[Crest] The Dark Knight ~ Why so serious? at Riuva : Research Institute for Unicultural Visual Arts

[Crest] The Dark Knight ~ Why so serious?

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Popularity: 12% [?] Published by Crest July 20th, 2008 in Crest, Misc Reviews

Disclaimer: This article does not serve the role of a review, but to act as a column, opinion of the author. It does not serve to assume any positions of authority or legitimacy. As usual, this article contains spoilers central to this movie and I will assume that you have watched it. Some of my quotations from the movie might not be accurate as I am referrring them from memory.

For this article, I will like to take a different approach in writing this article if I ever had any established style in writing articles on Riuva previously. The Dark Knight, the movie has reviews all over the spectrum , most of them on the superlative end and lauding the efforts of the late Heath Ledger. Naturally, for the superlative reviews, there would be the critics and hacks. I dont wish to pass judgement on this movie in a hasty manner by simple praise or denouncements, cinema is a medium where the audience be it you or me will ultimately judge for the films for themselves. If you are part of the societal herd that’s deaf and mute to the others then sadly such a statement wont hold true.

As a preamble, I love the series and the characters. I read my fair share of the comics such as The Killing Joke, The Long Halloween and Arkham Asylum : A Serious House on A Serious Earth. I quote these titles because the material from these comics are used and referenced in the movie that I will talk about later. When I watched the film with kokanaden and LianYL, I had a gamut of experiences and emotions washing over my senses. I believe in watching movies with an approach of going in emotionally nude, removing out adult sensitivities and letting it envelope over my perspectives. So it might be more real, closer and more intimate. The supposed fear of watching how the Joker laughs, exposing his yellow teeth and laughing while he went about carving smiles onto people’s faces, the sobriety and gravitas portrayed out by Jim Gordan in his handling of the Joker and his carnival of terror.

The close and dark photography of the film, how the Hong Kong night seemed to come alive under the camera lens. The action scenes done on IMAX cameras, the pace of the action sequences , so fast that one couldn’t feel anything else but the desperate and the frenetic. Of how Batman struggled against his own existence and his savior de vivre (way of life) as the Batman, how the world seemed to be teetering on the scales where a little push will throw it into irrevocable chaos.

If one is to watch it with the detachment of boring adults, how will all those emotions feel? As remote as writing an article on a medium where the words seem to flood out and you are resigned to admiring it on another end seperated by a screen. Yet no matter how immersed we are in; there’s still the safeword that after the end of the film, lights burn away the cloak of make-believe and the curtains closes on us and the world is still as mundane as ever.

With the end of this preamble and rambling, let’s move to the review proper.

In the universe of the Batman, it’s hard to have an established canon of what is the "correct" continuity, actually this has been an issue with many western comics. However, there has been defining works where much has been drawn out from and seen as the iconography such as The Killing Joke and The Long Halloween in this case. Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke is seen as the one of most influential narrations of the Joker’s origin but for the Dark Knight, the movie does not explicit talk about the origin of the Joker. What Christopher Nolan, director of the Dark Knight, used from The Killing Joke is the idea that how even the most upstanding citizen can descend into madness and to darkness, in the case of The Killing Joke it was Jim Gordon and the means was to cripple Barbara Gordon in front of Jim Gordon before shaming him in a "maddening gauntlet"

In the Dark Knight, the character that was chosen to fall was District Attorney Harvey Dent. And the means was to kill his future wife, Rachel Dawes before the Joker seduced him over to the ways of violence and anarchy in both literally and figuratively with that amusing cross-dressing scene. Harvey Dent, as described by Nolan to be the parallel of the Dark Knight, where despite succumbing to the ways of murder and violence doesn’t lose his sanity akin to the Joker. In the movie, despite him killing 5 people, they were either mafia or rogue police officers. This harkens to the Long Halloween, where Harvey Dent after transforming into Two-Face, intially started out his super villain career by killing the corrupted elements in the police force.

