Batman Rewatch: The Dark Knight will always have the Joker. The Dark Knight Rises is just a joke.
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Every week (more or less) from now until The Batman hits theaters, we're watching Batman's theatrical films in chronological order. This week: The Scarecrow returns and returns again. Last time: Richie Rich meets the Plague Ninjas. Later this week, because we're running out of time: Batman becomes everything Ben Affleck isn't.
There is no good way to write this next sentence, so I'll just pick a bad way. The Dark Knight would have been way less awesome if Heath Ledger lived.
Obviously, no superhero movie is worth a human life. He should have been there at the world premiere on July 14, 2008. See Ledger on the red carpet, Ledger on the late night circuit, amusing crowds with tales of psycho clown prep. He would have hosted the season premiere of Saturday Night Live, and the monologue gag would've been the whole cast in Jokerface doing their own "Why so serious?" impression. (Imagine Amy Poehler, pregnant, in murder mascara.) Today, you'd see rumors about a Ledger cameo in The Flash. He'd be around, and his Joker would be "iconic" in a safe way, something he would laugh about on Instagram every couple years. Instead, we lost him. So in The Dark Knight he is unfathomable. You went to the theater three or four times that summer to watch a dead man light your world on fire.
Warner Bros. Heath Ledger as the Joker in 'The Dark Knight'
With Dark Knight, director Christopher Nolan perfected his default tone of stern awe. The other actors are fine and firm. Christian Bale turns down his Begins volume: Bruce less boozy, Bats less croaky. As Harvey Dent, Aaron Eckhart is vanilla with a couple sprinkles. Maggie Gyllenhaal gives Rachel some personality until she's sacrificed to the altar of male sorrow. There are early plot threads about gangster coalitions and fiscal globo-crime. A trip to Hong Kong features an airborne prologue that was cool in IMAX. This is one of Nolan's ideological gunmetal dollhouses, with whole relationships built on people discussing each other's symbolism. The most crucial plot point — shaky on reflection, absurdly overplayed in the sequel — is Batman's belief that one effective District Attorney will turn his nightmare city into statistical Singapore.
Then the Joker starts breaking through the dollhouse walls. The whole gray stalwart movie exists as something for him to attack. His dissonant effect is profound and hilarious: He's the devil in The Master and Margarita, and he's the Kool-Aid Man. Something meta, too, in the way he tapdances over how these stories are supposed to go. ("You didn't think I'd risk losing the battle for Gotham's soul in a fistfight with you?") The merry destruction starts from the opening bank scene, that tight criminal crew getting slasher-film'd mid-heist by their own boss. Then the mad clown strolls into Mob Parliament and makes a pencil disappear. Michael Jai White plays a gangster just long enough for Joker to kill Spawn.
Even true believers might have plot questions about the last hour. A lifeboat climax requires you to believe Nolan and his co-writers have solved an unanswerable philosophical conundrum with the triumph of the human spirit. Cell phones give Batman sonar, it looks jank. Every Joker plan demands fifth-dimensional logic, but the Joker is there to remind you logic doesn't matter. He invents Two-Face out of thin air by putting on nurse's scrubs to prattle about dogs chasing cars. His mountain of money is a bonfire. He reveals one sad origin, and then another sad origin. Really, he's making fun of the whole idea that origins explain anything. This, in a film still Year One enough to reveal how Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman) earned his Commissionerhood. This madman sees your traumatic past and cackles. Thank goodness no one ever made a whole dumb film about the Joker's backstory!
This villain has a nominal mission. He wants to corrupt the incorruptible, and reveal that common civility is a mask. "I'm not a monster," he says. "I'm just ahead of the curve." If you believe that line — there's no reason to believe anything he says — then this is the second straight Batman baddie whose motivations are purely (and totally) destructive. These are characters unadorned by any personal life, and their henchmen have no personality. (Back in 1989, the Joker had a girlfriend, a boss, and a best pal — all people he wound up killing, sure, but that's still a character arc.)
