Reflections on The Dark Knight (spoilers abound)
July 22nd, 2008 by Justin Richards in Film
I repeat, spoilers everywhere.
Like our theater critic Lance Goldberg, who gave the film a rave review, I loved the latest Batman installment. And one of the remarkable things about the film was the way its messages spilled out into the theater to address our own relationship with its hero.
Take the chaos vs. order theme, which unfolded throughout the first half of the movie before being laid out explicitly by The Joker at Two-Face’s bedside. This is of course the theme of any crime-fighting story, but I’ve never seen it dredged to the surface the way it was in The Dark Knight.
Suddenly we’re able to see through what we’re doing when we watch a Batman movie, and we see that it’s like watching a sporting event. Most moviegoers are fans of order, but some of them don’t care. The most important thing is that both sides put up a good fight.
We don’t want The Joker to lose because the game would be over. But the funny thing is that in this movie, neither does Batman, apparently. Remember the note from Rachael Dawes, about how he’ll never be ready to retire the mask and cape? And then there’s the climactic scene when Batman saves The Joker with his grappling hook as he’s falling down the side of the building.
Sure, Batman has his moral code and everything, but what a world of good it would do to just let The Joker die. And even when the clown is caught at one point, it’s Commissioner Gordon who actually collars him. Batman just gives him a good fight.
It beats watching the Superbowl, if you ask me.
A friend at the St. Pete Times, cops reporter Stephanie Garry, pointed out another way that The Dark Knight interrogates its audience. At the end of the movie (huge spoiler) when Harvey Dent goes bad and ultimately dies, Batman takes the fall for all of Dent’s wrongdoings. The people of Gotham need to believe in a perfect fiction, he says, so they can have faith that order may someday win out. Meanwhile Batman is the real hero, the only character uncorrupted by chaos.
For the Batman audience, said Stephanie, the perfect fiction is The Dark Knight himself. He is our Harvey Dent.
But there’s a flaw in this analogy. Real-world moviegoers, unless they follow an Abrahamic religion, have no true hero defending them from behind the fiction. Maybe that’s why we’re so drawn to The Joker, whose life is nothing more than a game with no rules.
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