Batman - The Dark Knight
Dir Christopher Nolan, featuring Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Aaron Eckhart, Michael Caine, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Morgan Freeman (M)
By Ruth Hessey
Gotham City exists in the grim twilight of a great civilisation. The Batman legend feeds on a primal fear that things are about to get much, much worse, as well as the eternal hope that, afterwards, they will get much, much better. That's what keeps us going as darkness looms.
Gotham is falling into the jaws of chaos. The agent thereof is the Joker, a character so damaged, so married to pain and terror that he is indefatigable. There is nothing you can do to the Joker, or threaten to do, that he hasn't already experienced, and learned to revel in. This is the role that killed Heath Ledger. You can see the place he went to in his eyes, which gleam through the grotty mask of his face, fantastically intelligent, fascinated, and crazed.
The Joker breaks into the fortress of capitalism, literally the glass towers of the rich and privileged, which comprise Bruce Wayne's world. There has never been so much safety glass shattered, so many temples blown sky high. But the Joker has no interest in the jewels of this glamorous world. He is not motivated by desire but the opposite of desire.
By the time Christopher Nolan's crushingly noir excursion to the dark side has finished, we realise that the Joker has divested himself of all humanity. When he appears briefly, disturbingly, dressed as a woman, it's clear that his personal disintegration has broken down even the basics of his identity. All that is left is his mad leering hatred, his lust for pain in all its forms, his defiance of anything that is good in the world.
Batman's titanic struggle with the Joker is not a war he can win. If he fights back, he plays into Joker's hands. The question - what can we justifiably do to defend ourselves? - is one of the cornerstone debates of the American constitution. But from the very first scenes, the right to bear arms doesn't help anyone. You can force people to respect you at gunpoint, but when you run out of bullets, you're done. Playing on the flaws in human nature, in particular greed, the Joker can always find new recruits for his mission.
This is why Batman himself takes up so little screen time in his own story. Christian Bale carries the role's chunky armoury with the same grace as Bruce Wayne's wealth, ably abetted by his wise and reassuring butler (Michael Caine) and manager (Morgan Freeman). He is torn between his desire to be an ordinary man (and win the love of gentle, gorgeous Rachel, played by Maggie Gyllenhaal), and his workaholic obsession with protecting the citizens of Gotham from themselves. Rachel, probably quite rightly, suspects that Bruce Wayne has intimacy issues, and that Batman will never allow him the vulnerability of human feelings.
Ultimately you leave the cinema overwhelmed by the grim violence of the film, which fights up close and dirty.
Visually it's an extraordinary experience, a transformation of noir's tropes (the shafts of light and plethora of shadows) into a world so broken and sliced into white-hot pieces that you can barely make sense of it. But there is an exquisite order in the chaos, a fascist formality and video game surrealism that resists the forces of disintegration with a sort of superhuman determination. This is a film for men; about the worst place any man can find himself. We realise the protagonists can never get rid of each other, the fight will never finish, and the ending is overwhelmingly oppressive.
The Dark Knight is currently screening in cinemas. Watch the Trailer below