You have to remember, then, that Dark Knight was experienced as a ripped-from-the-headlines fable. President Barack Obama allegedly cited this Joker as an analogue for ISIL, which seems precisely as unhelpful as the time Ronald Reagan compared the Soviet Union to the bad guys from Star Wars. Actual geopolitical forces have a long past, and hope for a specific future. Joker reminds me more of the masked marauders from the same year's The Strangers, who torture people just because they happen to be at home. Is anything scarier than a troll just doing it for the lolz?
I'm only talking about the Joker. I'm not sure I have anything else to say. The Dark Knight is maybe my favorite movie I never want to see again. I used to think it was a brilliant take on a mythos I cared about, with a lot to say about the world I lived in. Now it feels rather dry, a bit flavorless, as atonal as the James Newton Howard/Hans Zimmer score. There are Bat-stories where everyone is fun, freaky, and unknowable — not just one Joker in a sea of grim faces. Dark Knight doesn't hit me anymore, and I don't want it not to hit me. I only care when I remember.
I first saw it a full year before the movie hit theaters. An empty street in Chicago, August 2007, my ears still ringing from Daft Punk's set at Lollapalooza. Me and a few hundred other people got stopped at an empty street, and a huge production truck drove by us. There in the carriage was Christopher Freaking Nolan, surrounded by computers and equipment, five or a dozen people around him, with I swear a smile on his face. Was he filming the chase scene that night? I loved him. I thought he was changing Hollywood. I thought movies would never stop getting better.
I actually saw the film properly on opening night, sitting in the front row of an IMAX theater. Nothing is worse than the IMAX front row. (The most revealing problem with Nolan's alleged perfectionism is that he does not realize an IMAX theater has thirteen good seats, tops.) The view was not ideal. After two and a half hours, I could draw Eckhart's chin dimple from memory. Didn't care. I saw it twice more that month. I was in the cult. I was a shareholder in Dark Knight Enterprises. In fairness, so was everyone else. The film's influence spread. The superhero-desperate Oscars changed their rules again and again. Multiple blockbusters copied the Joker's whole I-meant-to-get-captured prison gambit: Skyfall, Avengers, Star Trek Into Darkness.
Nolan even xeroxed himself. "Was getting caught part of your plan?" asks the baffled good guy. "Of course!" says the villain. That dialogue comes early in Dark Knight's sequel, one of the worst movies ever made.
Ron Phillips/Warner Bros.
Where to begin with 2012's The Dark Knight Rises? Batman is a public enemy, except all the good cops love him and the nice children worship him. Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway) thinks her apartment is economically dire, but we clearly see it's a hip boho studio. Instead of just killing Batman, Bane (Tom Hardy) sends him to an underground prison. It is referred to as "hell," "hell on earth," and "the worst hell on earth." In this horrible place, Batman must survive the ferocious advances of a helpful chiropractor, an informative blind seer, and the supportive community of inmates who cheer each other on during escape attempts. Hell is Positive Reinforcement. Bane himself is totally invulnerable, except for the face tubes he wears on the most accessible part of his face. Don't you dare tickle those face tubes.
A big swing for topicality is the much-discussed Dent Act, which has created some kind of local Guantanamo. A complicated portrayal of post-9/11 overreach? The only inmates we see are gun-hoisting bad dudes, while the entire Gotham P.D. winds up in a self-sacrificing battle to stop an actual nuclear blast. You're getting the general pointless mood here, so many important things turning irrelevant. Batman gets stabbed, it doesn't matter. Batman sacrifices himself, he doesn't.
The problem here is not a failure of aesthetic principle, or an inability to fulfill vast intellectual ambition, or a misunderstanding of the Batman canon. The problem is it's all stupid. And not the kind of stupid where you can enjoy silly things happening, or appreciate the talents of the production designers, or bask in overripe performances. Hathaway's attempts at theatrical impudence get swatted down by thinkpiece-y dialogue. "Everything we do is collated and quantified," she has to explain, "Everything sticks." (The Catwoman material now comes off like a thematic prequel for co-screenwriter Jonathan Nolan's terrible third season of Westworld, another overripe class warfare smash-up with its own crucial giant technology ball.) Marion Cotillard has to be boring for 140 minutes until it turns out she is the daughter of Ra's al Ghul (Liam Neeson, whose spooooky cameo is the single worst scene in Nolan's filmography.)
