2008-07-21 22:23:06

THE DARK KNIGHT: MOVIE OF THE DECADE?

Filed under: 9/11,Faith,Film,Justice
Posted by: Craig

 

With The Dark Knight‘s claims to box-office pre-eminence secured, the spin cycle begins.   What does this hugely popular, amazingly resonate movie mean?   What is the message amidst all the madness cruising through Gotham’s streets?     At HollywoodJesus.com, The Joker is associated with postmodernism and all things relative, making Batman the force for moral absolutes.   At Dirty Harry’s Place, Batman emerges as a surrogate George W. Bush, willing to be hated for the sake of a larger mission.  Yet, at Beliefnet.com, The Dark Knight is traced back to St. John of the Cross and his dark nights of the soul.   Is this the sign of a great movie or merely a conflicted audience?  How many readings are possible?  How many readings are helpful?  What might be the filmmakers’ intent?

The Dark Knight is all about choices. Christopher and Jonathan Nolan embed this comic book universe with the contemporary question:  how should we respond to terrorism?   Will we suspend civil rights for the sake of order? What are the limits of interrogation?   The Joker pushes Bruce Wayne to the brink of his moral code.   Batman breaks ankles to obtain information.     Do ethics hinder our effectiveness in fighting crime?   The Joker is frighteningly free, dangerously untethered.   He makes law and order attractive.  Yet, he also points out how easily we adapt or rewrite our rules.  What happens when our plans are derailed?   Do we paint ourselves as heroes to rationalize carefully crafted schemes?    The Joker exposes our tendency to justify our actions irrespective of the law.   How much difference is there between a mobster, a corrupt cop or an accountant who fudges the books?   Don’t vigilante break laws, too?  This is about how the world (doesn’t) work.

Casual moviegoers may be shocked by the thematic richness of The Dark Knight.   It is far more than an adrenaline rush (although there are plenty of dazzling tricks–sky hook, anyone?!).   As Batman chases The Joker down a hole, we are all implicated in this increasingly dark crusade.  Interrogation scenes reflect the haunting photos from Abu Ghraib.   Will we abandon our moral precepts to gather evidence?    Even more horrific are the suicide bombers created by The Joker.  His false promises of future glory literally consign people into becoming ticking bombs.  We’re snapped back to London and Spain, where a bomb may be planted underneath or even within anyone.   It is easy to turn on each other.  In a paranoid era, how do we retain our faith in people?  Is goodness still viable?   The darkness in Gotham threatens to overcome us.

(Warning:  Spoilers ahead!)

Just when The Dark Knight seems to have exhausted the audience, Christopher and Jonathan Nolan trot out an old saw in act three. The situational ethics of the sixties gave rise to countless teachable moments about characters adrift in a lifeboat.   If a cross section of humanity were caught in a dinghy with limited resources, who should live and who should die?   And who gets to stand in judgment?   This moral dilemma takes on surprising relevance in an age of wiretapping, torture and Guantanamo Bay.   Are some lives worth more than others?  Who deserves to be saved?   Can’t we eliminate the wrong kind of people?  The Dark Knight could have devolved into silliness comparable to the television show, “Survivor.”  Who will be voted off the island or thrown overboard?  Instead, The Dark Knight offers a surprisingly humane, redemptive conclusion, rooted in prayer and compassion.   The Joker gambles on our innate selfishness and loses.   Nolan defuses the forgettable fireworks we’ve come to expect from popcorn flicks with something even more amazing:   good resisting coercive evil.  

The Dark Knight may be the best film of this decade.   (It has actually rocketed atop the IMDb list as the best film of ALL-TIME!).   It encapsulates all the conflicted feelings swirling around the war on terror.   It burrows into our corporate soul and wonders what price victory.    As the second part of a longed for trilogy, The Dark Knight stands alongside such troubling sequels as The Godfather Part II and The Empire Strikes Back.  It is always darkest before the dawn.   Fulfilling the promise embodied by his first features, Following and Memento, Christopher Nolan emerges as the most important director of his generation.   I devote almost an entire chapter of my new book, Into the Dark, to Nolan.   No one probes the human psyche with more depth or consistency.   The cracked mirror he holds up in Insomnia, The Prestige, and Batman Begins convicts us.   We are all duplicitous sinners.   But Nolan doesn’t stand in judgment above us, but in conviction alongside us.   He doesn’t talk down to the audience, but expects us to rise up, to examine the evidence, and come to the haunting conclusion that we are all murderers, thugs, and thieves.  We’re all adrift in the same boat, searching for lifeline.

