The Dark Knight

I’m still kind of reeling, stunned by this, but I’ll jump out on the limb and assert (and later reflect and expand upon the assertion): this is the best American pop/genre film since Silence of the Lambs.

How’s that for pumping up your expectations? More crazy-ass assertions to come on the centrality of anarchy and disorder to great American pop . . .

29 thoughts on “The Dark Knight”

  1. just back from it. more later in response to reynolds’ feverish ramblings to come, but for now let me say that i thought it was pretty good, but not anything earth-shatteringly great. if it had ended 30 minutes before it did it would have been really great, but it just kept going. heath ledger is (was?) dynamite.

  3. Yeah, I’ve been busy at school, and too tired at night. My enthusiasm remains for the film, and I promise to get to a fuller review….

  4. OK:
    the promised but probably-not-terribly-anticipated comment hyperbolizing around and about The Dark Knight and American pop. I just listened to a decent, if too somber for my likes, chat between the reliably-great Elvis Mitchell and Christopher Nolan (KCRW’s program/podcast “The Treatment”), and I may crib a thing or two from it even as I think my investment goes in somewhat different directions. I’ll avoid overt spoilers, but—maybe hold off if you’re still planning to see it?

    First, I’ve sat on my immediate-upon-viewing enthusiasm for over a week now, and I feel a great need to see it again. Some of that excitement has bubbled off, the initial contact high reduced: it was, as David Denby complained, full of climaxes, and while never feeling draggy did feel long. Or, rather, it felt very “And then, and then, and then;” not a bad thing, as unlike Denby I felt the film cycling around, throwing small (and sneaky) twists our way, and upping the ante each go-round. Still.

    But I also think, despite the appearance that TDK hits all the beats of a conventional superhero film, right down to and epitomized by its final “showdown(s),” the film works a number of intriguing deceptions, a prestidigitation which catches the audience committed to seeing the expected plot-beats while the other hand sneaks an ambivalence into the details, allows for contrary readings and confusions. As an example, cribbed from Nolan’s chat, in one later scene Alfred (the reliable Michael Caine) performs an act which seems a kind of mercy, a kind of generous salvation of his charge Bruce Wayne from a certain emotional revelation…. but watching Alfred’s face, or thinking through how his character performed through the film, there’s a sense that the act was equally manipulative, as much a means to ensure a certain course of action as it was to protect a noble love. Not to get too cagy here, but in that scene one could easily see (and embrace) the Romantic edge of all this Dark-Knight kerfuffle: lost loves, noble sacrifices, everyone in the hero’s circle also heroically embracing his best interests, serving their better angels. OR… just as easily, but far less embraceable, one could see Alfred removing a potential obstacle to the continued commitment of Wayne to the Batman franchise – I mean this in both inter- and intra-textual senses: a character perhaps (in a sort of “Machiavellian” manner, according to Nolan) pushing Wayne along toward the role he might otherwise give up, as well as a filmmaker carefully deploying plot and character to keep the series alive. (More on this meta-frame in a moment.)

    As in many of Nolan’s films, I think there’s some hoodwinking going on—I just think it’s better-disguised, less overt in this film.

    But to my first exaggerated claim: the centrality of anarchy. I’ll do this quickly, or quickly for a virtual windbag like me:

    –An American distrust of disorder is as old as conceptions of America itself. Early lit finds the corruption of disorder in the mob, this vague sense that democracy is as prone to chaos as to the good, and even when the symbolics shift away from the mob toward certain figures of destructive force and charisma (Ahab, Ras the Destroyer), the key point that Batman mythology seems to reinforce is that old chestnut: doing good can enable forces which refute/resist the good. I certainly think this film could be mapped via that dualism. I’m less interested in such a model, though.

