The Filtnib’s Progress

There is very little redemption in Chris Nolan’s The Dark Knight. There are only different degrees of pain. Pretty much everyone is stoic about it; not everyone survives.

It’s certainly the darkest superhero film I’ve ever seen. The Financial Times last week noted that The Dark Knight was “the fourth big movie about a superhero this year”, complaining: “Hollywood has never looked so unimaginative”.

You hardly need A-level psychology to understand why, post-9/11, the western world has taken a renewed interest in the old superhero trope. But this Batman is not intended as a balm to our post-terror world; far from it. You get the sense Nolan wants to shake us up, to menace us anew – not in the name of entertainment but for the sake of our own moral fibre.

The villain of the piece, the Joker, is a messenger, voicing via loudspeaker the terrifying idea that chaos is a natural state; control an illusion at best. And worse than this, that as humans it’s our destiny to return, like lemmings, to anarchy. This is what he means when he says, “I’m not a monster. I’m just ahead of the curve”.

In wreaking random, city-shattering destruction, the Joker is thus not only Osama Bin Laden – our generation’s most obvious agent of chaos from without – but also our own worst selves; the chaos within. He takes our potential for cruelty, our attraction to anarchy, to their most extreme points, but he believes we’re all anarchists at heart. (He’d love this taboo confession from a Salon.com reader re: 9/11: “When the towers started collapsing and all chaos broke loose, I felt actual excitement. Here was an event that broke banality.”)

It’s a spectacularly joyless film. There is only the manic bacchanalian mirth of the Joker as he revels in his own disorder. Most movies adhere to the classic formula: show a character on an arc; make the film follow that character’s evolution. Most superhero films show the superhero’s arc, from naive or misdirected youth to maturity: renewed, older and wiser, redeemed. The only arc in this film is borrowed from Greek tragedy (spoiler ahead): the tale of the good man (D.A. Harvey Dent) who loses everything and turns bad. Everyone else treads water.

That the film’s true motor is the Joker, with Batman often merely a witness, is surely a message in itself; the same one Michael Haneke wanted to make with his hyper-violent film Funny Games. By watching the film we are implicated; we fulfil the Joker’s theory by not looking away from the inexplicable violence he inflicts. We are hypocrites, because although we’re consumers of such violent entertainment, we rarely acknowledge any appetite for destruction and darkness.

As the Joker, Heath Ledger is terrifying yet magnetic, plumbing the depths of vicious amorality. The actor’s subsequent death in troubled circumstances makes David Denby’s comment in The New Yorker a haunting one: “you can’t help wondering… how badly he messed himself up in order to play the role this way. His performance is a heroic, unsettling final act: this young actor looked into the abyss.”

But back to the film. Happily Nolan uses language aswell as explosions to weave his net. It’s a clever, dirty trick to have your villain speak the truth, and like Shakespeare’s chaos-loving Iago, the Joker has great and terrible insights into the human condition. At one point he zooms in on the control/chaos dichotomy, pointing out that when bad things happen chaotically, citizens experience terror; when bad things happen in a planned way, we barely blink an eye.

Ring any bells? The subtext is, of course, the “controlled” chaos the U.S. and UK governments unleashed on the so-called “axis of evil” after the traumatic momentary anarchy of 9/11. Our retaliatory torture and terror (“shock and awe”) – on Iraqis, Guantanamo prisoners, victims of extraordinary rendition – were deemed acceptable, “non-terror”, because they were seemingly controlled. As the Joker would agree, that illusion (for surely all violence is anarchy, on an individual scale) is enough to lend legitimacy to many heinous crimes.

It’s an idea borne out by one particular scene, where Batman pulls off an astounding feat, flipping an 18-wheel truck across a street. The audience almost applauded; we’d just had a gruelling five minute truck-chase in which the Joker destroyed about ten cars and brought streets grinding to a halt. The sense of relief (the good guys are winning again!) was almost palpable. Yet that same act perpetrated by the Joker would have inspired dread.

Films in the last five years that have seriously tackled the fall-out from the War on Terror (Lions for Lambs, Rendition, In the Valley of Elah, Redacted) have pretty much bombed at the box office. Perhaps for now, fantasy can tell us more.