The main contender for finest 21^st century film is Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy.   Both LOTR and The Dark Night offer mythic struggles riddled with temptation.   Their action sequences are big, bold, and energizing.  Both directors eke out a hard earned hope.  Yet, Lord of the Rings looks effervescent and bright compared to Nolan’s Batman movies.  While Lord of the Rings suggests that we can only resist evil as a community, bolstered by a fellowship of complimentary gifts, The Dark Knight chooses a more solitary path.   He is willing to be hated, rejected and despised for the sake of society.   Perhaps they represent the two moods/moments which divide the war on terror.  

Lord of the Rings summarizes the first half of this decade.   It offers clarity regarding good and bad, heroes and villains.   It is rooted in J.R. R. Tolkien’s vision and experience of World War II.  War exacted a horrible price, but good still triumphed over evil.   Peter Jackson’s Rings trilogy reflects who we thought we were after 9/11.   The enemy was clear, the world’s outrage uniform.   But when we rushed into Afghanistan and especially Iraq on trumped up evidence without international support, we crossed over into The Dark Knight’s vigilantism.   We poured money into new technology, placing our faith in firepower.   It looked like mission accomplished.   But we attacked as less than a fellowship.   Without enough outside accountability, we descended to the level of our enemies.   With our plans for quick succession derailed, Iraq edged toward chaos.   The Joker drags Batman into a similar quagmire.

An air of dread dominates The Dark Knight.   It taps into our fear regarding random terrorist acts.  It reminds us of the creepy power of handheld video.  One destabilizing force sets off panic in the streets.   We all become ticking bombs, likely to explode in public spaces.      There is no rationale for this kind of evil.  The Joker is beyond greed.   He delights in death.  As Alfred reminds us, “Some men just want to watch the world burn.”   The Gotham police and district attorney Harvey Dent are rooting out corruption, building a case against organized crime.    They battle a multi-national, multi-racial crime syndicate that extends from America to Asia.  But The Joker breaks even the criminal code, stealing from the mob.  What happens when there is no honor among thieves?  Perhaps vigilante justice is better when confronting disorganized crime.   Batman adopts methods that the authorities cannot.   Our problems in Iraq may stem from our strategy.   A nation attacked a nation in order to catch a movement.  We sent an army to combat isolated individuals.   The Dark Knight reflects post-Iraq realities.  All are fallen.  Most are implicated.  Few are spared.  The stain of sin and duplicity washes over humanity.  

The weakest link in The Dark Knight may be Batman himself.    We see him ruminate over the ashes of a smoldering building, but he bottles up most of his struggle.    There are hints of personal guilt and responsibility in his refusal to concede to The Joker’s demands. Does Batman really believe there is blood on his hands?   While Batman Begins focused upon his backstory, The Dark Knight shifts to the origins of Two Face.   Harvey Dent is free to vent his emotions and act out on his loss.  But the famed bachelor Bruce Wayne must put on a different mask in public.  

With Batman hidden by a cowl, Lieutenant Jim Gordon occupies the moral center of The Dark Knight.  Like the soldiers who serve in Iraq, his family bears the brunt of the battle.    They must deal with the long nights of waiting, wondering, and worrying.   Gary Oldman brings a weary determination to Lt. Gordon.   He is an everyday cop, familiar with the compromises inherent in the force.   When a successful campaign bumps him up to police commissioner, he takes the job out of duty rather than joy.   Gordon knows the cost of fighting criminals.  It is long, protracted struggle, taking a toll on himself and his family.   We feel the weight of his world.   

So how do we deal with our fallenness?   What solution does Christopher Nolan propose?  Bruce Wayne brings his frustration to Alfred, “People are dying.  What would you have me do?”   Alfred snaps back, “Endure.”  But such endurance involves much more than survival.  We’re challenged to remain decent in an indecent world.   Such choices come at considerable cost.   The Dark Knight suggests we can die as a hero or live long enough to become a villain.   Neither option looks particularly attractive.   Both echo the sacrificial path of Jesus, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King.   Their non-violent tendencies got them killed.   By the conclusion of The Dark Knight, Gotham’s hope resides in a watchful protector, a silent guardian.   He will suffer so that they might retain a hope, a promise, a purpose.   Gotham may long for a white knight to save them, but for now, a Dark Knight must suffice.

 

 

 

Comments (13)

13 Comments »

1. Christopher Nolan is the man who should direct The Screwtape Letters in my humble opinion. Assuming a worthy script, of course.