    –Instead of a two-faced American dream, the good Batman counterposed with a destructive Joker, and the vanquishing of the latter a mechanism for purifying the former, I’m struck by the way Harvey Dent gets deployed in this film. He literally becomes Two-face, becomes a force so bound to its vision of the good that no meaningful morality can emerge from it. Why is Two-face in this film? I think (see above) it’s a kind of magic trick; watching the (expected) moral dualism play out in his story, and in that final showdown between Dent, Gordon, and Batman (and followed by the film-ending soliloquy which seems, quite unsatisfactorily, to drive home that vision of a purified Knight flirting with darkness but really a force for light), we can forget what we’ve just previously seen, over the course of two-plus hours: a disruption which does not pit good versus evil, nor test good’s mettle against evil, but simply refutes again and again and again notions of origin, motive, purpose. The Joker abides. In his penultimate showdown scene, he ironically tosses out the trailer-teased line “Here [beat] we [beat] go”—and the film closes down on him, shuts down his disruptive force, denies the pleasures of his topsy-turvy energy. Ostensibly, the film contains his energy, with the (obligatory) showdown. But our last shot of him is, if I recall right, a medium-shot of his face, and he’s staring at the camera/Batman/us, claiming this and that—and the camera is literally upside-down, in sync with his worldview. We’re then told he’s to be incarcerated, but he’s not dead, he’s still laughing. Etc. We jump to the other story, to Two-face and another showdown, and we leave the Joker cackling over the abyss.

    From his entrance, the Joker constantly reminds us of the rules (while in a mask in the opening bank robbery, he makes a joke that he is supposed to shoot the bus driver, a joke which only makes sense a few minutes later, a joke predicated on him following rules which are themselves disruptions of the way things ought to be done, while bank-teller/mob-figure William Fichtner screams at him from the floor about how he’s violating criminal codes and will pay). And the Joker doesn’t really break the rules—he flouts them. He reinforces them, eggs others into the most vicious deployment of them. The Joker’s power is not so much that he resists Order but that he demands the overt, exaggerated deployment of Order until it begins to lose all sense of decorum, morality, clarity. Presto – ta dah! The pencil disappears. People do exactly what they’re supposed to–that’s his wildcard (for the most part).

    In a nutshell, what I’m arguing is: the subversive force of the Joker, in the film and via the film’s savvy deployment (and Ledger’s brilliant performance), is to make us question the foundations of Order not by negation but by affirmation. He’s a comic force par excellence; he doesn’t resist the good, he amplifies it. I could insert the obligatory connection to post-9/11 sociopolitical sensibilities, and I do think this is a great post-9/11 pop film, but I also think it’s a more far-reaching critique of American pop morality.

    –As Nolan notes too briefly (and then lets go, without unpacking the notion), the Joker is inviting Batman (and us, I think) to enjoy what they’re doing. Batman, of course, can’t—he’s gotta whisper, he’s gotta be tortured, he’s gotta blah blah blah. But the anarchic heart of this film—the anarchy at the heart of great American pop—is that we don’t just enjoy the flirtation with destruction in so much of our pop art but that the core of our pop art is itself a kind of dangerous ordered destructiveness. I have in mind most explicitly the vicious resolve of Ethan Edwards (and later, even more ambiguously, Travis Bickle) and the bald licentious lust for disorder embodied in Hannibal Lecter. In these two examples—and I’d add the Joker/TDK–the enjoyment of a destructive force which cannot really be explained (away) is crucial to the how the film works (as plot, on audiences, in American culture). That destructive force organizes the film—it is not something other, not a monstrous interruption of an otherwise-ordered world—it’s a bald embodiment of a morally-just end shackled to unmediated means: to rescue the kidnapped daughter, to save the potential victim. The films to some degree close off the pleasures, restore the necessary muted order, disguise by displacing these engines of a pleasurable destructive order (Ethan left outside, framed by the door; Hannibal on the phone with Clarice, but out of country, moving into the crowd; the Joker upside-down but on a hook, left laughing as we turn our attention to a more clear-cut Two-face[d] conclusion, and the con-artist humdrum of Gordon’s last voiceover…).

