THE DARK KNIGHT

July 21, 2008 

American pop culture has no shortage of analysts, critics, and armchair psychiatrists. And I’m one of them. So as others have commented on the phenomenon of The Dark Knight, the sequel to 2005's Batman Begins, I am compelled to add my two cents. There’s more here than just a good movie.

On Friday, July 18, the long-awaited film, starring Christian Bale as Batman and the late Heath Ledger as the Joker, opened in theaters across the country. Tickets to opening weekend performances were selling on Craig’s List in some cities for $100.00 each with movie critics predicting that not only would the film break box office records but that it was the best of the superhero genre and perhaps one of the best action/crime thrillers of all time. It’s already set the record for biggest opening day box office with over $67.8M in tickets sold. As of this writing it is on track for a $155M opening weekend.

Certainly, the hype that preceded the movie’s release, a fundamental characteristic of the motion picture industry, was responsible for the rush to see The Dark Knight during its opening weekend. Batman Begins was an excellent movie and a brilliant recreation of a franchise that nearly died when George Clooney played Batman in 1997’s Batman and Robin.  From the moment Batman Begins was released fans were waiting for a sequel.  Ledger’s untimely death from a drug overdose and talk of an Oscar for his performance only increased the anticipation.

But the half-life of hype is very short. It takes word-of-mouth recommendations from friends, family, and co-workers who have seen the movie and people who go see it multiple times during the film's run to make it a true blockbuster. That’s not generated by publicity, but by how people react to the movie personally.

Early reviews and the comments of moviegoers after seeing the The Dark Knight only partially reveal how people are reacting to it. Words most often used to describe it are “dark, searing, and disturbing.”  It’s “as serious as a movie can get.”  The Joker “is pure unadulterated evil.”  It’s “a masterpiece.”   It is “a movie perfectly pitched to the nasty desperation of the times.”  And my personal favorite, it’s “an epic movie with mythic overtones.”

So what is it, without giving away the plot, about The Dark Knight that people will personally react to?  Why will people recommend it to others and go see it multiple times while it’s still in theaters? 

The simple answer to that question is that most everyone who sees the movie can find a reflection of themselves somewhere in it or can identify with the moral dilemmas the major and minor characters are confronted with. Like any great work of art, those reflections and identifications differ from person to person. Every good drama or action adventure movie attempts to do this on one level or another. Some succeed, most don’t. When the movie maker creates a prism that allows us to look into the souls of others while looking into our own, however, he does something people are drawn to. The Dark Knight does it about as well as any movie can.

In James Cameron’s 1997 Titanic, there wasn’t a man, woman, or child above the age of reason who saw that movie who couldn’t picture themselves as a passenger on that doomed ship. Although it was about how different classes of people during the early 20th Century, brought together by fate, interacted with each other in a life and death crisis, they behaved no differently than their 21st Century counterparts. Couple all that with, great acting, masterful storytelling, great cinematography, and phenomenonal special effects, and you get a blockbuster.

The Dark Knight has all the same necessary ingredients. It’s a classic, timeless story about desperate people with multiple sub-plots. It’s a movie about good and evil in a crime-ridden city and how its people react to the most evil and idealistic among them. It’s a compelling portrait of an evil mind and a love story with a woman torn between two men both driven to out-wit the Joker.

In Ledger’s Joker we see evil in its rawest form, merciless, relentless, unyielding, not bound by any rules. Ledger’s interpretation of the Joker is both original and frightening. If he wins a posthumous Oscar for his performance, he deserves it. His haunting portrayal of a psychopath will live on for generations.

Bale’s Batman, on the other hand, walks the line between good and evil, torn between his desire to stop being Batman and his compulsion to use his disguise to do what others in Gotham can’t. He finds a new and powerful ally in prosecutor Harvey Dent, who vies with him for the affections of Rachel Dawes, but who ultimately is unable to do what only Batman can. Along the way just about everyone else in the movie is drawn into the multiple conflicts in ways that force them to confront their own demons.

Ultimately, what makes Bale’s Batman and Ledger’s Joker so compelling is that neither possess any physical or mental superpowers. Unlike Superman and Spider-Man and the many nemeses they face, they are simply human beings compelled by the motivations that occupy their souls. They are “real” people with “real” problems.

Director Christopher Nolan has raised the bar for movies about comic book heroes. Even sequels to successful franchises like Spider-Man, Superman, and Iron Man will have to go back to the drawing board if they want to keep pace. Like everything successful that comes out of Hollywood, movies about comic book heroes are multiplying exponentially. Judging from the previews I’ve seen, none of them come any where close to The Dark Knight.

Nolan’s The Dark Knight ultimately succeeds not because it’s a good movie about Batman and the Joker, but because it’s about the evil that lurks in men's souls.