I didn’t read the reviews before heading to the movie house and I had no idea that I would be pondering human nature after watching the year’s biggest blockbuster that was based on comic books I used to read as a kid.
“The Dark Knight” is about one of the oldest philosophical/theological puzzles: The persistence of evil. (Atheism, Gnosticism and Taoism offer a way out of this problem of evil, but that’s another story.)
In “The Dark Knight,” the Joker is the face of evil, and he is no longer the goofy, fun-loving criminal portrayed by Cesar Romero and Jack Nicholson. Heath Ledger’s intensely acted character is basically the Marquis de Sade who prefers mayhem to sexual perversions.
The Joker’s very name takes on an existential meaning in this movie. He believes that nothing makes sense. “You know what I am?” he says near the end of the movie. “I’m a dog chasing cars. I wouldn’t know what to do with one if I caught it. You know, I just do things. The mob has plans, the cops have plans…. You know, they’re schemers. Schemers trying to control their worlds. I’m not a schemer. I try to show the schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are.”
The problem with most people is that they try to find meaning in this world. For the Joker, innocent people, including children, will always die and bad things will always happen to good people because that’s how it is. There is no point to anything, except its utter pointlessness. Like the joker card. What exactly does it do? In most games, it can be anything yet it is always nothing.
For the Joker the joke is…on us. In the movie, no one could predict his moves. He’s not after money, like most criminals; he’s not after anything. He just wants to play with Batman while setting the world on fire. “I think you and I are destined to do this forever,” he tells the caped crusader, sounding like a mad Gnostic. “I don’t want to kill you! What would I do without you? Go back to ripping off mob dealers? No, no, you…you complete me.”
The Joker’s shameless parody of one the most memorable lines from one of my favorite movies was disturbingly hilarious.
According to the Joker, the only — for lack of a better word — sensible way to live in this world is to respect no rules because there aren’t any. He is, as I’ve said, like the Marquis de Sade, who supported the French Revolution even though it was directed against members of the ruling class like him. For the marquis, the revolution didn’t go far enough. Why stop at beheading the members of the nobility and the clergy? Why stop at abolishing the monarchy? If the revolutionaries were for freedom, then they should also abolish all laws! “Accept the freedom of crime,” he told the bloodthirsty Jacobins. Everyone should live as they please. Freedom is not freedom if murderers, robbers, rapists and perverts like the Marquis de Sade can’t do their, well, thing. “Chaos,” says the Joker. “I’m an agent of chaos. Oh, and you know the thing about chaos? It’s fair.”
Harvey Dent, the “white knight” of this movie, is Gotham City’s kick-daggan district attorney. He cracked down on the criminals, hard. He tried to do good. And what was the result of his goodness? His girlfriend was blown into kingdom come and half of his face was horribly burned.
All this makes no sense at all. But, like the Joker, Harvey embraces this senselessness. “You thought we could be decent men in an indecent time,” he lectures Batman. “But you were wrong. The world is cruel, and the only morality in a cruel world is chance. Unbiased. Unprejudiced. Fair.” Harvey became the living, breathing embodiment of man’s dual nature. He has given up on logic. Henceforth, he will make decisions based on a coin toss.
“The Dark Knight” is an unusual superhero movie. The villain, the Joker, practically got away with everything. He killed a lot of people, corrupted a lot of cops, turned Gotham into a living hell and transformed one of its brightest hopes, its dynamic district attorney, into a criminally insane person like him.
And what about Batman? All he really wanted to do was to win back the love of his live…whose death he failed to prevent and whose last letter to him stated that she would marry another man.
The movie ended as the police were about to launch a manhunt for Batman, the hero.
I wasn’t smiling on the drive back home.
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