   Comment by Mike Rinaldi — July 22, 2008 @ 3:16 am

2. Thank you for straightening out all the thoughts swirling and churning in my head after riding the roller coaster of that movie! We accompanied our summer staff (college students) to see it this weekend and its taken me some time to process it. I appreciate your thoughts regarding the LOTR representing the first half of the century and this representing a closer picture of how we are now…the darkness that comes with the realization of the consequences of our actions/sin.
   One of our friends suggested that if Batman played a Christ-like role, Morgan Freeman played the role of Holy Spirit, which he has done in previous films. Any thoughts about that? If the Trinity were to be identified, I’d have a hard time pointing to a God figure. Unless Alfred is a distant God figure. I’ll have to see it again. And this time I’ll remember to breath.

   Comment by Catherine Warner — July 22, 2008 @ 5:16 am

3. Right on, Craig. Just saw the film last night with a young man I mentor. He wasn’t too impressed, and I was still in the middle space … letting the experience of the film continue to live in my mind on the long ride home and then be able to enter into critical reflection. I was struck by the frailty of hope, and the frailty of Batman (mentally and physically).

   I was also struck by Lucius Fox’s immediate and strong negative response to the unethical “wiretapping” Batman rigged with the sonar technology, and yet he carried out that one mission for Batman and was able to simply type in his name when the job was done … to destroy the invasive technology.

   Let’s praise the humanity exhibited in the prisoner who threw the ignition switch overboard without hesitation. What a slap in the face to our “rehabilitative” prison system, our American justice. In a country owned and heavily influenced by corporate interests, and where 91% of the country’s wealth is in the hands of a mere 20% of the population, one of the solutions to maintain this dominance is to help create prisons and fill them up (with mostly people of color) … when “real” criminals roam our streets in business suits!! Dark Knight showed that we are too quick to believe the lie, that non-prisoners are worth more than prisoners … that they are scum. In doing so, we don’t see the scum within us, the shared destiny and struggle for humanity.

   I applaud having Lucius Fox and the “lead” prisoner as people of color who were strong, moral centers … beacons of light and hope … and having a Cuban as the Mayor. All Gotham’s leaders were white (or light-skinned) as far as I could tell, including Batman, Bruce Wayne, Lt. Gordon, Harvey Dent … That’s typical for our country. Unfortunately, Det. Ramirez’ role was as a traitor (I don’t know Monique Curnen’s racial/ethnic background). We need more positive roles for Hispanic folks, so I’m glad the Mayor was Cuban, but I wish some Mexican actor(s) had some prominence in the film as a strong role player … especially given our “fight” for the border to keep “terrorists” out.

   And on another note, Lt. Gordon’s son was a rock, unshaken by the narrow miss of tragedy, resilient. He’ll be one of the only people to know the truth about what happened that night and how Batman “carried the cross” because that’s what Gotham needed at the time (even though he did not deserve to bear that cross). I wonder what role he’ll play when he ages.

   Craig, your analysis is so complete. I don’t have much to offer at present in the way of filling in gaps or thinking new thoughts. I think I’d have to see the movie a second (or third) time to peel off more layers. Great review! Much to chew on. And if I said any hair-brained things, feel free to rake me over the coals for it.

   Now, I hope to take my wife to see the movie tonight!

   Peace

   Comment by Nick Connell — July 22, 2008 @ 5:42 am

4. Thank for the comments so far. There is already a strong, perfectly suited filmmaker zeroing in on Screwtape. But obviously, Nolan can do whatever projects he wants for the remainder of his career, Mike.

   Catherine, Lucius and Alfred form two voices of conscience. Like the Holy Spirit, they bring wisdom and discernment. Perhaps God the Father is the watcher who rises above it all, alternately weeping and cheering for Gotham. Or is that too deist?

   Nick, you’ve picked up on a crucial subtext. Nolan exploits our racist stereotyping, particularly by casting the massive Tiny Lister in the prisoner role. We feel we know his heart and actions just via his face. But oh what a twist to our perceptions. Yes, amidst all the white knights like Harvey Dent, we have a Cuban mayor and a black police commissioner. With nothing really made of their background. It just is…. Same with the crooks–all tribes represented. The Dark Knight echoes The Matrix in that regard–a big racial polyglot, the same mix we see in Los Angeles spreading across the border blurring world….

