You wanna play a game?
Let’s say you had an idea. A kind of “intellectual project,” if you will: you saw a problem, and thought you could design a solution. The problem was a city run rampant with organized crime, and the solution was very much a design — a visual/emotional icon, more myth than man, but with man-powered kung fu to back his plays and a millionaire’s stable of technological muscle to accomplish his means. The design is a calculation: a cunning cause, engineered to create a desired effect; part chess strategy, part domino topple. The original problem, after all, is just a system. (It is called organized crime, mind.) Systems, like spider webs, can be undone with the right tug at the right string. And so, in a hundred pounds of black kevlar, you tugged.
Suppose someone else had an idea. Suppose their idea — their intellectual project — was no less cunningly designed than yours, but here the calculation took glorious advantage of what in gameplay would be called your “base assumption,” that frustrating, unspoken truth that is buried so deep beneath your strategy that you may not know you are playing your every move towards it until a better chess player comes along and, instead of tugging on that spider’s web with you, kills the spider, releases a dog, and watches the dog eat your face. And, in this instance, laughs and laughs and laughs.
Anybody want to see what happens?
The Dark Knight — which arrives at the height of a humdrum summer to answer that question, at a level of craft and dedication that will be a high-water mark for 2008 — is not just the film that Batman Begins inspired in all of our minds with its critical final words (“escalation,” “taste of the theatrical,” “calling card”). It is significantly more: the most dextrous, complicated, and absorbing “comic book movie” ever made. It may never be possible for our pigeon-hole culture to truly abandon the notion that films can be so narrowly defined based on their source matter, but if they ever can, The Dark Knight will be the film that does it.
What a pleasure it is to see a film of this stripe — or any stripe at all, for that matter — so thoroughly and intelligently revel in its own idea. Christopher Nolan has an intellectual project, too. Now easily marked among the three best English-language directors working today, Nolan treats filmmaking like a puzzle box. He wants to see what clockwork mechanisms, when set in motion, can be used against our inherent assumptions — a hundred years of cinematic lies and bad habits — to create meaning. That’s the thing about Memento that none of the successors understood: it wasn’t just the gimmick of working a story backwards that made the film superb; it was working a story through the gimmick as the only way to come around to the most complete expression of the idea.
The mechanical artistic analogies of The Prestige (with its own escalating gamesmanship between two men whose intellectual projects, in that film, are nothing more ornate than their own Mephistophelean ambitions) cycle in and out of narrative time to turn the medium into the message in a way that few since Eisenstein have even attempted. Nolan uses the tricks and tracks of filmcraft and storycraft to play all of us against our base assumptions. Not that he needs to bother when he’s delivering material of this calibre, but in 2005, he even weighed in against one of the most vulgar: the one we used to have wherein “comic book movies are _________.”
Batman Begins — whose name is more and more leaning towards the double meaning of “prototype” — subverted a lot more than 10 years of bad Batman & Robin sugar hangovers. It put brains behind the parallel sequence of dimwit Peter Parker making his own spidey-suit in Spider-Man 1 (what if you actually had to design a thoughtful response to a systemic problem?) and weight behind Professor X wheeling his way around Roy Thompson Hall in X-Men (if this world were real, what would the super-people in it really need to be?). If Begins fell prey to the tried-and-true Freudian pop psychology that has always giggled its way through the Batman mythology (“My parents are deeeeaaaaaaad!!!”), at least it did so with a genuine moral ambiguity at its center. This ambiguity was gleefully explicated by what could have been lame-duck third-tier bad guys after the wasteful expense of ’60s throwback villains that ruled the Schumacher films. In Nolan’s hands, Ra’s Al-Ghul (and to a lesser extent, the Scarecrow) were stripped of their silliness and placed right into the middle of the central problem of Batman: the character’s inherent facsism. Scarecrow was in it for himself (wonderful capitalist that he was), but Al-Ghul was a man ahead of his time. He struck too early with his world-rending condemnation of Gotham’s rot: by the middle of Dark Knight, even Bruce Wayne might have been lining up to burn Gotham to the ground.
