Thoughts about The Dark Knight: Difficult questions about good and evil. (Sorry it’s so long!)

This is a film to geek out over! My filmmaker daughter has pronounced it “perfect”. She’s looking at many things – directing, how shots are set up, camera angles and movement, lighting, characterization, story and more. I just thought it looked cool. I love superhero flicks- and not just because they get to wear capes and um…tights.

But for those of us who believe that God moves and speaks both into and through culture this is a film that does a rare and important thing. It asks, “What do you believe?” Throughout its 165 minute running time, it continues to pepper us with hard hitting and introspective questions that have just as much Bam! Pow! as any of the cool explosions and car crashes in it.

Alert: There be major spoilers here.

The set up for the film comes as masked members of the Joker’s gang knock over a bank. We’re thrown immediately into a realm of stark malevolence as each bank robber systematically shoots another one so there will be less of them to split the money. The last remaining robber is the Joker himself. The horrified and defiant bank manager challenges him about the codes and standards that even crooks have kept amongst themselves. He yells, “What do you believe, huh? What do you believe?” The question is thrown at all of us again from another angle when Joker muses later on, “You have all your rules but you throw them all out when you are challenged”. (That’s not a direct quote but you get the gist.)

So what do we believe?

Joker is right. We do waver in our values when the going gets tough. The film highlights some very pertinent dilemmas. When is it okay to suspend civil liberties to protect the common good? When is it okay to kill people to stop terrorism? Is right and wrong more complicated than we’d like to believe?

The Joker is a fascinating character. He provides a disturbingly unhinged and pain-filled voice that forces our self-reflection. He knows he can push “good people” into contradicting their values. And he seems to be raging against a machine that should work, but doesn’t. As he flies down the streets of Gotham, hanging from a police cruiser, hair flying in the wind, you get the sense that he is laughing at our system of values even as he is driven by his own despair of it. There is nothing that can save him. He is beyond caring.

Joker defies Batman’s understanding of the criminal mind. I wondered if the filmmakers are trying to suggest he may be the devil himself. He does not want anything. He cannot be bought. Millions and millions of stolen dollars are meaningless to him. He is bent only on torment and pure destruction. Joker enters the story without any identity or history to track, no name or true face. The Batman canon (from the original comic books) says that Joker exists for Batman – he torments and taunts him, constantly attacking the people and the city that Batman loves. His whole sense of self is found in opposing the hero. There is no self, no there there; he needs Batman in order to be.

We are not told how he got to this desolate, subhuman place. But isn’t this dehumanization what we do to evildoers in order to distance ourselves from them? We reduce them in our minds to monsters and clowns without a hint of personhood, believing that they only exist for destruction. Masking their humanity makes it easier for us to take them down. Heath Ledger inhabits the Joker character with a compassion so complete that it is possible to believe there is a vestige of human being left in him. Even so, Alfred, Batman’s trusted butler and mentor asks the open ended and necessary question for us: “How do you disarm those who ‘just want to watch the world burn?’” 

Is that the definition of pure evil? Is operating on the desire purely to destroy the point at which one truly loses one’s humanity? How do we decide who is redeemable? If we decide Joker should die to save many, at what point do we become him? Perhaps it takes someone as seared and unreasonable as Joker to reveal that our system of understanding truth is too small.

The ingenious Joker forces us to grapple with our own take on our laws and values. There is a haunting scene in which he forces two groups of people to vie against each other. They are being evacuated away on ferries because of his terrorist threats. One boat has the “good people”, the law-abiding citizens who just want to go home. The other boat carries convicts from a local prison. Each group is given the choice to press a button on a detonator rigged to blow up the other boat. If no one chooses to press it, then the Joker promises to blow up both boats at midnight, but if one group does choose to press the button to kill the others, they will be spared. The conversations amongst the evacuees on both boats expose what we all are thinking. They assume that the others would want to save their own skin. And isn’t it a no-brainer to blow up the “bad” guys?

The regular folks vote to push the button but can’t find anyone who can bear to do it. Finally one man steps up to the plate. After all, those criminals had their chance. On the convicts’ boat, the trembling warden holds the detonator. A big, burly inmate demands it from him, insisting, “I’ll do what you shoulda did 10 minutes ago.” The warden hands it over  and my own heart is exposed as I judged that to be his decision to put the others to death. I expected the inmate to press the button. But instead, he grabs the detonator and tosses it out the window. That’s what we shoulda did.

Back on the first boat the man decides he can’t press the button either. It’s interesting that the “bad guys” chose not to murder long before the “good guys” did. I am reminded of how Jesus expanded our concept of sin through his assertions that if you are angry with your brother it is as if you have murdered him. If you have lust for a woman you have already committed adultery. Darkness is in us all. So who are the good people? Ultimately, everyone on those two boats expected to be killed. Ultimately, everyone offered up their lives. They didn’t have to become vigilantes like Batman. They simply needed to remember their own humanity.

This film has been compared to Bush vs. the War on Terror story which says that sometimes you have to make hard decisions to protect people and preserve their way of life, even if it means breaking laws and using deception. Even Batman cooperates with deception in order to keep people’s faith in the good, which is Harvey Dent, the city’s DA who had battled the mob in their city and won. They believed in Harvey Dent. The people will remain unaware that Dent has lost his faith in good and has resorted to trusting chance, letting go of any personal responsibility. Dent has become, literally, two-faced. Batman slinks away into the night, carrying the wrath of the people on himself instead, making himself an outcast for the sake of the greater good. I find it troubling that the powers that be believe that the way to create peace is to offer up a lie. They believe that there is nothing that is larger and truer to believe than this false world that they construct, a Matrix in which to live and keep some semblance of normalcy.

It also seems to make sense that the way to create peace is by destroying the ones we determine to have no code of belief other than destruction of their enemies. There does not seem to be another choice. It is clear to us now that there was no other moral choice than to destroy Hitler’s empire, for example. But the one thing that Batman will not compromise in his war on terror is that he will not take a life, not even Joker’s. And Batman does not make this choice because he is greater than us. He has no superpowers, just his determination to fight for good.

In our reality, we live in a time in which our heroes present themselves with far more ambiguity than Batman. The pure “Truth, Justice and the American Way” (Superman) hero doesn’t exist in this postmodern world. But one answer to evil is revealed in this film, though perhaps unintentionally. It was offered up to us by a bunch of real, ordinary people on two boats. Ultimately, it’s the weapon of love: self-sacrifice. These people were made into enemies because of the terror of holding the power of life and death over each other. And as they chose not to take the lives of the others, they were transformed into a “we” that would all share in the same fate. They all were rewarded with more life. It seems they had the same conviction as Batman. Perhaps the way to “win” in our real life conundrum – the war in Iraq – is to imagine together what it would mean to become “we”.

The lesson of the boats is, love your enemies. That is a concept that exposes the true face of each of us for better or worse. In the face of the overwhelming global dangers that we are challenged with in this age, it is important that we name and confront evil. But the weapons that we use ought not be the same as those used by evil. It is crucial that the Good we believe in be much larger than what Batman, Harvey Dent, George Bush, and even Barack Obama can bring. What do we believe?

 

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