The Dark Knight has no use for FISA

By Sharon McGovern

This is not a review, though I submit The Dark Knight kicks a** so very hard. Instead, this will be a brief look at themes employed in TDK; a sequel to Batman is a NeoCon. If you haven’t already contributed to the movie’s astonishing opening weekend take, you might want to decide right now if you want to read something that gives away a number of its plot points.

The Dark Knight begins with “the bat man” having become a fixture in Gotham. He inspires resentment for the toll his fight against evildoers is taking on the city and for his high-handed approach to law enforcement, as well as some loyalty among those who appreciate the dangers of whacking the hornets’ nest of the villainous elite—and a cadre of bat-groupies, vigilantes whom Batman contains and leaves for police pick-up along with the criminals they flail at. The war Batman is fighting is too dangerous and too compromising for amateurs. Still, it bespeaks a civic mindedness in Gotham that didn’t exist before, and hope in a previously hopeless city. Batman is a one-man surge.

Bruce Wayne is growing weary of bat-enforcement and as the city takes a turn for the sane (a glimpse of the bat signal discourages minor criminals), hopes to de-escalate his superhero duties and let the relatively ethical police and increasingly effective district attorneys take over. Then he could drop his twin masks—caped crusader and playboy rake—and properly romance the only woman he ever loved. The costs of being Batman wear at him, drain him of money, health, and reputation. What he’s doing is right, but it’s hard. The movie asks the viewer to consider what it would be like to be despised for doing unpopular things in order to fight evil. What would Batman be if he minded the polls?

Behind the scenes and (mostly) beyond the law, the bat-tactics bear an uncanny resemblance to methods used in the War on Terror. The mob bosses’ activities are traced though their finances. Extraordinary rendition is used to extract their chief money launderer from Hong Kong. Batman uses, ahem, extreme interrogation techniques forbidden to the police and D.A.s. It’s soul killing work and not always productive, but it is imperative within the narrative for Batman to have those options. If prisoners don’t cooperate when they are in relatively secure confinement, they are threatened with removal to more dangerous cells. Finally, every cell phone in Gotham is monitored in order to locate and frustrate the horrible new batch of terrorists in town. It’s warrentless wiretapping enhanced with echolocation. For some reason, this is most bothersome to Wayne’s technical advisor, a dapper black man who votes to use this ability, just once and never again.

But the most agonizing aspect to being Batman is the responsibility for the lives of the people of Gotham, and some of their deaths. He has meddled with the various criminal fiefdoms in the city and in their desperation to stop him, they have backed the new psycho in town and violence explodes. When Wayne protests “they have crossed the line” his advisor Alfred replies, “You crossed the line first, sir. You hammered them. And in their desperation they turned to a man they didn't fully understand. Some men aren't looking for anything logical. They can't be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.”

That man calls himself The Joker. He has extorts millions of dollars from the criminal community, and sets the giant pile of money on fire in front of the horrified mob bosses of Gotham. He doesn’t need that much, he explains: bullets, gasoline, dynamite—all very cheap. He’s like Osama bin Laden turning his back on his family’s fortune and the sordid lifestyle of a Saudi aristocrat in favor of more rigorous and fanatical perversions financed by the sympathetic rulers of various oppressed precincts. The Joker declares, “whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stranger” and wants to push Gotham to its breaking point. He has a variety of sob stories to explain his behavior and the scars on his face, but once you commit a certain amount of evil motives become less compelling. And yet some are more willing to blame Batman for inspiring his most lurid acts of violence than The Joker for planning and committing them.

When pressed, however, the good people of Gotham are, well, good. In their most terrifying challenge, a ferry full of citizens and a ferry full of convicts are each given detonators that will blow up the other. If neither presses the button, The Joker will destroy both at the stroke of midnight. The passengers discuss their situation, vote on potential outcomes, watch the minutes tick by, and finally decline to play The Joker’s game. It’s a relief, not just that a group of characters in a story survived, but that a filmmaker has given the stand-ins for the audience—even the worst among them—a break. Just as the occasional superhero movie pays tribute to the difficulties and rewards of heroism, sometimes they also give a nod to the essential decency of the American people. It’s a gesture all too rare in mainstream filmmaking.

Gotham’s champion is Harvey Dent, the city’s District Attorney. He is fearless, upstanding, and nimble enough to disarm—literally—a mob informant on the witness stand. He is the man Bruce Wayne would like to be if he weren’t burdened by his twin personae. But he has a weakness, symbolized by a two-headed coin. His show of flipping it and leaving decisions to fate is a fraud, though a harmless one at first. When he is maimed by The Joker and undone by grief, he is pushed from quirkily dishonest to downright villainous. He becomes obsessed with revealing the ugliness and dishonesty he feels must lie in everybody after he discovered it in himself and in the institutions he respected. He even goes so far as to nearly recreate the circumstances of the murder of Bruce Wayne’s parents, and force another aggrieved father to lie to his son: “Everything will be all right.” His degradation is tragic.

The moral of the first movie was that it didn’t matter what a person was underneath, but what they did that defined them. In this one, it not only matters what the characters feel or do, but how they seem. Nothing seems to be as it should in Gotham: clowns are sinister, bats are badass, and the most prominent businessman in the city is a feckless libertine. But the city needed a sterling ideal of law and order, one removed from the compromised police department and ineffectual attorney general’s office, and certainly from Batman and Bruce Wayne who were unreliable examples. Harvey Dent wasn’t as pure as his reputation, but Wayne realized a city full of masked men somebody needed to play the role of white knight. The Dark Knight job was taken.