One of the central themes of this movie is how one must suffer endlessly before welcoming an improvement to matters as eloquently elucidated by Harvey Dent in the line "The night is darkest right before the first light of dawn." The Dark Knight starts with an endless tension that builds up through every action sequence, every entrance of the Joker till it finally cracks and explodes in a huge crescendo before dissipating into nothingness. The Dark Knight seemingly punishes the audience with a battering of bleakness endlessly, however perhaps only through such we may emphasise with the characters. With Bruce Wayne, Harvey Dent and their alter-egos.

Virtue and morality are ideas explored in the movie as well, the presence or the lacking of it. In the Dark Knight, the Joker prances around, decrying on the human condition of virtuous pretense. The Joker goes as far to create his variation of the Milgram experiment (PS thanks to LianYL for correcting me on the name of it) in the Dark Knight by terrifying and coercing people into going against their personal conscience for their own survival. The Joker was convinced in his mad little worlds that people are base and their supposed virtues are totally expendable when push comes to shove.

His "social experiment" serves an illustration of the dynamics between motives, morals and choice. It can be seen as a corny example but it was nevertheless a telling one when the supposed "bad" people chose to abandon the detonator whereas the normal folks didn’t pull the trigger but for fear of repercussions such as "what if the trigger was rigged backwards?"

Heroism and motives, are those connected? Does one do a good deed for a selfish reason? Does that make such actions any more good or any more bad? To invoke Friedrich Niestzche, are we judging a morality of consequences or a morality of intentions?

Aaron Eckhart, the actor who played Harvey Dent, delivered such words in the Dark Knight, "You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become a villain.”. Such words echoes the deep distrust of this era, the distrust of goodness and virtue. That nothing is unchanging, that heroism will finally falter in front of the corrupting darkness. Such words resonates against the final scene, the coda so to speak of the Dark Knight. Where Jim Gordan begs the Batman not to take up the responsibilities for Two-Face’s crimes, his words to his young son parallels against the idea of heroism and virtue doomed to failure. Jim Gordan’s words speak of a hero that’s borne out of the darkness, someone that won’t receive the adulation of the populace, a pariah , a modern Atlas to bear the weights of the world beneath the deepest surfaces of the world.

The bleakness is pervasive, so pervasive that film noir is no longer the right description. There’s no goodness in this Gotham, what remains is destruction and nihilism symbolised by the Joker. The Joker, as described by Christopher Nolan, is an absolute character. There’s no character development for the Joker, he simply cuts, kills and blows his way throughout the movie. Such a line might seem that I am demeaning the presence of the Joker. On the contrary it’s not, Heath Ledger had a brilliant performance depicting such a Joker. His every appearance was almost electrifying, depicting a man whose insanity can be seen as a brilliant rejection of conventional sanity and fuelled by a psychotic destructive streak.

Personally, I see this interpretation of the Joker as lowering the stature of the Clown Prince of Crime. The Joker is seen as the anti-thesis of the Batman, the Joker is a character not solely defined by violence or a lust to destroy. He carries a strange sense of the whimsical, a logic and even a "moral" code that only the Joker himself understands, the Joker had no personality nor fear as shown in the "Knightfall" comics where Scarecrow tried to gas him with fear gas but ended up got smashed with a chair.

In regards to this movie, I believe that Heath Ledger gave this Joker more then just a dimension of violence, as a standalone performance it is excellent but in regards to the Joker character, it’s a revisionist wrinkle.

The development of the characters were mainly focused on Harvey Dent and Bruce Wayne. On how they were forced to react towards the Joker’s taunts and violent rampages, Bruce Wayne’s decision to surrender the identity of the Batman was a point that illustrated of the helplessness of this generation. How we are forced to give in to the shadows of the unknown and terror, the anxiety experienced by the populace. The incidents of Reese and the Gotham General Hospital drenched my mind with this thought of what’s truly wrong in this situation? To take one’s life for self-preservation, how fragile of this generation’s morals?

