Cinematic Evil and The Dark Knight

Kind of like Listology... kountr.

So...and I'm just gonna go out on a limb here...this guy doesn't like comic book movies, does he? ;-)

The Dark Knight tells us the opposite: that both heroism and villainy grow out of reason and law and civilization and that, therefore, these things are mere shams and subterfuges masking a Hobbesian reality devoid even of honor, in which man is a wolf to man and there is nothing to believe in but the individual Nietzschean will, either to good or evil. It's the sort of thing that you have to be an emotional adolescent, steeped in his own anti-social fantasies, in order to believe.

I'm trying to figure out how this message which he claims is untrue, is actually untrue. There is little to no room in this life for honor; it doesn't mean that there is no honor in the world, but there's not much, and for one, who says that The Dark Knight is devoid of it? I think that Jim Gordon basically personifies the honorable hero. Batman doesn't, and Harvey Dent doesn't, for reasons that make the movie as complex and thought-provoking as it is, but here we have a mere man who doesn't aspire to anything rising to the level of an honorable hero by film's end.

Anyway, to get back on point: You'd have to be an "emotional adolescent" to believe that both heroism and villainy don't grow out of reason and law and civilization, and that neither one can be true because the world is not black-and-white. There are heroes and there are villains, in the simplest terms, but there are no purely evil overlords and there are no white knights (or Dark Knights, as it were). And yes, it's hard to stomach, but many people have callous disregard for others, and there have been countless examples in human history which prove that in this world "man is a wolf to man."

It's the heroes who are the immortals. Not only Batman himself but those who apparently "die," including the Joker and the other supervillains, are always sure to be back in yet another sequel or "rebooting" of the franchise. Meanwhile, the mortals are of no interest except insofar as they can give us a comic or spectacular death. The only people who die in movies like this one, which depend on our sense that there will always be another life for any character who matters, are virtually -- often literally -- faceless, anonymous. They're just there to contribute to the body count, which is an aspect of the spectacle.

Okay, first of all, he must be misremembering the movie: The Joker does not die. He never appears to die. As the Joker plunges to what is sure to be his death, laughing gleefully all the way, Batman clearly saves him, which in itself is another component of the plot to mull over. Batman could've ended the Joker's reign of terror by letting him die, but instead Batman saves him, inviting the possibility of more madness into the world. Who came first, the chicken or the egg? Batman or the Joker? Is the mere fact of Batman's existence the catalyst for untold horrors to be acted upon Gotham City? Then again, I'm sure the author of the article disagrees with this point, which I can't understand, as I certainly agree with it very much.

I also think it is very narrow-minded to say that death is simply spectacle in The Dark Knight. That insults both the intelligence of Christopher Nolan and his collaborators as well as the audience, which is assumed to gorge itself on said spectacle. If you think death is treated like a joke in The Dark Knight, you must've been watching a very different movie. Yes, many of the people who die in this movie are not fleshed-out characters and could therefore be seen as anonymous. Yet isn't that what happens in real life? Aren't random bystanders almost always the victims in crimes of horrible destruction? And Rachel Dawes does die, very significantly. When the Joker commits acts of terrorism or muder in The Dark Knight, it is not meant to be there simply to elicit a laugh or a gasp. Yes, the Joker is indeed a pyschopath simply acting psychopathic because he enjoys it (and I find the author's presumption that there are no men like him in the world to be bewildering), and many of the things he does are amusing. His "magic trick," pulling out a bazooka, taunting policemen; he treats it all with humorous disregard, and yes, it is "scary and funny" (the author's emphasis implies that he's never had such an experience in real life). But the fact that the Joker thinks that it's funny, and invites us to cackle along with him, makes it all the more terrifying. Here is a man who will stop at absolutely nothing, nothing, to debase and degrade those who try to stand for something or hold to some set of standards, and I think it also tests the audience. Does this mean that cinematic villainy has become "post-modernized"? If so, does it matter? Do we want to see Norman Bates over and over again? Isn't our depiction of evil allowed to evolve? Yes, there's a trend to have mindless villainy thrown on the screen, like in those awful Saw movies, but the Joker's being evil for evil's sake, as it were, does have a motivation, and it is the society which surrounds him. Now we come full circle back to the author's most grievous complaint, that both heroism and villainy grow from civilization, and are in large parts masks and acts. And again I wonder how this isn't true.

Have I missed the author's point or gone off on a tangent? Perhaps, I don't know; it is very true that I am biased. I think that The Dark Knight is one of the best films I've ever seen, and actually happened to be listening to the score soundtrack when I came across the article. (I still am, actually. Like the movie, it is long.) It certainly helps that I've been a lifelong comic book fan.

It's just that seeing the film, multiple times, was a very emotional experience for me.