    And I’m losing my train of thought. But okay: I think I’m at least confused enough to get a conversation going. The pleasures of the film are NOT in their hyperbolized moral dualisms, nor even in their (too-easy?) recognition of the ambivalent boundary-crossing between Good and Evil (between Order and Chaos) in its plots and plotting — the pleasure is that Evil is besides the point (whether The Searchers‘ Scar, Silence‘s Jamie Gumb, or the mob/ChineseBusinessman/corrupt police — or Harvey Dent — of TDK). The work of Order is not mirrored by evil nor simply shackled to a consequent evil/chaos; when enjoyed fully, the ideal of Order/Good is the engine of anarchic fun in American pop.

    Plus, may I say? Ledger’s Joker, wearing his white nurse linens, half-skipping/half-shuffling away from a hospital, thumbing repeatedly at a cellphone that won’t quite work before bombs burst in the background, is one of the great unnervingly wonderful images of the last decade…

  5. First, for someone who doesn’t like Andy Warhol, your post makes a great case for his brilliance, but that’s another story.

    SPOILERS

    I thought The Dark Knight was little more than the emperor’s new clothes—awkwardly constructed, miscast, soulless, poorly edited, and, well, a bit boring. That Alfred scene toward the end; it didn’t really pull at me on first viewing but I buy the way you (Mitchell, Nolan) open up contradictory readings. I didn’t connect to the post-9/11 resonances (or, at least, there wasn’t anything necessarily fresh about them), although I think that too is a totally legitimate approach to talking about the film. I certainly can’t say I was stunned by it.

    Sure, Nolan mirrors Michael Mann with cool, sleek, metallic, chilly art direction; but Mann’s films tend to have an actual pulse with characters complex enough to keep audiences away from the cinemas (Memento is the only film of Nolan’s that I can enthusiastically recommend). TDK flirts with moral ambiguity but said ambiguity is spelled with capital letters whenever possible (its thematics—morals, ethics, codes of honor, meh and blah—are mostly pummeled into our heads). Batman, and Bale’s one-note performance, lacks any notion of character (he’s troubled, he recognizes his vigilantism is too dark to save the day, he needs a white knight the people can believe in, he’d like the girl now please . . . yeah, that about sums up his character). In other words, I guess it is hard not to enjoy the Joker’s antics when Batman is such a cipher (noble, yes, but all mask).

    Aaron Eckhart was sorely miscast. After years of playing unctuous corporate types, jerks and overgrown adolescents, it’s hard to take him seriously as a shining, straight arrow (and all that nonsense about his love for Lois Lane; I didn’t believe a word of it). Simply put, Eckhart has made a career in which his face is not to be trusted (at any angle). I can’t think of another actor in his late-thirties/early-forties who could have pulled it off (the movies don’t seem to be interested in white knights and heroes these days). George Clooney would have made a great Harvey Dent, I think, but that’s tad problematic given the history of the franchise (maybe Redford in his heyday, Paul Newman, Harrison Ford . . . Heath Ledger? Cate Blanchett?).

    The big set pieces were less than engaging—fuzzy, dark, confusingly assembled. The opening bank heist had a few humorous moments but forget Michael Mann, Sidney Lumet could have directed circles around Nolan, utilizing a stronger sense of spatial and temporal precision. The scene sequence between the two ferries (one containing, seemingly, every innocent Gotham resident; the other every prisoner) was embarrassing in its literalness and its pandering. For me, all of the chaos and anarchy Mike speaks of is central to this sequence, and, well, I expected some exploding bodies. For a few moments I thought the film was going to confound its audience with an unexpected (or should I say desired) act of pathetic, selfish, fear-infused violence. Here was the film’s true ideological turning point and Nolan and company backed off. From then on everything in the film was little more than empty, Hollywood spectacle. The final set piece in the building construction site (complete with genuine and decoy hostages) was just bad filmmaking. Its puzzling spatial dynamic undercut by baffling infrared surveillance shots (“just this once Master Wayne”). There was even a silly “child in peril” sequence.

