Two Bits

(Although I have always intended my blog posts to act in this manner, this may be the first entry where it really… matters. That is to say, these are intended to be commentaries, not reviews, so spoilers are sure to abound sooner or later. Read at your own risk.)

“Now “Iron Man” and even more so “The Dark Knight” move the super hero genre into deeper waters. They realize, as some comic-book readers instinctively do, that these stories touch on deep fears, traumas, fantasies and hopes” (Rogert Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times).

I can’t really pin down the exact moment during the movie when I realized I was not watching a comic book movie but an actual film. I would imagine this happens to most of you who have seen it. With most comic book adaptations, specifically Spider Man and X-Men, you sort of get the sense as you watch the movie that you are just watching a recreation. You get your heroes and your villains, re-imagined for the modern age, and they galavant around onscreen for a few hours until the super hero defeats them in some pat way and the movie is over. This was especially true of the later movies in the Spider Man and X-Men series. Those films were simply crammed with characters, and the characters existed purely because they existed in the comic. But they were great. We didn’t really need anything else in our superhero movies. We didn’t think there was anything else to get from our superhero movies.

Then you watch The Dark Knight.

I think most of us have had some basic understanding about Batman up until this point. We knew he was human. We knew he was dark. We knew he was rich. But we also knew that he was still, at the bottom of it, a superhero. His super power was, if anything, simply being obscenely rich and also intelligent enough to invent clever technologies (or, as established in Batman Begins, smart enough to hire someone who is smart enough to invent all of those things). But I think a lot of us knew Batman through the old WB cartoon, or the old movies, or even the Adam West TV series. And yeah, we knew who Batman was. But now Christopher Nolan has made him real. More real, in fact, than any other superhero I have yet to see on the big screen.

Now, I think that people who really followed the Batman books and were really into them will know this already. But this is an eye opener for the rest of us. But I don’t want to downplay what has happened with this film by saying that, well, Nolan took a dark character from a dark book series and put it on the big screen and, hey, it’s dark! I think he did much more than that, because I think he was very aware of the other Batman movies when he came at this. He had to have been. But I think he was also very aware of the real depths of the Batman character that the comic books have gone on to reveal over the years.

He’s also done something else pretty interesting too, and that is to make the villains real as well. Now, with Batman, I’ve always felt the villains were pretty real. Very few of them were diabolical for no reason at all. Most of them had tragic backstories. Two Face is a classic example: they were not born evil, and they may not even think they are evil. In fact, they are usually not even motivated by the typical vices of greed, power, and influence. They have many reasons to be doing what they are doing, and the difficult decisions they end up making along the way have very real consequences for them. This is part of what makes the movie so great.

Let’s talk about Two Face. In two and a half hours, Nolan corrupts an incorruptible character, and he does it better and in a more believable way than George Lucas did with Anakin Skywalker in three times the length of The Dark Knight. It would have been easy enough to simply throw some acid on the guy’s face and call it day – and I kept expecting that to happen too. I think it is enough to say that Harvey Dent’s transformation is real. It’s believable, and it’s very serious. This is not a fantastical comic book story. It’s about a real man’s struggle against evil and the very fine line he walks to get there. And it’s about how easy it is for him to cross that line separating justice from vengeance. Brilliant.

The Joker is probably the most vile, malicious, and evil villain I have ever seen in a superhero movie. And like Dent, he is also serious. He’s a man who does what he does because there is no reason to do anything else. I think his entire motivation is summarized when he tells Dent how no one notices when a tank full of soldiers explodes halfway across the world, but when he threatens the mayor, “Introduce a little anarchy… Upset the established order… Well then everyone loses their minds!” I think the Joker takes a look at a world where people are not bothered by daily death counts on television during war but will turn the nation upside down over one murder, and he falls into a sort of inescapable nihilism. I think the message about the human condition that Nolan delivers with the Joker is one of the more profound – and disturbing – themes to appear on film since the invention of the reel. And this is a comic book adaption.

That’s why I put a spoiler warning at the beginning. More so than anything I have talked about yet (and granted, I haven’t talked about much) The Dark Knight defies a review. There’s not much to say as a review. The movie is great. A+. But it is such a deep film, such a profound film, that it begs for discussion. It begs us to talk about it. It begs us to ask questions about the Joker and Two Face and Batman, and how these characters could exist in the world, and how they do exist in the world. Every now and again, a book or movie or (rarely, but it happens; see my upcoming Portal essay) video game will come along that will encapsulate some dangerous insight about the human condition in one piece of media. That such a thing could ever be contained, even in part, in a script or a novel’s pages or even twenty hours of a video game is astonishing enough. That Nolan has done it so well, with characters that we have known for so long as something else, something less serious, is pretty amazing.

Before I move too far from the Joker, a quick observation. In two different scenes in the movie, the Joker offers two different accounts for how he got the scars on his lips. Having read the Joker’s Wikipedia blog before the movie came out (in a nerd-like spasm of preparation), I was reminded of a note about his history, where he seems to remember different versions of his own history so often, he’s not sure which one is true. “Sometimes I remember it one way, sometimes another… if I’m going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice!” He says in one book. If the movie-Joker’s different stories are a throwback to this… Well, score one more for Nolan.

As for Batman, well, like we’ve established, he’s human. And Nolan takes it seriously. Gordon saves Batman at one point, and this shouldn’t astonish us, because Gordon is human too. I like that about the characters in The Dark Knight - Batman isn’t the only one with guts. He’s not the only hero. But he’s the one with the mask. And that presents some very real moral dilemmas. Is it OK for Batman to enforce the law by himself? Is it OK for him to stop the Joker by spying on every citizen in Gotham? We get the sense that Batman is not really sure, and is in fact leaning towards the negative side. As Gordon remarks at one point, he’s not a hero. I think what he is, what Nolan is suggesting he is, is a normal human being who is struggling with the very real consequences of his decisions. He set out to change the world and make things better, but is he doing that? Can he do that? There are vigilantes in The Dark Knight, dressed like Batman and trying to do his work; and they end up dead for it. What is Batman really accomplishing here? The amazing part is that even though Nolan seems to be challenging the superhero fantasy, he’s actually challenging our own, very real ideas of morality and justice and heroism.

Like I said. The movie’s great.