Is crime being seen as right or wrong in the Dark Knight? Christopher Nolan puts us through the millstone of escalation with bigger and more violent attacks by the Joker on Gotham so that the Batman may inevitably triumph for only today. And what’s the motivation for one to commit crime? Base desires or as the Joker put it with his "I am an agent of chaos!" litany to the Dark Knight. Perhaps the movie is taking a leaf with Frank Miller’s All Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder where the Batman is portrayed as a violent vigilante who derives pleasure in punishing his enemies endlessly.

Why do I make such a comparison? Nolan’s vision of the Dark Knight can be seen as where to combat evil, a greater power must arise from the darkness to extinguish it. The Batman’s struggles of preserving his moral code despite of the Joker baiting him endlessly. Telling him to succumb to the anarchy and break free from the restrain of rules, yet only by willingly leashing our own freedom can we truly be free, to invoke Jean Paul Sartre. Batman/Bruce Wayne throughout the film was struggling to fathom the Joker and he saw him as any other criminal before realising that the Joker is one motivated by destruction and anarchy alone.

Can we condone Harvey Dent’s killings? Despite his victims being corrupted and threatening to society? It boils down to the nature of crime and vigilante, one of the recurring themes revolving around the Batman is what the Batman is actually. A super detective? Or a rich wealthy man who’s trying to exercise his sense of justice on the world? Or something else? As mentioned by Harvey Dent, the Batman is guilty by the eyes of the law but he’s a saviour to Gotham because of the very failings of the law. Is the law truly righteous? Do we mete out justice based on consequences brought out by malicious intentions? Such questions are meant to be asked and perhaps never to be answered definitely.

Such a conundrum is the tragedy of Harvey Dent.

Christopher Nolan has said that the storyline focuses a lot on Harvey Dent and the scriptwriter, David S.Goyer has professed that the movie script is based on the Long Halloween comic series. Harvey Dent is shown as a possible opposite to Bruce Wayne, The Batman saw Harvey Dent as a possible heir to the legacy of fighting crime and saving Gotham however when placed on the crossroads of tragedy and picking up the pieces, Harvey Dent fell instead. He and Bruce Wayne both suffered great personal tragedies but as with a recurring theme in western comics, choice is very empowering. Harvey Dent chose the way of meting out his sense of justice and putting blood on his hands.

Christopher Nolan created a vision of the Batman in today’s modern world. A world where virtue and moral verities are seen as a relic of the past and corny. A world where people has been gripped by anxiety and fear, where the power of choice shines through the darkness. The choice to do good or to do bad. A world where absurd levels of machismo manifest itself through crime, through violence. Where people only feel in control and assertive by action.. inevitably violent ones.

It may not pander towards the the purists, but the movie with its endless tension and climaxes lead us to suffer with the characters, be enthralled with them in dark sequences, so we may understand and emphasise the sacrifices by heroes. Heroes who may not be what they seem and may not be the heroes shown by "truth". Indeed, some say that the theme of evil having to be defeated by a greater evil is depressing to no end. Yet must this greater evil be truly malicious? In fact, Nolan’s vision of the Dark Knight might show us that it’s beyond good and evil.

Yet, why be so serious and let such a wonderful movie exhaust us with great questions?

Let the movie carve smiles or inverted frowns upon the audiences.

Credits:

To the endless writers who contributed to this complex universe of characters.

To the staff who created this brilliant movie, especially Christopher Nolan and the late Heath Ledger.

To you the reader for reading it to here.

- Crest

Popularity: 12% [?]

19 Responses to “[Crest] The Dark Knight ~ Why so serious?”

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1 MistaYoH 42 comments Jul 20th, 2008 at 1:29 am

F**k yeah. Great article as usual. Had a good time reading this
2 Stifler 106 comments Jul 20th, 2008 at 2:39 am

The Duck Knight calls. Why so serious?
3 C.I. 44 comments Jul 20th, 2008 at 3:06 am

Shit, now I’m all the more tempted to go catch it.

