The Dark Knight's Horrifying Brilliance and Enduring Influence
The Dark Knight, written and directed by Christopher Nolan, was released ten years ago today in theaters, and it remains the greatest movie of all time.
The film, which grossed more than $1 billion worldwide, was released during a meager and embarrassing time for traditional superhero movies (and no, the Dark Knight was not a superhero movie; I'll delve into that soon). The Dark Knight's release followed "Fantastic Four", "Hulk", "Hancock" and "Hellboy: The Golden Army", all of which were Darko Milicic-esque busts with convoluted and bland plot lines featuring vomit-inducing CGI that seriously damaged superhero movie's reputations. Nolan was already working at a disadvantage, having to release his film to a skeptical and worn out audience. However, through a brilliant marketing campaign that featured hidden websites and coded pictures, anticipation for the Dark Knight grew.
And Nolan blew it out of the park.
While the Dark Knight was marketed as a superhero film, it was never an actual superhero movie, but instead a psychological crime thriller that dissected the deep insecurities ingrained in people and society as a whole. Sure, it's still an action blockbuster, but it has so much more depth and complexity than your average action movie.
As the Wall Street Journal forebodingly wrote at the time: "The whole movie is a social experiment on a global scale, an ambitious, lavish attempt to see if audiences will turn out for a comic-book epic that goes beyond darkness into Stygian bleakness, grim paradox, endless betrayals and pervasive corruption."
The film's core conflict wrestled not with the played-out good vs evil, but order versus chaos. Are there evil people in the movie? Why of course. The Joker, Lau (a Chinese mob money launderer) and Salvatore Maroney (head of the mob) are all nefarious creatures. And good people? Even in such a dark film, Commissioner Gordon, Rachel, Lucius Fox and Alfred all have good, well-meaning intentions. But this is still a Warner Brothers action film, and it's about Batman vs Joker and their conflicting beliefs crashing into each other.
The Joker and Batman's first scenes in the movie perfectly illustrate their methods of operation. Joker stages a wild bank heist, with masked clowns shooting through skyscrapers, driving trucks into walls, inducing mass panic. As the heist progresses, the masked clowns begin slowly shooting one another, and nobody knows what the heck is going on. It was pure madness, just how the Joker wanted it.
Batman's opening scene was much more orderly. He calmly put to rest some thugs in a simple parking garage, neatly tying them up in an orderly fashion, waiting for the authorities to come, then swiftly dissappearing.
The Batman, portrayed excellently by Christian Bale, represented order. Batman may be an eccentric billionaire with technologically advanced weapons and an explosive bat mobile, but his character operates with an air of extreme caution and restriction right off the bat. Batman has moral lines he simply does not cross. Even though he enjoys beating gangsters to a pulp, he is philosophically against anything more drastic than that. The Batman usually defeats his opponents through clean hand-to-hand combat or via a well-synchronized precision gadget. He strategically plans an excruciatingly complicated kidnapping of Lau. Batman never aims to kill, only to prevent chaos. Even Bruce Wayne himself is a very orderly man. His hair is always slicked back impeccably like Pat Riley. His face is unblemished. He simply projects an aura of calm.
The Joker though, throws a massive wrench into Batman's neat and structured ethical code. In Heath Ledger's most masterful, terrifying and compelling performance of his career, he fully immerses himself into the Joker's mental and physical state. The Joker maintains a wiry, hunched posture with limbs dangling wildly, like a disjointed puppet. His eyes rapidly flit back and forth. He makes compulsive, quick clicking noises and flicks his tongue out habitually, like a rabid dog. His hair is never combed, always wildly frayed in all different directions. His clown makeup is smeared across his face haphazardly. He has terrorist elements to him, yet he has no political agenda. He steals billions from the mob, only to burn it all. He uses knives because they are often bloodier than a simple gun. He always changes the origin story of how he got his scars. What makes him so terrifying is that he's not some big, "imposing" CGI character. He's playful, charming at times, but when he growls like a wild animal, pocket knife in hand, that's when he becomes alarmingly petrifying. Joker is a sociopath, a new kind of demonic terrorist, one without a clear directive. He is, so perfectly described by himself, the ultimate agent of chaos.
"I'm like a dog chasing cars," Joker tells DA Harvey Dent in a tense scene. "I wouldn't know what to do with one if I caught it. I just do things."
