Commenting: The Solypsisyphisticate #1

No Really, Why So Serious?

Why in hell has The Dark Knight made so much money? Yes, it’s a big-budget action flick, but it’s also a morally complex and ultimately ambiguous meditation on the possibility of human redemption in an inhumane world. It’s also goddamn disturbing, thanks to Heath Ledger’s brilliant performance as the Joker, re imagined by the Nolan brothers as a psychotic genius devoid of any rational motivation, a man who states what might be a strident motto for another movie villain with a wistful serenity: “Everything burns.”
So How is a movie like this able to play in the sticks?

One of the most striking differences between this and previous Batman films, including to a certain extent Batman Begins, is the realism of its setting. Not a hint of the kitsch of the Adam West days, the noirish mood of Tim Burton, or the ridiculous dayglo of Joel Schumacher. Rather, Nolan transforms Chicago into a truly representative city by rendering it nearly unrecognizable. In the opening shot, we zoom in on a blocky, nondescript glass-and-steel edifice that could be in any American city, and before we have time to get our bearings, the terror begins as a window explodes into a clear sky. The responsible party is, of course, the Joker, who stashes grenades in his jacket, blows up hospitals, holds public transportation hostage and tries to assassinate public officials. Why? Not for money, or power, or even pussy. It must be because he hates our freedom.

On the other hand, we have the Bat-Man, a shadowy government operative who performs brutal interrogations, carries out highly illegal extraditions, and oversees a secret surveillance program that the butt-baby of Orwell and Foucault (who’s the top in that scenario?) would have been hard pressed to imagine. Voice of God and drug rehabilitation expert Morgan Freeman expresses the powerful “uh-uh” factor that any responsible person would feel if faced with this technological nightmare, but he swiftly decides that, seeing as it will only be used against the “evil doers”, he’ll go along with it just this once. When the task is complete, he destroys the system, just as the Bill of Rights and habeas corpus will be reinstated when the terror alert goes down to green.

So The Dark Knight is about the War on Terror? Not exactly.* At least not in the same way that, say, The Manchurian Candidate is about McCarthyism. But it does reveal more about our current situation than does fearmongering propaganda like 24. There the functioning of power is too obvious; here we see that the manner in which power replicates itself is subtle. The discourse of terror and fear survives, not through a conspiracy, but because we all participate in it. The Dark Knight is, in many ways, a response to and a symptom of the general anxiety of the last seven years. Though it seems to me that lately people haven’t been quite as scared, or conversely, as pissed off about everyone being scared, as we previously were.
Perhaps we’ve just gotten used to it, or maybe we love this movie because we miss that fear?


*Though at least one Australian wacko would have you believe as much.