   Comment by Craig — July 22, 2008 @ 8:51 am

5. Craig, LOVE this entry. I had not come even close to drawing the parallels to the war on terror as of yet. I really don’t think you could have said it better, this film directly reflects the nature of the world and the mayhem that has begun. I think perhaps most profound is your discernment of the lighter, more clear battle that is fought and won in LOTR as compared to the hazy, borderless, seemingly never-ending struggle in Dark Knight. Have we officially entered a season of darkness in America? Shall the film noir return with a vengeance for years to come? I must say I am not opposed as long as Nolan is filling frames…

   Comment by Todd Stevenson — July 22, 2008 @ 2:02 pm

6. THE DARK KNIGHT: MOVIE OF THE DECADE?

   Bookmarked your post over at Blog Bookmarker.com!

   Trackback by watchful — July 22, 2008 @ 7:03 pm

7. Great info – keep up the great work.

   Comment by Import from China — July 22, 2008 @ 11:03 pm

8. Thanks for the fantastic analysis, Craig! (Where did you find all these great stills?) After No Country for Old Men (with which Dark Knight shares an equally elusive, motiveless villain who is basically the personification of evil), There Will Be Blood, the Departed, and the underrated Munich, the finest of American cinema this century continues its preoccupation with the question of nihilism, evil, morality, and justice. Aside from the expert storytelling and the superlative craftsmanship, these films strike a chord because of their willingness to reflect and confront the issues you so eloquently deal with here. After seeing it for the second time, I was especially struck by the thematic parallel between Dark Knight and something like Munich, both of which feature protagonists who pay hefty spiritual/emotional price for carrying out action (often retributive) which they deem morally necessary, who must bear the sins of their people in order to achieve “justice” (Much like Bonhoeffer’s willingness to do what was sinful- killing another human being- as a way to simultaneously “redeem” his people (Germany) AND implicate himself in their collective sins.)When future generations look back to get a sense of what people were feeling in the midst of our post-911 Bush-era- our fears, paranoia, moral dislocation, and our desperate need for hope, clarity, and decency- these provocative films will be indispensable.

   Comment by Eugene S. — July 23, 2008 @ 1:32 am

9. [...] a dead guy playing a psychyopathic monster, don’t we? It may be the movie of the decade, as one enthusiastic reviewer has suggested, but in only one sense. If the first ten years of this century have been an echo of the [...]

   Pingback by Purple State of Mind — July 23, 2008 @ 11:30 am

10. Craig,
    Spot-on analysis. This film will not stop resonating in my mind; I am not sure I have ever been so captivated by a performance — Ledger was truly amazing. thanks for putting into words the thoughts I could not organize. I need 2 or 3 more viewings to get my head around this one!

    Comment by Dudley Bell — August 1, 2008 @ 11:08 am

11. [...] two different professor’s thoughts. The Dark Knight: Movie of the Decade? [...]

    Pingback by Ongoing « Jesus In New Orleans — August 1, 2008 @ 1:06 pm

12. Craig

    I loved your review. My son and I watched it together and had some stimulating post-film conversation.
    No doubt the Dark Knight must be viewed thru’ the “war on terror ” lens .How far do we use force to leverage information out of a terrorist in the name of security? How do we respond to terror? How far do we encroach on civil liberties and with the Lucius Fox dilemma to what extent do we invade privacy to make our land safe?
    …I think there are some other strands to chew on too.
    It was my son who proposed the idea that the Joker ( bereft of any redemptive qualities whatsoever )should be viewed as a symbol or even the embodiment of evil . Perhaps a Satan figure.In light of the fact that he was a pathological terrorist who reveled in destruction and had no fingerprints on record ,no DNA match and even no textile match I found this notion intriguing.And in synch with the father of lies his retelling of his own origin ( ie how got his scars) is fabrication. What do you think?
    As you mentioned we had a recast ethics 101 lifeboat game which I think points to a Biblical anthropology where to paraphrase Pascale man is both the glory and the garbage of the universe. Even the most hardened criminal still carries the image and likeness of God and is capable of not only acting out our depravity but also expressing altruism,compassion and selflessness. Then of course, this leads us back to the Joker typology ; is he a devil figure since he gets off on evil and manipulates crooks and cops alike by going after their dark side?
    I think you hit the bullseye on this rich film being a cinematic tract on choices. In particular ,Harvey Dent becomes a powerful parable on the corrosive power of bitterness.His external disfigurement perfectly mirrors his interior grotesqueness. If we don’t forgive we become paralyzed and grotesque because of the toxic power of bitterness and resentment.
    I would value your thoughts
    Cheers!

    Comment by Billy Hogg — August 2, 2008 @ 1:06 pm

13. Fascinating. I want to read more. How much time did you write a post?

    Comment by Ben — August 24, 2008 @ 7:40 pm

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