Just watch this Joker scene. It's the performance of a lifetime:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DZ7pOVQgqo
But even though, on its face, order is represented by Batman, and chaos by Joker, the deeper one delves into the film, the more those distinctions blur. Joker may be a madman, but he has a simple objective: to expose society as the twisted, materialistic entity it really is. Joker believes the concept of maintaining constant order is a fruitless task, a chaotic endeavor in and of itself, and that's why he is not scared of the Batman. He's not entirely wrong. He believes chaos is the closest society can come to a true order, accepting its flaws and unleashing full-fledged anarchy. Batman pushes back harder than anyone on this insane yet truthful philosophy of the Joker's.
While everyone rightfully labels the Joker a villain (as they should, since he's a murdering psychopath), the surrounding characters all act as pawns in his game. Batman may have strict moral codes, but that doesn't mean his actions don't mask an insecure rich man whose only friend is his servant and who finds the need to beat up thugs at night. Harvey Dent may begin as a good man, but he is driven to insanity. Gordon means well, but the Joker propels him to fake his own death and have his family unnecessarily grieving for days believing him to be dead.
The Joker brings out the rabid dog that is bubbling beneath the surface in us all. He just wears his madness like a Scarlet Letter. Sure, he is absolutely, positively insane, but there is still a little bit of all of us in the Joker, and a bit of the Joker in all of us.
The Dark Knight isn't just a masterful work of art because it has an interesting and layered core conflict of order and chaos. It thrives because it presents itself as a traditional comic book movie (a clown with masked goons against a cop and a man in a cape), but operates to its own beat: a thrilling, haunting, gritty portrayal of how good men can succumb to the darkness and maintain a good image while others helplessly attempt to prevent that darkness from spreading, only to shoulder all of the blame. This is of course an allusion to the trajectories of the film's two "heroes", Harvey Dent and Batman, and the film's most famous line:
"You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain."
Dent's initial motives are pure of heart. He wants to diligently cease all organized crime in Gotham, and he's succeeding. He's got a loyal girlfriend in Rachel (who serves as a moral compass for Harvey and Bruce), he's getting a giant fundraiser thrown for him, and the streets are cleaner than ever. But once the Joker kidnaps Rachel and blows her to pieces and torches half of Harvey's face, transforming him into the gruesome "Two Face, Dent becomes a far worse villain than the Joker. His new life objective becomes to relentlessly hunt down innocent people and blame them for Rachel's death. While the Joker well-deserves the title as the film's quintessential villain, "Two Face" commits the most egregious act of horror by holding a gun to Gordon's eight-year-old kid in front of his family. Joker is a demon, there to light the fuse. Two-Face (the later incarnation of Harvey Dent) is the explosion, the devil.
What makes the Dark Knight truly stand out is its grim outcome. In almost every superhero movie, the superhero usually defeats the villain and everyone lives happily ever after. Maybe a useless side character dies to provide the film with a hint of realism. But in the Dark Knight, that could not be further from the truth. On the surface, the Joker technically loses since he ends up in an asylum, and yet it's clear he has won. Joker took Gotham's three heroes (Dent, Gordon and Batman) and broke them all. Harvey lost his girlfriend and his sanity, spent the last quarter of the film ruthlessly killing innocent people and finally died. Batman may have survived, but the Joker put the Batman in an impossible position with no good solution on how to spin Dent's death to a Gotham public that had been drained of hope.
Ultimately, Batman and Gordon agreed on preserving Harvey's image, both realizing that Batman was the hero Gotham deserved, but not the one it needed at the moment. Gotham needed hope, and Batman selflessly complied.
Batman ended up living long enough to see himself become the villain, and he finishes the movie being chased by the police, as a fugitive. Even Gordon must help the public keep the faith by maintaining Harvey was a noble person, even though he had Gordon's whole family at gunpoint in one of the movie's most horrific scenes. Imagine praising the man who tried to kill your family. That is what the Joker reduced Gordon to.
This whole movie also had a brilliant plot that was executed by the greatest director alive and a stunning supporting cast including Michael Cane, Morgan Freeman, Gary Oldman and Aaron Eckheart. But it was no Columbo episode, a well-crafted story with excellent actors but a laughable production quality. No, no, no. The soundtrack, composed by Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard, was heart-poundingly intense. The serious nature of the film evoked enough tension as is, but combined with Zimmer and Howard's ferociously ambitious, tick-tock score, it was a full-fledged nail-biter. Dark Knight was just as groundbreaking in its set pieces and cinematography as well. I mean, look at these breathtaking pieces of cinematic, I-MAX art. (Director of Photography Wally Pfister blew it out of the park).
