The Dark Knight

As A Midwestern kid I grew up reading my share of comic books. I was thrilled by the exploits of the numerous super-heroes let loose by the illustrators. My favorites were Batman, Submariner, Plastic Man, The Spirit, and The Heap, a kind of benign Swamp Thing. And, god, don’t let me forget Wonder Woman, my wife’s favorite and symbol of the New Woman, strong and possessed with marvelous powers. When my wife was teaching in the University of Arizona’s Dance Department she did a theater / dance piece that featured a large burlap sack on stage with something inside moaning and groaning and trying to get out of its prison; finally a woman burst out of bag and made a long shout of triumph: It was Wonder Woman in full regalia, ready and able to lead the charge against a world controlled and dominated by men. So, as my wife saw Wonder Woman, she represented the liberating spirit of Feminism. She became more than what her creator wanted her to be.

This is a lead-in to some thoughts about the latest Batman movie, “The Dark Knight.” It is a film that aspires to be more than it seems to be. There is an attempt to elevate comic book material, to use the super-hero in a relevant, more emotionally real way, and the same goes for the Joker, the manifestation of the arch-villain, and played so brilliantly by the late Heath Ledger.” The Dark Night “ lands somewhere between industry filmmaker and a place where thornier issues try men’s souls—between entertainment and Art, with a foot in both spheres. Cartoon characters are employed with heightened drama, moral purpose, and a tragic sense of loss. Even a sweetheart and a courageous D.A. can die—can’t be saved by our intrepid hero. Grit, sorrow and anger have been added to the fairy tale. It is as if something snuck into the script through the back door when no one was watching. This movie as fiction is more than what the Batman franchise was in the beginning.

Heath Ledger plays the Joker, not as a circus clown, but as a pathological genius, an individual devilishly clever and always two steps ahead of everyone else. He regards killing people as a lark, in a word, fun. He won’t kill Batman because that “would ruin all the fun.” Unlike most criminal minds, the Joker is not interested in money and he proves it late in the long film. As Bruce Wayne’s manservant says, his only real desire “ is to watch the city burn.” The Joker has a reverse relationship to Batman: His devil is balanced against Batman’s heroic stature; he is a destroyer next to Batman’s virtuous altruism; and, finally, he is The Shadow pulling the rug out from under our Better Self.

Quite frankly, Ledger stole the show. His interpretation of the Joker is shattering, disturbing, and extraordinary. The Director, Chris Nolan, got Ledger to reach deep into his own psyche to pull this characterization out of some dark pocket in his inner depths; and from what I understand he had some trouble returning to normality. He was suffering from insomnia and anxiety: this is where the pills came in, the drugs that killed him, accidentally. His characterization of the Joker had been forged in a different furnace than Jack Nicholson’s Joker. According to the Poet William Blake, whose illustrations have a cartoon-like quality, creative people work within “Furnaces of Affliction.” He also said that John Milton wrote about God and Angels in PARADISE LOST with chains on, but wrote of the Devil and Hell “at liberty” because he was “of the Devil’s Party without knowing it.” I would say something similar about “The Dark Knight.” Chris Nolan and Heath Ledger are of “the Devil’s Party” while Batman and the Police Commissioner, despite being on the side of the angels, are outwit and overshadowed by the Forces of Darkness, which is why the Knight is “Dark” in this telling of the tale.