The Dark Knight: A Post-9/11 Tale (Part Four)

In my last semester of college, I completed a writing portfolio entitled "Exploring Modern American Culture through Contemporary Cinema." It contained four essays dissecting four recent films. I started with Christopher Nolan's dark epic The Dark Knight (2008). The fourth and final part of that essay is below. I will post a new portfolio excerpt every day. What's up next? A look at Marc Webb's (500) Days of Summer (2009). Previous posts: Part One, Part Two, Part Three.

The Dark Knight: A Post-9/11 Tale

White Knights and Dark Knights: Leadership Dilemmas

In “the battle for Gotham’s soul,” three main players try to keep the city from succumbing to chaos: Batman, Gordon, and Dent (Nolan). While they have the common interest of defeating the Joker, their varying backgrounds and positions produce three distinct views of how to deal with the rapidly escalating situation. Batman, the vigilante, has one rule he strictly adheres to: no killing. That principle aside, he believes in protecting the city at all costs, making him only one step away from being as lawless as the Joker. He will break rules – and mobsters’ legs – if it means keeping Gotham safe and sound. Gordon and Dent, on the other hand, are bound to legality by their jobs. They admire Batman and allow him to disregard the law, but they can never do so themselves. Though they both follow a creed of lawfulness, discrepancies exist between the two men. Gordon wants to rely on his police force; Dent does not trust the lieutenant’s men and women due to their history of corruption, often a source of tension between the lawmen. Even though all three – Batman, Gordon, and Dent – have their differences, they manage to compromise and cooperate with each other for a higher purpose.

While the trio is able to find common ground, the disputes the men have raise a few questions. Which route – vigilantism or lawfulness – is better for combating the Joker’s malice? Is one better than the other? What about the morality and ethics of one versus the other? What measures are appropriate when dealing with imminent security threats? The list goes on. The film does not give easy answers to any of these questions. The citizens seem to favor Dent’s approach. To the public, he is Gotham’s white knight, a bright symbol of hope for a better future. By the end of the film, Batman becomes the dark knight of the title, vilified by the very people he strove to defend. In many ways, though, he is more heroic. It is Batman who defeats the Joker in the end, while Dent, suffering from great personal tragedy, loses faith in their cause. He concludes in the third act that he failed, alongside Batman and Gordon, because they could not be “decent men in an indecent time” (Nolan). The corruption that allowed the Joker to thrive in the first place made it impossible for the trio to keep their hands clean as they tried to reestablish order in the city.

Even in a generally upstanding community, acts of terrorism are difficult to cope with. There are many reasons for this, one being the arduous task of responding to them in a timely manner that is both effective and just. Gotham’s leaders and heroes face this dilemma when the Joker begins his reign of terror, just as the Bush Administration did after the foreign strike on the U.S. in 2001. Several tactics from that presidency were widely questioned or condemned, such as entering into foreign wars, using enhanced interrogation techniques, and implementing invasive surveillance programs. Some critics of The Dark Knight have claimed it has a neoconservative slant that supports the aforementioned strategies. Others have disagreed, saying the movie is about “the need for public resoluteness in the face of terrorism… the inherent limitations of relying on vigilantism,” and “reaffirming law, legal institutions, and popular courage” (Ip 211). Commenting on The Dark Knight’s politics, Nolan denied the presence of an intentional bias saying “We just write from the perspective of the world we live in, what interests us and frightens us” (Svetkey).

Regardless of the filmmakers’ aim or angle, the world created in The Dark Knight is clearly analogous to the present-day United States in terms of its struggles with morally ambiguous leadership. Like the Bush Administration, Batman uses invasive, secretive security measures to fight terrorism. In the film’s third act, he uses an advanced high frequency generator that accesses every cellphone in Gotham. This device helps him defeat the Joker, but does the end justify the intrusive means? As his friend and colleague Lucius Fox says, the tool is “beautiful, unethical, dangerous” (Nolan). Fox believes it is wrong for Batman to use such a powerful invention to essentially spy on millions of people, even if his intentions are good. This is not the only time Batman’s techniques are questionable. There are multiple instances earlier in the film in which he uses violent interrogation tactics. For example, he deliberately injures a mob boss to get information from him, and he brutally beats up the Joker after Dent and his girlfriend, Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal), are kidnapped. In these scenes, viewers may be reminded of alleged torture committed by U.S. agents, one of the extreme methods used for gathering intelligence in the War on Terror. While the specific tactics are different, the general idea is not: use violence to get important details needed to protect citizens. And just as many Americans denounced the government’s stance on torture, audience members may recoil at the sight of Batman using inhumane force for interrogative purposes.

