We will now have a break from talk of feminism and whether or not I’m a sellout to the patriarchy. Why? Because I’m going to talk about a big summer action movie!
Which was amazing. Get on seeing it now. For those of you that haven’t, there be spoilers below, so click at your peril….
Let’s get this out of the way: I know Christian Bale was arrested and accused of some not-nice shit. But I’m talking about a movie here, not whether the lead may or may not be a scumbag. So I don’t want to hear it in comments.
Because I loved this movie.
Batman has always been my favorite superhero; despite being a comics geek, I’ve never been much for capes and tights. I like books that deconstruct the idea of superheroes, like The Boys and Black Summer.
But Batman himself deconstructs the idea of the superhero. Batman is fucking crazy. And there’s always at least a wink toward that idea (except for that travesty of a flick with George Clooney–love Clooney, but he was an abysmal Batman) in any movie or comic about him. He’s not a hero, as The Dark Knight makes quite clear. He’s a vigilante. He pretends to hold himself to a higher moral code than the rest of the world, but he’s really only got one rule, as the Joker points out in this movie.
And I loved this one specifically because it got into the ideas behind Batman–it didn’t dig too deep into Bruce Wayne’s psyche, but it looked at some other aspects of the character.
Batman’s the guy they call in to do the dirty work. Through him, in this movie, we look at rendition and at coercive interrogations–we see him jet off to Hong Kong to scoop up a rogue businessman and bring him back to the US, and we see him wedge a chair under the door to beat the everloving shit out of the Joker. (Who, of course, likes it.) We don’t dwell on Bruce Wayne’s motivations for these things, because it’s Batman who does them, and Batman is a construction, not a person. Batman was created to do those things, the things most people can’t bring themselves to do. And he’s an extension of the idea that those with noble motives can do whatever it takes to achieve those, and here they point out at the end that he lives in the minds of others as much as he does in Bruce Wayne’s.
The Joker is more than just a Batman villain–he’s the Shadow, the opposite, the Other. Batman has noble motives and compromises himself quite often in pursuit of the supposed higher goal. The Joker has no motives. He has no goal. I would say he’s pure id, but he’s something darker than that. He’s a monster, truly. The scars, the makeup, they serve to make him less of a person, but in this movie they’re never perfect. The makeup’s always melting, running, coming off on his fingertips–it’s an obvious construct. Precisely because of the makeup, we never forget that somewhere under all this darkness there’s a person.
A person whose story we won’t get. A person who doesn’t really hate. Evil isn’t the right word for him, yet as I noted above, not really pure id, either. We get no sensual pleasures from the Joker–the camera even cuts away from him as he kills people. In part, yes, to save the rating of the film, but also in part to never show him at the moment he does it. It makes him scarier. Does he enjoy it? Does he just do it and not care? Would there be some pain in his eyes if we could see them?
The Joker is the wild card, and that’s what this Joker is, not a prankster. You never know what he’ll do, and he simply doesn’t value his own life any more than anyone else’s.
Heath Ledger’s characterization–fuck, that’s way too pompous a word for what that was. He simply became the Joker.
My Twitter reaction was “Heath Ledger is the best actor since Brando. And he’s dead.”
I’ll stick by that. Brokeback Mountain (why the hell haven’t you seen that yet?) was a masterpiece of restraint, of simplicity, of turning pain inwards. And this performance required that same restraint. A lot of actors (including Jack Nicholson) would have taken it over the top, but here the Joker was the perfect combination of lunacy and void, of calm and volatile. That same stillness was there. This Joker had no fears, no worries, no interest in anything but chaos. The lack of bitterness, of anger, of fear made Harvey Dent/Two-Face a perfect foil.
Eckhart is an excellent Dent. He’s earnest but allows you to see just enough of the darkness there (admittedly, some of the foreshadowing was a bittttt much) that you buy it when he loses it. I was disappointed that they knocked him off at the end here–there was so much potential for that character.
As much as I think they got the character design perfect for the Joker, I think they went over the top on Two-Face, though. It was the only part of the movie that was too cartoony, though, so I’ll forgive it.
This movie was so clearly about Heath Ledger as the Joker and about the nature of ’superheroes’ that it left Bruce Wayne kind of out in the cold. Christian Bale is such an excellent actor that he does feel a little wasted here, as do Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine. But, well, since I’m going on the assumption that people reading this have seen it, was there a moment without Heath Ledger in it that you didn’t want him to show up?
