Darkness Follows - The Dark Knight

In 1951, as the Red Scare began to grip America, Howard Hawk’s sci-fi classic The Thing From Another World showed how a group of people, facing an enemy it can’t begin to fathom, can be torn apart by fear and paranoia.

Fifty-seven years later, as the Terrorism Scare rages on, Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight does the same. Some films entertain, and some examine. The Dark Knight does both, and ultimately we’re asked to examine ourselves. A society facing a dark night of the soul is asked one simple question.

Can decency survive in an indecent world?

A government begins an ill-advised war that soon spirals out of control. A new kind of enemy enters the fray – a shadowy figure who doesn’t fight in the traditional ways, who doesn’t kill for the traditional reasons. The good guys, frustrated by failure, are reduced to torturing perceived enemies and spying on ordinary citizens, willing to “trade a little liberty for a little order,” as Thomas Jefferson so aptly put it. Does any of this sound familiar?

The Dark Knight is not just a great film; it might be the first great cinematic comment on the New America. We look back on Red Scare paranoia and ask, “Why? How?” Nolan holds up a mirror and asks, “What were you saying?”

The Dark Knight begins with the Joker (Heath Ledger) orchestrating a complex bank heist. It’s the first of many complex plots he will organize throughout the film , and he is always a step ahead of everyone else. The banks are controlled by the mob in Gotham City, so this robbery would seem like a poor choice. However, as we soon learn, the Joker has no fear of the mob. In fact, he has no fear of anything. He is an alien entity, an inexplicable force. The more we try to understand him, the less we do.

At one point, Joker tells Batman (Christian Bale), “I don’t want to kill you.” He doesn’t. He wants to change Batman, and he succeeds as the hero resorts to eavesdropping on the entire Gotham populace to locate the Joker near the film’s climax. It’s a violation so profound that longtime friend Lucious Fox resigns from Wayne Enterprises. The Joker also transforms earnest district attorney Harvey Dent, first into someone willing to torture his enemies, and then into something even darker. In fact, the Joker wants to change everybody and everything. He wants to instill so much fear, inspire so much chaos, that the people will destroy each other. And then, to paraphrase Alfred, he can sit back and watch the world burn.

The Dark Knight is ostensibly a comic book movie, but the Joker is no comic book villain. He has no powers other than a keen intellect and unwavering willingness to destroy the social order. He uses guns, knives, and bazookas. He straps hand grenades on himself, and turns his followers into suicide bombers. He is perfectly willing to kill and equally willing to die. Near the end of the film, when Joker is hanging upside down off a tall building, Nolan turns the camera 180 degrees to create the illusion he is upright, his stringy hair reaching toward the sky as if pulled by an invisible force. It is the perfect visual embodiment of what the Joker represents: A world in which everything has changed; the normal rules no longer apply. Up is now down; down is up.

In a mesmerizing performance, Ledger uses the Joker to embody the collective fear in everyone – the fear of the unknown, the fear of what cannot be understood. When he emerges from a hospital wearing a nurse’s gown, blowing up the building by remote control as he shambles away, some people in the audience laughed. I got chills. While Ledger instills some humor in the character, he allows absolutely no camp. You might laugh a little at this nightmare of a clown, but he will ultimately crawl under your skin and stay there a long time. If there’s any doubt about Ledger’s astonishing versatility, try watching Brokeback Mountain and The Dark Knight back to back.

To complete Thomas Jefferson’s quote: “A society that sacrifices a little liberty for a little order will lose both and deserve neither.” At the end of his relentlessly pessimistic film, Nolan offers a glimmer of hope. A group of people looks into its own dark night and doesn’t blink. But Nolan has no answers for society at large, only possibilities.  And if a society ever looks into that dark night and sees the night looking back, the Joker will be there, laughing, watching the world burn.