The Dark Knight Misses a Step and Almost Falls Flat on His Ass
“I’ve seen now what I have to become to stop men like him.”
That one line from the trailer sums up what The Dark Knight wants to be about — Bruce Wayne’s internal battle over whether he really wants to turn into the kind of person he’d have to become to defeat the likes of the Joker, and by extension the larger question of just how much good has to compromise in order to defeat evil. It’s a question which really connects with the zeitgeist right about now, what with all the fear and scare-mongering over terrorism and the justifications being thrown around for torture, rendition, spying and so on, which is one reason the movie is doing so well at the box office.
Note, however, that I said that’s what the movie wants to be about. Unfortunately, it doesn’t entirely hit the mark. No process of internal change or growth happens all at once; it inevitably involves a series of steps. In fact, that’s pretty much the definition of a character arc — the steps the character takes in growing and changing over the course of the story. Good screenwriting involves (among many other things) dramatizing all the important components of the protagonist’s arc in a smooth, believable and interesting fashion. In The Dark Knight, though, one of the biggest and most important steps happens entirely offscreen!
A little background. The Joker has announced that he’s going to kill someone new every day until Batman comes forward and unmasks himself, and he’s begun to deliver on his threat. Bruce decides he can’t take the guilt anymore, so he tells Harvey Dent, Gotham City’s crusading District Attorney, to call a press conference at which he’ll announce that he’s Batman and turn himself in to the police. Batman hanging up his cowl and going to jail — pretty dramatic, huh? Of course, we know it can’t happen because then there’d be no sequels and probably no movie either, but it’s a great idea because it creates a ton of tension: we’re dying to see what happens to change his mind and how much the decision to keep being Batman and risk the lives of more innocents costs him.
At the press conference, though, Dent is the one who announces that he’s Batman and turns himself in, and Bruce Wayne just stands around on the sidelines looking rich and lounge-y. WTF? Seriously, OMGWTFBBQ? Well, later we find out that Dent persuaded Batman to use him as bait to trap the Joker instead of just turning himself in and trusting the Joker to stop killing people. (Like that was ever a good plan anyway.) This makes for a decent moment of surprise at the press conference when the wrong Batman steps forward, but it comes at the expense of the most important turning point in Bruce Wayne’s entire character arc — when he decides not to give up and to keep fighting no matter the cost.
Look at it this way: for Bruce Wayne to decide to give in to the Joker’s demands, he should have reached the point of ultimate despair. He should have put everything he had into the fight against the Joker, and yet the Joker should have utterly defeated him. Giving up should have seemed like the only viable option remaining, because it should’ve been absolutely clear that there was just no conceivable way he could ever win without either killing a whole boatload of innocent bystanders in the process or turning into a monster even worse than the Joker — or more likely, both. Then surrendering would almost make sense, and we’d share Batman’s despair.
The problem is that at this point in the movie, we haven’t yet seen him give his all against the Joker. In fact, we haven’t even seen him come close. They’ve really only just begun to scuffle, and their biggest encounters are yet to come. So what does that make Batman, a quitter? A wimp? A loser?
Now think about what it should take to change his mind at this point. Remember, the Joker should have beaten him at every turn and left him with nothing but the nuclear option, becoming even worse than the Joker in order to defeat him, which would be the ultimate Pyrrhic victory. Given the theme of the movie, there are really only two basic options. First, something or someone could restore Bruce’s faith in himself, his confidence that he can win and his certainty that he’s inherently good enough that he could never become truly evil like the Joker. Or second, it could become clear to him that however horrible the collateral damage caused by his battle against the Joker might be, the damage done by a Joker unrestrained by the Batman would be far, far worse.
What The Dark Knight offers us, though, is Harvey Dent coming up with a new plan. This suggests that Batman’s despair was pretty shallow and unnecessary — that all he actually needed to do was put a little more thought into the problem, but that he decided it would be easier to just give up. It makes Batman look even look more like a quitter. And it also makes him look kind of stupid.
Luckily, most of the rest of the movie is so crackerjack-super-fantastic-awesome-good that it’s possible to sort of gloss over this flaw while watching it, but there are some other problems I’ll talk about in future posts.
Tags: Aaron Eckhart, Batman, Box Office, Character Arc, Christian Bale, Christopher Nolan, Consequences, Cusp, Despair, Eat My Brains, Inner Conflict, Joker, Stakes, The Dark Knight, Theme, Villain's Plan, Zeitgeist