Also, I never did read many comics published by D.C, Marvel Fanboy here.
4 llyke 9 comments Jul 20th, 2008 at 3:13 am

Very well written. I haven’t seen the movie yet, but this makes me very interested.
5 madeener 13 comments Jul 20th, 2008 at 4:05 am

Watched it; loved it; came out wet in the pants with fists clenched and yearning for more.
6 Jalin 17 comments Jul 20th, 2008 at 10:35 am

Mm, i had watched it.

I was quite bemused with the title as well. ‘The Dark Knight’
but i’m glad they fixed up the reasoning behind this towards the end of the movie.

I never myself followed the DC comics, rather i followed the movies instead.
However, i must agree that this movie is different from the previous ones, which as you had mentioned with the presence or lack of moral/virtue.

Nontheless, a nice movie.
7 kokanaden 336 comments Jul 20th, 2008 at 1:16 pm

One theme which kept on recurring, which Crest missed, was idea that us humans are unable to tolerate titans in our midst. The film mentioned Caesar and Churchill, followed it up by tracing Batman’s. The movie highlights the love-hate relationship humans share in general with the so-called titans; the movers, the who’s-who of society. We’d love a dictator to lead us in times of chaos, yet we turn on them, vilify them, when the chaos is at an end. Why? It takes a superhuman effort/wielding of power to end that chaos, and we, being the self-serving hypocrites that we are, are afraid of that power. We use fall of Adam in the Garden of Eden (metaphorically speaking) to justify our actions, that no one is incorruptible, and apply it to the superheroes.

The Joker comes across in this film as the litmus test Gotham City faces; one which they pass, barely. The Joker seems to be the representation of the human soul laid bare; the human soul without the so-called morals defined/set down by us humans. On the other hand, Batman epitomizes the moral code we cling to so dearly, so proudly: Contradictory at times, but unwavering, the basic ideals and principles holding firm. And so, the clash between the Joker and Batman, redefined in this context, seems to be one battle we face within ourselves everyday.
8 tj_han 1442 comments Jul 20th, 2008 at 10:15 pm

Remeber FFX? Lulu said, “No matter how dark the night is, dawn always comes.” or something. It’s a fucking cliche!
9 kokanaden 336 comments Jul 20th, 2008 at 11:08 pm

@tj_han Remember FFXXX? The pornstar said, “No matter how dark the Knight is, he always has a dick.” or something. It’s a fucking cliche!
10 Victor 81 comments Jul 21st, 2008 at 12:09 am

u 2 are cliches…
11 John 1 comment Jul 21st, 2008 at 1:12 pm

tldr; for my sanity
12 Yakumo 11 comments Jul 21st, 2008 at 8:47 pm

@John qft. i only made it to the 2nd paragraph. lolz.
13 Ascaloth 202 comments Jul 22nd, 2008 at 4:00 pm

Either you’ve got it wrong, or perhaps it was LianYL who misled you. Although both examples have superficial similarities, the Joker’s fictional experiment actually has little to do with Stanley Milgram’s experiment. I’ll fill you in on the details.

The Milgram experiments were started in 1961, and were designed to find out whether people would go against their moral codes to inflict harm on another individual simply because they were told to do so by an authority figure. The impetus for the experiments were the start of the war trials for Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, and sought to answer the question whether people are capable of resisting orders from authority that goes against their strongest moral imperatives against hurting others.

The experiment were set up with the experimenter and two individuals who would take the role of “teacher” and “learner”. When the roles are decided, the “teacher” and the “learner” would be seperated into different rooms without a direct line of sight between each other, and given a task: the “teacher” had a list of word pairs which he would teach the “learner”, and then afterwards test the “learner” by reading out the first word of each pair, and then giving the latter an MCQ of 4 possible answers. If the “learner” got a wrong answer, or failed to answer the question within a short time limit, the “teacher” had to administer an electric shock to the “learner”, with the voltage increasing with every wrong answer the “learner” gave. The “teacher” would be able to hear any complaints from the “listener” each time he gave the latter a shock.