    Still, though the film lacks soul and heart, it does have a ripe, red hole at its center and that belongs to Heath Ledger’s compelling performance as Joker. More concept than character, the Joker is an androgynous prankster who brings self-righteous piety down to size (Dionysus with John Wayne Gacy’s smile). I was reminded of Euripides (perhaps it was that fabulous scene Mike references in which the Joker dons a white nurse’s dress) who used cruel gods in his dramatic actions to point up how mortals are forced to work out their destinies for themselves (the Batman myth doesn’t seem all that concerned with actual mortals, but I have to admit I’m not an expert on the comics or the graphic novels). I’m not so sure the film does “clasp down on the Joker, denying the pleasures of his topsy-turvy energy”; the audience with whom I saw the film seemed won over by his anarchic spirit until, and including, the very end. It makes sense that we are literally left hanging in the air in the concluding minutes. The Joker was the center of this universe and proved to be the only true pleasure to be had during the 140 minute running time; the film’s lack of closure concerning the character, coupled with the knowledge of Ledger’s “tragic” death (literal closure), created a frission that couldn’t be matched by anything else.

    Greek myths portrayed a universe full of evil forces, unpredictable change, unsparing living conditions, and the inevitability of death and defeat; the gods (particularly in Euripides) were amoral and indifferent to human concerns over what is just and right. (something tells me there’s a few feet of Ledger on celluloid for Batman Begins Again: Third Time’s the Charm), but I wish the film had bored more deeply and with greater glee into the chaos and disorder the Joker so winningly unleashes. Perhaps we can blame it on Ledger’s untimely exit, but the film felt unfinished to me.

  6. I don’t get the Andy Warhol line–jab?–but spell it out, and I’ll take umbrage or be appreciative.

    Fair read, but a couple quick rejoinders:

    –re Eckhart–you write:

    “After years of playing unctuous corporate types, jerks and overgrown adolescents, it’s hard to take him seriously as a shining, straight arrow (and all that nonsense about his love for Lois Lane; I didn’t believe a word of it). Simply put, Eckhart has made a career in which his face is not to be trusted (at any angle).”

    I think that’s *exactly* why he worked so well for me. From moment one, I’m watching Dent’s virtue as already tinged with an intensity that is scary.

    –re the Joker:

    “the film’s lack of closure concerning the character, coupled with the knowledge of Ledger’s “tragic” death (literal closure), created a frission that couldn’t be matched by anything else.”

    Really nice point. Sharp.

    –Overall:
    I think the film’s overstated characters and overstated plot conventions were crucial parts of this universe. I love me a film that goes in other directions, but (as with those Greeks you note) what we’re starting with is a pretty determined, even deterministic set of generic conventions. What fascinated me about the Joker and the way he energizes the film is that Nolan/Ledger/et al. don’t sidestep or transcend or ignore such conventions but inhabit and embody them in ways more subversive. To me, to this viewer. (And I’ll refer again to Silence o.t.L.–another film playing fully within the premises of its genre yet, while there, reinvigorating a sense of what those premises could be, might mean.)

    But we see it differently. So far, Arnab likes, but no big deal; Mike too-heatedly likes; Jeff disparages. Others?

  7. i liked it more than might have appeared from my first brief comment. i was just set up by the reviewers to expect something utterly amazing, and i didn’t get that. but i enjoyed it thoroughly–did not look at my watch once till the 2 hour mark. i think the film is a little slack–some of this may be due to the demands that the summer blockbuster genre places on it, some due to over-plotting (the whole hong kong subplot could have been dispensed with)–but it does some new things with the genre.

    i won’t repeat mike’s points about order/chaos but i will say that the dualisms that he dismisses at the end of his review are not as dull as he suggests. the last scene may sell this out a little, but i think the film quite seriously asks us to consider whether batman really is a hero. it’s par for the course in superhero stories for the public to turn on the supermartyr, but here wayne himself is not convinced (and is himself part of the glad-handing super-rich political network), and as the joker tips him towards the edge his weapons are those of the establishment: surveillance, conspiracy, deception, secret arms programs. the joker, with his gasoline and matches, illustrates a point that i think michael made about the previous movie: batman’s powers are those of immense wealth and the technology it commands. there’s more than one reason why he can’t be a man of the people. (tony stark, on the other hand, at least enjoys being a millionaire playboy.) yes, the last scene pushes the martyr frame (perhaps a bow to genre) but i think what goes before makes it harder for us to buy it: i’m not sure i like wayne or batman, or that the film wants me to.