Maggie Gyllenhaal is The Token Girl, but she’s miles better than Katie Holmes. Rachel Dawes is the bravest character in the film–the only one willing to step up and stare down the Joker. I wish they’d shown us the scene where she was abducted, though–by the only other female character, the lady cop…what a good moment that might have been. Here’s hoping it’s in some deleted scenes pile that’ll make it onto the DVD.
And at the end of the movie, what are we left thinking about? About whether killing the Joker might have been acceptable, since it’s so clear he’ll never stop? About who the real hero is, Harvey Dent or Bruce Wayne? Whether it’s better to follow your emotions and lose control or maintain, whether giving yourself up or hiding so that you can fight again is the real heroic course of action?
Even with the most purely–again, evil isn’t the right word, nor psychotic–chaotic, perhaps, villain in film history, this movie manages to not be about Good vs. Evil. It’s about increments of those things, and how much you can give up before you lose your soul. And if you’re just a predator, like the Joker, how evil are you really? Ledger’s made the Joker horrifying and compelling and even sexy–terrifyingly sexy, a nightmarish S&M vision that we’re all irresistibly drawn to. The edge. The void.
Rest in peace, Heath Ledger. We won’t see your like again anytime soon.
I agree, great movie… AND did you see the preview for Watchmen beforehand? OMG, i can’t wait for that!!!!!
Agreed on all counts. Dark Night is a testament to the artistic possibilities of a blockbuster. The masses do not need to be patronized to!
I agree completely on most points. I think Eckhart was more then excellent, I thought he was amazing. Given that I’ve only ever seen him in “Thank You for Smoking” (which was great, BTW), this is such a departure. And he’ll be back - no one checked his pulse, and it’s a superhero movie!! Plus, now that they can’t have the Joker back…
Your lack of mention of Gary Oldman is a fail. He was also awesome in this. I LOVE Gary Oldman and I love him because he’s a completely different person in every role. How can one man be the Dracula he played, Sirius Black, and Jim Gordon (among so many other roles) and play each one so completely differently? Even his speech patterns are different. Remarkable.
I’ve never seen Brokeback Mountain and I doubt I ever will - the whys and hows are not important here. Heath Ledger was so phenomenal as the Joker that it will be impossible to ever find another Joker as good. He was an incredible actor that was taken far too soon. But really, watching this movie was not like watching Heath Ledger’s last film because there was only one scene were I really saw Heath behind the Joker, and that was when he was talking to Dent in the hospital. That was a difficult moment because when his face was still I saw the goofy kid in “10 Things I Hate About You” behind the Joker makeup and I cried a little.
Also, I’ve watched the Watchmen trailer like 60 times now and it turns me on.
How did I miss Gary Oldman? I love love love Gary Oldman.
Yeah I totally loved Dark Knight — I love the way they really make it clear that Batman is the brutality that civilization needs to survive, but they can’t accept him, because then it really wouldn’t be civilization. The way he rides off on his motorbike is very western, very Shane. Except you know that the fight’s not really over.
To make Janelle happy and to elaborate a bit–of course the only true good guy here is Gordon. And even Gordon compromises and it blows up in his face–he keeps dirty cops around and they sell him out. Still, he is willing to put himself on the line to protect others–as is, of course, Rachel Dawes.
The brutality that Batman engages in often backfires on him–beating up the Joker, kidnapping the guy from Hong Kong–and the creation of such a compelling villain draws out the comparison between the two.
That’s one reason I was sad that they offed Two-face–here’s another Batman bad guy that draws out the line between good guy and bad guy, between hero and criminal. And they had to lie to maintain his image with the people of Gotham–they have to maintain the fiction of the line between good and evil, but the very fact that they let us in on the secret shows us that there is no line, that the difference between Batman and Two-Face and the Joker is only one of degree, not of kind.
“The Joker has no motives. He has no goal. I would say he’s pure id, but he’s something darker than that.”
One could argue that Ledger’s Joker is the Devil himself. Joker does have a goal, and he raves about it at the end - how he turned Dent into a monster, nudged the White Knight into betraying his own crusade. That’s Satan. If you look at the portrayals of Satan in western religions, Satan is the tempter, the one that sees what is REALLY inside someone and pushes people to betray the parts of themselves that they keep hidden. That’s what the Joker wanted to do - expose what people like Dent were hiding.
And that ends up being something he can’t do with Batman because Batman isn’t hiding that - he’s living it outwardly.