This is Chris Nolan at his best. CGI was scarcely used. That truck flip was real. They actually filmed in China, instead of using a green screen. Set pieces took months to construct. Nolan chose a dark blue tint for Gotham and the result is chilling. This film took itself so seriously with regard to production, plot line, everything.... it's laughable that this was a PG-13 movie. It's more frightening than 99% of R-rated movies. It questions your philosophical beliefs, and exposes the bone-chilling truth that within all of us is an animal waiting to be unleashed if provoked. And the Joker is the perfect instigator. As Joker eloquently puts it to Batman in the interrogation scene, "In their final breaths, people show you who they really are. When things are down, they'll eat each other."
Nolan smartly avoided cursing, sex and blood, all red-flags for PG-13 movies, but still...come on. I saw this when I was 12 and while I loved it, I was legitimately horrified and had nightmares about it. The person who approved this rating should be fired. I've never seen a more egregiously incorrect film rating. Semi-Pro was R, this was PG-13. Get real.
But besides the rating fiasco, the film was not just an incredible movie. It was a cultural influence for the next decade of movies that predictably nobody has been able to replicate, since Heath Ledger and Chris Nolan do not grow on trees. This movie spawned the "dark superhero movie", where heroes were not always golden boys, but distraught figures with problems just like the rest of us. The Dark Knight quite possibly inspired all of this because Batman, the supposed hero, was anything but. He refused to break his moral code against killing. By simply executing Joker, Batman could have ended the madness, but instead he resisted, while Joker killed innocent people, set bounties on civilians, blew up a hospital and ran a social experiment in which two boats full of passengers were incentivized to blow the other boat up. Joker targeted every figure who represented maintaining order. He poisoned the deputy commissioner, he blew up Judge Surillo in her car, lead Harvey on the path that resulted in his death. But Batman presided through it all, attempting in vain to stem the spread of the chaos, watching his girlfriend die, letting Harvey crumble, reduced to invading people's privacy by hacking into every cell phone in the city to find the Joker, watching his city burn to the ground.
The Joker wanted to bring good people to their knees, and he stayed true to his promise. He took on Harvey, Gordon and Batman, and the entire city of Gotham, and crushed them. He didn't just win through physicality. He shattered everyone mentally.
The film, which grossed more than $1 billion worldwide, was released during a meager and embarrassing time for traditional superhero movies (and no, the Dark Knight was not a superhero movie; I'll delve into that soon). The Dark Knight's release followed "Fantastic Four", "Hulk", "Hancock" and "Hellboy: The Golden Army", all of which were Darko Milicic-esque busts with convoluted and bland plot lines featuring vomit-inducing CGI that seriously damaged superhero movie's reputations. Nolan was already working at a disadvantage, having to release his film to a skeptical and worn out audience. However, through a brilliant marketing campaign that featured hidden websites and coded pictures, anticipation for the Dark Knight grew.
And Nolan blew it out of the park.
While the Dark Knight was marketed as a superhero film, it was never an actual superhero movie, but instead a psychological crime thriller that dissected the deep insecurities ingrained in people and society as a whole. Sure, it's still an action blockbuster, but it has so much more depth and complexity than your average action movie.
As the Wall Street Journal forebodingly wrote at the time: "The whole movie is a social experiment on a global scale, an ambitious, lavish attempt to see if audiences will turn out for a comic-book epic that goes beyond darkness into Stygian bleakness, grim paradox, endless betrayals and pervasive corruption."
The film's core conflict wrestled not with the played-out good vs evil, but order versus chaos. Are there evil people in the movie? Why of course. The Joker, Lau (a Chinese mob money launderer) and Salvatore Maroney (head of the mob) are all nefarious creatures. And good people? Even in such a dark film, Commissioner Gordon, Rachel, Lucius Fox and Alfred all have good, well-meaning intentions. But this is still a Warner Brothers action film, and it's about Batman vs Joker and their conflicting beliefs crashing into each other.
The Joker and Batman's first scenes in the movie perfectly illustrate their methods of operation. Joker stages a wild bank heist, with masked clowns shooting through skyscrapers, driving trucks into walls, inducing mass panic. As the heist progresses, the masked clowns begin slowly shooting one another, and nobody knows what the heck is going on. It was pure madness, just how the Joker wanted it.
