“The beginning of The Dark Knight you see
that Bruce Wayne and his Batman persona have
matured. He’s really the fully formed Batman
from the comics.
And so you’re looking at a character who
has embarked on this crusade, he is looking
for an end to it, and sees in the person of
Harvey Dent the new district attorney in Gotham,
he sees the response that he was looking for,
he sees the legitimate face of his campaign
being taken over by Harvey Dent. And I think
that pleases him for a couple of reasons.
It pleases him in our story because this was
his original aim, to see the good of Gotham
rise again. But it also pleases him I think
because he sees that he might be able to stop
being Batman, he might be able to go back
to having a relatively normal existence.”
If at the start of Batman Begins we found
Bruce Wayne and Gotham City in a state of
insufficiency, the beginning of The Dark Knight
sees our protagonist in a firmly established
position of power. In the time between the
two films, Batman has effectively turned the
tide against the criminal underworld and has
been accepted by its law enforcement as a
symbol in their fight against organized crime.
With the mob on the run the world is seemingly
on the cusp of being flipped back on its feet.
But it’s exactly this sense of sufficiency
in power, that hides a latent naivety and
blindness to the unintentional consequences
of Bruce’s actions.
But he’s also in a place where he’s having
to question, having to gage the response to
his presence in Gotham that he’s seeing.
He’s seeing a rise in copycats and vigilantes
and all kinds of things going on, and escalation
of the war with organized crime. And so, there
are a lot of potentially negative consequences
of his crusade brewing in Gotham at the beginning
of the film.”
And so, if Bruce’s story in Batman Begins
maps closely onto the story of the Fall of
Man from the Garden of Eden, The Dark Knight
more closely embodies the narrative of the
Tower of Babel.
Having survived Ra’s al Ghul’s flood and
having found a renewed sense of purpose and
courage in the face of fear, Bruce and the
people of Gotham city set out to reestablish
order by completely eradicating organized
crime in one giant trial.
But as in the story of the Tower of Babel,
this sudden shift towards extreme order is
marked by a sense of excess and hubris, in
which Bruce and the other protagonists are
in danger of losing themselves in their newfound
power.
Besides the emergence of armed vigilantes,
we find this hubris in Gordon’s willful
blindness towards the corrupt cops in his
department and in Bruce’s use of the Batman,
who in essence becomes an extra-judicial arm
of the law acting with impunity, which becomes
abundantly clear in the forceful extradition
of Lau from Hong Kong.
On top of that, this drive towards total order
and control is shown in Bruce’s advanced
spying technology, that allows him to listen
into and visually locate any call, giving
him the ability to be anywhere at any given
time. But we can also find it in Bruce himself,
as he aims to manipulate events in such a
way that the final return to the harmony of
the Garden with Rachel can take place. But
like in the story of the Tower of Babel, these
unconscious pretensions to Godhood lead the
protagonists to believe that there is no limit
to their mission, no end to what Batman can,
and cannot endure.
As the ultimate manifestation of this blindness
to excess, Nolan introduces us to Harvey Dent.
Gotham’s new district attorney is in many
ways the person Bruce could never be. As a
fearless representative of pure order and
justice, he seemingly embodies the image of
the would be king at the center of his realm.
He’s Bruce without the trauma, a man before
the fall, pristine in his existence, and he
has therefore replaced Bruce in his union
with his feminine counterpart.
But Harvey’s seeming perfection is also
indicative of a latent blindness to his inner
animality and his capacity for evil. In his
devotion to complete order, justice and control,
he quite literally represses the other side
of the coin.
There’s something right from the beginning
you see in him that’s questionable. You
see a sort of vaulting ambition, you see a
little germ of darkness there, that can and
therefore will in this kind of story, rise
up and turn into something ugly.”
And so, instead of dealing with an insufficiency,
Bruce is now forced to overcome his excess,
his pretensions to Godhood. He has to lower
Gotham’s inflated order and face the consequences
of his actions.
And when pushed to its extreme, when repressed
to its limit, these consequences and this
latent tension of chaos and animality will
inevitably rise up, and explode…
And that was really the hook that got me interested
in continuing the story. I wanted to see,
you know, what that criminal response would
be. It’s very much personified by the presence
of the Joker. And the way in which the conventional
mobsters of Gotham unleash the Joker really,
I think is kind of similar to the way Bruce
Wayne, you know, channels his darkest impulses
into the figure of Batman.
Like Ra’s Al Ghul, The Joker is a manifestation
of a part of Bruce’s and Gotham’s unacknowledged
Shadow. In essence, the Joker is upside down
Batman. If Bruce, Gordon and Harvey all embody
the spirit of order, justice and meaning,
the Joker embraces meaningless chaos and animality.
“I had an idea of what the Joker would be
in the world we created of Batman Begins.
And to me it was creating a sort of psychologically
credible anarchist, a force of anarchy, a
force of chaos, a purposeless criminal, a
psychopath. To me that was the most, that
is the most frightening form of evil, the
enemy who has no rules, the enemy who is not
out for anything, who can’t be understood,
can only be fought.”
