The Dark Knight As Tragic Figure Of Liberalism
Far from being a validation of the Bush administration’s journey to the dark side, The Dark Knight was an epic extolling the aristocratic institutions the Resistance venerates today
Each month, I check the latest additions to Netflix’s catalog. They brought back The Dark Knight this month. After this latest viewing of one of the most beloved superhero films ever made, which harvested all of Hollywood’s awards in Heath Ledger’s legendary wake, I noticed many things that had escaped me before. I now have a very different reading of the film in the perspective of early 2019, with the Blue Wave entering Congress on the heels of a massive victory made possible by the upper middle class suburbs rejecting the corruption of Trump’s Washington.
The Dark Knight is a comic book film, and it’s constrained at many points by the logic of such films. But what Christopher Nolan and his brother Jonathan did to elevate it above all other comic book film adaptations was to make it a mafia noir. In classic noir fashion, Batman’s discovery of Gotham’s dark underground and its psychotic id represented by the Joker is simultaneously his discovery of self. The Joker, an outside contractor for an informal commission of mafias, has more intimate knowledge of his fellow masked “freak” than Bruce Wayne can manage in self-reflection. To properly understand The Dark Knight, we must begin by abstracting their fun action movie duel out of their semi-recognizable world, and see them both as the personification of order and chaos, rather than a symbol to inspire good as Wayne hopes, or “agent” as Joker claims. They are a superhero and supervillain who exist outside of the trivial corruptions of Gotham.
Permitting that, it becomes easier to see why Batman is neither George W. Bush nor Dick Cheney, and Joker is not Osama Bin Laden. They are yin and yang icons without corollary in the real world. In any case, journeying “to the dark side”, a la Cheney, never bears substantive fruit for Batman, even when you’re temporarily mislead to think it does with torture of suspects and warrantless surveillance. The Joker is always one step ahead, while Bruce Wayne is forced deeper into the tragedy of being complicit in Rachel Dawes’ death specifically because he tried to have her by retiring Batman and handing Gotham over to its accountable civic officials.
Far from an endorsement of the Bush administration, The Dark Knight is a tragedy meant to earn your faith in a temperate liberal oligarchy that upholds our institutions of law and order, and keeps crime to a minimum with strong belief in the system, and probity. The stepping into the dark is only the remit of the personification, or the gods as the ancients would say. Wayne’s hope is for something better.
Despite some Adderall-bent Twitter blowhards anointing Robert Mueller a superhero for bringing inevitable justice to Trump, Mueller more embodies the telos of the Nolans’ Batman in The Dark Knight, or rather what Bruce Wayne wished to see in Harvey Dent, rather than what he did see. The story’s momentum is in Wayne’s denial over his impossible love for childhood friend Rachel Dawes, who will ostensibly take him back once he realizes he’s Bruce Wayne, and not Batman. In the most critical tell of the story, Wayne is made to feel tension with Batman and what they both actually are. Batman is fooled by the Joker in a richly cruel choice: save the life of great white hype District Attorney Harvey Dent, or save Rachel Dawes, whom Batman threw himself at protecting, disregarding all else. Wayne intended to save Rachel, which caused her death. Despite Batman and Wayne’s and everyone else’s rhetoric about Dent being critical to Gotham believing in justice again, the Joker saw through it, and clawed into Wayne’s confusion, while keeping alive his “Ace in the Hole”.
The Joker recognizes Batman as a lawgiver and new Founding Father of Gotham. He sees that their cosmic battle deserves prime attention over the boring cops and robbers, in a romantic, if not exactly chivalrous duel. He sees that Batman has injected backbone into Gotham, which will be evidenced at the beginning of the next film, The Dark Knight Rises, when Gotham’s crime rate hits a new low, sharply contrasting to the infestation in Batman Begins. Although he says he doesn’t want to kill him, Joker will try numerous times, perhaps knowing that it won’t work, but also knowing Batman’s counterstrikes won’t work on him either. That is, so long as he has his equally good read on Harvey Dent alive and relevant.
Wayne must lie to himself about the character of Dent, already called “Two-Face” in the beginning prior to his metamorphosis, in order to steal Rachel from him. He has to lie even harder when he sees Dent prepared to extra-judicially execute one of the Joker’s mentally ill men from Arkham. Earlier in the film, Wayne tactically probes Dent’s intentions and character while accidentally-on-purpose bumping into him and Rachel at dinner. Dent brings up the Roman office of dictatorship, speaking to its use in periods of crisis, and its short-term frame of civic duty, alluding to the office when it was taken by the virtuous patrician Cincinnatus who safeguarded the republic and its institutions, elbowing aside plebeian concerns in the process. Rachel naturally warns him that the last person to hold that office was Caesar (a populist demagogue riling up the plebeians), and he held it for life. Dent’s response was that “you either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” Dent told on himself right then, but Wayne heard what he wanted to hear. This misread was fatal for Wayne, but one the Joker wouldn’t make.