    so, far from a great film, not even a perfect summer blockbuster, but i think the things that keep it from the latter make it more interesting, and that it might even aspire to the former in the context of a mid-july release is a very good thing.

    and, of course, there’s ledger’s joker.

  8. In the New York Times today:

    “Here is where Dionysus comes in, the brutal egoist of “The Bacchae” who so insists on being acknowledged as a god that he sends his most devoted servant into a frenzy in which she drunkenly beheads her own skeptical son. At the festival Alan Cumming’s performance sketched the Bacchanalian divinity with campy glee, as if bent on sexual mischief. But I think of the play differently: the only way to shape any social order, Euripides seems to insist, is to acknowledge that Dionysus — Dionysus in the broadest sense, embodying unruly desires, unseemly threats and bewildering confusions — can neither be eliminated nor ignored.

    In this tense engagement nothing is straightforward. Order must ultimately incorporate disorder; the result is inherently messy. As Kant famously put it, out of the crooked timber of humanity, nothing straight was ever made.”

  9. I can see why one can find TDK unsatisfying. It is longer than it needs to be. It juggles more plotlines than did its predecessor. And it banishes Batman himself to the periphery of the movie. I can scarcely think of a central scene in which he is involved. Still, I loved it for its intelligence, its priceless images, and its willingness to challenge its audience. You go to see Batman, but what you get is a meditation on order and anarchy which pushes the Joker into the center of the frame. This movie belongs to the Joker, not primarily because Ledger puts in such a stunning performance (though it is remarkable). It belongs to him because he embodies the premise of the movie. The Joker lays out that premise as the contrast between himself, who just acts, and the “planners” and “schemers” in the critical hospital scene with Dent (the scene on which the entire movie pivots).

    It is not just good (=order) versus evil (=disorder), but the emergence of a whole new kind of evil. As the Joker says, when Batman appeared, it upped the stakes for the villains. No longer was it enough to be a common hoodlum, robbing banks (“planning” and “scheming”); the crime fighter evolved with the arrival of Batman, so the criminals have to evolve and the Joker is the first of this new breed. The goal is no longer to knock off a bank, get rich, run the West Side, but to destabilize and corrupt the ruling order and the values it espouses. Again and again the Joker is addressing himself to the common criminals, urging them to modernize; burning the money perfectly symbolizes the displacement of the old with the new. It makes sense, then, that Batman Begins would concentrate on the evolution and motivation of the new crime fighter, while this sequel largely ignores that story and focuses instead on the evolution and motivation of the new villain.

    Mike has said all the needs to be said about the way the movie handles the order/anarchy theme, and the remarkably subversive way it encourages us to identify with the Joker. By coincidence I was reading an Adam Gopnik piece on G. K. Chesterton recently that refers to Chesterton’s wonderful novel, “The Man Who Was Thursday”, in which secret police infiltrate an anarchist cell, and it turns out that the entire cell is composed of these secret police. The agents of order become the agents of disorder. As one of the police says: “We deny the snobbish English assumption that the uneducated are the dangerous criminals. We remember the Roman Emperors. We remember the great poisoning princes of the Renaissance. We say that the most dangerous criminal is the educated criminal. We say that the most dangerous criminal is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral people, and my heart goes out to them.”

    Certainly there were some false steps. Nolan chickened out when he had the passengers of both ferry boats endorse Batman and not the Joker’s world view. And the final scene, setting up Batman as the vigilante on the run was contrived. He had to take the fall for Dent’s five murders. Really? With all that collateral damage, ten times that number of deaths could have been covered up. Nonetheless, TDK has easily been the movie of the summer so far (though I want to believe X-Files is better than Michael says it is).

