Why I don’t believe in Harvey Dent
Halfway through my sophomore year of high school I was overwhelmed by an impulse to become more traditionally feminine, which I satisfied by getting a job in the children’s section of the public library. I remember presiding over a storytime circle of elementary schoolers in which I tried to guide them towards an appreciation of modern art--"It’s a kind of picture book” was my logic at the time--and I had finally coaxed them into admitting that Kandinsky’s Woman V was a successful expression of complex emotion when I looked down at the page and realized it was upside down.
The Dark Knight is a successful expression of complex ideas, held upside-down. Without betraying too many plot details (Jeff Michaels of Akron, OH: you are the last person in America not to have seen this movie; please do so at your earliest convenience), the film gets a lot of mileage out of the distinction between Batman, the outcast who fights crime from behind a mask, and DA Harvey Dent, the fight’s public face. Batman is an outcast and a vigilante rather than a hero, which leaves him free to “make the choice that no one else will face--the right choice.”
Americans have regarded printing the legend as a national sport ever since George Washington didn’t chop down a cherry tree. We can be brutal to our celebrities, but public figures who have been dead long enough to lapse into legend get the royal treatment, their shortcomings papered over for the sake of giving us something to believe in.
If it sounds like I object to this kind of dishonesty, I don’t. Batman and Commissioner Gordon lie, Dent comes out looking like a saint, and everyone in Gotham is better off. The perversity of Dark Knight‘s moral is in not in its endorsement of deception but in its insistence that we deceive only in order to sanitize.
To put it in more concrete terms: Gotham needed a face to put on the fight for justice, and Batman and Dent were the city’s only two options. The film seems to take it for granted that Batman’s outlaw tactics and unwillingness to reveal his identity make him ineligible. But why should this be so? There as many outlaws as saints in the American canon of heroes. To pretend that the Gothamite rank-and-file will only accept a whitewashed hero suggests that Christopher Nolan deeply misunderstands how this country goes about its myth-making, or at least that he’s never heard of Pretty Boy Floyd.
The movie begins with two henchmen discussing the Joker’s make-up ("To scare people, you know? War paint"), and the first conversation we see between Bruce Wayne and Alfred begins with Bruce’s scars: “Every time you stitch yourself up you do make a bloody mess.” “It forces me to learn from my mistakes.” This is clearly a film interested in the strange alchemy by which outward signs don’t just symbolize invisible truths but make them real. For Nolan to turn around and suggest that all good masks make heroes look like choir boys is a betrayal of everything about masks and myths that the rest of the movie suggests he should understand better. Why is Abe Lincoln’s honesty de facto more legitimate than Davy Crockett’s bear-killing precocity? (To put it another, less prudent way, do we really like it better when Obama trades on his personal myth than when McCain does?)
About an hour into the film, Alfred says something that the film’s ending ratifies: “They’ll hate you for it, but that’s the point with Batman.” With all due respect to Michael Caine’s confidence-inspiring British accent, that’s the coward’s way out. Far better that the honest outlaws of the world should feel a responsibility to inspire their public’s confidence, and far better that the public should be willing to accept a hero who is something less than harmless.
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Yes, but at times it is suggested in the movie that the Joker won and that Batman is really not as brave as he is thought to be, so it sort of leaves these possibilities open to question.
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Might I suggest that one go back and read Paradise Lost before one takes seriously moral ambiguities in Dark Knight?
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Part of the answer was at the beginning of the movie - the imitation Batmen. They weren’t as good in either sense of the word.
Proper justice is a difficult balance at most times. Vigilante justice is impossible. At best you can redress the most egregious and obvious grievances. If a vigilante becomes a hero - a role model - there will be no justice.
Is this not the neo-con argument? That we must do the most horrible evils to keep everyone safe?
Yet the answer for Gotham is not to try to address a corrupt justice system with vigilantism, but to remove the corruption. Dent is the oddity in that he is both alive and elected at the beginning in a city that would have had him killed or would vote either for vigilantes (think the Duke rape case prosecutor) or someone who takes their bribes, or just the usual negligence which has given us Obama and McCain in the real world.
Just as our answer should have been to treat the second WTC bombing like the first - find the criminals, arrest and prosecute them.