Batman (and the Joker, and Two-Face, and everyone else in Dark Knight) are tools in Nolan’s kit, whirring gears in his own intellectual project to set opposing systems (Batman’s and the Joker’s) against each other on the board of Gotham City, and see what happens. To an extent, the majority of the film feels like a schoolboy mixing unstable chemicals. There’s a degree to which the frothy soup that ensues seems to get quickly out of control; for the longest time, the escalation of action against reaction is climbing so exponentially between Batman and the Joker that “watching the world burn” — the cleansing fire to which Ra’s Al-Ghul referred in Begins — seems to be the only potential way out. Only by reaching towards a bit of technological deus ex in the final act (a clumsy, god-that-Daredevil-movie-sucked sonar vision gimmick whose thematic point drops like a lead weight) does Nolan even begin to suggest that the rapidly expanding system of chaos he has created might have a potential solution. If Batman will be 20 minutes behind his director in figuring that out, well, that’s why it’s his story.
In The Dark Knight, intellectual projects abound. Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman, onscreen almost constantly), Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart, welcomingly gormless) and Batman (Christian Bale, who gained back his Rescue Dawn muscle mass, but appears to have forgotten a piece of his soul) come up with a doozy: through Machiavellian misdirection and good ol’ Untouchables door-crashing, they complete the bold stroke of Batman’s original play, and take down organized crime in the city of Gotham. Oops: nature continues to abhore a vacuum, and good lordy god, the results are among the most terrifying you will see on screen this year. Dogs indeed: the film is rife with them, the vicious slavering things. When the criminal power structure of Gotham falls, the Joker (Heath Ledger) arrives to pick over the bones.
The Joker. So turbo-hot is the miasma of grief and morbid curiousity surrounding Ledger’s death that the Joker performance in The Dark Knight would overshadow the film no matter how it turned out; thankfully, the performance is so good — and the use of the character in the screenplay so well-devised — that Ledger sits exactly where he needs to, at the top of an utterly fascinating inverted pyramid of motives and means on the part of every other character in the film. The Joker is allowed a level of self-awareness not possessed by any of the others (at least until the conclusion), which makes him part character, part catalytic story prop. He understands Batman, and Batman’s effect on the world, so thoroughly that calling the two of them “antagonists” seems neither fair nor accurate. The Joker is above this story, Jaws to Gotham’s Amity Island, a propulsive plot device and a walking monologue on social and personal hypocrisy.
Under Ledger’s care, the Joker is once again nothing like the character in the comic book – nor, it should be remembered, could he ever be. The (comic’s) Joker is a concoction of letters and paint: he is not human, and could never be played by a human, nor would we (as humans) want to see him if he could. Ledger does what an actor should do: he assesses the trappings of the character he is playing, and invests himself accordingly. This Joker is, by turns, a clever bank robber (Detective Comics #1!), a true sociopath (all knives and pervy tongues), and ultimately, a self-proclaimed Agent of Chaos: he exists to peel back the lie of the entire stupid world. On those terms, it’s not difficult to see how unerringly light Ledger’s touch is: he creates the moments, reads the lines, and then disappears at the end of the film like smoke.
Some would presume that Batman’s base assumption, the one the Joker is exploiting, is Batman’s unwillingness to kill. Several sequences in the film certainly point in this direction, but this interpretation is another of Nolan’s bait-and-switches, diversionary and ultimately incorrect. The Joker’s understanding of Batman is deeper. The base assumption that the Joker frustrates with every new game and puzzle is the oldest and stupidest of them all, the one we’ve had inculcated into us since childhood and which continues to rule our interactions with every other person, agency, and system on the earth:that the games are winnable. The pitiable insistence that God cares; that it’s supposed to be fair. The Joker may dress like a woman and plead for the introduction of a little anarchy, but he’s far better than a chaotic mad bomber with parasexual undertones: he’s an atheistic leveller, a walking, talking Nietzchean avatar in lank hair and fright makeup. In Batman Begins, we got to watch the primal scene of Bruce Wayne’s childhood play out into the Batman he became. In the Joker, Dr. Freud is no longer on call. The Joker’s own backstory is so rightfully irrelevant to his current nature that he rewrites it every time it’s told.
In this way, The Dark Knight is frustrating; it is perhaps better described as uneasy, and very little in the way of “fun.“So volatile is the Joker’s condemnation of structure – that thing to which we all so desperately cling when we need to make meaning out of anything – that by the latter half of the film, the moments of eerie silence that presage the Joker’s appearance (always underscored by the nauseating whine of bows on electric guitars, the highlight of Howard and Zimmer’s shivering score) begin to have an almost viscerally repulsive effect. I once said that the world did not want (Batman Begins’) Batman; the world certainly does not want this Joker. Robbed of the release of laughing at the amiable badass we have come to expect from a comic book movie villain, the audience is left cowed. The Joker and his project become so frightening, so anti-Hollywood, that it’s amazing Nolan was allowed to conjure them for the Scotiabank crowd at all.
