Today’s Rave: The Dark Knight

This movie was so good, I could hardly believe it. No one oversold this movie. The dark themes explored, exceptional moral questions posed, the dynamite acting of every cast member (Heath Ledger being perhaps the best), the great cinematography, everything just made this thing outrageously great.

Sometimes, there’s a man. And sometimes there’s a movie. And this is that movie.

This Joker is no mere prankster, or even a mere psychopath, though he does have psychopathic traits. No. As Batman stands for good as motivation unto itself, so too does the Joker provide a foil for Batman by representing evil and chaos. But not in a petty, vindictive way. He applies it as a pure philosophy, and as such, has no rules, no code, and no discernible motivation. It is this that makes the Joker so incredibly dangerous, so unpredictable, and so hard to stop. He doesn’t want money, he doesn’t want power. He just wants to watch the world burn.

This is what has historically made the Joker one of my favorite villains. What makes him so powerful and dangerous is not his fighting ability, his tactical brilliance (though he does have a great deal of it) or his technology. It a sense, it is his philosophy that makes him such a match for Batman. His unpredictability and his willingness to do whatever it takes with no regard for the cost to himself or others makes taking him on an exercise in wrestling with a pure force instead of a person.

The movie captures this phenomenon so brilliantly that I think everyone is able to understand this after seeing it. The movie repeatedly captures the sense of chaos and hopelessness engendered by the Joker, as Gotham collapses into pure irrational fear, and there are only a few individuals willing to stand against the tide.

But this is really the amazing thing, and it has implications even today re: terrorism. The Joker can engender fear, can appear to be an unstoppable force. But ultimately he’s just one person. By striking at the right people at the right time in the right fashion, he can create a chain reaction that makes it seems as if the entire city is going to hell in a handbasket, when in reality nothing is further from the truth. But people being who they are, he has the entire city running scared.

The fact that ultimately Batman can face him as a person is what makes him defeatable. For all his grand schemes the Joker underestimates the human spirit once in a while, and his reliance on people reacting a certain way out of fear or insanity can backfire. But even so, the movie shows his grasp of human nature to be a nearly perfect one, as he can make even the most steadfast knights of virtue fall from grace with little more than a short speech and an appeal to the fairness of chaos.

This movie so perfectly captures the dark ethos that lurks just beneath the streets of Gotham that it should (if the first movie didn’t already) catapult Batman right up there next to any other superhero great (Spiderman, Ironman) in recent movie history, and in many ways, surpass them because Batman, more than any other hero at the movies today, makes you think.

That always gets a thumbs-up in my book.