Conclusion

The ethical problems of surveillance and torture are just two elements of the film that may feel familiar to a post-9/11 audience. There are distinct parallels between Gotham and the U.S. found throughout The Dark Knight’s superhero storytelling. The Joker’s actions characterize him as a terrorist, while in the narrative of early 21st-century America, terrorists – both domestic and foreign – are the main villains. Acts of extravagant violence cause anxiety and tension to rule Gotham. Millions are left on edge, wondering when and what the Joker’s next move will be. In the days, months, and years after 9/11, U.S. citizens have dealt with similar worries. The last decade saw a country suffering from national post-traumatic stress disorder, filled with “psycho-political fears” and concerns about the potential for future attacks (Kolenic 1023). To quell the nation’s dread, government heads, like the protectors of Gotham, employed plans of questionable moral quality. Whether they were noble dark knights, like Nolan’s hero, or simply crooked politicians is up for debate. What is not is The Dark Knight’s connection to post-9/11 culture. It is a reflection of a wounded nation’s problematic road to recovery.

Sources

Ip, John. "The Dark Knight's War on Terrorism." Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law. (2011): 209-29. Print.

Kolenic, Anthony J. "Madness in the Making: Creating and Denying Narratives from Virginia Tech to Gotham City." Journal of Popular Culture. 42.6 (2009): 1023-39. Print.

Nolan, Christopher, dir. The Dark Knight. Writ. Jonathan Nolan, Perf. Christian Bale, and Heath Ledger. Warner Bros., 2008. Film. 31 Oct 2013.

Svetkey, Benjamin. "Q A Director's Chair." Entertainment Weekly. 01 Aug 2008: n. page.

The Dark Knight: A Post-9/11 Tale (Part Three)

In my last semester of college, I completed a writing portfolio entitled "Exploring Modern American Culture through Contemporary Cinema." It contained four essays dissecting four recent films. I started with Christopher Nolan's dark epic The Dark Knight (2008). The third part of that essay is below. I will post a new portfolio excerpt every day. Previous posts: Part One, Part Two.
 

 The Dark Knight: A Post-9/11 Tale

Gotham: A City in Need

Long before the Joker’s ascension, Gotham was city notorious for its corruption. That corruption was what inspired Bruce Wayne to don the batsuit in the first place. In Batman Begins, the titular hero returns to his hometown after a long absence, a massive goal weighing on his mind: restore Gotham to decency. At the start of the second film, we learn he was largely successful; between Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, crime rates have gone down, the once unscrupulous police force has started to turn around, and Gothamites are slowly taking on the responsibility of keeping their city safe.

The Joker sees all of this, and he is not pleased. He doubts Gotham’s ability – and humanity’s, in general – to be truly good. In an attempt to break Batman’s spirit and turn him against the strict moral code he follows, the Joker condemns the city’s inhabitants, declaring: “their morals, their code – it’s a bad joke, dropped at the first sign of trouble. They’re only as good as the world allows them to be. I’ll show you. When the chips are down, these – these civilized people, they’ll eat each other” (Nolan). He tests this hypothesis repeatedly, terrorizing citizens with a variety of horrific threats. For example, in his first threat, which is broadcast on the Gotham City News network, the Joker announces that for every day Batman does not reveal his true identity, someone will die. And just as he says, he’s a man of his word (Nolan). This threat alone sends the city into a frenzy. Even more warnings come later, each pushing the civilians a little closer to utter depravity. The Gothamites turn on their leaders and each other in their tense, frightened state. By the end of the film, however, the citizens’ goodness prevails over their crueler survival instincts, much to the Joker’s surprise and dismay.

Though the Joker’s radical philosophy does not triumph, he does, through his terrorist acts, coerce the citizens to do terrible things to each other. This can be seen when he demands the death of Coleman Reese (Joshua Harto), a Wayne Enterprises accountant who asserts he knows who Batman really is. Deciding his cat-and-mouse game with the Caped Crusader is too much fun to give up, the Joker gives the people of Gotham one hour to kill Reese, or else he will blow up a hospital. The Gothamites are so on edge, so fearful of the Joker, that they make several attempts on Reese’s life. This sequence displays the acute anxiety that inevitably arises when a community is struck with unexpected large-scale violence. Though magnified and dramatized, the emotions of Gotham’s citizens are not dissimilar to those experienced by Americans in the years after 9/11.

