THE LAST LAUGH: AN IN-DEPTH REVIEW OF BATMAN: THE DARK KNIGHT

by ADA JAZZY D

“This site deserves a better class of review, and I’m going to give it to them.”

Everybody has seen The Dark Knight (TDK) by now, and if you haven’t, you are hereby officially stripped of your geek card.  Is TDK good?  Duh.  But it is more than good, it has layers. 

Philosophy or the Tao of TDK:

     Every time a movie comes out the History Channel tries to cash in with a slap-dash pseudo-documentary, but their Batman Unmasked was actually not bad.  The nickel version:  Batman suffers a tragedy and responds by disciplining himself into an incorruptible symbol of order—shoring up justice.  His rogues’ gallery is—though some are a stretch—a dark mirror, where the monster took control.  The Joker is more than just a foil, though.  TDK brings chaos and order face to face.  Batman Begins’ theme was fear.  TDK’s theme is faith.
TDK’s Batman is a hero struggling with himself.  Harvey Dent is a possible replacement, and if Batman, Gordon, and Dent can trust each other maybe Wayne can lay down his burden.  Taking an evil form, the bat, and turning against evil doers, Batman becomes a ghostly force for justice snagging criminals from their far-flung fortresses and silently tracking their dirty money.  But in the Joker he faces the Hobbesian choice, the impossible choice.  If the people are punished for Batman’s deeds, does he save them by quitting?  Does he break his code and kill the smiling menace?  Or does he endure, does he keep the faith?  Batman might be a realist--even an authoritarian--but he’s also a small “L” liberal: justice, democracy; property rights.  Perhaps not going so far as to believe most people are good, Bats recognizes most understand right and wrong.  In the end, his faith, in Gotham, people, and in justice, is rewarded as the ferryboat hostages refuse the Joker’s lethal game.  Batman chooses strength:  he gives up his retirement dreams, his hero image, and his friends’ lives for Gotham to have a chance at faith.  Last time, he faced a fascists-type, self-appointed executioner who called Batman’s code fear, this time the villain calls it a joke. 
     Joker is pretty damn close to a masterpiece.  Way down in the back issues is the character’s essence, and rarely anybody cares to dig that deep with great villains like Joker or Dr. Doom.  No most of the time you get something like this:  “This villain thinks he’s the good guy,” spouting from some idiot on the movie set of the next comic mythology to be raped by philistines.   Wow, really took it to another level there:  specifically, level 2 just above “he’s the bad guy.”  But TDK is different.  Boiled down from the past decades’ excesses, Joker is the trickster, not the comedian, like Loki the Norse giant or Freddy Kruger or King’s horrific “It.”  Tricksters are wizards and nightmares and gender-bending shape shifters (the last being interesting because Joker does one of his biggest character scenes in a female nurse uniform).  Tricksters know forbidden things, things that might drive a man mad.  Although his origin is left, wisely, a mystery with him giving different stories about his scars, reinforcing his deceitfulness, something bad clearly happened to him.  His response to tragedy is different.  The moral foundations crumpled and he saw the world pretending at sanity like children playing cops and robbers.  He has no goal except delivering the punch line that shatters the set up expectations—and Gotham is his straight man.  In fair comparison, some cite the serial killer’s “poetic justice” murders in Seven to Joker’s rampage in TDK.  However, that’s not right exactly—he’s not taking Gotham’s sins to their monstrous lows. 
     Like The Killing Joke--available at your local Heroes and Villains comic shop--TDK’s Joker believes anyone can be a monster with the right leverage.  There’s no justice or order or morality; it is anarchy with a little waiting in line to keep up appearances.  He’s not trying to win, he’s not trying to convince anybody or revenge anything, he just sees the same joke everywhere …and he laughs.  His “war-paint” is vaguely clowny, but the point is as crucial.  As a symbol he can be pure, incorruptible.  It intimidates and makes him more than a man.  And this Joker is no coward, he doesn’t sober up after a few gut kicks.  This Joker doesn’t make puns or have gag weapons—hid joke is the joke.  On comedy, “if it bends, it’s funny, if it breaks it isn’t,” a famous funnyman wrote.  But if it breaks when it was expected to bend it’s funny, an unknown comic book blogger added.  Hence the Joker’s “pencil trick” is funny because it is unexpectedly brutal.  He fixes on Batman, not for money or envy or revenge, but because Bats is the biggest joke of all:  the monster that doesn’t kill, the outlaw for justice, protector who can’t protect when Joker starts killing people for Batman’s existence.  A little gasoline and bullets and people start eating each other.  If Batman kills him it’s the ultimate joke, and if Batman brings him to “justice” it’s still funny because he’s just going to do it again and again and again.   While the ferryboat failed, Joker’s rewarded when his games break the mind of Harvey Dent.
     Batman wins and Joker wins at the same time just by sticking to their philosophies.  An extremely liberal professor once said that it was amazing people didn’t cry when you think of all the pain, injustice, starvation, disease, and death going on right now—this second.  Another reaction might be anger.  Another might be laughter.