  11. for future reference, to add images in comments, do the following:

    1. upload your image somewhere and grab the url to the image (should usually end in .jpg or some other image suffix).

    2. put the following tag in your comment:

    [img src=”” /] (but use angled brackets instead of square ones)

    3. insert the image url between the inverted commas/quotation marks

    4. post the comment.

  15. i loaded my images in flickr, but i think i simply do not know how to use flickr, because i can’t find a setting of the image that gives me a url that ends with an image suffix. i’ll try again. i’ve done it before. it worked.

    did i forget the forward slash? maybe.

  17. I’m not really sure I want to chime in on this, and I have no interest in getting deep into it, but: I found it completely lacking in any kind of joy.

    There were several relatively minor missteps that nonetheless annoyed me a lot:
    The Mayor wears eyeliner,
    talk of Gotham (which is clearly Chicago) being an island with a ferry system,
    Bale’s ridiculous Batman voice,
    the ridiculous gadgetry,
    the wooden performances of everyone except Ledger
    yet more annoyingly incomprehensible fight scenes.

    But what really bothered me was the darkness, the grim disgusting world portrayed here. If you were a citizen living in this city during the – what, two weeks? – that this movie took place, you’d have packed up and left. Baghdad is a cakewalk in comparison. Why is this America’s favorite entertainment of the year? Even of the decade so far? Have we fallen that far down into bleakness?

    The only even mildly redeeming thing about it is Heath Ledger (an actor I had absolutely no use for before this by the way), but I found him sickening to watch. Wherever he went inside himself to get this performance probably helped kill the guy, and that borders so closely to the level of a snuff film that I was made incredibly uncomfortable by it.

    I wish I hadn’t seen it. I wish it wasn’t popular. PG-13? I don’t see any good coming from this.

  20. After Ledger was killed in his role as Billy Bob Thornton’s doomed son in Monster’s Ball (SPOILER), the role stuck with him. For weeks he ate moonpies and refused to breathe. As a child, having played a dingo in a school play, he undertook to steal infants from nearby campers until his parents finally had to hire an acting coach to train him for a more peaceful role as an Auckland Sheltie.

    Ac-TING!

    Meanwhile, who stole the Mauer I used to live with, who cackled at news reports of the enfeebled while munching caramel corn and intermittently coughing mucus into kleenex? Don’t go changing, to try and please me. You’ve never let me down before…. Uptown girl! You’ve been living in your uptown world! JFK! Blown away! What else do I have to say!

  21. Crime fighting is so much more fun when done in sleek Malibu cliff-side homes with Iron Man cracking jokes over dirty martinis. The original chic is always preferable to the bleak kind.

  22. I saw this at the IMAX theatre on Navy Pier, and it was pretty stunning. I don’t think I can add much more to this conversation save for a few observations. The first is a general observation about the IMAX experience itself, which I found to be so distracting that I was not able to pay attention to the story and the dialogue as closely as I usually do. I had to ask my wife to clarify certain things to me.

    Speaking of which, I think bewildering confusion is the single most important motif in the film, and Jeff has already picked up on that. Batmen wannabes litter the night; Gordon is dead, then alive (think of his boy’s confusion, as well as his wife’s: a slap and a hug); criminals pose as policemen (and profane a sacred ceremony to honor Loeb); criminals pose as hostages, hostages are dressed up as criminals; ethical dilemmas seize you so quickly and with such force and with so little time that your head spins; matters of the heart leapfrog over one another (if this, then this, but if this, then not that, this instead…unless, etc.).

    The only thing that makes sense is the Joker, and he puts matters this way: I don’t want to kill Batman, Batman can’t kill me, so the two of us will go on like this forever. I also take this to be Joker’s raison d’etre. It’s very personal for him. That stuff he tells Dent in the hospital is, well, interesting, but not really Joker’s style (he doesn’t care enough). It’s what he corrupts Dent with.

