Top of the Otts in Film #1: The Dark Knight
In a
span of time dominated by the specter of terrorism in a free society, it took the Dark Knight's graphic novel approach to address it seriously. TV, most especially 24, ripped
as much as it could from the headlines without getting sued, and chain-fed it
all into a low-high-concept 50-kal. Scripted film, such as the
obscurantist Syriana, got lost in a mishmash of Hollywood politics and
pretension before it could look at the Middle East honestly. The irony is that, in
trying to deal with terror as an Islamist phenomenon blah blah blah while contextualizing that
so as not to offend the broader body of peaceful Muslims blah blah blah, both
approaches failed.
The Dark
Knight is having none of this, because for Nolan, the story isn’t
about the decade and Islam, it’s about the liberal order and terrorism. The deliberately underplayed Middle
East/Central Asia origins of the first movie’s antagonist, Ras al-Ghul
(literally “Head of Terror”) as well as his political aims, are reduced to
background. And in favor of The Joker. This sublime creation is conceptual ground zero for the most sinister form of the scourge – those who see terror as an
end rather than a means. As Nolan has Michael Caine put it, “Some men just like
to watch the world burn.” This prospect is what makes the Joker so terrifying –
no political aim, no vision of an alternate order, no desire for personal aggrandizement; just a social arsonist. In some sense, mayhem for its own sake is the unstated goal of every
underthought movie villain. But here, the goal is explicit, and all the darker
for it. Nolan goes further still: the Joker is not merely a villain, but he is
inspired to be an arch-villain by the very example of the superhero. This
raises the prospect that all that our hero has done for order and for good is
worthless, for the end product is still worse terror.
And our hero
knows this. And despairs over it. And yearns for a legitimate authority from
the liberal order to prove equal to the challenge. And crawling deeper into the
dark message we are being taught…the liberal order, Harvey Dent, proves unequal, the paragon is co-optable. The perhaps overstated morality play of the bombs on the
boats is supposed to be the sugar for this bitter pill, that both
criminals and average citizens cannot be brought into a fundamentally anarchist
project. But we still taste the medecine:
Batman still has to save the liberal order, and to save it using extremely
illiberal means. He turns every phone into a monitoring device (violating privacy),
uses physical coercion (torture), and deliberately perpetuates the lie that the liberal order never failed by masquerading as another illiberal villain. Yes,
basic human decency spares the public from self-immolation, but it does not
save them from annihilation at the hands of a man who would see them burn. Only
the good but illiberal Batman can do that, at the price of both his personal life
and his public reputation.
If all this
had not fairly split the apple on top the head of the terror in the liberal
order conundrum, Nolan also manages to hit a few additional intermediary bullseyes.
Batman is an inspiration to the ordinary citizen, but they only become
nuisances. The media, new and old, is a half-witting vector for the incubation
of fear. Organized crime is overawed by the discipline and
evil of a societal outcast with the courage of his anti-social convictions. Or my
own favorite – the Joker’s changing explanation of his scars – the ultimate usurpation
of the terrorist's only possible exculpation by means of explanation. Perhaps one
of his stories of personal grievance is true, but we don’t know. And we do know that he’s happy to
lie about it for the purposes of manipulating his victims’ sympathies. It is a
subtle aspect of the film, but among its more brilliant insights.
That’s a lot
of philosophizing. The movie itself is dialogued-up, perfectly acted, and
contains a number of Nolan’s head-turning action sequences, which have grown
rare in an age of CGI. If I have any criticisms, it’s that Maggie Gyllenhaal is
just kind of present, which one assumed Katie Holmes could have accomplished
just as well. That and the climactic fight between Batman and Joker is a bit of
a letdown, a detail I want to ascribe to Heath Ledger’s untimely passing.
In the
world, this was the decade of the War on Terror. In the world of film, it was
the decade of the comic book. The Dark Knight was the best work of art on both.