After a number of wrong answers and corresponding voltage increases, the “learner” would start to complain about heart problems, and start banging on the walls. At a certain point, the “learner” will cease responding altogether. In actual fact, one of the two participants is actually a confederate of the experimenter, and through sleight of hand always causes the naive participant to become the “teacher”, while he himself always becomes the “learner”. Moreover, there is no actual electric shock, as the confederate had been instructed to fake his suffering each time he supposedly gets a shock.

Should the naive participant acting as the “teacher” wish to stop the experiment, he is assured by the experimenter that the latter will take all responsibility for any outcome, and given a series of verbal prods to continue. The experiment is halted only if the naive participant expresses a wish to stop after having been verbally prodded to continue four successive times, or if he has administered the maximum 450-volt shock three successive times.

The results show that 65% of the participants administered the maximum 450 volt shock, proving that the majority of people do not have the will to resist authority, even if told to do something against their strongest beliefs. So what is the difference between the Milgram Experiment and the experiment by the Joker portrayed in the Dark Knight?

There are quite a number, but the most important one is that the Joker is NOT regarded by the “participants” as an authority figure. The aim of the Joker’s experiment is to prove that their own survival is always of people’s utmost concern even at the expense of others; unlike the Milgram Experiment, it is NOT designed to prove that people will submit to the accepted authority of others even at the expense of their own moral codes. The presence of an authority figure in the Milgram Experiment vs. the presence of a cruel Game Master in the Joker Experiment is the factor which most distinguishes one from the other.

In a way, the Joker Experiment is most akin to a group dynamics-based experiment on Game Theory more than anything; if both parties do or do not press the trigger, both will die. If one parties presses the trigger while the other does not, the other party dies while the former party lives on. Of course, this is a simplified version of the game theory structure of the Joker Experiment; like you pointed out, the possibility that the Joker may have deceived both parties about which detonator was rigged to which set of bombs is an additional factor that has to be taken into account.
14 LianYL 785 comments Jul 23rd, 2008 at 10:20 am

Ascaloth, you’re so awesome in your field of studies. May I savour your balls?
15 Crest 49 comments Jul 23rd, 2008 at 10:20 am

This comment is mainly directed to Ascaloth, and I am not flaming him. Most people on the net thinks that giving polemic replies is an indication of belligerence but it’s not such most of the time.

For the sake of getting things clear, what actually happened was I thought of the Milgram experiment but I got the names mixed up and thought it was mistakenly called the Milgene experiment due to a lapse of memory before LianYL corrected me. I already knew what the Milgram experiment encompassed.

I said it was a variation of the experiment because of the very reason that you said why it’s not. I preferred not to use Game theory as what the Joker mimicking because game theory has many forms and variation, naturally in this situation we will think of it as the Zero-Sum concept or the “Prisoner’s Dilemma” which is very much featured in popular culture because it’s the closest to what’s happening. As what you said, if both cooperate both parties will end up being blown up so they only have two linear choices which is to blow the other party up or not to blow them up and with almost all game theories, each side is determined to maximise their own payoff or in this case survival.

Yet, that is to assume if the only aim is to maximise their own payoff.

The reason why I said it’s the Milgram experiment was despite not what the Joker represented as a “moral authority”, it was the choices that created the illusion of an empowered authority where they are forced to resist their own moral codes. If we are to replace an authority figure with the base impulse to survive, it might make more sense. Nevertheless the Joker’s experiment is not a true Milgram experiment because the original experiment as you said, was merely a “teacher” watching a “learner” being given electric shock and not something as complex as being forced to choose whether to kill others in order not to avoid getting themselves killed.

That’s why the Joker’s social experiment is not a true reflection of either theories but as I said a “variation” of it because I saw that if one is to replace the “Experimenter” as the Joker’s choices, the “Teacher” as the base survival instincts and the “Learner” as their moral codes or the people on the other ships, it makes sense. Or not.