Batman's opening scene was much more orderly. He calmly put to rest some thugs in a simple parking garage, neatly tying them up in an orderly fashion, waiting for the authorities to come, then swiftly dissappearing.
The Batman, portrayed excellently by Christian Bale, represented order. Batman may be an eccentric billionaire with technologically advanced weapons and an explosive bat mobile, but his character operates with an air of extreme caution and restriction right off the bat. Batman has moral lines he simply does not cross. Even though he enjoys beating gangsters to a pulp, he is philosophically against anything more drastic than that. The Batman usually defeats his opponents through clean hand-to-hand combat or via a well-synchronized precision gadget. He strategically plans an excruciatingly complicated kidnapping of Lau. Batman never aims to kill, only to prevent chaos. Even Bruce Wayne himself is a very orderly man. His hair is always slicked back impeccably like Pat Riley. His face is unblemished. He simply projects an aura of calm.
The Joker though, throws a massive wrench into Batman's neat and structured ethical code. In Heath Ledger's most masterful, terrifying and compelling performance of his career, he fully immerses himself into the Joker's mental and physical state. The Joker maintains a wiry, hunched posture with limbs dangling wildly, like a disjointed puppet. His eyes rapidly flit back and forth. He makes compulsive, quick clicking noises and flicks his tongue out habitually, like a rabid dog. His hair is never combed, always wildly frayed in all different directions. His clown makeup is smeared across his face haphazardly. He has terrorist elements to him, yet he has no political agenda. He steals billions from the mob, only to burn it all. He uses knives because they are often bloodier than a simple gun. He always changes the origin story of how he got his scars. What makes him so terrifying is that he's not some big, "imposing" CGI character. He's playful, charming at times, but when he growls like a wild animal, pocket knife in hand, that's when he becomes alarmingly petrifying. Joker is a sociopath, a new kind of demonic terrorist, one without a clear directive. He is, so perfectly described by himself, the ultimate agent of chaos.
"I'm like a dog chasing cars," Joker tells DA Harvey Dent in a tense scene. "I wouldn't know what to do with one if I caught it. I just do things."
Just watch this Joker scene. It's the performance of a lifetime:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DZ7pOVQgqo
But even though, on its face, order is represented by Batman, and chaos by Joker, the deeper one delves into the film, the more those distinctions blur. Joker may be a madman, but he has a simple objective: to expose society as the twisted, materialistic entity it really is. Joker believes the concept of maintaining constant order is a fruitless task, a chaotic endeavor in and of itself, and that's why he is not scared of the Batman. He's not entirely wrong. He believes chaos is the closest society can come to a true order, accepting its flaws and unleashing full-fledged anarchy. Batman pushes back harder than anyone on this insane yet truthful philosophy of the Joker's.
While everyone rightfully labels the Joker a villain (as they should, since he's a murdering psychopath), the surrounding characters all act as pawns in his game. Batman may have strict moral codes, but that doesn't mean his actions don't mask an insecure rich man whose only friend is his servant and who finds the need to beat up thugs at night. Harvey Dent may begin as a good man, but he is driven to insanity. Gordon means well, but the Joker propels him to fake his own death and have his family unnecessarily grieving for days believing him to be dead.
The Joker brings out the rabid dog that is bubbling beneath the surface in us all. He just wears his madness like a Scarlet Letter. Sure, he is absolutely, positively insane, but there is still a little bit of all of us in the Joker, and a bit of the Joker in all of us.
The Dark Knight isn't just a masterful work of art because it has an interesting and layered core conflict of order and chaos. It thrives because it presents itself as a traditional comic book movie (a clown with masked goons against a cop and a man in a cape), but operates to its own beat: a thrilling, haunting, gritty portrayal of how good men can succumb to the darkness and maintain a good image while others helplessly attempt to prevent that darkness from spreading, only to shoulder all of the blame. This is of course an allusion to the trajectories of the film's two "heroes", Harvey Dent and Batman, and the film's most famous line:
"You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain."
Dent's initial motives are pure of heart. He wants to diligently cease all organized crime in Gotham, and he's succeeding. He's got a loyal girlfriend in Rachel (who serves as a moral compass for Harvey and Bruce), he's getting a giant fundraiser thrown for him, and the streets are cleaner than ever. But once the Joker kidnaps Rachel and blows her to pieces and torches half of Harvey's face, transforming him into the gruesome "Two Face, Dent becomes a far worse villain than the Joker. His new life objective becomes to relentlessly hunt down innocent people and blame them for Rachel's death. While the Joker well-deserves the title as the film's quintessential villain, "Two Face" commits the most egregious act of horror by holding a gun to Gordon's eight-year-old kid in front of his family. Joker is a demon, there to light the fuse. Two-Face (the later incarnation of Harvey Dent) is the explosion, the devil.
