Given the unprecedented box-office success of The Dark Knight, it’s appropriate to consider what effect its themes and ideas will have on audiences. After setting the single-day box office receipts record last Friday, the film set the weekend record as well, bringing in $155.34 million, besting the $151.1 million take for Spider-Man 3‘s opening weekend last year.
Like that film, The Dark Knight is both dark and edifying, and it presents mature themes handled with intelligence and real sophistication.
Heath Ledger’s performance as the Joker, as I noted last week, certainly was a big factor in the film’s huge box office success in its opening weekend. The Joker character provides a fascinating antagonist for the Caped Crusader.
It is important, however, to give due credit to director and co-screenwriter Christopher Nolan and cowriter Jonah Nolan for creating a brilliantly conceived character which Ledger then brought to life with astonishing vividness.
The similarities between the Joker and the Batman create a certain fascinating tension, of course. Both operate outside the law, both find it difficult to develop close relationships with other people, both lost loved ones at an early age (if anything the Joker says can be believed; he makes two different claims about how his face became disfigured), and, quite interestingly, neither one asks for any return for their life’s work.
But for all their similarities, they have chosen very different paths, of course. This confirmation of the reality of moral choice is a powerful aspect of the film. It is confirmed and strengthened in the case of District Attorney Harvey Dent, who is quite torn between two possible futures: one as a hero, and one as a villain. We endure Dent’s anguish and literally see the two sides of him in his face as he struggles with his choice.
That makes Dent’s character a truly important element of the film, and may be one reason why his presence never seems an imposition and does not strike the viewer as a waste of screen time that could be spent on the Batman and the Joker: in his character we see the struggle between the hero and villain played out in a single person’s soul. It is a subplot that gives us further perspective on the themes of the main story.
Unlike Dent and like Batman, the Joker has made his choice. He does not want power, money, or adulation; he simply wants to destroy other people’s happiness and freedom. His means to this evil end is to create chaos and destroy things. And at that he is a true genius.
In this way the film powerfully brings out an important philosophical and theological idea about the nature of evil: that it is the absence of good. Evil is parasitic in not having any true nature of its own but simply functioning as the negation and destruction of what is good.
That is vividly evident in the Joker’s lack of interest in obtaining anything good. Criminals, after all, typically commit their crimes in order to get things that we all consider good, such as money, power, gratification, etc. The Joker will have none of that. His every impulse is simply a nihilistic desire to destroy things, create disorder, and spread unhappiness.
Yet he does not appear to derive any real joy from it. In this the character differs strongly from other modern film villains: he is not a sadist, for he apparently does not derive pleasure from his actions. There is a certain powerful melancholy at the heart of the character which Ledger establishes brilliantly. (Note the photo at the top of this article.)
The Joker’s wish regarding Batman, notably, is to bring him down to his level, to make the hero into the villan the Joker is sure the Batman really is in his heart of hearts.
Even his calling card, used several times in the film, adds to this meaning. It’s a joker, of course, the card with no fixed value. Everything about the character suggests a deliberate and detailed personification of nihilism in its most sadistic form.
In this joyless impulse toward destruction, the Joker strongly evokes the Judeo-Christian conception of Satan. The Devil, after all, is an accuser, an adversary to humans, who wants to harm them both in this world and in the next. He is not a creator, however, but exclusively a destroyer.
The Joker’s passion for destruction, his insistence that others are just as corrupt as he but not honest about it, and his clear lack of joy in anything he does all make the character much more than just a cartoonish movie villain. For that, both Ledger and the Nolans deserve much credit.
I think that they should have two face but not as mr Dent. They should keep the role going that would be great! Still have the Joker he is the classic of Batman! I would put a twist to the plot and have two face break the joker out of jail, and the one to break the Joker out of jail would be the BATMAN! STILL keep the Joker i love the Joker and so do a lot of people! But for the maiin 2 villians have TWO FACED AND THE JOKER!
Now I did not like this film.
It too closely depicts the world for which our postmodernists long.
By the way. This last, having been made a key motive for the plot, is even a logical fault in the movie.
Commissioner Gordon and Batman both agree that a tarnished Dent would lead to release of all the criminals he put away.
But this does not comport with the real world. Those convicted by Federal and State Attorney Eliot Spitzer were not released after his moral downfall.
Now I did not like this film.
It too closely depicts the world for which our postmodernists long.
• All advances either lead or lend themselves to destruction.
• Beliefs that human officials alone can clean up institutional corruption are not even tempered from the outcome. (For all your discussion about lack of true creators, I was amazed that you didn’t mention that this world has no Creator either.)
• Fear of consequences from having placed all hopes on a man leads to cover-up.
• And in the end, this same fear leads to the “hero” accepting the blame in an outright endorsement of the most casuistic fallacy we have being foisted upon us: That the ends justify the means.
By the way. This last, having been made a key motive for the plot, is even a logical fault in the movie.
Commissioner Gordon and Batman both agree that a tarnished Dent would lead to release of all the criminals he put away.
But this does not comport with the real world. Those convicted by Federal and State Attorney Eliot Spitzer were not released after his moral downfall.
Sam:
This is a thought-provoking article.
“He is not a creator, however, but exclusively a destroyer.”
I think we use the term “creator” rather too loosely these days–as in “Chris Carter, creator of ‘The X-Files.'”
I think a case can be made for the lack of true creativity in any human endeavor–a grim assessment, I know.
To truly create involves starting with nothing (“no thing”) and producing something.
“Creators” throughout history have never been able to do that.
They have had to start with preexisting materials and/or ideas formed in their brains (which are themselves also preexisting materials) and rearrange them into something “new.”
Like mankind, Satan himself was a created being and by definition incapable of God-like creativity; he could only rearrange what God had already created, in his case destructively. Like Satan, the Joker can’t create or even uncreate; he can only disarrange the created order. Satan cannot dissolve a single atomic particle of God’s creation, only cause chaos in the cosmos; similarly, the Joker can only threaten to destabilize the established social order–what could be called the “cosmopolis” (the “world of people”)–which is admittedly, from the purely human perspective, bad enough, but from God’s perspective no real threat.
Broadly speaking, true creation is impossible for humankind.
Physics, chemistry, and biology all deal with preexistent materials; rearranging matter and energy may produce something “new” to human experience, but never something out of nothing.
The time for creation ab initio has passed and may never return.
If a scientist claims to have produced “life” or a new type of matter, don’t believe him. He’s just gratifying his ego, indulging in a fantasy just as strong but diametrically opposite to the Joker’s. Neither the scientist nor the Joker can ever achieve such goals.
But I’ve gone off on a tangent, I see.
Leave it to you find unexpected insights in a Hollywood film of which even the producers may be unaware.
Good post.
Best regards,
Mike Tooney