Gotham's Dark Nights

We saw The Dark Knight this weekend (by "we" I mean T and myself, not myself as Queen). Wow. Really, wow. I like superhero movies in general, and I've always liked the Batman concept of billionaire playboy by day, slightly irredeemable crime fighter by night, but Dark Knight unquestionably moves the genre into "real film" status. (I have to admit that I've heard a similar claim for Sin City, which I haven't seen.) Christopher Nolan's take on Batman is particularly interesting, because his superhero is a little unlikeable and spoiled. Also, Christian Bale's Batman voice is hilarious and pathetic. I think this is purposeful--it shows the artifice, the construction and vulnerability of Bruce Wayne's disguise. Batman is brave and high tech, but he's also a little ridiculous. His batman outfit and husky delivery and underground lair are not wildly less weird than the Joker's face paint, which is not entirely out of place in angular, shadow-filled, no place Gotham. The whole world of the film, while mirroring the random violence and shifty politics of our world, is an unmoored dreamscape where the scariness of what is not normative--clowns, superheroism, violent crime--is amplified by the fact that it's not balanced by the presence of normal people and places. Nothing is quite right in Gotham. The streets are all alleyways, and everyone knows who the district attorney is. It's a demented, enclosed space of nightmare.

And the movie is genuinely that complex. That's why it's such a triumph. Yes, it's filled with action sequences and batman gadgetry, and some of the metalanguage (Joker to Batman: You complete me) is at once sarcastic and symbolically sophomoric. But in the Joker's leaking, painted leer and random violence, and in Bruce Wayne's unheroic responses to the Joker's devastation, there is a corollary to our own ethical position in history. The movie raises a provocative question about the role of heroes in a world bent on meaningless self-destruction. Or, put another way, it asks whether or not heroism and its attendant virtues--honor, truth, freedom, sacrifice--are any way to fight a dirty war.