of gleeful mayhem would play anymore. What kind of figure would Tyler Durden be?

Of course, it's not exactly a new insight to suggest that the Joker and Batman are involved in a mutually abusive, codependent relationship, each enabling the other like Jack and Tyler.

But like a family where no one talks about daddy's drinking, the Batman films have merely flirted with the notion that Batman helps create the situations he tries to solve. One or two throwaway lines in a villain soliloquy, delivered like a petulant adolescent rant at Thanksgiving dinner, is about as thorough an investigation of this premise as the films have allowed...until now.

As with his earlier work, Memento and Following, Nolan here returns to his theme of heroes must who create villains in order to be heroes.

Writ as a small-scale noir premise, this theme reminds us all that we are individually often not what we imagine ourselves to be. Androids do not dream of electric sheep. They dream of real sheep because they don't know they're androids.

Writ as a large-scale heroic epic, however, this theme metastasizes into the grand opera of hopelessness and despair that is The Dark Knight.

Heath Ledger's Joker is a terrifying figure, not because he's larger than life but because he seems so...ordinary. "I'm not special," he tells Batman, "I'm just ahead of the curve."

Ledger's Joker has no apparent origin. He relates different stories throughout the movie about his facial scars. Does it really matter if it was his drunken father? His faithless wife? His own self-revulsion?

As the Joker mockingly tells and retells changing stories to justify his mask of insanity, we hear echoes of Bruce Wayne's grief over his lost parents. Lots of kids lose their parents. They don't all go on bat-costumed vengeance trips.

But the Joker recognizes that people want that narrative, they crave it, they want to know why a madman is a madman. Does Wayne just use his dead parents as an excuse to do what he was probably going to do anyway?

In a moment of great insight, great clarity on the character of Gotham, the Joker tells Harvey Dent that people will tolerate the most horrible, nasty things just so long as they think it's "part of the plan." Relatively less horrible, but unplanned nasty things make everyone misplace their collective feces.

Previous incarnations of the Joker portrayed him as a criminal mastermind with grand schemes, improbably large pools of resource and a flair for theatrical cruelty. This was Nicholson's Joker, a man looking to punish, to mock and to get away with it in grand artistic style. "We are artists," Nicholson's Joker tells Vicki Vale.

This is the Joker to oppose a heroic Batman. A Joker who abuses the world for his own amusement. A Joker who has no case. An inflated villain to confront an inflated hero.

Ledger's Joker, by contrast, is a man of the streets. Standing before a large, large pile of money (his money), he sets it ablaze.

"Do I look like a man with a plan?" he asks. The police make plans, Harvey Dent makes plans, Batman makes plans. What does it get them? Not one good, righteous, plan-making person in this film makes it through without getting seriously injured or killed or watching helplessly as their families are held hostage by lunatics.

And how does the Joker accomplish all this? With state-of-the-art gadgetry and a global spy network? No. This Joker is a "man of simple tastes." All he needs is some gasoline, dynamite and one all important thing that the so-called heroes of Gotham seem hell-bent on giving him at every turn: the initiative.

And that's where the grand tragedy becomes most clear. Because if this simple man of simple tastes, if this Joker, can wreak this much consistent havoc in Gotham City, then what hope is there? He's not a supervillain. He's just a guy with some explosives. Kill him, arrest him, destroy him and fifty others will pop up.

At the beginning of the film, we see the flipside of this premise as copycat Batmen in matte-black hockey uniforms patrol the city and end up creating more problems than they solve. As the real Batman puts a stop to it, one of the impostors asks "what's the difference between you and me?"

"I'm not wearing hockey pants," is Wayne's glib response. And yes, that is the difference. Bruce Wayne has access to millions of dollars worth of advanced weapons technology. That's what differentiates him from the vigilante cosplayers who try on his mantle for size.

Yet, that's precisely what Wayne wants. Batman can't be Batman forever. He has to inspire the people to take up his cause. And they have. And he doesn't like it.

Unlike Wayne, the Joker simply is who he is. He has no gadget factory. He doesn't need to inspire people to be more like him. He is the natural consequence of humanity existing in this Batman-dependent state.

Gotham doesn't need Batman. Gotham needs a police force that can arrest, try and convict guys like the Joker. The way to defeat the Joker is to simply stop letting him set the agenda.

In the film's climax it is the people themselves, including the criminals, who figure this out. Put into a Jigsaw-like dilemma by the Joker, the good people of Gotham recognize that the only winning move is not to play. They do what the police and Batman seem genetically incapable of doing: they reject the Joker's premise and refuse to submit to his blackmail.

That represents the Joker's only failure in the story. Pushed, the people ultimately do the right thing: they become more noble in the face of crisis, not less. And they don't do it because they believe in Harvey Dent, they don't do it because they're inspired by the heroic Batman. They do it because it is their nature.

For his part, Batman entirely misses this point. Obsessed with the idea that justice is forced into place by "heroes," he engages in illegal wiretapping, torture and a coverup of official misconduct and murder, all in the name of maintaining Gotham's unhealthy hero-dependence and undermining the very quality of character that allowed the people to foil the Joker's plans...all on their own...without his help.

He could change all that by taking off his mask and helping lead Gotham into a new era where psychotic street performers from the id can't hold the world hostage with a handful of explosives and a band of schizophrenic henchmen.

"You either die the hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain," prophesies Harvey Dent and, by the end, we see clearly which path Wayne has chosen.

A world without monsters would have no need for Batman, and Batman needs to be needed. He'd rather rule a city of proto-Jokers than serve a city of everyday heroes.


Three stars, Jason Wayne says he has clear shots on five clowns.