McCain was asked today what he would do about a captured Osama Bin Laden, and he was talking some kind of trial. Not the 5+ year detention without charge, trial, Habeas Corpus, rendition, waterboarding and other torture, and the rest we have done to even some uninvolved.
In that, Osama has won, burning our better side, and we have become TwoFace. Justice v.s. Vengeance, liberty v.s. tyranny at what seems no more logical than the flip of a coin. We have a side that remembers our heritage to the Magna Charta. And we have the side in our fear and anger that just wants to see the world burn.
Yet the coin this November has two heads, one dark, one light, but both augur the same result.
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Mr Willson, you intrigue me; what is your take on “Paradise Lost” and the recent “The Bat-Man” picture show?
Please, enlighten us.
As for your thesis of “moral ambiguities”, I can only imagine you mean the entire opus of that Protestant Milton. Regardless of my “first take”, you have brought to our attention an opinion and topic that is worth discussing.
Thank you.
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Yet Batman never defeats the bad guys...never, ever never.
Yet people will pay to see such tripe forever and ever.
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Helen,
I like your argument, but I sincerely disagree. I think you’re right so far as to say that the outlaw has a place in frontier tradition, but that’s precisely why Batman doesn’t want people to be like him. Batman is trying to become a symbol to the people of Gotham; a promise that justice will be done, even if the police fail. Frontier justice has a deep tinge of vengeance in it; the drive to pursue a criminal across the desert has little to do with protecting the community, and everything to do with harming one who did wrong.
No rules can constrain the sheriff in the desert; Batman works with the cops not out of convenience but out of an acknowledgment that only he can morally balance himself for long enough to bring Gotham back from contemplating the worst measures. The modus vivendi between the cops and the mob that existed in Batman Begins was a slow cancer, terminal if untreated. But when Batman shakes Gotham out of his apathy, he reminds people not only of their power but also of their desperation.
Batman is the ultimate detective, and the ultimate strategist. In the comics, he’s the only man who could ever take Superman down. But he knows that normal men lack either the vengeful determination, or the talent, to be like him. It’s not so much that he can make extraordinary moral choices, but that only he has the skills to make those choices AND remain whole.
Normal people have to use guns, have to kill, if they step outside the law. In Britain, once cops lost their authority, they resorted to the threat of violence represented by carrying submachine guns (Seriously! Look at them in an airport sometime). In America, cops still DO have that authority, and that’s the world Batman is trying to rebuild. The problem is, sometimes silences are harder to notice than we hope, and the people didn’t care that Batman didn’t carry a gun. They think a costume is all they need to have the power to take back their city, and forget that a badge, too, is a kind of costume…
Batman caused -or at least made possible- the transformation of the cops from buffoons to warriors. Jim Gordon alone could only save the city by becoming a monster; Batman has just enough talent, and just enough moral ambiguity, to go far enough to help the cops, but no farther. He’ll do things they can’t, he’ll use resources they can’t afford, he’ll break the law, but he never kills. But the people he never meant to inspire are. Gotham could survive, at least for a while, the notion that blood goes unavenged, but it can’t survive the notion that blood cancels out blood.
Batman needs, desperately, to marginalize himself, because he believes in justice. Only he can become the Batman, and make the ordinary, flawed man become the mask. Tarantino’s wrong in Kill Bill Vol. 2: Clark Kent isn’t Superman’s indictment of humanity, but Bruce Wayne IS Batman’s indictment of what happens when men don’t care about the outcome. Batman - Bruce - stares into Harvey Dent’s maimed face and sees the callousness that he always mimed.
Gotham needs Batman to stand between dusk and dawn. But law is the presence that can make the eerie silence on the street feel calm. As long as justice relies upon a dark specter in the night, the law can never be legitimate.
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I think Dave K. makes a good point. The American outlaw is a hero, but Gotham city has more than enough Dillingers and Wyatt Earps. My one caveat is with his comment about the line in Kill Bill Vol. 2 that Dave references. That interpretation of Superman is incorrect, but remember that Bill is the one giving it. That fundamental misunderstanding of Superman tells us all we need to know about Bill’s moral outlook, which is why he should not raise the Bride’s daughter and why he must be killed.
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“Yet Batman never defeats the bad guys...never, ever never.
Yet people will pay to see such tripe forever and ever.”
sorta like real life with Osama or Ghadafi
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