What makes the Dark Knight truly stand out is its grim outcome. In almost every superhero movie, the superhero usually defeats the villain and everyone lives happily ever after. Maybe a useless side character dies to provide the film with a hint of realism. But in the Dark Knight, that could not be further from the truth. On the surface, the Joker technically loses since he ends up in an asylum, and yet it's clear he has won. Joker took Gotham's three heroes (Dent, Gordon and Batman) and broke them all. Harvey lost his girlfriend and his sanity, spent the last quarter of the film ruthlessly killing innocent people and finally died. Batman may have survived, but the Joker put the Batman in an impossible position with no good solution on how to spin Dent's death to a Gotham public that had been drained of hope.
Ultimately, Batman and Gordon agreed on preserving Harvey's image, both realizing that Batman was the hero Gotham deserved, but not the one it needed at the moment. Gotham needed hope, and Batman selflessly complied.
Batman ended up living long enough to see himself become the villain, and he finishes the movie being chased by the police, as a fugitive. Even Gordon must help the public keep the faith by maintaining Harvey was a noble person, even though he had Gordon's whole family at gunpoint in one of the movie's most horrific scenes. Imagine praising the man who tried to kill your family. That is what the Joker reduced Gordon to.
This whole movie also had a brilliant plot that was executed by the greatest director alive and a stunning supporting cast including Michael Cane, Morgan Freeman, Gary Oldman and Aaron Eckheart. But it was no Columbo episode, a well-crafted story with excellent actors but a laughable production quality. No, no, no. The soundtrack, composed by Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard, was heart-poundingly intense. The serious nature of the film evoked enough tension as is, but combined with Zimmer and Howard's ferociously ambitious, tick-tock score, it was a full-fledged nail-biter. Dark Knight was just as groundbreaking in its set pieces and cinematography as well. I mean, look at these breathtaking pieces of cinematic, I-MAX art. (Director of Photography Wally Pfister blew it out of the park).
This is Chris Nolan at his best. CGI was scarcely used. That truck flip was real. They actually filmed in China, instead of using a green screen. Set pieces took months to construct. Nolan chose a dark blue tint for Gotham and the result is chilling. This film took itself so seriously with regard to production, plot line, everything.... it's laughable that this was a PG-13 movie. It's more frightening than 99% of R-rated movies. It questions your philosophical beliefs, and exposes the bone-chilling truth that within all of us is an animal waiting to be unleashed if provoked. And the Joker is the perfect instigator. As Joker eloquently puts it to Batman in the interrogation scene, "In their final breaths, people show you who they really are. When things are down, they'll eat each other."
Nolan smartly avoided cursing, sex and blood, all red-flags for PG-13 movies, but still...come on. I saw this when I was 12 and while I loved it, I was legitimately horrified and had nightmares about it. The person who approved this rating should be fired. I've never seen a more egregiously incorrect film rating. Semi-Pro was R, this was PG-13. Get real.
But besides the rating fiasco, the film was not just an incredible movie. It was a cultural influence for the next decade of movies that predictably nobody has been able to replicate, since Heath Ledger and Chris Nolan do not grow on trees. This movie spawned the "dark superhero movie", where heroes were not always golden boys, but distraught figures with problems just like the rest of us. The Dark Knight quite possibly inspired all of this because Batman, the supposed hero, was anything but. He refused to break his moral code against killing. By simply executing Joker, Batman could have ended the madness, but instead he resisted, while Joker killed innocent people, set bounties on civilians, blew up a hospital and ran a social experiment in which two boats full of passengers were incentivized to blow the other boat up. Joker targeted every figure who represented maintaining order. He poisoned the deputy commissioner, he blew up Judge Surillo in her car, lead Harvey on the path that resulted in his death. But Batman presided through it all, attempting in vain to stem the spread of the chaos, watching his girlfriend die, letting Harvey crumble, reduced to invading people's privacy by hacking into every cell phone in the city to find the Joker, watching his city burn to the ground.
The Joker wanted to bring good people to their knees, and he stayed true to his promise. He took on Harvey, Gordon and Batman, and the entire city of Gotham, and crushed them. He didn't just win through physicality. He shattered everyone mentally.
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