The Dark Heart of The Dark Knight

Rating: Null/10 (31 January 2014)

Batman is no longer just a superhero. He's a study in damaged psychology. So too are his rogue's gallery of villains. Part of what prepared me for The Dark Knight was the work that the Nolan brothers began in their previous film Batman Begins, which threw away the laser light show of the earlier films and got down to the business of exploring how and why Bruce Wayne created this bat persona in the first place. That movie explored his motivation in a logical sense by returning Batman to the film noir world from which the character has his origins. The beauty of The Dark Knight is that, having already explored the origins of the Batman character, Nolan can now build a story that is free of heavy introductory elements.
Having explored Batman's personality in the previous film, The Dark Knight, for the most part, moves Batman just left of center so that the story can focus on the psychology of his chief adversary. This portrait of The Joker is more or less grounded in reality. Unlike previous incarnations of the character, in which he is an established fixture in Gotham City, this Joker seems to have no past. The film throws away the conventional approach to The Joker and attempts a new approach. We usually see him as a harlequin in clown makeup who has his own private mob of clown-faced goons and a bag of incendiary tricks.
In The Dark Knight, those elements are gone. The Joker drops into Gotham City seemingly out of nowhere. No one in Gotham City has any idea who this man is, and when the story is over we know next to nothing about him. What passes for a back-story is a running gag in which he threatens his victims with a knife while regaling various versions of the story about how he got the scars on his cheeks. Whether or not any of these stories are true hardly matters. We never find out anything about his background. We don't know why he wears makeup or why he commits atrocities. What we come to understand about these things is born from a bizarre pseudo-philosophy that has less to do with truth than from the fact that, for the most part, he's just yanking our chain.
Like Hannibal Lecter, this Joker's effectiveness lies in how little we know about him. He has no bag of tricks, he hides his face behind a ghastly smear of white, black and red makeup. He speaks with an unnerving Bugs Bunny voice and informs us that "The only sensible way to live in this world is without rules". He is an anarchist. He doesn't want money, or power, or even media attention. He wants to blow stuff up - real good.
As the police and the mob figures in Gotham City try to figure out this menace, Bruce Wayne's butler Alfred (Michael Caine) offers a brilliant theory: "Some men aren't looking for anything logical, like money. They can't be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn." That line stays in our minds and what we come to learn is that The Joker's motivation is bred from the fact that he is excited to toy with Batman, whom he considers an equal. He creates a battle of good and evil with his arch nemesis because he sees the Caped Crusader as a worthy opponent. When the bat asks "Why are you trying to kill me?" the clown can't believe his ears "I'm not trying to kill you. What would I do without you? You complete me!" That has been the point of the battle between Batman and The Joker from the very beginning.
That is the film's great story arc but there is another thread brewing that is just as substantial. Commissioner James Gordon (Gary Oldman), working secretly with Batman but keeping it under wraps, helps the dark knight round up the key figures in the local mob, including an accountant that he must travel all the way to Hong Kong to retrieve. Gordon doesn't know this vigilante's identity and keeps their affiliation under wraps. He's getting the job done, so why complain? This secret alliance helps the public image of District Attorney Harvey Dent who publicly makes a stand against Gotham City's mobsters.
Dent's role in the story creates a much deeper exploration of what corrupts a man's soul. Dent is a do-gooder, a man who stands for truth and justice without ever really understanding what he is up against. When the invisible alliance between he and Gordon and Batman pin the mob to the wall, it opens the door for The Joker to begin his reign of terror. No one really understands The Joker or his motives. He is a loose cannon. He is unpredictable and when one of his bombs takes out Dent's fiancÃ©, Dent himself has his own soul corrupted, he becomes embittered by his love's death and by his own disfigurement which seems to represent the emerging of his own dark nature. Literally two-faced.
These complexities have always been at the heart of Batman both on the page and on the screen. The Batman villains have always had a deeper level, and there has always been a method to their madness. The Dark Knight is the first film the truly examines that madness. It presents both The Joker and Two-Face, not as cartoon villains but as men with deep emotional scars. The Joker is an enigma, operating within a pattern of anarchy that no one can understand nor predict. Two-Face is presented as a tragic hero, a very good man who gets into a situation that brings his darker nature to the surface. In effect, this returns the Batman saga to its film noir roots. The story is dark, its characters have deep emotional complexities and The Dark Knight explores that is a way no film ever has.