In his momentary triumph over Joker in the penultimate boats scene, Batman claims that he’s won, because the people of Gotham are ready to show how much more good they are than the Joker’s cynicism. And yet the Nolans’ make it clear the people actually aren’t very good: they’ve tried to conduct scapegoat murders, and are ready for more. By voting to blow up the boat filled with prisoners, the “good” people of the other boat are telling us that democracy is problematic, unsuited for questions of life and death, never mind the functions of state. “They’ve had their chance” the supposedly “good” people say of the prisoners they’re about to sacrifice. “They made their choices. They chose to murder and steal. Doesn’t make any sense for us to have to die too.” In light of their Trumpian rhetoric, the “good” boat’s realization isn’t one of morality, simply that they’re unqualified to turn the key on that detonator that blasts open a door to chaotic chance. They’ve been “nudged” by Batman to trust in the process inaccessible to them, and haven’t been convinced by the Joker that the aristocratic institutions are too rotten to invest in. In this nullified vote, the people of Gotham didn’t choose horror to maintain the system, like they usually did.
Instead of an ultimate victory of good, it’s a pattern in The Dark Knight that anyone making a dumbass, arrogant, or otherwise bullshit statement (like “the people are good”) is proven painfully wrong, and immediately. In this case, the Joker already played his Ace in the Hole, unleashing Harvey Dent’s true dark potential on what he perceives as Gotham’s corruption, including Jim Gordon’s family. Some read this as unbelievable and unsupported within the narrative, but they failed to take into account how grave unrealized ambition can feel for idealists. Disillusion of a virtuoso is a seed of evil as much as the imperfections in justice can be, and an agent, or rather a personification of chaos exploits that. The conservative reluctance of Gotham to reform its intrinsically fallen justice system from the mafia domination in Batman Begins to their radical reaction in The Dark Knight meant that Gordon had to retain many compromised and compromisable people whom Dent hypocritically loathes, and rightly (or wrongly, in the case of Jim Gordon) blames for Rachel’s death. Once you strip Dent of Rachel, it isn’t so hard to push old “Two-Face” through the wall of sanity, especially if the Joker sells him on the fairness of blind Fortune above the arbitrariness of the law system that failed him.
In effect, Dent becoming a vigilante of chaotic revolutionary justice foreshadows the Jacobinism of the third Nolan Batman. His terrorism against the corrupt system will be expanded dramatically by Bane with kangaroo courts and mass bloodletting. The third film is widely read as conservative, if not outright fascist, but taken together, that conservatism is better understood as a status quo liberal fear of both Jacobin excess and corrupt inefficient government, like in dysfunctional states which Hillary Clinton never visited on the campaign, or countries the European Union pounds into submission for their maladaptive graft. The best of all possible worlds has Rachel Dawes and Bruce Wayne together, and Harvey Dent one-facedly alive and inspiring Gotham as a human accountable to the people, but still above them, an agent of order and capital. The tragic world of The Dark Knight is instead a nightmare, where the missing phantom limb of stabilizing institutions and good people promotes the need for self-appointed personifications of those institutions and that good.
The ending, where Batman tries to wrap a band-aid around that nightmare, shouldn’t be read at face value. In taking the blame as Batman for Dent’s rampage, Wayne was as much in denial here as he was at any time prior. The Joker had beaten him in body and spirit. His only realization in this story was that he actually is a freak like the Joker. When the camera slides 180 degrees to position itself upside down while the Joker is hanging from the building, we’re to understand Wayne is finally seeing it from the Joker’s perspective. The real Bruce Wayne does not belong with Rachel Dawes. He doesn’t belong in the world of mere people, of good and evil. “You gotta do every thing yourself. Don’t we?”
Compared to other mafia stories about societies riven with corruption such as The Untouchables or the Narcos series, The Dark Knight is easier to recognize in its liberal aristocratic nature, mainly through its blind spots, or Anglo-Americanism of the 21st century, freed of Capones and El Chapos. Real aristocrats who want you to believe in the republic’s institutions in those worlds often join in on the crime, like the Kennedys and elites in Mexico have. The relationship between neoliberalism and criminal capture of governance is a co-dependent Ouroboros which vast swathes of the globe have found to be intractable. The Resistance might be reliant on megarich donors like Bruce Wayne, but their disavowal of safety nets and their promotion of a dissolving and alienating capitalism that manufactures urban hellscapes like Gotham erodes faith in any system protecting us from chaos. Relief doesn’t come when Robert Mueller puts Trump in jail. Relief comes when the people, not our institutions, decide to stop enabling Sisyphean wars on vice or sadistic politics of inequality.
