Under Repair

Sorry for the lack of posts, but I played The Dark Knight Drinking Game, where you have to do a shot of Jameson's every time you see Heath Ledger's tongue.


Needless to say, after 20 minutes I had to be rushed to the hospital with alcohol poisoning.

Dark Knight in America - 4

After seeing a bunch of clown-masked hoods rob a bank and kill each other off until there are only two of them left, these are the first words out of the Joker's mouth:

BOZO
No. I kill the bus driver.

These are the second:

THE JOKER
I believe that what doesn't kill you . . . simply makes you stranger.

And there you have him -- a killer of innocents who gains strength not only from cheating death but from taking other lives, the way Renfield believes he'll gain immortality by eating more and more insects and animals. If Renfield was a serial killer, this is how he would operate. He would kill more and more people and become more and more supernatural, and the same principle operates here.


So does the supernatural element -- there's something spooky about the Joker. Where does he get all those explosives? Never explained. How does he set up each new threat so quickly? No idea. Does he have henchmen? Yes, but we never see them in operation. Along with "My God, what did it have, 20 different endings?" it's one of the two big complaints I've heard from people who didn't like the movie ("How does he DO all that stuff? It's just not realistic.").

No, it's not, and it's not meant to be. So what is it, if it's not realism? Simple answer: it's a nightmare. And not just any nightmare, but our current national nightmare.

To quote Dana Stevens, in two plus hours Chris Nolan does more nuanced thinking about the war on terror than we've seen from the Bush administration in seven years.

And in the words of Rupert Murdoch's new leisure activity, the Wall Street Journal:

Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past. And like W, Batman understands that there is no moral equivalence between a free society -- in which people sometimes make the wrong choices -- and a criminal sect bent on destruction. The former must be cherished even in its moments of folly; the latter must be hounded to the gates of Hell.

Personally, I go into fits of Cesar-Romero-as-the-Joker laughter whenever I think of George W Bush actually giving us back our rights after he's taken them away in the name of a temporarary emergency. The emergency is permanent, people; it's Oceania-vs-Eastasia permanent, because the villains, like The Joker, are incredibly resourceful, everywhere-at-once, boogeymen.

The Joker is the Designated Enemy. He could be anybody under that makeup. Even the people chasing him. Because there's a third way to interpret this movie politically. It's not just a right-wing power fantasy or a left-wing nightmare about how and whether or not you become a terrorist in order to fight terrorism. It's also a parable about the Bush administration. If you replace "gangster" with "politician" in this movie, then Gotham City turns into Washington, and the Joker isn't a villain any longer -- he's a media consultant. (Okay; I know; redundant.) He's the guy your team hires to take out the other team's candidate. He's the guy who does all the opposition reasearch to find the weaknesses and attack them.

In other words, the Joker is this guy:



Other posts in this series:

The Man Who Laughs
The Shadow
The Premise

Dark Knight in America - 3

Where do arch-enemies come from?

Batman's came from a 1928 silent movie called The Man Who Laughs, starring Conrad Veidt. Bob Kane saw the movie and the image of the title character stuck with him . . .

. . . and became the model for the character's look when he made his first appearance in Batman #1:

Originally a homicidal mastermind, the Clown Prince of Crime soon became more clown than criminal, which led to inadvertently hilarious moments like these:


It wasn't until 1973 that the Joker returned to his roots with a literal vengeance, in the Denny O'Neill penned "The Joker's Five-Way-Revenge." Every modern interpretation of the character (from Alan Moore's The Killing Joke to Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns to Heath Ledger's embodiment in The Dark Knight) is a riff on the villain in this story:

And in this story, you can also see a seed of darkness get planted in Batman's character, one that's watered by Alan Moore and tended by Frank Miller until, like a weed, it pretty much overruns everything else in the Bat-Garden, and winds up as a twisted romance in the only place that makes sense -- an asylum:


What The Dark Knight does is return us to that moment where the seed is planted, so we can see how the Joker waters and tends it. Because that's his job in the movie. If you say white, he'll be black. If you say black, he'll play white. He doesn't have an origin -- he just has stories about how he got his scars, and he'll tell a different one depending on who's listening. He has unlimited access to explosives and money, but he's not interested in getting rich; he's much more interested in blowing shit up. He's got no sex life (unlike Jack Nicholson's Joker, who gets all Jack over Kim Basinger); he's much more interested in screwing with your head.

And his favorite head to screw is Batman's. Why? In terms of the story, because it's a test of character that spins off from the end of the first movie, Batman Begins, and the line "I'm not going to kill you. But I don't have to save you." This is where the shadow is created, in the margin between acting and not-acting; this is where the darkness begins and gives birth to everything that happens in the second movie.

Between the absolute
And the exception
Falls the Shadow.

Between the provocation
And the retaliation
Falls the shadow.

That's where The Dark Knight takes place -- in an arena where the only character laughing, the only character having any fun, is the one who is going to show the hero just how much of a tool he is for thinking he's pure and how much of a joke his values really are in the real world.

