Top of the Otts in Film: #1 The Dark Knight

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.