To visually establish the Joker as this cosmic
force of self-negating subversion, Nolan shows
him tricking his fellow bank robbers into
killing each other until he is the only one
left. The Joker embodies meaninglessness,
and so he correspondingly lacks any kind of
identity or backstory. And to add to this
marginal nature Nolan has him participate
in the imagery of animality, as a wild dog
hanging out of a car, and as a serpent, marked
by the rapid movements of his tongue.
But the Joker’s metaphysical essence is
most succinctly manifested in his role as
a clown. As Jonathan Pageau has observed,
the clown is a trickster who aims to make
a mockery out of the established norms and
categories, to flip the world on its head.
And so every time the Joker appears, he subverts
and turns things upside down. In doing so,
he aims is to completely dismantle the order
in Gotham, and expose people to his worldview,
that chaos is the only truth and that the
faith in their ascent is one big farce.
But in his role as the Shadow, the Joker also
embodies the potentiality for a positive transformation.
Traditionally, the role of the jester or the
fool was to mock the kings and queens of his
court, to expose them to their excesses, to
deflate their egos and to remind them that
despite their great power and eminence, they
remain but mortal human beings of flesh and
blood.
And in the same manner, Nolan utilizes the
Joker as a psychological force, exposing Bruce
and Gotham to their excesses of order and
control. Because how is it that this fight
for a transparent and lawful order is headed
by an extra-judicial and anonymous vigilante?
Bruce has covered himself against chaos and
death to such an extent that he’s lost the
way towards his center and is thus actually
responsible for dragging the city down into
hell. And so, to stop the Joker’s chaos
from spreading any further, Bruce is pressured
to take off his covering, to abandon his role
as Batman.
It seemed sort of the ideal way to get to
the core of Batman and the paradox of Batman.
Because he’s somebody who’s essentially
doing bad things for good reason. He’s using
you know force and vigilantism and intimidation,
but he’s trying to do in the service of
good and I think it’s an interesting place
to have your hero.”
But of course, the Joker’s goal is to exploit
this flaw to its extreme, as he aims to regress
Bruce and the city back to the point of a
complete loss of self-confidence, to the brink
of desperation and apathy. And so, rather
than marking a move towards integration, Bruce’s
ultimate decision to give into the Joker’s
demands, becomes the image of a cowering down
in front of his Shadow, of an unwillingness
to face the reality of his being, and of a
misguided hope that by abandoning his mission,
his problems would simply disappear.
It’s only through the actions of Harvey
Dent, who proclaims himself to be the Batman,
that Bruce overcomes his urge to lay down
his arms and is pushed to continue his journey.
But because Dent’s plan to trick the Joker
is born out of a sense of overconfidence and
hubris, Bruce’s participation in this scheme
is simultaneously an indicator of his continued
failing to come to terms with his excess in
an appropriate manner.
And so, even though they finally manage to
capture the Joker, the situation is rapidly
turned on its head as both Harvey and Rachel
are kidnapped as a consequence. This inability
to effectively contain his nemesis, exposes
Bruce to the limits of his power… If the
Joker is this destructive force which seeks
to regress Bruce into passivity, he also comes
to represent a force of temptation, the danger
of Bruce losing himself in his excess.
As the embodiment of chaos and animality,
the Joker sees order and moral goodness as
mere circumstantial and hypocritical constructs,
veiling people’s true animalistic nature…
And so, instead of forcing Bruce into submission,
he now tempts him to fully embrace his excess,
to indulge in animality and to unleash his
inner capacity for chaos.
Similarly, the Joker also seduces the larger
established order into becoming tyrannical.
He taunts the detective into beating him up,
he tricks Gordon into shooting the hostages
instead of the criminals. And finally, he
tempts all of Gotham to let go of the rule
of law by murdering one of their own citizens
in cold blood. All to prove that deep down
inside, everyone is an animal, an agent of
chaos, waiting to be unleashed…
“I think the Joker understands Batman, or
feels he understands Batman, possibly in a
way that Bruce Wayne doesn’t entirely understand
himself. And, I think in the interrogation
scene in the middle of the film, between the
Joker and Batman, it’s interesting to see
how the Joker is able to get under his skin.
We like to think of our heroes, our heroic
figures, as being immune to those kind of
mind games. But of course, we all know that
Batman is the most tortured and psychologically
unbalanced in a way, of these heroes. And
so, he’s very vulnerable to the threat that
the Joker poses, and we try and continually
remind the audience of that during the course
of the film.”
Of course, the ultimate example of this vulnerability
to the shadow is found in the transformation
of Harvey Dent. As the representation of seemingly
pristine order, Harvey has actually repressed
his animality and his capacity for chaos to
such an extent, that he becomes highly susceptible
to its corrupting influence
And so, when he’s pushed to his limit by
the tragic death of Rachel, Harvey’s being
doesn’t move towards integration, but is
rather, and quite literally split in two,
transforming him from Gotham’s idealist
white knight, into the tyrannical and arbitrary
Two-Face, who abides only by the law of random
chance.
