Killing Joke

Srsly

Having let it sit for two weeks while vacationing, I guess the issue with The Dark Knight, like Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ or most pornography, is that it functions better as a conveyance than as a movie. The Joker, played, as if you didn't know, by certified Dead Hot Celebrity Heath Ledger, is easily the most captivating character in the piece, re-envisioned here as a nihilist-anarcho-terrorist whose raison d'etre is to destroy and kill - a point he proves emphatically in the film by burning an enormous stack of money, thus symbolically placing himself outside of the capitalist-criminal continuum and in the realm of villains who exist solely because Batman's appearance as an arbiter of moral order in Gotham City has summoned them into being as a sort of cosmic rejoinder. Director Christopher Nolan, who wrote the film with his brother, realizes The Dark Knight as a game wherein the stakes are continually raised: how many charred bodies is the Joker going to stack before the forces of good - Harvey Dent (played by Aaron Eckhart as Himself), Lieutenant Gordon (Gary Oldman, as the most normal character in the film), and, of course, the Caped Crusader himself - buckle under the mounting pressure to disavow their principles and use Any Means Necessary to restore the order the Joker is self-consciously critiquing and deconstructing. Unfortunately, Nolan's film ends up being morally incoherent, seemingly unable to choose between endorsing extraordinary measures - transparently linked to Bush's perpetual War on Civil Lib...I mean, Terror - and disavowing them, settling in the end on "Okay, but just this once...", which is no answer at all to the questions the filmmakers fancy themselves to be raising. Yet a muddled message is a comparatively venal sin next to The Dark Knight's greatest shortcoming: when Ledger is not onscreen testing the boundaries of the PG-13 rating, it's kind of boring.

You see, The Dark Knight is really two movies: one wherein Ledger's psycho clown blows things up, tortures people to death, and generally engages is outlandish acts of ultraviolence to the delight of moviegoers everywhere; and the afterbirth, wherein Nolan attempts to wrap the Batman brand around the experience, allow the good guys to win (sort of), prove the Joker's moral philosophy of the lowest common denominator wrong (in a scene ripped pretty much out of Spider-man 2), and, of course, establish an opening for the inevitable third installment of this apparently inexhaustible cash cow. I empathize with Nolan insofar as the former film, without the latter, would be nigh unwatchable. Even as Americans hath loved Ledger's Joker too well, there's no natural end-point to his immolation act, and The Dark Knight, with its Domino's Pizza tie-in, required a set of brakes; bombs get boring after awhile, and what was he going to do for his next trick, rape a pack of nuns? Plus, consider the commercial imperatives at work: you can't have a Batman movie without Batman, so we're saddled with the fact, which most of the audience seems content to ignore, that Bale's iteration of said Dark Knight is rather dull; it's rather like watching Patrick Bateman (only one letter off, for you conspiracy theorists), Bale's character from American Psycho, if he were on Klonopin and didn't kill women and the homeless. He broods and broods some more as Bruce Wayne, a part whose contours were more effectively explored in the origin story that was Batman Begins, and when donning the bat-suit, he comes off as utterly ridiculous, sounding like a fourteen year-old feigning a deeper voice in an ill-fated attempt to convince the liquor store cashier that he actually is 23, like it says on his fake ID. In a way, it's compelling meta-theatre: whereas Ledger seems (ironically, in retrospect) liberated by his part, Bale wears his like a straitjacket. Unfortunately, the franchise sinks or swims with the latter, an inevitability made all the more so by Ledger's untimely passing. If Batman survives into perpetuity as a dramatic proposition, it's going to have to do so on the strength of its villains - a possibility made all the more likely if the whispers about Philip Seymour Hoffman signing on to play the Penguin are true.