Why? Because the Joker is a terrorist, and that's what a terrorist does. He doesn't want to destroy your country--he wants to destroy your country's values. And the moment you compromise your principles even once is the moment he wins.




Other posts in this series:

The Premise
The Shadow

Dark Knight in America - 2

The streets are empty, except for two people. One of them has a gun, but he's not going to shoot first, because that isn't fair. He's waiting for the other guy to make his move, because by his code, he can only shoot in self-defense, not in anger, not as a pre-emptive strike. Not against this opponent. Too much is at stake.

It's a typical Western showdown, and we could be watching it in the streets of Tombstone, or Dodge, or Deadwood. But we're not. We're watching it in Gotham City, and the gunman who's withholding his fire isn't the hero -- it's the villain.


In a movie that manages to turn everything on its head (including rotating the camera so that the final monologue from the villain is rightside-up instead of upside-down), the subversion of the classic frontier showdown manages to link The Dark Knight to an archetypal American myth, a traditional Hollywood trope, and a scary political echo all at once.

You'll find the Myth under V for Vigilante. The gunman who uses his death-dealing power for good, sometimes behind a badge, sometimes outside the law, and whose story always breaks into two distinct parts, like that of Beowulf: the rescuing hero who saves the town from violent outsiders, after which he becomes the dangerous gunman who must be ostracized from decent society because of the violence he represents, either by being kicked out of town or by giving up his guns and marrying the schoolteacher.



In April 1931, Street & Smith Publications took this myth, threw out the hero part, and created the original dark knight -- The Shadow. The Shadow was a black-hat who acted like a white-hat, a vampire-like scourge of crime designed to terrify criminals before blowing them away with his big fat guns. Not for him, the possibility of settling down with a schoolteacher -- the Shadow embodies what could have been an unpublished stanza from TS Eliot's "The Hollow Men" (published in 1925): "Between the law/And justice/Falls the shadow."

But the Shadow wasn't a 24/7 crime-fighter -- he had a series of other identities (not just Lamont Cranston) in which he lived during the day, like a reverse vampire inhabiting several different coffins at once. (He only became specifically Cranston during the radio show.) And in 1939, Bob Kane and Detective Comics combined the vampire image, the vigilante myth, the crooks-can-be-terrified goal, and the daylight-playboy/nighttime-avenger figure, and created Bruce (Batman) Wayne.

Oh yeah--and the big fat guns? Totally part of the character for the first couple of years --

-- until that Hollywood trope I mentioned above enters the meme. There are several ways to describe this trope -- only the bad guy shoots first; the good guy only fires his gun to defend himself; violence can never be pre-emptive -- but the easiest way to describe it is with two words: Good Violence. Good Violence never starts the war; Good Violence wins the war. Good Violence never fires first; Good Violence only fires when provoked by Bad Violence.

This trope took the gun out of Batman's hands and changed his myth to include the commandment "Thou Shalt Not Kill." Thereby creating a second shadow, not just between law and justice, but between provocation and retaliation. If Batman had kept the gun? You could have drawn a straight line from him to a certain San Francisco cop. Who is also a vigilante, in his way.












In The Dark Knight, the Joker stands squarely on the side of Bad Violence -- except when he faces the Batman. Only then does he use Good Violence and wait to see what Batman does. Will the vigilante fire first? Attack first? Give in to the Bad? And if he doesn't, can the Joker ever be stopped?

And the political echo? The Joker's not just saying, "Unless you become like me, you're never going to stop me." He's saying, "If you don't shoot first, it's not because you have principles -- it's because you're a Liberal, and all Liberals are pussies."

Dark Knight in America - 1

In 1984, Hate Week is celebrated from April 4th to April 10th. Along with waxwork displays, military parades, and incendiary speeches, you sing the Hate Song, and the Ministry of Truth distributes atrocity pamphlets which are designed to enrage the population of Oceania against their heartless and subhuman enemies.

In America, Hate Week is celebrated whenever the Republicans have a political convention. Along with waxwork politicians, military posturing, and incendiary speeches, you sing the Hate Song against the liberal media, you run against Washington no matter how long you've been in office, chant "USA! USA!" at every opportunity, and the Ministry of Truth distributes press releases against atrocities that all seem to have their basis in either a woman's right to choose or a man's right to own a gun.

What does this have to do with the biggest summer blockbuster ever?

Simple: the Republican party thinks it's Batman, when actually it's the bitter, scarred side of Two Face.

And where does the Democratic party fit in all this?

Simple: the Democratic party think's it's Batman, when actually it's the Harvey Dent side of Two Face.

In honor of America's Hate Week, we'll distribute our own atrocity pamphlets here, as we look at liberal stupidity, conservative rage, women as hostages, villains as terrorists, and a complicated definition of the word "hero."

In other words, I'm finally going to write a review of The Dark Knight the only way I know how -- by reviewing the country's political system as well. Because that's why the movie is so dark, so deep, and so popular. It's about America, and whether it actually gets the heroes it deserves, or just deserves the heroes it gets.

review buffering . . . .