As the Joker does things in the story it tests
the characters, it forces them to confront
things about themselves. I very much like
that in terms of its approach to villainy,
because I think it puts it on to the characters
that we already know. So, you’re seeing
characters that you’ve come to know forced
into very uncomfortable decisions and very
paradoxical situations. And it tells you something
about those characters, it reveals them in
sort of new and interesting ways.”
“Well I think the force of the Joker, the
character I like to say sort of cuts through
the story like the shark in Jaws, just he’s
a force to be reacted to.”
And I think that makes the Joker become a
very, very unpredictable character. I think
at times you really do feel he’s prepared
to do absolutely anything, so that the physicality
of the story is all geared towards getting
to a point near the end of the movie where
you’re actually concerned that the whole
city will go down, you’re actually concerned
that this guy is going to completely destabilize
that society.”
As this breakdown of order reaches its apogee,
so too Bruce’s mental state is on the verge
of collapse. Having regressed into apathy
after the death of Rachel and the maiming
of Harvey Dent, Bruce wonders whether Batman
has done more harm than good. And so, in an
effort to write his wrongs he rescues the
very person who threatened to pull him from
his position of power, and sets out, once
again, to confront his shadow in one final
struggle for the fate of his being.
This climactic battle simultaneously plays
itself out on the societal level. The Joker
has placed explosives on two ferries, one
of which carries law abiding citizens, the
other transporting a group of incarcerated
criminals. Each ferry carries the detonator
of the explosives from the neighboring ship,
which they will have to trigger if they wish
to survive.
Reflecting Bruce’s internal struggle, the
question is whether the law-abiding citizens
as the image of the center and of order will
adopt tyranny and echo Bruce’s embrace of
his excess, or whether the convicts, as the
manifestation of the edge will indulge in
their capacity for mayhem and become markers
of Bruce’s regression into animality? Or,
as a final option, whether these two forces,
will finally come into harmony and triumph
over the subversion that’s threatening to
make the city tear itself apart?
The opportunity you get with working in a
particular genre, it allows you, affords you
the opportunity to explore things you’re
interested in or afraid of, neuroses you have,
worries you have about the way the world is.
It allows you to explore them in a very sort
of exaggerated manner in a way that you can
really tap into the collective fears that
we have as a society, particularly in the
case of Batman. You have the opportunity through
his environment, through Gotham, to really
offer a really dark reflection of the society
we live in. That way going through the process
you hope to come with something that will
resonate with the audience, that will touch
something in them.”
If in Batman Begins, Bruce was tasked with
saving Gotham from being drowned by a flood
as a manifestation of insufficiency, in The
Dark Knight he ultimately realizes that this
time he has to save the city from excessive
order and hubris…
His victory over the Joker thus lies in the
letting go of his power as the central figure
in the fight against organized crime, by uncovering
himself of his pretensions to Godhood, and
by placing his faith in the goodness of the
people of Gotham.
This integration is likewise reflected in
the ultimate triumph of the people on the
ferries, who similarly utilize the realization
of their capacity for tyranny and chaos and
turn it on itself, transforming a flaw into
a virtue, and thereby saving the city from
descending into death.
“Well I think particularly when you’re
dealing with an iconic character, superhero
character like Batman, there’s a very direct
relationship between the physicality of the
character, to the iconography of the character,
and the internal state, you know the emotional
state of the character.”
“The interesting thing about Batman as a
figure is that, he’s driven by very dark
things, there’s a lot of rage, a lot of
anger that really motivates him. But he’s
trying to channel that into something good.
After his triumph over the Joker, Bruce has
to go through one final transformation by
taking responsibility for the downfall, the
crimes and the ultimate death of Harvey Dent.
By 
willingly covering himself in sin, he effectively
comes to terms with his human fallibility,
as he lowers himself from the top of the hierarchy
as Gotham’s hero, to the very bottom, as
its most wanted criminal.
In carrying this burden, reaffirming his role
as the dark knight and watchful guardian of
the city, Bruce has seemingly saved Gotham’s
soul.
“One of the story elements I’m continually
drawn to is the protagonist who suffers. I
think if that comes from inside themselves
somehow, if they are somehow responsible for
their own predicament, I find that very evocative.
So I think with all the stories I’ve tried
to tell, I’ve always quite liked having
a central character who’s in some way responsible
for his own situation.”
But if this self-sacrifice secures the ascent
of the city, it comes at the cost of Bruce’s
being. Even though his willing covering of
sin is a marker of his psychological transformation,
by choosing to hide the truth about Harvey
Dent, Bruce shows that despite his victory,
he still lacks faith in people. And by extension,
he lacks faith in himself. He has lost Rachel
and his hope of a return to the Garden has
therefore been shattered. And so instead of
moving upwards, Bruce descends down into darkness,
away from his center into exile and symbolic
death. His self-sacrifice is therefore punitive
in nature, and the lie upon which it rests
becomes the foundation for a false ascent,
a foundation that will come crashing down
in the final chapter of Bruce’s journey.
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