A "review" of The Dark Knight

It's a good thing that movies don't have dicks, because if The Dark Knight had one I'd suck it, and I'm not even gay.

I'm quite glad to be too old to fall into that "hafta-have-the-merch" phase that occurs in every boy's life just after they outgrow Sesame Street and just before they pitch out that poster of the girls with the Pink Floyd album covers airbrushed onto their naked backs. When I became a man, I did away with childish things. Thank God.

I had to go digging through the archives[0] in order to find out how I felt about the last Christopher Nolan-helmed Batman movie. I seem to recall that it was "good". I apparently waxed poetic as to the renewed darkness and intensity of the character that DC Comics lost when it put nipples on the costumes and tried to pretend that Ahnold was a physicist. Fortunately those days are long gone and Nolan adheres to the same formula that made Batman Begins such a high-quality picture.

He kept Morgan Freeman in it.

Lucius Fox has gotten the short end of the stick for so long that I think he showed up for the first time in one or two episodes of the animated series. Hardly a fitting place in the canon for Batman's number one mechanic and go-to gearhead. What, are you dense? Are you retarded or something? He's the goddamned Batman. He's a scientist, not an auto technician.

You really can't discuss The Dark Knight without mentioning Heath Ledger's character, The Joker. He's not just good. He's not just great. He's definitive. It's as if in one fell swoop some Aussie up 'n' comer had made good on his only reason for being: to put Jack Nicholson, Cesar Romero, and Mark Hamill all in their places. Sit down, gentlemen. Anarchy has a scarred new face. With his mission accomplished, Heath departed this earthly realm to return to movie star heaven to await the day they remake Peter Sellers's Being There.

We all know The Joker. Much like Santa Claus, he has uniquely distinguishing features that immediately make him recognizable: purple suit, white face, green hair, grotesque facial features, predilection for chaos and bodily harm. Check, check, check, check, and a big check on that last one, baby. Ledger's Joker is never more perfect than in a simple throwaway scene in which he has successfully pulled off his latest coup and is driving around the city in a stolen police cruiser. It is dusk, and he is tooling around the town with his head outside the window, doglike, taking in the nighttime air and basking in the fact that he just walked away from blowing up fifty people for no good reason. The car, the street, and the city are all literally and figuratively his own personal playthings.

In that one beautiful moment, he is alive.

Something I never understood about earlier incarnations of The Joker is that they always gave him an origin or an objective. "I'm going to kill Batman because he disfigured me," or "I'm going to dehydrate the U.N. along with my three equally-zany cohorts." What? The Joker is the living embodiment of chaos, the personification of strife and discord created for no reason other than because, in a very morose way, it's kind of funny.

Oh, sure. It's not "Ha ha" funny. More like "I think I'm going to be sick," which is only funny if you're as random and demented as The Joker himself. He's clearly not right in the head, but in The Dark Knight he's finally freed of the burden of motivation. Maybe he robs a bank for the money. Maybe he doesn't. You can never be truly certain until you corner him, stare him eye-to-eye, and ask him what the punchline is. The jokes, you see, are really his own, deemed for an audience of one. All the world is a stage, in The Joker's eyes. And all the men and women but players upon it. And it had better be a comedy, and to The Joker that means doing some pretty sick Titus Andronicus-style shit. Come to think of it, Barbara Gordon would look good without her tongue or her hands.

So now The Joker is finally as random as he wants to be, robbing millions one minute and torching a bunch of bills the next. "I'm not in it for the money," he says. "This town needs a new kind of criminal." Wrap your mind around the beauty of that statement and you can being to understand how amazing Heath Ledger's performance is. By comparison, Christian Bale is reduced to hoarsely barking angry monosyllabic outbursts like "Where's Dent?!" and "They need me!"

I saw the film on a six-story IMAX screen with a whopping 1200 watts of sound driving every car chase and truck-flip straight into my bones, so it would be an outright lie to say that the film lacks action. Sometimes it's bombs and bazookas, sometimes it's something as simple as making a pencil disappear. Forget the ray guns and the hallucination powder of Batman movies of yore. The Joker uses Uzis and knives and 55-gallon oil drums filled with...something. I don't know what. It's down-home felonious danger to life and limb just as God intended it to be. Freeze ray. Pffffft. Give me a psychotic with a switchblade and a lack of personal hygiene any day.

