Don’t read this unless you’ve seen The Dark Knight. I’m going to pretty loose-lipped when it comes to spoilers, so avert your eyes until you have seen the movie.
I’m not really going to talk about how absolutely amazing The Dark Knight is in broad terms, everyone has already heard more than enough about all of that. All I’ll say broadly is that every single person should go see the movie, more than once. It’s fucking astounding.
But the subject of this post is to take a couple of specific examples that really stuck out in my mind and sort of delve deeper into those aspects. The most obvious and interesting little detail I noticed was the incredibly complex nature of the Joker’s character and how it is embodied in his nefarious plots. Now, even though the Joker himself claims (in one of my favorite scenes, between him and Harvey Dent) to be nothing more than a person who “does things”, his every plot, his every action, is predetermined to a degree. That he is a genius is obvious (take note, Jack Nicholson), and that he is completely lacking anything resembling a conscience is equally obvious, if not more so (take note, Jack Nicholson). From breaking himself into and out of prison to grab a squealer to dropping a warning to the people of Gotham to avoid the tunnels and bridges to better serve his purpose of trapping the ferry crowd into a moral nightmare, he controls the city more ably than any of the other characters. His plot is intricate, involving every major character behaving in the manner he has determined that they would, and upon it hinges the fickle nature of nobility of purpose, justice and the fragility of it all.
Which brings me round to an interesting example of a visual metaphor. In the first scene in which the Joker makes an appearance, he escapes in a school bus, pulling right into line with the rest of Gotham’s school buses, shrewdly disguising himself from the police, who arrive just after he pulls away. It works as a kick ass bank heist scene, but it also serves up an interesting aspect of the Joker – he uses the system he so despises for the purpose of bringing down the same. He’s dependant on it, just as his character is dependant on Batman. It’s just as Alfred said: Batman crossed the line first. The Joker is just crossing it harder, with the intention of erasing the line and covering it with explosions. A similar event happens later in the film, with the Joker escaping the hospital he just blew up in another bus – again, disguising his anarchy in the folds of a regimented society. He knows exactly what will happen when he tells Gotham to kill Mr. Reese, just as he knows exactly what the people of Gotham will do when he tells them to avoid the tunnels and bridges because of the nature of the structured society he’s fighting.
This is when it gets interesting.
Towards the end, in another of my favorite scenes, the Joker tells a pissed off Batman: “Do you think I would risk the battle of Gotham’s soul on a fistfight with you?” Of course not. He has already made his play, the rest is just fireworks to sate his appetite for destruction. His real plot has already succeeded: the forced metamorphosis of Gotham’s White Knight Harvey Dent into the vengeance-driven Two-Face. Batman, at this point had not been aware of it. Dent had been collateral damage of the Joker’s personal battle with Batman; that Harvey was his target all along is a revelation that catches him off guard. It is in this scene where the Joker truly shines – he doesn’t care that he’s been physically beaten. He doesn’t care that the ferries didn’t blow up. The real fish was landed long ago.
It’s intricate enough, but the real complexity arrives unsaid in the film: The Joker wins. He targeted the best man in Gotham and reduced him into a killer, a murderer, someone who is no better than the countless men he put behind bars. But we already knew this. The Joker wins because of Batman and Gordon’s reaction to what Dent has become; they cover it up, and in doing so prove that the Joker was, again, several steps ahead of them. He proves that the three best men have no faith in the people of their own city. Forget that the Joker’s ferry plot was foiled by those very same people – Batman and Gordon believe that the fickle nature of the people in their city will be completely crushed when they see what happened to Dent, and they give Harvey a hero’s funeral. They lie to spare the public the fact the Joker has effectively killed the heart of the city.
It doesn’t matter if the Joker is right or not; it doesn’t matter what the true reaction of the city will be. What matters is the belief of Jim Gordon and Batman, the two trusted protectors of Gotham. And they believe what the Joker told them to be true. And that is why the Joker wins.