In the years after the attacks, there has been a “widespread sense of crisis” in the U.S. as people see few solutions to what seem like never-ending problems of political, social, and economic turmoil (Baum 267). Unlike in The Dark Knight, this apprehension has not caused constant fear of inter-citizen violence among all socioeconomic groups. In the film, Gotham’s entire population lives in daily fear of death, either by the Joker’s hands or those of their fellow citizens. Despite an atmosphere of unease, U.S. society has never faced the dire life-or-death situations seen in the movie, which lead to monstrous actions by everyday people. However, this does not mean the post-9/11 culture of fear and anxiety has not produced unethical behavior among citizens. For example, issues of xenophobia, particularly against those of Middle Eastern descent, plagued the nation for some time after 9/11. They even continue today, with several attacks on Muslim homes and mosques documented last year, all carried out by non-Muslims (Belnart). It seems that in real life, just as in The Dark Knight, the threat of terrorism has the power to lead to societal disunity. The everyday tensions and prejudices built up out of fear may not be as dramatic as the gunshots the Joker encourages, but they have just as much power to keep society from functioning as a united whole.

Sources

Baum, Bruce. "The Dark Knight (Warner Brothers Pictures, 2008)." New Political Science. 31.2 (2009): 267-69. Print.

Belnart, Peter. "A Quiet Campaign of Violence Against American Muslims." Newsweek. 20 Aug 2012: n. page. Web. 16 Nov. 2013. .

Nolan, Christopher, dir. Batman Begins. Writ. David S. Goyer, Christopher Nolan, Perf. Christian Bale, and Liam Neeson. Warner Bros., 2005. Film. 16 Nov 2013.

Nolan, Christopher, dir. The Dark Knight. Writ. Jonathan Nolan, Perf. Christian Bale, and Heath Ledger. Warner Bros., 2008. Film. 31 Oct 2013.

 

The Dark Knight: A Post-9/11 Tale (Part Two)

In my last semester of college, I completed a writing portfolio entitled "Exploring Modern American Culture through Contemporary Cinema." It contained four essays dissecting four recent films. I started with Christopher Nolan's dark epic The Dark Knight (2008). The second part of that essay is below. Read part one here. I will post a new portfolio excerpt every day.

  

 The Dark Knight: A Post-9/11 Tale

The Joker: An Agent of Chaos

The demented and mysterious Joker is The Dark Knight’s fiendish antagonist, as well as the catalyst for its culturally symbolic story. This well-known figure from Batman mythology is given an interesting and terrifying twist in Nolan’s post-9/11 tale. In his metaphorical world, the Joker represents terrorism, unhinged and unrestrained. Terrorism is a difficult word to define; though commonly used in the media and by the general citizenry, there has been no consensus about its meaning (Williamson 38). The term is usually related to the use of violence to send an ideological message, often a political one. In The Dark Knight, the Joker spends most of his time trying to demolish the very notion of principled behavior, so viewing him as a terrorist promoting an ideology might seem far-fetched; but, as much as he denies it, the Joker is motivated by one particular worldview. As he creepily tells Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), he is an “agent of chaos,” claiming it is “fair.” He also manipulatively encourages Dent to “upset the established order” (Nolan). The Joker upholds anarchy and amorality; this is his creed. He is a terrorist because he forces it on a city with violent actions that create panic in the streets.

The United States is of course faced with two main categories of terrorism: foreign and domestic. With the 9/11 attacks, foreign terrorists set the stage for the War on Terror and a culture of anxiety, but in the years since, a number of violent acts have instead been planned and sometimes even carried out by domestic terrorists. There have been at least sixty “publicly known” terror plots since 9/11, with an increasing number being planned within U.S. borders (The Heritage Foundation). There have also been a number of mass shootings in the past decade, not always considered acts of terrorism, but definitely adding to the fear of seemingly spontaneous violence that permeates modern American culture. With this in mind, the Joker clearly works best as a representation of domestic rather than foreign terrorism. This is due to his loner status and his lack of loyalty to another government, or any government for that matter. Viewers could interpret the Joker’s reign of terror as what might happen if a mass shooter was given immense power and endless resources. Driven by a twisted mentality, he kills for personal reasons, thinking he is sending a message every citizen of Gotham needs to hear. That message is the superiority of irrationality, senselessness, and pandemonium.

Sources

The Heritage Foundation. (2013). 60 Terrorist Plots Since 9/11: Continued Lessons in Domestic Counterterrorism. Washington, DC: Steven P. Bucci, James Jay Carafano, and Jessica Zuckerman.

Nolan, Christopher, dir. The Dark Knight. Writ. Jonathan Nolan, Perf. Christian Bale, and Heath Ledger. Warner Bros., 2008. Film. 31 Oct 2013.

Williamson, Myra. Terrorism, War and International Law: The Legality of the Use of Force Against Afghanistan in 2001. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2009. 38-40. Print.