"The Dark Knight"
For all its spectacle and angst, pyrotechnics and brooding, the theme of “The Dark Knight,” written and directed by Christopher Nolan, echoes the beginning of Canto the First of Lord Byron’s “Don Juan:”"I want a hero: an uncommon want,/When every year and month sends forth a new one,/Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant,/The age discovers he is not the true one..."
It's a morality tale with no happy-ever-after-ending. The Joker (Heath Ledger) has out-gambinoed the Mob, with whom he was previously copping and laundering money. He forms his own Al Jolson-in-reverse white faced clan with a few now-chastened mobsters and refugees from psyche wards and begins to perpetuate his singular jihad of Magnum Chaos.
The new District Attorney, the telegenic Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) vows to rid the city of the calamitous clown, just as he mopped up the mere not-so-maniacal and ethnic mobsters. Can you spell R-u-d-y G-u-l-i-a-n-i? Dent courts (and wins. Dent 1, Wayne 0) Bruce Wayne/Batman's (Christian Bale) old belle, Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal), after which he, Batman, and the soon-to-be Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) wage the mother of all wars against their nemesis, without the support of the public and most of Gotham's rank-and-file.
After a Wagnerian struggle, Dent's dead, Rachel's dead, not to mention scores of cops and robbers, not to mention one helacious Batmobile. Though his eventual allegiances (Originally I thought he was the Dark Knight) and his Jokeresque methods came to light, Batman and Gordon accede Dent posthumous glory, realizing, unfortunately, that their erstwhile partner-in-crime fighting was more a poster child for hope than the sultry, sulking image-challenged Caped Crusader.
Both a hero and an anti-hero, the Batman has a credibility issue. He is a force of good, sworn – to himself, at least, he has no official mandate - to protect the Gotham of his murdered parents. But because of his stealth, the questionable nature of his m.o., and that damn mask, he’s got the public looking not a little askance at his exploits. He’s a flawed hero, which nowadays would result in his instant tabloid-blazing apotheosis. Here’s he’s just a pointy-earred, bulletproof object of scorn and pity.
It’s a tough role, complex, requiring nuance and rage; but Bale nails it. His Bruce Wayne is not the smarmy, two-dimensional, turtle necked Adam West version. This one is wracked with guilt and anger, for which Bale’s throaty voice serves him well. No one could ever say that Bale’s Bruce Wayne is mellifluous. Chiseled, yes, silver tongued, no. We would never confuse him with Daniel Craig’s 007 (But imagine, in King Kong versus Godzilla fashion, Batman versus Bond). This do-gooder is mortal, like the rest of us, which means he’s jealous when Dent squires Rachel on the rebound.
And when he pulls two puerile rich-boy stunts – showing up late, arriving via helicopter, with a babelicious ballerina on his arm, at the fundraiser he throws for his rival (A scene in which he lends his money, his support, but not his acquiescence at his romance); taking an entire Russian ballet company for a last-minute spin on his yacht so Dent can’t take Rachel to the ballet – we sense that he’s not doing this to assuage his ego but because if he didn’t he’d be compelled to tear Dent from limb to limb. It wouldn’t take much for him to put a dent in his opponent with the kung fu (the three-dimensional articulation of his rage and grief) he learned in part one, the one he uses here to demolish SWAT teams, cops, bodyguards, rogue Jokers (it’s not so much a running joke as a viral-desire of the Joker to germinate his demon spawn), and henchmen.
As a hunky, hulky, smoky specie of split personality, Bale inhales the role of dark knight and makes us hold our breath. Rich, handsome, civic-minded (philanthropist by day, avenger by night) he’s a very public though masked, anonymous figure in an open, very public city of millions of people. He seems to vanish at the drop of a hat, which annoys not a few people. We like our heroes unmasked, in plain sight, accessible and accountable, thank you. This one requires a bat signal emblazoned across the nighttime sky (How, then, could they ever call him during the day? You would think Alfred - Michael Caine, redoubtable, standard against which all future butlers must be weighed -could concoct some better digital means of distress signal).
He’s got baggage. In “Batman Begins,” Rachel won’t stay with him because he’s The Batman, and she doesn’t rank as high on his priorities as his civic duties, fueled by revenge for his murdered parents. He wants to come clean for Rachel, let Dent take credit for the scouring of the Augean Stables of Gotham’s city streets (Heck, he even let’s Dent pretend to be the Caped Crusader at a press conference), and settle down with his woman. He feels for the deaths he’s caused. There’s a brilliantly conceived scene – it lasted but a nonce – when he’s stands on the corner on the top of a skyscraper, looking down onto a cavernous valley of urbanity, dwarfed like one those miniscule figures in a Casper David Friedrich’s paintings.
