Dark Knight phenom

1. Heath Ledger. According to many sources, The Dark Knight brought out an audience that ordinarily would not be interested in a Batman movie, or a superhero movie, or a comic-book movie, or for that matter an action movie, because of Heath Ledger’s performance as The Joker. There is a certain amount of truth to
this I suppose — the audience who made Brokeback Mountain a runaway smash probably weren’t necessarily itching to see the complex crime drama of The Dark Knight, and Ledger’s death certainly focused a lot of attention on the project. But then, where was that audience when it came to I’m Not There — which featured Ledger, and Christian Bale, and Cate Blanchett? Was Heath Ledger even a “movie star” in the sense that, say, Will Smith or Tom Cruise is a movie star? That is, could he deliver an audience on the strength of his name alone? This is not a knock on Ledger, who was a wonderful actor, or his performance in The Dark Knight, which is as good as you’ve heard. Perhaps it’s a case of the right actor in the right part, not unlike Robert Downey Jr in Iron Man or Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean, where the performance illuminates a role the audience thought they knew and captures the imagination of the public in unexpected ways. Or perhaps it’s more like Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic, and Ledger’s Joker is simply the right performance in the right movie at the right time and is an unrepeatable phenomenon.

2. According to the Wall Street Journal, The Dark Knight is a smash hit because — wait for it — because the public secretly supports the policies of President George W. Bush. That’s right — Mr. 27%, the most reviled president of the past, oh, hundred years or so, is secretly a hero, an action hero, to a huge movie-going audience, who vote with movie attendance instead of their voices. Take that, Rendition/Valley of Elah/Stop-Loss, etc, etc, etc, Batman has come to show that America loves torture! Did you know, when you paid your money to see The Dark Knight, that you were revealing your advocacy of George W. Bush? I didn’t, but it appears the Wall Street Journal knows better.

But seriously, does Batman = Bush? I’ll admit that the popularity of The Dark Knight reveals something in the present moment of our national character, but I’m guessing “advocating torture” isn’t it. But maybe The Dark Knight does say something about our national anxiety vis-a-vis the Great and Glorious Unending, Unwinnable War on Terror. So let’s take a look at this:

A. The Joker is certainly a terrorist of a very pure kind — he doesn’t even have an endgame, nothing less than the complete destruction of the social contract, or his own death, will placate him. We, as Americans, certainly felt that way about the terrorists of 9/11 — nothing they did made sense to us, we couldn’t begin to understand their motives or beliefs. But does Joker = Osama? Isn’t it kind of weird when the real-life bad guy attacks and destroys gigantic skyscrapers (and the Pentagon!) and the movie guy, the comic-book movie guy, settles for a hospital and a couple of ferries? I’ve been reading complaints about how the Joker “couldn’t have possibly” loaded oil-drums of gasoline into this or that building, or placed the explosives to blow up the hospital, or planned this or that in advance. Well, Osama bin Laden planned that attacks of 9/11 and damn near achieved everything he set out to accomplish — and he’s the real-life guy! What does it say about us, and about our supposed secret support of George W. Bush, when we just kind of shrug our shoulders and let bin Laden get away, but pick over the supposed impossibilities of the plan of a comic-book movie villain?

(and, as

curt_holman

 notes below, the analogy of Joker = Osama would only be apt if the Joker blew up the ferries and Batman therefore decided to go after Lex Luthor instead.)

B. Like George W. Bush, Batman does, essentially, bug everyone’s phones, without their permission, in order to catch a terrorist. Unlike George W. Bush, however, Batman makes it clear that he’s bugging everyone’s phones without their permission in order to catch a terrorist, not just because he feels like it or it will bring him more power or will make his political enemies weaker. Batman also refuses to take control of the phone-bugging whatsit — he puts it in the control of Lucius Fox. Whereas Bush put his phone-bugging law (if that’s what you want to call it) in the control of Dick Cheney. If Bush had put FISA in the control of Morgan Freeman, I’m guessing everyone would be a whole lot happier about it.

C. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, et alia, created a policy of torture for prisoners. This, according to the Wall Street Journal, is the nub of The Dark Knight and the reason for its popularity. We recognize that torture is illegal and immoral, but, damn it, sometimes you have to get your hands dirty when you’re dealing with psychopaths.

Okay. First of all, in The Dark Knight Batman does not torture, nor does he advocate torture. He does, admittedly, slam the Joker around the police interrogation room, but he applies no systematic program of torture. Many other characters in the movie give cryptic arguments for torture, saying that since the Joker has no rules and no limits, we are hobbling ourselves if we don’t act the same. But what Batman argues is the opposite — he staunchly believes that, whatever the cost to him personally or to Gotham City as a community, we must have rules. Here he is, in the actual situation the Bush administration has been warning us about (a bomb is about to go off and the only way to find out where it is, etc) and he refuses to torture the Joker. Oh, and guess what? When the Joker “talks,” his information is incorrect and serves only to make Batman’s situation worse. So it seems that the Joker fully intended to give the information about “the whereabouts of the bombs”, but intended to do so only when doing so would deliver the maximum hurt. I agree that The Dark Knight has provided the US with a cinematic arena to air their anxieties about the issues of the day, but the Joker is not Osama and Batman is not Bush.

3. Hype. Business as usual. Hollywood shoves a cynical, designed, focus-grouped corporate product down the collective throat of the US and the US gladly takes it. The audience are sheep, the critics are bought, it’s all just commerce.

I don’t buy this theory. For one, I pay pretty close attention to advertising campaigns, and I found the campaign for The Dark Knight clear, sober and refreshingly free of hype. The audience for this movie was, somehow, ready for it months before it opened.

When I saw Iron Man at a Thursday-before-opening midnight show, a preview for The Dark Knight came on and the audience went berserk. There was nothing particularly remarkable about the preview, it made the movie look slick and fast and clever, but all previews do that. But the Iron Man audience roared when the Batman logo came on and screamed its approval when the preview ended.

(There are, of course, some similarities between Iron Man and The Dark Knight. Tony Stark and Bruce Wayne are close cousins, narratively speaking, and each movie view its protagonist through a more-or-less “real-world” lens. Iron Man barely seems to belong to the same genre as the silly, romantic Superman Returns — which I think also contributed to Iron Man‘s surprise success.)

If anything, the hype for The Dark Knight didn’t even begin until after people had already seen it. The advertising, somehow, promised less than the movie actually was. There are billboards for The Dark Knight up all over the place in Santa Monica, and few of them offer any sense of the sweeping, multi-layered crime drama the movie delivers. One billboard features the Bat-Pod crashing through a window, one features Batman in front of a burning building, one features the three main characters wielding their key props — all standard comic-book-movie promotional images, but by far the least interesting and least representative images from the movie. No, Warner Bros did something very strange and very unusual for a corporate investment as important as this: they promised a fun, slick, splashy “superhero movie” and then delivered something quite different, and quite more.

My own theory:

It’s a good movie.

I know, I know, that’s just crazy talk. But having seen it twice and looking forward to seeing it again, and then owning it on DVD and taking it apart scene by scene at my leisure, let me tell you: an audience knows when a movie is good, and they’ve been so starved for good movies for so long by a Hollywood system that is destined, in so many ways, to deliver safe, predictable thrills and spills, that when a movie comes along that combines an excellent script, a rich, compelling drama, a crisp, efficient shooting style, an interesting take on contemporary anxieties and talented actors giving clear-eyed, lucid performances, well, by gum, an audience will go see that movie.

(Yes, the fact that it’s Batman punching the Joker and not, say, Reese Witherspoon worrying about the rights of detainees makes it “fun” and therefore “okay” for a mass audience to go and enjoy, but I have heard no one yet say “Go see The Dark Knight, it’s fun.“)