The weirdest thing about the Talia twist is the obvious point missed. She is avenging her dead father. If Bruce had saved him in that Batman Begins train crash, would she have bothered spending a near-decade plotting slow-knife vengeance? Don't expect self-awareness. Rises exudes hysterical confidence, even as it regurgitates fan service in place of inspiration. "Yes, Mr. Wayne," says Lucius (Morgan Freeman), "It does come in black." Gag. Robin, gag gag gag.
I'm being cruel to be kind. No, I'm not. I'm being cruel because I was too kind. My status as a shareholder in Dark Knight Enterprises made my early appraisal of Rises a retroactively embarrassing experience. It all had to mean something. I saw the naked emperor and I praised his clothes. Surely there were magnificent depths lurking herein. Sustainable energy? Occupy Wall Street? Big holes in the ground: Bad or good? In the Dark Knight Rises chapter of his book The Nolan Variations, the (generally wonderful) film writer Tom Shone references Edmund Burke, Thomas Carlyle, and Marlon Brando's role in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now. Nolan and his collaborators, we learn, examined Fritz Lang's Metropolis and Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers for inspiration. Hahahahahahaha! All this for a movie starring Tom Hardy as a steroidal big toe who sounds like a James Mason wind turbine.
Bane is stupid, but he is wonderfully stupid. I am starting to wonder if the grandiloquent meathead will wind up being the whole trilogy's most lasting influence. Hardy looks like The Dark Knight Rises feels. He has clearly worked very, very, very hard on making himself terrifying without ever realizing he is totally ridiculous. His big speech can only be understood as a parody of big speeches. "Rrrrm Grthrm's Rrckrnrng," sure. Batman & Robin had less brain cells than a pet rock. But nobody working on that poisoned film thought they were doing Sidney Lumet.
Heaviness once seemed to be the Dark Knight trilogy's best virtue, and it was just keeping up with traffic. The 2000s were a great time for dejected-paranoic reconsiderations of cheeky-geeky material. You felt it in the great Battlestar Galactica reboot, in the undercurrent of wistful loneliness bubbling through the Doctor Who revival, in the much-vaunted creep of grown-up tensions between Harry Potter's Quidditch matches. (007 was sad now, it was a whole thing.) Seemingly every major genre saga of the last couple decades built to some final act equivalent to The Dark Knight Rises, with a final rally-the-troops showdown against ultimate evil. I used to think this was a metaphorical reaction to real-world events: The "Voldemort is [fill in your political villain]" theory of culture. You constantly heard some variation of the same line, There's a war coming. "You've given me an army," says Batman in Rises.
Does all that look prophetic, in a week with war and nuclear arms back in the headlines? Or was this escapism hopping the fence into outright delusion, weaving ever-more-elaborate tapestries of obvious good taking on one-dimensional cosmic antagonism? Never forget: Eleven years into America's vastly complex Middle East quagmire, there was a gigantic successful movie where the definition of "war" was "Batman and the cops and the orphans on a school bus versus the Vengeful Nuclear Lovers from the Hell Pit." So The Dark Knight Rises serves a crucial historical purpose. It proves the whole moody-downbeat mode of genre storytelling can be just as dumb as anything else.
Which is why we have not yet reached the end of the long tail of Bane parody. Making fun of him is a straightforward way to make fun of a whole generation's hyperbolic pretensions. Hardy's performance is as goofy as anything in the Joel Schumacher movies precisely because the movie's worshipful tone is so askew. Everything around him is equally inflated. The Bat airship is floating mulch. And, oh no, the big giant ball is exploding! In response, everyone can only wear that somber Joseph Gordon-Levitt look on their face, wide eyes watching awe-inspiring horror. Why so serious? Seriously, why?
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