Prophecy or Batman and the World of Tomorrow:

     Much has been made about comics heralding and warning about the near future’s promised supermen.  But TDK has removed most science fiction from the stories, right?   Well, one, Batman and Iron Man are pretty similar in tech ways, Batman just hasn’t incorporated all the devices into one suit.  But face it; he’s got some sci/fi gadgets.  Still he’s no superhuman.  But in TDK one is reminded of JFK lines from New Frontier:  “…we will witness not only new breakthroughs in weapons of destruction, but also a race for mastery of the sky and the rain, the ocean and the tides, the far side of space and the inside of men’s minds?”  One should remember when Batman first came out Psychology was young—and arguably still is.  TDK’s Batman is one step in the future, where the right technology, the right training; the right mind can craft an icon, a call to the world.
“Watch for my sign.”  This is before super-famed celebutards, or rock-star candidates, or reality TV.  Batman captures the mind of Gotham.  Fear for criminals, vindication for victims, a symbol, a signal.  Psychology is key to Batman’s power.  He mastered fear, and now he’s become trans-human—no limitations in his mind or that of his prey.  Luckily, he’s a billionaire and a ninja or we’d have people in hockey pants diving off rooftops as we speak.
Joker lost fear and all his limitations, when he mastered reason.  Joker is really the sanest person alive, he threw out the trust, the faith we have in ideas and ideals.  Reason will show you there is no discernible point to life.  Reason will point out all the chaos and disharmony and illusions we ignore and scream why?  Joker has answered why not?  This seems to give him an almost uncanny look into people’s minds.  He knows how you think, he knows how to get at you, and you’ll never see it coming.  Joker is a pure terrorist, but the terror is just what’s behind the curtain, it is the ends, not the means.  Frankly, one watching TDK gains small comfort from the dues ex machina like corrupt cops or the invisible man quality Joker seems to have or the “when the hell is he doing all this stuff?” reaction to his crimes.  What if the more impressionable realized how easy it would be to do some of this stuff?  What if they grasped the meaninglessness of the Joker’s actions?  Batman may be a billionaire, but as the Joker says, his interests are cheap—you don’t even need hockey pants.

Culture or Looking for Love in the Dark Knight:

     Honestly, I thought:  I’ll go see the Dark Knight and I’ll just keep an eye out.  Surely, in the back of my mind I had some fresh-faced geek girl, with horn-rimmed inspired glasses, and blue highlights.  Obviously, she’d be alone, wallflower-ish, yet somehow socially brave enough to speak to me, date me, and release her repressed, and most likely internet inspired on my part, inner Amazonian.  I was, in a word, deluded.
First off, the midnight showing I went to can’t be described without using the word “cluster.”  Nobody knew which line to be in, people were cutting, security guards numbered in the ones—and nobody cared.  Secondly, everyone, except me, had someone to go with.  The upside was I had no trouble finding a seat, mostly because I wasn’t trying to seat my entire high school senior class with me.  Thirdly, they were young.  I never went to a midnight showing, and no girls went anywhere dressed like that when I was 13 (we were still getting over parachute pants).  Young and loud.  And stupid.  Young, loud, stupid—and that was the comic book fans.  Lest we forget that the draw of Batman goes beyond Geekdom, let us bare witness to the goateed redneck with the team Tap-Out tee shirt whom graced the theater with this little nugget of wisdom before the trailers:  “Step the [expletive] off, mother [expletive], I’m going to see [expletive] Batman!!!”  True story.  His ilk applauded the bat pod stunts like it was the Queen of England.
     It occurred to me, while sitting there and listening to the people behind me drone on, before the opening credits, about how Catwoman was a fundamentally sound movie except for wardrobe, that any woman smart, mature, good looking, and unique would avoid this pre-flight experience like the plague or at least have a number ugly friends forming a protective barrier.  While painfully single, as are many of geek-kind, the geek-sheik girl has her pick—and she doesn’t need someone that knows more about Batman than her.  When she buys a comic book it’s an interest and cute, when I do it I’m a loser—though when is the last time I bought just “a” comic.  Same thing with TDK, I’m watching it with way too much reference material in my brain to be cool.
The sad thing about TDK is she, the imaginary female fan counterpart, was there in various forms.  I don’t know where strangers meet and become friends, but they do it at parts unknown, and then they bring a battalion to all social events.  Two women is approachable, but when the eye-catcher is six seats deep in a group that is measured rows times aisles you give up.  You go drown your sorrows in buttery goodness, which is hard because the owners, laughing from atop their pile of money, decided to put Johnny-give-a-crap on duty for the biggest opener in history. 
     Frankly, TDK is too broad.  We can’t claim this one, it’s the first Superman big, as shown by the guy describing the ending to another person who was apparently blind, but still wanted to be in on it.  If you want to meet the Catwoman fans, the midnight showing of that cinematic abortion is the place to be.  But as for TDK, we shuffled out to the parking lot and somewhere a nerdy girl grasped the tattooed arm of some loser--lost in the hurly-burly of the melting-pot patrons.  TDK’s too big an event to connect with anybody there.  But maybe someday, just maybe at a special showing of Dare-Devil (because I’m the only human who likes that mess), I can be that “some loser” she’s with.