Guest Review: The Dark Knight (2008)

By: T-Rav

The Dark Knight is my favorite superhero movie ever. It’s not a perfect film, but it’s as close to perfect as any of the big players in this genre, and in many ways transcends the superhero format altogether. And, of course, it’s often thought of as a deeply conservative movie. I agree, but for somewhat different reasons than the oft-cited ones.

** spoiler alert **

The Plot

Hopefully the basics are known to most people here. In the second part of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, the Caped Crusader (Christian Bale) is waging his battle to clean up Gotham and its criminal underbelly, with the help of Lieutenant Gordon (Gary Oldman) and D.A. Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart). In retaliation, the mob enlists the maniacal Joker (Heath Ledger) to take our hero out (read: the plot of every ‘90s Batman movie). What seems like a straightforward conflict, however, quickly takes on much larger stakes as the Joker takes control of events, overthrows the mobsters, and wages war on Gotham, with an agenda that only gradually becomes clear. Batman and his allies are pushed to—and beyond—the limits of their endurance to prevent Gotham from descending into total chaos.

Why It’s a Great Movie

I was blown away by this movie the first time I saw it, and that impression hasn’t changed. The cinematography and well-paced musical score were many people’s first introduction to Nolan’s technical genius as a director, which Inception subsequently confirmed. An interesting point made before is that for a Batman movie, most of the action takes place in the daytime; yet there is a certain quality to it that makes it feel like night, all the time. A clever element in this is the way in which the film closely mirrors the post-9/11 world, given its terrorism allegory. We have warnings of mayhem broadcast, a suicide bomber of sorts, and even a shot of the aftermath of an explosion that resembles the World Trade Center rubble. The subtext is clear without being ham-fisted.

The acting is similarly great. Heath Ledger’s show-stopping performance as the Joker has been exhaustively discussed on five hundred other sites, so I won’t say anything more about it here; rather, I want to point out the ensemble work you see here with the actors. In addition to those already mentioned, Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman are great as always, and Maggie Gyllenhaal—well, I thought she was a step or two up from Katie Holmes as the love interest, for whatever that’s worth. Even the minor supporting characters are surprisingly well drawn. Also, given that this is a Nolan film, it goes without saying that The Dark Knight is about as far from the campiness of the Schumacher era as you can get. This is gritty, grim realism all the way through (though not entirely without humor—the scene where the Joker destroys a hospital is chilling and laugh-provoking all at once), yet nonetheless ends on a ray of hope.

The only flaw of sorts is the plotline involving Dent/Two-Face, whose character was not fleshed out as well. I would have suggested saving him for the third movie, except the way things played out in the movie there’s no other obvious way he could have gone. (If you have thoughts on this, by all means suggest alternatives in the comments.)

The Dark Knight and Conservatism

After the movie came out in 2008, there were a lot of commentators at National Review and elsewhere who argued that it was clearly conservative, mainly because Batman’s struggle against the Joker mirrored the military/law enforcement’s fight against terrorism; ergo those who want to stop terrorism are the good guys. One guy—I forget who—went so far as to call Batman a stand-in for George W. Bush. Before Andrew’s head explodes, I want to say that while there’s some truth to this, it’s a bit superficial and needs some digging into.

Obviously, much of this movie revolves around the clash between Batman and the Joker, who represent two ways of looking at the world. The Joker is a nihilist. He informs Batman that morality is a social convention, “a bad joke—to be dropped at the first hint of trouble.” Push people hard enough, he claims, and they’ll forget all about ethics and fight like animals for survival. Batman, on the other hand, stands for the idea that people can stand up for something good outside of themselves, rather than act selfishly. True, the men and women of Gotham haven’t been very encouraging in this regard, but that’s why he’s doing what he’s doing—to awaken them to the better angels of their nature. Seen in this light, the fight between Batman and the Joker is not a matter of one person beating the other, but a struggle of opposing philosophies.

This complicates Batman’s task because he can’t simply dispense vigilante justice and kill the Joker. He’s never been a fan of that method anyway, but it becomes awfully tempting given this anarchist’s crimes and the fact that he’s constantly daring Batman to “break your one rule” and kill him in cold blood. Arguably, this would save a lot of lives, but it would also be an affirmation of situational ethics and the notion that the ends justify the means, which is what the Joker is claiming—and which is also, incidentally, a very liberal belief. In order to defeat the Joker and what he stands for, Batman must therefore fight within a constrained morality. The constant debate over the extraordinary measures he takes is evidence of this; for example, he creates a machine that conducts surveillance of the whole city and then hands it over to Freeman’s character, the one man who expresses misgivings about it, destroying it after the Joker is located and put away. Nolan doesn’t come down squarely on either side of the “security vs. civil rights” debate; what he does clearly say is that power must be handled carefully and sparingly; the lengths to which Batman goes are a case of extreme circumstances, not day-to-day affairs. This is all very conservative.

And then there’s the movie’s finale, which needs explaining in some detail.
The Joker sets up one last conundrum for the defenders of Gotham: Two ferries are rigged with explosives, and the people on each are given the detonator for the other boat. One is filled with criminals, the other with ordinary citizens. The people on each ferry are told if they blow up the other boat, they will be allowed to live; if nobody on either boat has pressed the button by midnight, they all die.

Now, what we don’t get here is a deus ex machina of any kind. Batman can’t come in the last minute to save everyone; he’s tied up fighting the Joker. The cops are too far away. The choice comes down to the people on the ferries. In each case, we see them come to the very brink of blowing each other up. The convicts, as might be suspected, nearly stage a riot, wanting to take the detonator from their guards by force; but what happens on the civilian boat is even more telling. The impulse is to kill the criminals, who after all “deserve it” because of their crimes, and they hold a vote which overwhelmingly decides to do so. Here we see the democratic process put to perverse ends: under direct pressure, the people have voted to commit murder.

But in each case, something happens. One of the criminals steps up and tells the guards to give him the detonator; he then promptly throws it into the water, and he and others gather to pray. Meanwhile, none of the civilians want to be the one to actually press the button. A man who was pressing for the decision finally takes the detonator, prepares to trigger it—and after a long moment, can’t bring himself to do it. It’s at this point that Batman is finally able to beat the Joker and prevent him from blowing up the ferries himself, but really, he’s already won. Faced with the prospect of certain death, unless they chose to blow up other people—a literal “kill or be killed” situation—the people of Gotham, after a moment of desperation and readiness to do the deed, made the choice to sacrifice themselves in the name of what’s right.

This is an obvious rejoinder to the Joker’s version of morality, and the fulfillment of what Batman has been seeking all along. His goal, as he explained as far back as Batman Begins, was never to just beat up criminals, but to inspire the people he protected to believe that they, too, could make the right decisions. Batman isn’t a vigilante; he’s a symbol for good and people’s capacity to choose it. Seen in this light, this scene is the climax of The Dark Knight and indeed the whole trilogy. It also makes a deeply conservative point: Our institutions, as excellent as they might be, can only carry us so far. Ultimately, a society depends on the behavior of its citizens, not the structures we’ve put in place, and on the recognition of an objective morality, whether it derives from religion or natural law.

Conservatism sees human nature as fixed and flawed, and I generally have an especially dark view of it. People will be selfish a great deal of the time, as we see over and over. But that’s not the same as saying that human nature is irredeemably evil. Equally fundamental to our beliefs is the existence of an objective good, one people can aspire to, however short they may fall. That’s the broader argument The Dark Knight makes about the human condition, and that's why this is not only a great film but a great conservative film.

Thoughts?