"The Dark Knight": When the Comic Meets the West

When the first in the new "Batman" franchise came out in June 2005, it was a few months before I started my first semester of college. Now, about a month before beginning my last semester of college, I, like so many other fans I know, felt the urge to get into the theater to watch the much-awaited (for obvious reasons) sequel, "The Dark Knight." I did so on Saturday afternoon, and to say that it does not disappoint would be a gross understatement.

Critics so far have been talking about the movie taking the summer blockbuster to a new, art-house level. They have variously (and with some qualification) praised the willingness of the director, Christopher Nolan, to take risks, hurt key characters, bring Batman down to earth (both physically and allegorically); and, of course, another theme has been Heath Ledger's remarkable performance (more on that in a moment). All of this is worthy of the praise which has been lavished upon it, but the brilliance of the movie lies in its ability to break outside of its genre and capture elements of both the western and the gangster film.

The latter of these genres is introduced in the beginning, in a scene which--as Manohla Darghis has pointed out--owes quite a bit to Michael Mann's famous bank robbery in "Heat". I think that Mr. Nolan as well as Ms. Darghis is aware of the debt. He even has William Fitchner show up as an irate bank manager with a gun to assure the robbers, with action as well as words, that they "don't know who [they're] robbing from." Unfortunately for him, the knife cuts both ways: he doesn't know who's robbing him either.

Of course, this is only the beginning. There are plenty of moments which allow for Mr. Nolan to investigate the corrupt underbelly in Gotham's upper ward. While the first movie dwelt on the down-and-out; the underground men who reveled in the mud puddles but never quite blossomed, this version is concerned more with the men and women who inhabit the upperworld: The attorneys, the bankers, the politicians, the criminal lords, the embezzlers, the perpetrators of social chaos. And, with the help of Batman, of course, the city looks newly washed and waxed, but also fragile. As the Joker says at one point, people panic if anything happens that is not "part of the plan".

This is not to say that the city does not have enough to worry about without the Joker. Vigilantes wearing halloween suits and exercising their 2nd Amendment Rights show up making fools of their discrete bourgeoisie selves on every block and in every parking garage (a nice touch) and Cillian Murphy shows up as his Dr. Crane once again, if only briefly (this was probably a loose end that didn't need to be tied), but with Batman and the new District Attorney, Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart in his best role since "Thank You for Smoking"), more things are going according to plan than one could hope for. Neither of them have met their match and, as the Joker readily points out, Batman, unlike Barack Obama, does not appear to be concerned by the forces of globalization ("Batman doesn't know any borders.")

Naturally, all of this is to provide Ledger's Joker with a job opportunity, but Nolan also uses the opportunity to bring in and play up influences from outside of his genre. The allusions to the Western--which bleeds into the showdowns in the streets and the face-offs on the roofs--are profuse; and why shouldn't they be? After all, the themes--the establishment and maintenance of civilization, the moral paradox of vigilantism, the clash of order and chaos--that make this film unique are more endemic to The Searchers than to Superman. And Mr. Bale's Bruce Wayne is a fairly archetypal Western hero: he is the sustainer of a society which he realizes will, ultimately, be unable to sustain him. Because of this epiphany, it takes away some of the possibilities for character development. The Bruce Wayne of The Dark Knight is not the conflicted, semi-threatening character of Batman Begins; he has learned to be self-sacrificial (and also sacrificing of those closest to him to do service to the greater good.)

All of this is to say that the sequel is more democratic; much more screen-time is afforded to Gary Oldman's Lieutenant Gordon and to the new characters introduced; but the world of The Dark Knight is also a meritocracy, and, if Gotham is still up for grabs, the movie, hands down, belongs to Heath Ledger's Joker. His Joker is not interesting by merit of being conflicted, but rather by merit of being driven to all means of destructiveness (including of the self). As he says, he is a man of simple tastes; these tastes include guns, dynamite and gasoline and the only time in the entire picture when I didn't believe him was when he said this was lucky because all of these things are cheap--where does he buy his gasoline anyway? This role will, I think, become the defining role of Mr. Ledger's all-too-short career, which, in truth, is both a solace and a frustration. As it turns out, the hardest irony for the audience to accept will be that Mr. Ledger died early, but his Joker is immortal.