Classic Movie Review : The Dark Knight (2008)
For the first twenty-five years of my life, Joker wasn’t exactly a cool character. He wasn’t uncool, but he never felt real. No one thought that it would be cool to be like him because the though never even occurred to them. Christopher Nolan’s seminal Batman movie The Dark Knight changed that. Is it widely recognized to be the one truly great Batman movie, but it’s more than that. The Dark Knight is a movie that bears witness to important cultural changes…
…and it all starts with Joker.
The plot of The Dark Knight seems straightforward enough, but it is deceptively complex. Gotham’s criminals have inexplicably pooled their money together and entrusted it to their accountant (Chin Han) who happens to conveniently live in Hong Kong. The money being key to a legal case against organized crime, Batman (Christian Bale) volunteers for an extraction mission on accountant Lau. What do you want me to say? He’s Batman. He can pull it off.
Enter Joker (Heath Ledger) who offers to handle Lau himself in exchange for half the fortune. He proceeds to show he’s not fucking around by killing a mobster with a pencil. They realize that they’re fucked and chaos ensues.
The Dark Knight is a fantastic movie. If you’ve came here for a witty contrarian opinion, I’m sorry. There is nothing here for you. It’s a movie that is greater than the sum of its part, because it relies on themes that could live without Batman or any of his foes. Namely order and anarchy. Bruce Wayne vowed his entire life to battle anarchy and restore order in the streets of Gotham City. Because chaotic criminals killed his parents, but also because he can.
The man’s rich, psychologically unhinged and combatting crime is his hobby. He literally could do this for his entire life without running low on funds or motivation.
Against him is a force of pure chaos. Joker says it himself while visiting Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckart) in the hospital before promptly blowing it up: “I’m an agent of chaos)”. Batman uses violence to preserve order and Joker uses it to tear it down. That’s why he appears so sympathetic. His mere presence indicates that Bruce Wayne is fighting a losing battle. Institutions function on the good faith of the people championing them and good faith has run out.
In the movie and in real life.
Joker elevates himself against a system of oppression governed by a corrupt elite. Unlike what neckbeards will tell you, he doesn’t do it for his own gain, though. He’s still very much the embodiment of an idea. He burned down a mountain of money, for fuck’s sake. He is a man who doesn’t not care about his upcoming Amazon order. Notice that he simply vanished from the movie after the last interrogation scene. Heath Ledger’s Joker is also not real.
I love The Dark Knight because it reminds me that everything is ephemeral. That some things are worth fighting for and some others should be set on fire, destroyed and promptly forgotten. Although it is vibrantly explored through a Batman movie, it’s an idea that it bigger and more impactful than its narrative and protagonists. That is why The Dark Knight should and will probably be remembered for more than just being a superhero movie.
The Dark Knight also aged well because Batman didn’t. It made people realized that the end of one thing doesn’t necessarily means the end of everything.
8.9/10