Underneath the Joker’s performance art mayhem is the triad of Dent, Gordon, and Batman, who slowly evolve through the course of a perfectly-pitched classical tragedy until all three stand like damned men in a Mexican standoff. Dent’s path is the most telescopically transparent, even without the threat of Harvey Two-Face hanging over Eckhart’s Indiana good looks throughout. (If there’s one thing at which Nolan never even attempts subtlety, it’s his naughty use of foreshadowing.) Dent is the transformed man, the metamorph; the perfect little fascist in his own way, given that he dispenses with Batman or the Joker’s moral quandaries by rigging his coin flips… until the Joker takes that facility away from him. He certainly plays like a more evolved version of Batman for the first half of the film, which is why both Bruce Wayne and Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal, the second actress to strike out playing this role) are so carnally attracted to him. He’s the out, the obvious light at the end of the tunnel. Seeing him fall is, of course (and as the Joker will quip), as natural as gravity.
Jim Gordon, the monkey (or more fairly, wise ape) in the middle, spends the entire film praising the moral virtues of his two allies, only to come away as the only real incarnation of the virtue he seems to think has been divided between Bruce and Harvey. Our bedraggled Commissioner is a good man in hell, always; the terrible burden that is placed on him more and more as Nolan’s Batman series augurs on is nothing more than the weight of being the living conscience of a darkening world. In a thanklessly pivotal role (Gordon is forever ordering squads from Parkside Drive to 553rd Street, and back again), Gary Oldman once again suffers the grace of his effortless art: he never steals, never mugs, never upstages. He gives leadership to an exempliary supporting cast (Freeman, Caine, William Fichtner, Eric Roberts, Tiny Lister, the amazing Keith Szarabajka) with compass-like certainty.
This leaves Batman, whose trajectory is created by the force of the Joker’s actions: he must learn to take the same leap above the game that the Joker has taken, and subvert not only the Joker’s assumptions but his own as well. Here, the trick is the scariest and ballsiest of them all: Batman insists. He does not attack the problem of the exploding ferries head-on, because the demands of his ideology insist that he believe he does not need to. Batman begins again, changes the game, changes the meaning: for all his topple-the-game-board creative logic, the Joker remains as bound by gameplay as he might have accused his foe. Batman, having created the gameboard in the first place to cause an effect, can look beyond it to the intended result. The Joker believes in his ability to predict the outcome of his moves but not in Batman’s ability to create true change; when midnight strikes and the Joker’s final demonstration piece fails to succumb to the “gravity” pulling all of mankind down towards his own insane boundlessness, the insistence – and the hope – of Batman’s original project comes roaring back. Gotham remains worth saving, after all. The Grinch stole Christmas, but damned if the Whos didn’t keep on singing.
By the end of the film, it no longer mattered much to me which side the – ahem – coinflip landed on. In at least one way, the Joker’s ideology is of course correct: there are no winners in this game. Systemic structure is so easily undone, but faithless anarchy is meaningless and self-destroying. “Safety” exists only as far as one man’s ability to see past the base assumption upon which it is built, but zealotry and terror can be bowled over by a single hand reaching out to another. We live in this paradox, which is ultimately why The Dark Knight is so considerate. Good-guy-wins conclusion notwithstanding, at no point in the film does it feel like an easy moral certainty is within immediate grasp. All interpretations of this ludicrous cosmology we live in are in their ways equally valid (or invalid), but if I have to pick one with which to go down swinging, I hope it’s the same humanism that kept those boats from blowing up.
If the first film saw the creation of the ideal, The Dark Knight sacrifices the self in the ideal’s service. It is a thorough, canny exploration. The operatic heights of The Dark Knight‘s final moments do, sadly, utterly overturn the existing gameboard. By the time The Dark Knight flashes its last, Nolan and co. may well have completely exhausted their own project in this particular universe. For all the degree to which the story ably sets up the potential for a genuine Dark Knight Returns adaptation at some point in the future, it’s difficult to imagine the filmmakers ever extrapolating the meat of this interpretation of Batman to an extent equal or greater than what’s been done here. (The last thing this Godfather II needs is a Godfather III.) The force of The Dark Knight’s accomplishment is humbling: but does this mean the game is over?