The Dark Knight

Why has The Dark Knight grossed such spectacular revenues? Comic book adaptations are certainly reliable box-office fodder these days, and there has been considerable hype surrounding Heath Ledger’s portrayal of the Joker in the context of his untimely demise.

But there’s more to it than this. There’s something about film that seems to ring true; something that makes sense, appears apt, that reflects something meaningful about our present condition.

Commentators have already pointed to the political implications of the film: some wondering whether Obama or McCain or Bush or Cheney can be better identified with the Dark Knight; others noting how there are ten minutes in the middle of the film during which the Joker is referred to as ‘a terrorist’ in speech accompanied by all the appropriate rhetoric – “do we want to give in to terrorists?” etc.

Yet on a less superficial level, what can the film’s central preoccupation (i.e. anarchy vs. society’s laws and norms) reveal about the nature of the anxieties gripping modern, liberal culture today?

Perhaps it’s because I worked on the bloody thing for four long months, but I can’t help seeing my dissertation in all this. In it, I tried to investigate the phenomenon of suicide bombing from an unorthodox perspective. Rather than seek to either condemn the practice wholeheartedly or empathise with the plight of the one who explodes him- or herself in most abject desperation, I was concerned with suicide bombing’s place in liberal modernity. How is it a product of the modern; and what does it reveal about our liberalism?

The reason suicide bombing is ensconced within such a polarising discourse, I argued, is that our liberal order operates through a kind of generosity; a gift that cannot be returned. Put very simply, it includes you, even if you don’t want to be included. Your identity is formed, it has a place within this order: it is rationalised.

If, however, you challenge your positioning – if, like the suicide bomber, you challenge the very preconditions of social existence – we will still find a way to rationalise your behaviour. We will call it evil, or illegitimate, or the product of indoctrination, or the result of oppression and injustice. We will insist that it fails, lest we admit to “giving in to terrorists”. We will cast you out, as our inhuman antithesis. (although, as my dissertation argues, this exclusion is simultaneously a kind of inclusion – just as the Joker insists that Batman needs his anarchic other)

In other words, we will understand you, in some form or another. Our biggest fear is that you will continue to defy our logic, our attempts to rationalise what you do. And this is precisely the fear that The Dark Knight articulates. Studies of suicide bombers show that they are very much human, despite the inhumanity of their actions. They are sons and daughters, students, employees, people with emotions and goals and prejudices. Their demonisation perhaps has its culmination in the character of the Joker: a caricature of irrationality and destruction. He cannot be persuaded or bribed, nor can his motivations be rationalised. He simply must be stopped. And yet the most difficult task is to stop the person who doesn’t share such mundane concerns as the preservation of life.

It’s possible to read all sorts of things into The Dark Knight, and I don’t know how much of it was intentional. But what’s clear to me is that whilst the ‘terrorist’ receives nothing more than an extreme caricature, the film reveals rather more about the specifically modern, liberal anxiety presently gripping American and European societies.