A few thoughts on The Dark Knight

I'm in Pasadena at the moment visiting a friend. Earlier in the day after we visited Silver Lake's hipsters at Intelligentsia (yes, it's spread from Chicago), we went to the Hollywood Walk of Fame. It was incredibly sketchy to say the least. Among the myriad of jugglers, rappers hawking their CDs, and performers dressed like movie characters, I saw the Joker. Well, a poorer, taller imitation of him. But no mistake, he was Heath Ledger's Joker, not the iconic Jack Nicholson joker of the first Batman movie. My first thought: "Well that's awfully quick—the movie came out last week." The other characters—Gene Simmons, (a drunken) Spiderman, Captain Jack Sparrow, the Tinman—somehow seemed more appropriate, not only because the movies have been out longer, but because Ledger's joker, a sociopath, seems too dark, too psychotic to be juxtaposed with French tourists and vendors selling Maps of the Stars.

I saw the movie for the second time tonight (at double the price of my Illinois matinée), and I was as taken with it the second time as the first (especially the chase scene on lower Wacker Drive.) I won't review it for you here—there's a litany of reviews online. (I'm fond of Thomas Hibbs's piece in First Things). But in spite of Christopher Nolan's brilliance, I think he could have taken notes from the Coen Brother's film, No Country for Old Men.

As one reviewer aptly noted:

Imagine No Country for Old Men, change the plot some and throw in people dressed up as bats and clowns and that's the sort of sandbox of ideas and areas of darkness that The Dark Knight plays in. Without a doubt, if you combined the film's interpretation of Two-Face and The Joker you would have Anton Chigurh.

And while No Country for Old Men revolves around the same themes of chaos and destruction (though it should be said that the crushing blow it delivers to determinism manages to destroy any potential hope; The Dark Knight manages to keep hope alive, as Hibbs notes in the aforementioned review), it does so in a more subtle manner than The Dark Knight. Here I am referring to the scene between the Joker and Two-Face in which the Joker.....dare I use this line....seduces Harvey Dent to the dark side. The Joker says something to the effect of "Unlease a little anarchy," and "Chance is fair." In this scene, with both villains present, we have a glimpse of Anton Chigurh from No Country. But Chigurh's character is all the more disturbing because he never mentions the word anarchy, never goes into a detailed discussion of his morality of chance save to say that the coin he uses got there the same way he did.


My second qualm with the movie is that the score can be a bit too much. I can only handle the dramatic music for, I don't know, 2 hours, not 2 and a half hours. There are moments, especially in the latter hour of the film, where the intensity or horror of the moment are detracted by the music, which depending on your theater's sound system may overpower the dialogue. Recall No Country, which had no soundtrack whatsoever, making the film somewhat less human. I do not think that Nolan should have jettisoned the entire soundtrack of The Dark Knight. On the contrary, I think the music is quite helpful at times. I do think that it could have been regulated more.


Of course, one could argue that subtlety is not the mark of a movie in which the main character is wearing tights. But Nolan's movie is too clever to be lumped with other comic book movies. His treatment of Two-Face, for example, He eschewed the heavy handedness of the George Clooney Batman films in which both villains seem to play an equal role, which led to the dismal failure of the characters. Allowing Dent to metamorphose into Two-Face in the last 1/4 of the film does not distract from the Joker, and more importantly, from Batman's internal struggle between good and evil and the sorrow and loneliness that accompany it. It would be foolish to say that the director was incapable of being subtle. I would perhaps be willing to buy the argument that the heavy-handedness was needed for the general audience of the film, though.