Letters To Films

Dear The Dark Knight (some spoilers),

After more than two and a half hours with you, I felt a bit depressed. I know that this is era when we “reimagine” films that took the visual style of comics, but left the grittiness they had behind, but even so, your balance was off.

I was surprised to find you a bit of a downer, since I enjoyed the last batman film, and I’d heard so many good things about this one.

The thing is, whether cel-shaded or realistic, gritty or stylised, I go to an action-hero film expecting it to obey without exception one rule: the hero should be awesome (or at least become awesome in the course of the film).

You managed to pack into your two and a half hours so many scenes in which the Joker, for all his protestations of planlessness, was the only character in control. Even the tedious deus-ex-machina (in the literal, omnipresent sense as well as the dramatic sense) device to give Batman an intelligence edge was insignificant. In fact the extreme level of meticulous planning by the Joker did border on the ridiculous, something more than a little strange for a self-confessed agent of chaos.

I can’t deny Heath Ledger did a good job (although perhaps a little over hyped?). His Joker was deranged in just the right way, and pretty scary. However, it is hard to swallow the idea that someone could be so devoted to madness and chaos that he wants to do all the things he does, and yet not so mad as to be completely ineffective at them. I think I would have preferred a slightly less effective and in control joker, although he could have been a master of improvisation. At the very most, he could have had a number of small, self contained plans, rather than one grand plan. That would have provided a bit of much needed room for Batman to show some of the heroism that they talk about through the film.

The talking has enough of its own contradictions. I was hoping for a deeper meditation on the dangers of vigilantism and the importance of the rule of law than just a bit of verbal sparring to impress a girl at a restaurant. At the end of the day, the real answer seems to be “it’s bad, unless you’re as pure of heart as Bruce Wayne”. Which is great, except for the fact that it’s a nonanswer - it’s only the good who can be counted on to question the purity of their hearts (although his one rule goes some way to explaining why his breed of vigilantism is not as dangerous as many others, despite his occasional use of torture). And what of the ethical discussion about surveillance? I might agree that it’s “too much power for one man”, but when the seductiveness of that power is barely even acknowledged, it looks more like the reflexive action of a bunch of liberals controlled by the system - as the joker claims, rather than the true, painful sacrifice of an Übermensch for a principle he chooses to believe important. If it really is immoral to wield that power over a prolonged period of time, why is it ok “just this once”, a position strangely in contrast to one of the most famous of ethical laws - Kants categorical imperative.

Partly because of his motivelessness beyond a desire “to see the world burn”, it’s difficult to sympathise with the joker. Shakespeare had difficulty portraying the malignancy of Iago without giving much of a motive (not the only parallel to Shakespeares ‘dark knight’ Othello). The same problem is here. What makes it even harder is his insistence that we should know nothing about him, no matches for fingerprints, no friends or family. Even his tragic history is rewritten on a whim. He’s a man who seems to have nothing but knives, pocket lint and a hard to pin down location. All we really know about him is that he’s obsessed with driving men bad, and that he’s demonically good at it. Still, I do find myself interested in his philosophy, and his social experiments.

Just how would people vote in such a situation? At the beginning of the scene I’d thought to myself, 2/3rds for, 1/3rd against, but thinking about it now, I’m pretty sure that’s optimistic. Funny how I found what happened on the other ship more believable. Perhaps I believe more in the occasional heroism of bad men who know they’re bad than the lowest denominator of a self-righteous democratic crowd.

What should have been the most emotional moment of the film was surprisingly dead for me, I’m not sure why. In fact, more than anything else, it showed what a bad judge of character Bruce Wayne is. His hopes for a vigilantiless fix for the cities crime problem had blinded him to the whole point of institutions. Institutions are there because most people are not heroes, and the few that are might fall. Institutions are there so that no one man has to be the face of good. He should have let the police save their man, and gone after his own friend, and if he’d known what would happen, I’m sure he would have. Batman makes the same bad choice at the end, sacrificing his reputation for a lie he believes is important because of a misunderstanding of the unimportance of individuals inside institutions. It’s the individuals out of the context of institutions that are important. They are the ones whose symbolism can inspire people, and who will cause the most damage by their fall.

Far from being awesome, Batman spends most of this film finding excuses for cowardice and lies. He shows himself to be a follower, not a leader, dangerously susceptible to a cult of personality and there’s no doubt in my mind that the Joker won this one in straight sets.

Yours,

Depressed

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 26th, 2008 at 10:55 pm and is filed under 5, Heath Ledger, film, review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.