dark was the knight: my two belated cents on the batman

>WARNING: SOME SPOILERS<

I was raised in a strictly Marvel household. Spiderman came calling regularly, as did the Fantastic Four and Thor, who sometimes brought along his Avenger friends. Those DC fellows were verboten, considered relics from another era, somehow out of touch with the modern world. Then, in 1986, DC and Frank Miller unleashed the Dark Knight Returns on the world and it was like an earthquake. There was nothing out of touch about this wounded fisher-king of a superhero. Suddenly it was Marvel left looking quaint and a little shopworn.

It took me a long time to watch Batman Begins, largely because I couldn't get a lather up about anything with such a pedestrian title, but also because the buzz that it sprang up from Miller's Dark Knight mythos wasn't borne out by the trailers. The Dark Knight graphic novels are all about aging: the bitterness, guilt, loss of idealism, all while watching one's body begin to decay and fail. Bruce Wayne is 55 when they begin, and has been retired and drunk since the second Robin was killed in action. The wormwood encounters between the silver-haired Wayne and the ever-buff, never-aging Clark Kent are brutal, particularly since Kent is an unquestioning soldier of the American government, entirely lacking in Wayne's agonizing doubt and introspection. What did these questions have to do with the young and virile Christian Bale version of the Batman?

It's too much to say I was underwhelmed when I did finally watch it; more accurate to say I was merely whelmed. I enjoyed myself, but let my itchy trigger finger stray to the fast-forward button during the climactic action scenes and also, decidedly, during the final walk through the rubble of Wayne Manor, when Katie Holmes gives her "Oh, Bruce, maybe someday, but not today..." yawners.

The Dark Knight, on the other hand, has upped the intrigue in the whole Batman matter considerably. Sitting in the darkened cinema, watching the darkened Gotham, it struck me that this might grow into something more interesting than the original novels. It's the scapegoat thing that really sold me: the idea that the Protector of the City must be so strong that he can and will, voluntarily, carry the entire shadow of that city, forego the name of hero, be hunted as a villain, all for the good of the city's soul. That's exactly the kind of axiology one wants to find whilst grubbing in the nightsoil of the Dark Knight's Gotham, and Christopher Nolan doesn't let down the side.

It was a bold move on his part to de-hyperbolize the place itself. This is the first realistic Gotham City I've ever seen-- stylistically, it was exaggerated even in Batman Begins. And there are good reasons for using exaggeration. You watch those old "Batman" shows on TV, or the other movies, there's no question that we're not in the real world, so you don't ask things like, "How the hell did the Joker manage to DO that?!" Now, suddenly, Gotham is a real city, in our real world, and nagging questions creep in, like, "OK. How the hell did the Joker manage to DO that?!" How do you plant thousands of bombs in the major hospital while the city is on a sort of terrorist red-alert and nobody notices until they go off? And If I tied up a soldier and stole his uniform to sneak into the Mayor's honor guard... again, while the city was on red alert for just such an incident in that very place... Well, I wouldn't get very far, even WITHOUT huge telltale scars on my face announcing exactly who I was. Things like that. Old Bruce pulls off near-miracles, too, but it's easier to shrug off. He is richer than Croesus, and rich folks with geniuses on the payroll can do stuff, end of story, or so those of us who scratch out a living day to day are prone to believe.

Most of the problems I had with the film concerned the Joker, in fact. Here's a fellow who claims to be the opposite of a schemer, the anti-schemer, the big spontaneous trickster guy without a plan, but he has HUGE plans (granted, he's also a big fat liar). Somehow his plans get carried out in spite of the fact that although his organization of petty criminals must be enormous, he has no right-hand guy, nobody he trusts... And yet he manages to keep complete control of these guys? Terror is a good discipline, certainly, but one guy? without backup? Hitler and Stalin and Capone had inner circles. All dictators and crime-bosses do. Nobody manages to stay on top of a criminal organization without trusted troops to do the wetwork... and, although the Joker is not one to shy away from the wetwork, there's no way he could do it all, not in an operation this size.

In the end, these are minor itches, and there are more things I love than hate about this Dark Knight: the script, its reversals and surprises, for starters. I even liked the car chases this time. I love Alfred's story about the Burmese jungle. I love Harvey Dent's speech about Rome and its protector, and I love the full and tragic human they've made out of Two-Face. I love the big thumpy music they play during some of the action scenes. I love the convict on the ferryboat who offers to bear the shadow for the whole boat, much as Batman will for the whole city. I've had to go back and watch it three times to decide finally, but I think Nolan has pulled off a triumph, one that might lead to increasingly wonderful sequels if he can keep his interest up. Even one, perhaps, when Bale is 55, playing a man who has been retired and drunk for ten years...