This film is long. Like, two-and-a-half hours, my-bladder-can't-take-anymore long, and there's really not a lot of screentime for Bruce Wayne. He's still very scarred both emotionally as well as physically, which we see when Bee-Dub goes to put on a shirt in a scene that was deliberately put in there just fo' tha ladies. (Those wags who would rather see Maggie Gyllenhaal with her shirt off should check out Secretary, which I think I'm going to watch again tonight. Oh, not because I saw her in this movie. Watching Secretary is something I just do normally at least once every week or two.)

There are, by my count, appearances by three Gotham supervillains in this picture, with Harvey Dent playing only a limited secondary role in the latter half of the picture. Something I've learned from watching Batman movies is that diluting the villainy pool often makes things overly complex and nonsensical. Why would Poison Ivy team up with Mr. Freeze? No reason I can think of. At least with their mutual screentime isolated to limited, logical interactions, The Joker doesn't have to share the spotlight with a second banana for very long. Mister J gets the front of the stage and Dent gets to make his oh-so-important coin tosses. Everyone's happy.

I'm amazed at some of the actors who have attached themselves to an action movie. Not just an action movie, but a superhero movie. A superhero movie sequel. We still have Morgan Freeman, and Michael Caine, and Gary Oldman as Commissioner Gordon. I feel bad for the guy. His job is pretty much limited to handing out parking tickets and calling Batman for everything else. I'd like to see the next film be something like Batman III: Commissioner Gordon's Story and it consists mostly of a day in the life of Gotham's number one cop:

Scene 1: Jim Gordon is already late for work. Running up to the front stairs of the Gotham P.D. precinct where his overly small office is, he's balancing a cup of coffee, a muffin, some file folders, and a newspaper in his hands. A belligerent man in handcuffs bumps him and everything he's holding gets doused in coffee, two creams, and two sugars. His shirt is ruined. A man in uniform pulls the detainee off the commissioner and apologizes, lugging his perp down the hall.

Gordon voice-over: "Shit. Goddammit. Another day in Gotham City. Another day of waiting for the next big freak in a costume to pull off some insane heist. Jesus. In Kansas City they just deal with pickpockets and drug addicts. They don't have to worry about nutjobs dressed like cats stealing Egyptian idols. Fuck! Why do the Gotham museums even bring that shit here?! They fucking know that if they fucking bring a fucking jewel-encrusted penguin statue in from the collection of the Sultan of Fucking Brunei that it's gonna get swiped. And not a low-key smash and grab, either. It's gonna be a giant hot air balloon shaped like a puffin floating in and filling the museum with knockout gas or something. Fuck me, this town sucks."

"Christ. If the cops in this city are useless it's only because the bad guys all seem to have an un-fucking-limited budget to waste on gizmos and gimmicks. If I worked the beat in Miami, I'd know one thing for sure: Colombian drug cartels don't have fucking branding."

I'd watch that for two solid hours. Jim Gordon has to be an absolute saint in order to put up with half the shit he deals with on a daily basis: small flying mammal-themed kung fu vigilantes, dudes in face paint, furry-fetish chicks in vinyl, horticulture freaks, and people wearing those skinny little eye masks.

He's the police commissioner of Gotham City. You're wearing a unitard covered in question marks. He fucking knows who you are by now, Ed.

So The Dark Knight is quite possibly the darkest, bestest Batman movie yet. Nolan, Bale, and Ledger compromised nothing in bringing to life a vision of a town threatened by a madman with fluid and arbitrary demands. The big idea behind Batman Begins is that Gotham City's crime industry has shifted away from the mafiosa goombas and moved more towards the grandiose rockstar opponents who are playing for bigger stakes. This philosophy continues in The Dark Knight and moves it to its logical conclusion: examining a city gripped by fear and anxious to succumb to the whims of a grungy purple terror that has no ulterior motive. How do you bargain with something who doesn't really need anything?

Warren Ellis put it best himself: "You don't win fights by being a strong man or a clever boxer. You win fights by being more prepared to permanently fuck up the other guy." How do you defeat someone with that attitude? How do you do it without becoming just like them?

Some would argue you don't.

[0] "$ cd /home/toby/code/perl/blog-test && grep -ril 'riddler' ." Done.