Another point I like to make your comment that the Milgram experiment was designed by Stanley Milgram as a possible explaination towards the possible motives of the Nazi criminals. He wrote in later books that, the experiment is to show how willing are people to submit stark authority to inflict pain on others despite their own moral reservations. To Milgram, the chief finding was “The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.”

So it was designed to test whether will people submit to authority and perform acts against their own moral codes which you said it was not otherwise.

For others who didn’t understand what we were saying…..
The Milgram’s experiment and Game Theory can be wikied. For game theory, wiki the “Prisoner’s Dilemma”or Zero-Sum game instead otherwise you will see many other variations of game theory which are very very mathematical and my poor mind can’t fathom maths well.
16 Ascaloth 202 comments Jul 23rd, 2008 at 11:35 am

@LianYL,

どうぞ.

@Crest.

Erm, I did say the Milgram Experiment was to test whether people will submit to authority and perform acts against their own moral code. I didn’t say it was otherwise, as far as I know.

I guess I can see the reasoning behind the parallels drawn between the Milgram experiment and the Joker experiment. Although there’s one more point I would like to bring up; the Milgram experiment is set up in such a way that it is designed to test whether people will act against their morals under the behest of authority, if there are NO EXTERNAL FACTORS in play. In other words, whether people will commit crimes against their morals if the presence of an authority figure to assume all the responsibilities for any outcome of the experiment, and thereby absolve the participants of all blame, is present.

IMHO, that is the other factor which distinguishes the Joker experiment from the Milgram Experiment. The Joker may be glad to take responsibility for setting up the experiment in the first place, but the unwilling participants in his experiment will have to shoulder at least part of the blame for whatever outcome of the experiment, no matter how many fingers are pointed at the Joker for setting this up in the first place. In that sense, the Joker is no authority figure; the role of an authority figure in the Milgram Experiment is ostensibly to assume all responsibilities for the outcome, much like the Nazi leaders in the Holocaust, or Lieutenant Colonel Barker in the My Lai Massacre. Which is also why I disagree with the notion of the Joker’s choices as being the “experimenter”.

In a sense, I believe that game theory, specifically the “Prisoner’s Dilemma” or zero-sum game as you pointed out, quite nicely underpins the Joker’s motivations for setting up the experiment; nothing else would prove his beliefs that the base survival instincts trumps all else in human relationships as the underlying concept of game theory being that the goal of anyone involved in such a situation is to maximize their outcomes; in this case, the optimal outcome for either side is to survive at the end of the day, even if it is at the expense of the other against their moral imperatives to not bring harm on another. If game theory in this case was vindicated by one or both sides blowing the other up, it would also vindicate the Joker’s beliefs that base survival instincts trumps all. That is why I personally believe that the Joker Experiment has more to do with Game Theory than with the Milgram Experiment, although of course I see your points too.
17 Kaioshin Sama 101 comments Jul 23rd, 2008 at 2:40 pm

The thing that got me the most about the movie was that in the end Harvey Dent was pretty much right, that in the end everything in life all comes down to chance and that is the only true justice in the world. Not heroes and certainly not villains, because those are just labels we apply to people in order to give ourselves security and comfort. Justice wasn’t even evident in the end of the movie as Batman was forced to take the fall for Harvey just so that people could have someone to believe in to give them hope in the goodness of man. It seems like in the end Harvey Dent had to sacrifice his owns ideals so that everyone might ultimately realize them, which is kind of ironic in a sense. I just found his character so well portrayed and realized in the movie, better then even the much lauded Joker or Bruce Wayne. Though I will admit that in the end the only truly honest character was in fact the Joker.
18 The Sojourner 112 comments Jul 23rd, 2008 at 3:58 pm

Haha. To be honest with you. I did not really read everything but I have to say that I rarely see someone who exudes such enthusiasm like you do. 0.o

1 [Crest] The Dark Knight ~ Why so serious? : Anime News Updated Pingback on Jul 20th, 2008 at 8:56 am

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