As a sulking outré, he and the Joker (Heath Ledger) have a lot in common. Appearances aside, they both brim with anger that borders on insanity. In fact, an effective gerund for the entire film is “erupting;” they both simmer like Vesuvius, the only difference being that the Joker revels in chaos, he’s a self-styled agent of change, he burns a mammoth pyramid of stolen dough (with a swindling Hong Kong financier atop the blazing funeral pyre) because it’s about sending a message. He gets off on S&M (Watch how he simply loves being pummeled, being dangled by his feet off the edge of skyscrapers; and, oh God, you won’t believe his nefarious little tricks at the beginning of the film of making a pencil disappear and how Joker clan-wannabees have to win membership in a fight to the death with jagged, broken ends of a broomstick; and his cell phone-dectomy of a Joker clone in jail really is the bomb).
He despises schemes because then when things go wrong, they go wrong according to plan. As evidence he adduces that no one mourns the death of a convoy of soldiers blown up by a roadside bomb because they were part of a tactic (The State Department would call that damage control spin). All this we learn through wonky, melting Kabuki makeup (No coiffed and made up Cesar Romero is he), a voice that coils with manic urgency about to come unhinged, and a way of walking that initially reminded me of Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis in high heels and then, lo and behold, he walks down a street of pandemonium in a nurse’s outfit (in high heels) after blowing a hospital to smithereens. Sure enough, he does walk, unstable, ungainly, about to topple over, literally and figuratively.
Musicals have walkaway songs to which we hum. The Dark Knight lends us Joker-isms: “What doesn’t kill us makes us stranger.” “Let’s not blow this out of proportion.” And my favorite, he’s in jail, getting thrashed by The Batman, reminding him of their shared alienation status, “You complete me.”
So it’s no surprise when The Batman and The Joker do their danse macabre, hospitals, buildings, jails and pretty much anything with a ceiling and four walls, not to mention a pulse and a carburetor, gets pulverized. The movie exalts a perfect marriage of content (edgy performances) and form (sock-pow-wham-youch! effects that could support a sagging economy). Not only are the many, many explosions disorienting and white-knuckling, so too are The Batman’s various gravity-defying escapades: flying out of Hong Kong, double-crossing financier to the Mob in tow, attached to the exterior of an airplane winging through the metropolis’ skyline; jumping off of buildings; the fight scenes; the chase (my kingdom for one of those motorcycles) scenes. That’s why the aforementioned moment in which The Batman stands stationary is so riveting; the guy’s usually in motion.
The Bond franchise has no monopoly on adult boy toys. Indeed, Caine’s Alfred is the perfect foil for Bond’s “M.” There’s a gimmick that turns all the cell phones into live microphones so to triangulate The Joker’s whereabouts (and that’s when it gets dark: his majordomo Lucius Fox - Morgan Freeman - protests, shades of the Patriot Act, Batman! at such a large scale intrusion of privacy). There’s a ballistics gizmo that reconstructs fingerprints from a shard of concrete carved out of the wall of a scene in which two poor saps, one named “Harvey,” one named “Dent” (talk about joking around) have been murdered. And the Batmobile itself is one swift organic contraption: at various times its monitor reads “loitering, “catastrophe,” and, finally, “self-destruct.”
But the movie is not just a shallow, callow, melodrama, it reverberates with themes and symbols. There’s the excellently-conceived scene when two ferries – one loaded with Joker henchmen, one loaded with tax-paying citizens – do the right thing and don’t blow the other up, thus proving that there is general decency in the world, which makes The Batman’s ostracization all the more ironic. Dent is also an agent of chaos (Watch how he turns demonic at the end): he conducts his affairs – relationships, murders - at the flip of a coin.
At the end The Batman turns over Dent’s dead body, the better to hide his horribly mangled face (The most startling scene is when the monstrously disfigured Joker visits the equally monstrously disfigured Dent – gasoline, dynamite – in bed...two peas in a pod) and present for posterity his Baywatch stud profile. Then, if it’s not clear enough when Gordon smashes the bat signal, Lucius tenders his resignation, and Alfred burns the Dear John letter he never delivered from Rachel, that’s when it’s clear that The Batman and now-Commissioner Gordon acknowledge, to their chagrin, that while The Batman is the hero that Gotham needs, pretty boy Dent is the hero that Gotham, posthumously, valiantly wants.
All of which goes to prove that a society doesn't so much get the type of leader it deserves as much as it desires, setting up the prospect of yet another installment in which The Batman – the joke’s on him - has to continue his thankless, lonely, hardly quixotic vigil of being a knight errant – no Sancho Panza, no Dulcinea, only windmills and other chimera - with no agenda save to protect a populace that doesn’t, can’t...won’t understand him.