    The Chicago Tribune ran a story on The Dark Knight (Chicago is giddy with excitement about this film) which pointed out all its inconsistencies and continuity errors (the Joker’s hair is shorter in the interrogation scene than in the rest of the film). I thought it was nonsense. You don’t hold a genre film to such standards of realism. How the fuck can an oxygen tank blow up a 25-foot Great White shark? How the hell did the Ringo kid kill all three Plummer boys at once? As Doctor Evil says to his son, “Scott, you just don’t get it, do you?”

    I think I agree with Arnab. This was a very, very good movie, but not as amazing as everyone says. Isn’t No Country for Old Men the best genre film since The Silence of the Lambs? But I think I disagree with everyone here about Ledger. Had he not died, would we be praising this performance? So sad that his Joker was reduced to repeating himself. The pencil trick was great, as was the jacket full of toy-like grenades. I wanted more scary gags. Instead, he gives us the “why so serious” speech over and over. I felt that limited Ledger a bit. And the licking of the lips was too much. Dennis Hopper’s Frank Booth is the apex–though there was the odd touch here and there that Ledger gave us which I appreciated, such as his demented gait (as reynolds pointed out).

  25. jesus, he even brings in the crane disasters as part of our whole national decline. we are all the Joker? I don’t get it…………this is portentous without being particularly illuminating or precise.

  26. Speaking for myself, I am the walrus.

    But you’re right, Michael. I’m not sure the piece works as any kind of coherent position, or even reading of the film–I do however like how his focus on confusion (which both Jeff and John also noted) is an effective rejoinder to the conservative reading of the film. That said, you probably don’t need to be confusing when making the point about it being confusing.

  29. I’m going to eat a little crow and reverse somewhat from my initial responses (the hype was too big for any one film, though I gotta bow down to Reynolds’ ability to synthesize the film’s merits and moral complexities with such intelligence and furvor). On second viewing The Dark Knight is certainly very well-crafted: sleak, cut with precision and intelligence, and the art direction (particularly Batman’s underground lair; all concrete and florescent light; there is a specifically gorgeous shot where Alfred and Wayne are exiting the space as the lights shut down in concert to their movements) is stunning (though Gotham General Hospital does look a bit like the Dunder Mifflin building). And, yes, I think this film deserves a spot on the list with other great pop-genre blockbusters like No Country for Old Men, Silence of the Lambs, Unforgiven, Se7en, The Godfather, etc.

    There are times where the film seems to be at ideological war with itself (Reynolds spells this out nicely). The cynically playful duel between bureacratic order and and the deep pleasures of anarchic upheaval (an Ouroboros best viewed from a safe distance) is often undercut by the film’s willingness to deliver a big PG-13-bang for one’s summer buck every eight to ten minutes. And the film is interesting to reassess post-election. I think it’s Batman who says, “Sometimes people deserve to have their faith rewarded.” And, in the end, as the film posits the “good” guy (Dent, Obama?) to stand tall while the “better” man (Batman, Bush/Cheney?) does what dirty work must be done in the dark of night, I can’t help but ponder the film’s neo-conservative leanings.

    I still think the final half-hour to be problematic (I want TDK the art-house film not TDK the 600 million franchise) at best. That big, tattooed black con tossing the detonator out the ferry window is a hackneyed, even sentimental gesture. I guess I wanted the moral ambiguity to go as far as Fincher’s Se7en, if not farther; but Reynolds is right. There’s gotta be room for a sequel; keep the head on the lady and out of the box.

    Ledger? Even better the second time around. I really don’t see how version 3.0 will be able to survive his loss. And while I still don’t believe Dent’s love for Rachel to be the powerful force the script wanted it to be (the relationship is revealed through words not actions), I thought Gyllenhaal’s line reading during her character’s final moments to be a hint at what could have been if the film had the ability to invest more fully in this all-important coupling (if we are expected to genuinely buy Two-Face’s turnaround).

    Anyway, I’m glad I took another look.

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