Empty Symbols
by Chris Fujiwara

The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2008)

At the center of The Dark Knight is something that will probably be much discussed in the media and win some notoriety for the film, and whose obtrusiveness suggests that it was planted deliberately in the hope of achieving just those results. The fiendish Joker (Heath Ledger) has kidnapped two people whose value the film defines as transcendent: Gotham City's popular district attorney, Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), and Dent's girlfriend, Rachel (Maggie Gyllenhaal), formerly the lover of billionaire Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) and one of the few people who know that Wayne is the man inside the mask and suit of the famed vigilante Batman. At the end of an automotive chase sequence that is one of the film's several elaborate action highlights, the Joker falls into the hands of Batman, who proceeds to torture the Joker in an attempt to force him to reveal the whereabouts of the two victims.

The Joker (a self-declared "engine of chaos" subverting a buttoned-down very-late-capitalist society) informs Batman, who is about to start beating him up, that in doing so, Batman will break "the one rule" he has so far refused to break. This rule is that heroes must behave heroically. Batman violates it again later in the film, when, desperate to foil the Joker's latest "ticking time bomb" scenario, he takes advantage of an experimental technology that, in effect, lets him eavesdrop on all the cell phones in the city. Both the torture scene and the eavesdropping sequence throw out lines from the fantasy world of the film into the current political situation, where the USA (i.e., the "good guys" that Americans, with Hollywood's fervent encouragement, still flatter themselves they are) has become a security state that, its leaders tell us, is obliged to torture its prisoners and spy on its own citizens in order to prevent terrorists from wreaking destruction. Is The Dark Knight, as it might appear, a right-wing film in favor of unbridled State power, or does it view the issues it raises more ambivalently?

The filmmakers would, no doubt, prefer that the question not be gone into too deeply, and, in fact, the film's contemporary allusions (and the ethical debates they give rise to among the characters) function merely as a kind of solemn babble, much like the incomprehensible discourse that Dent (maddened by a fire that burns away half his face and damages his brain) keeps up throughout the last section of the film. The Dark Knight defines the blockbuster as a game of empty symbols, among which Batman and Dent are the biggest and emptiest: the "dark knight" who must make choices that ordinary citizens don't have to face, and the "white knight" whose purity must be maintained at all costs as a public-relations fiction, lest the public of Gotham City - well, lest they what? Despair, perhaps: which would mean, lose belief in their own goodness.

The film's concern over that danger seems misplaced, or disingenuous, since The Dark Knight has a powerful preservative on hand to keep this imaginary goodness - which is also that of its own most vital market segment, the U.S. mass audience - from tainting. This preservative is the gambit of the two boats. The Joker announces to the passengers and crews of two ferry boats that he has placed bombs on both of them and given each boat the detonator to the other's bombs. Director Christopher Nolan crosscuts between scenes aboard the two boats, building up suspense until, in what can be considered the ultimate liberal film moment (and a canny counterweight to the "conservative" torture scene), a black man, one of several mean-looking convicts being ferried to a new prison, seizes the detonator from the wavering crew and throws it into the river. Meanwhile, the passengers of the other boat, too, decline the Joker's bait and resolve to spare their counterparts.

The boats sequence, together with the torture scene and all the dialogue concerning the responsibilities and prerogatives of the Hero, the differences between what the people of Gotham "need" and what they "deserve," and so on, belong to the second, and worse, of the two films that, at two and a half hours plus, The Dark Knight has ample room to contain. The first film is a well acted and cleanly directed entertainment (Nolan deserves credit for avoiding the temptation to weigh down the film with the expected sluggish "noir" stylization) in which the Joker gains control over the Gotham City mobs. The second is a bloated, pretentious, incoherent meditation on The Big Issues of Our Time, or rather, what these issues get reduced to after being transposed into the simplistic terms in which major entertainment corporations find it comfortable to deal with them: those of a franchise blockbuster sequel in which a costumed superhero represents "Good," while a sinister and inexplicable arch-terrorist stands for all Evil.

Originally published in German in epd Film.

Chris Fujiwara
© FIPRESCI 2008

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