Butterfly Hunt

The Dark Knight Redux

Given the recent tragic events in Norway, it becomes once again unavoidably urgent to critically (intelligently) reassess the political and ethical implications of dominant superhero narratives.  

The trailer for Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises is online. A conversation with Allan Haverholm on Twitter inspired me to dig out this commentary I posted on 31 July 2008. 

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I sat in the movie theatre with so many great expectations. But it was just one long, relentless, chase-and-explosions flick. There is nothing in the film that I liked that was not a reference to comic book visuals and dialogues. Even the best lines, the supposedly profound discussion of heroism, good and evil and chance are taken from the comic books. Gary Oldman’s fantastic performance as Gordon is, even more than Ledger’s Joker, the one that is more cartoony. The sequence when Gordon comes home after faking his death are direct translations from Year One:

Batman: Year One, page 30 (2005 trade paperback edition), art by David Mazzucchelli, script by Frank Miller

I found profoundly unsettling how single-handedly the Joker is called a “terrorist”. Out of the blue, he is not a criminal, not a psychopathic ex-inmate of the Arkham Asylum for the Mentally Insane, but a terrorist. No one can deny that the adjective cannot be used literally anymore. The film’s political message seems to be thus: we people of Gotham (we, America) are good people and will not tolerate terrorism, which is just a form of irrational madness. As exemplified by Alfred’s conversation with Bruce, the film justifies the destruction of a whole city just to get one man (sounds familiar?):

Bruce Wayne: That man in Burma, did you ever catch him?
Alfred Pennyworth: Oh yes.
Bruce Wayne: How?
Alfred Pennyworth: We burned the forest down.

There is no attempt to understand the Joker’s traumatic past or the reasons for his actions, and physical violence seems to be the only way to “negotiate” with him. The whole film reads like a justification of torture in order to obtain what the good guys want.

I loved the way Chicago and London are merged to offer a very realistic view of Gotham as a crime-infested city that, nevertheless, seems to be inhabited by cuddly carebear inhabitants who are forced to flee the city by one single dynamite-loving psycho. The notion that Two Face’s turn to the “dark side” is the Joker’s triumph (balanced by the failure of his “little social experiment” when both ferries do not blow each other) aptly illustrates Nolan’s humorless, grim view of Gotham: everything is so simply bi-polar that one side can very clearly become the other. Beware of those terrorists, because they want us to become like them.

I think that The Dark Knight is an excellent example of what I have called “the triumph of the Corporate over Individual talent”. There is no doubt about Nolan’s cinematic quality, but he is forced to come up with a pastiche of referents (from James Bond to Bourne to Heat to the Godfather to Ghost in the Shell to The Silence of the Lambs to previous Batmans (including his own). Especially towards the end, when the Batman’s eyes become an all-seeing sonar, the film becomes (annoyingly) a first-person shooter video game (the set not unlike Donkey Kong’s) but without the privilege of interactivity (through POV and conative angles, we become him without being able to control his actions). 

A non-stop, loud spectacle of an eternal chase defined by the glorification of violence: in Nolan’s world good and evil, reason and insanity, the terrorist and the good guys, the hero and the villain, the outcast and the politician are all on each side of a one-sided coin.

Unlike No Country for Old Men, The Dark Knight is contaminated with a masked morality that, once again, falls into the simplistic, Bush-era rhetoric of good and evil (and evil being terrorism, and terrorism being irrational and with no traceable cause). Where No Country presents a wasteland of the soul, the alienated, motivated, unstoppable and uncontrollable human evil incarnate that defies understanding, The Dark Knight works as an apology for the violence against the enemy, without any attempt of understanding its causes in order to stop a vicious circle of madness. Unlike the Joker of Elizabethan theatre, Ledger’s Joker says no painful truths, but the lies imposed by the powers-that-be. Like the Batman and Bruce Wayne himself, he is a puppet whose purpose is to allow the order that chaos has established. Left literally hanging from a rope, The Puppet-Joker says to the Batman:

“You just couldn’t let me go could you? This is what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object. You truly are incorruptible aren’t you? You won’t kill me out of some misplaced sense of self-righteousness, and I won’t kill you, because you’re just too much fun. I think you and I are destined to do this forever.”

This all could be very well if it were only fiction. Russian formalism works well for traditional fiction, but not for world politics. Whereas the Batman and the Joker may need to keep fighting each other eternally to allow a fictional universe to exist, this cannot and should not be transferred to the way the ‘good guys’ are dealing with ‘the terrorists’.

Whereas it could be argued that Nolan’s film is precisely pointing out that good and evil are not so different from each other, the conclusion is that we always know who the good guys are. In the world outside fiction, in the world of real men and women who die every day, there is no justification for terror on either “side”. Hollywood is becoming, again, the best strategy to subtly (and not so subtly) make violence seem not only justified, but, even more worryingly, “cool”.