KIRBY:

Like Two-Face, I was two things while watching THE DARK KNIGHT.

After the screening, my moviegoing companions told me I had a childlike grin strewn across my face. Which should be expected since this film is a culmination of a lifelong fantasy – seeing the mythological conflict between The Batman and The Joker rendered fully on the big screen. The 1989 incarnation merely whetted my appetite for the promise of a fully rendered version. As much as I love comic books, the movie is still the pinnacle of entertainment as it is the artform closest to replicating fiction as reality, ala the cave in Plato’s myth. I have to applaud THE DARK KNIGHT for being the bat triumphantly emerging from the cave, engaging my child’s heart and adult mind.

Much of the praised heaped upon Chris Nolan’s film is that it offers a realistic take on the Batman legend. While it offers, as Richard Donner was fond to say of his approach to his SUPERMAN, much greater verisimilitude than the phantasmagoric Tim Burton films or the outlandish Joel Schumacher films, it is still far from realistic. Men dressed up like bats and clowns are absurd and no amount of rationalizing can complete obfuscate that fact. Instead, what Nolan does makes every detail resonate. The sequence of scenes about the creation of The Batman in BATMAN BEGINS were about Bruce Wayne thinking out and wrestling with the concept. It showed a man of intelligence and creativity pooling his vast resources retrofitting an army’s arsenal for a hero’s tools. Bruce Wayne is the ultimate Renaissance man – unstoppable martial artist, Olympic athlete, polyglot and unparallel detective. But many forget he is a supreme artist – his Bat persona is the forged by masterful designer.

BEGINS demonstrates that the lack of the bat iconography diminishes the impact of the alter ego. When Bruce Wayne takes to the rooftops at night in his prototype suit, he looks like a SWAT member in a ski mask – an imposing figure, but not a terrifying.  But as soon as he assumes the familiar silhouette of The Batman, he transforms from simple action hero to movie monster. By playing around with the archetypes of the collective unconsciousness, Bruce Wayne as The Batman is able to invoke existential terror greater than the immediate threat of physical violence.

This thinking has been there since Batman’s creation. As one story goes (Like the fictional background of The Joker, the Batman character has various origins.), artist Bob Kane devised Batman over a weekend as an assignment to create a character to replicate the new and highly successful Superman. While the drawing was a winged figure, it wasn’t exactly a weird and menacing. It was the contribution of writer Bill Finger that transformed a half-formed, copycat notion into the transcendent icon of Batman that we know today. As the unofficial history goes (Legally, Bill Finger has no recognition for this contributions to the creation of Batman and Bob Kane is considered the sole creator in the eyes of DC/Time Warner). Finger suggested darkening the costume, replacing the domino mask with a cowl and crude wings with a cape. The later change is the essence of the alchemical beauty of the Batman’s visage - with a sweep of his cape and the misperception of his form by blurry-eyed witnesses, he transforms from man to monster.

The Batman saga has always been rooted in psychological distortion. Bruce Wayne takes the form as a winged avenger to be a psychic attack capitalizing on the fears of a “cowardly and superstitious lot.”

The Batman, however, becomes impotent when he is faced with someone beyond fear. Heath Ledger’s characterization of The Joker is less of a performance and more of an invocation.  The decay of his humanity and sanity seems to have stronger resonance when it is on the deteriorated face of a pretty boy. Corruption is more pronounced when it conquers purity, and that contributes to Ledger’s devastating presence. The familiar leading man has disappeared into the public’s collective concept of the Platonic ideal of The Joker. The inherently mythological nature of superheroes and supervillains readily speaks to archetypes. Its characters are beyond human, so their emotions and psyches are corresponding superhuman becoming more conceptual than flesh. Thus The Joker is the grinning face of chaos that we all encounter living our lives. It’s a paradoxical of humans  - we smile in the face of both joy and anxiety. The Joker is that rollercoaster, which is why audiences have a greater reaction to him over the more staid Bruce Wayne/Batman character(s), which Ledger adroitly channels.

But as The Joker says, The Batman completes him. While many superhero movies are mired in recapitulations and reconfigurations of the Christ figure, THE DARK KNIGHT goes to the next level with God vs. the Devil. While this conflict has been hinted at in film before – the 1989 film’s concluding battle between Batman and The Joker occurred at the top of a cathedral ascending into the heavens. However, In THE DARK KNIGHT, the climax isn’t really about fisticuffs between Batman and The Joker, but as a Hobbesian contest for the souls of the citizens of Gotham City and particularly, Harvey Dent.  The resolution isn’t an actual conclusion. Instead, the film ends when the true meaning of The Batman vs. The Joker’s conflict, and correspondingly, good vs. evil is revealed with resounding clarity – they are doomed to perpetually repeat their conflict because they are intrinsically linked. But there is something that can transcend their tangled battle – hope. While Harvey Dent was perverted by The Joker into becoming Two-Face and dies, the truth of Dent as heroic symbol is greater than the reality of the monster he became.

Pay no attention to critics who seek to diminish the film by simply calling it a play on the “War on Terror.” While allusions seem plausibly, the truth is that the “War on Terror” is playing into the archetypes of conflict, of good vs. evil. That’s the beauty of the film – it resounds with so many – young and old - because it speaks to the essential nature of man living in modern society, and does it without toxin of irony. Because good and evil are tethered together, the struggle is a recursive loop where neither can triumphant over the other. There is no need for a second film because the first is the perfect, ultimate summation of The Batman vs. The Joker.