Why So Serious?: ‘The Dark Knight’ (2008)
An asterisk looms over Batman as large and lunar as the Bat-Signal itself: the only major superhero without superpowers; the only one with a clearly drawn psychological origin story; and the only one, finally, whose costumed pursuits are driven by darkness, by a lust for vengeance. Consider all this, and one is forced to conclude that Batman is nothing so much as the ideal superhero-for-people-who-don’t-like-superheroes. That would certainly help explain why I love Batman — why I’ve always loved Batman — even if I can’t love every property with his name slapped on it.
The Dark Knight, as it happens, doesn’t have Batman’s name on it — the first Batman movie about which this can be said — but it’s got one of his nicknames on there. It’s an easy movie, in places, to like, and, in spite of its virtues, it’s an easy movie to not like. It does loyal Batman fans the signal service of taking their hero seriously, but does it take their hero too seriously?
Even though superheroes originally emerged from something called comic books, diehard fans prefer they not be rendered too comically. Christopher Nolan knows this, which makes him an ideal director for a Batman trilogy. Talking about 1997’s disastrous Batman & Robin, from the Batman movie franchise to precede his own, Nolan has said, “If people on the film aren’t taking it seriously, why should we?”
No one who’s seen Nolan’s movies should be surprised to hear him mistaking seriousness of intent for absence of humor; the two have always accompanied each other, in every single one of his eleven dreary films. Comics fans had long been pining for someone to take their heroes seriously — to discard the self-deprecation and irony that had cloaked just about every superhero property from the beginning — and, in the mirthless Nolan, they certainly found their man. Memento (2000) had made him an indie darling, and Insomnia (2002) had kept him one; then Nolan cannily saw a way to bigger budgets. He pitched Warners on a new Batman, and by 2005 he’d set the clock back with Batman Begins.
Not even Nolan’s grimness and gloom can ruin a story as strong as Batman Begins, wherein we witness barely orphaned Bruce growing crookedly into adulthood, wrestling internally with bitterness and blood-lust. Over several years, he journeys the world. We see him acquire the skills that only compound his fierceness — that make him Batman.
The Dark Knight doesn’t have these advantages, because The Dark Knight needs to concern itself with Batman himself, fully formed — The Dark Knight needs to show the subtle shadings of Batman’s psyche now that his foundational transformation has already occurred. Instead of character development, what we get are easy epiphanies about Good and Evil, not all of which emerge from Batman’s lips. Here’s one from Harvey Dent, soon to become Two-Face: “You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” And then it emerges from Batman’s lips after all, when he repeats it. Say it aloud in your best scratchy growl: “You either die a hero…or you live long enough…to see yourself become the villain.”
The Dark Knight, in its opening moments, would have us believe that here’s a movie with a sense of humor. This was a time, 2008 — you may recall — when people were receiving inordinate attention for dressing up as superheroes and committing acts of putative citizen law-enforcement. The Dark Knight has some fun with this phenomenon, when Batman arrives on the scene and puts a bunch of such vigilantes on their asses.
“Don’t let me find you out here again,” the real Batman scolds them, after dispatching with the bad guys.
“We’re trying to help you!” one of the impostors shouts after him as he walks away.
“I don’t need help!”
“What gives you the right? What’s the difference between you and me?”
“I’m not wearing hockey pads.”
So he’s got better equipment. And, for people who care about such things, the equipment’s about to get better still. The movie also makes sport of a citizenry fed up with superhero shenanigans, intent on holding them legally liable for collateral damage — an idea that predicts and, for all we know, actually influenced major storylines in Incredibles 2 (2018) and The Boys (2019-present).
Too bad the movie’s makers seem never to have seen the original Incredibles movie, from four short years earlier. After The Incredibles, it became impossible for supes to credibly lapse into “monologuing” — or it should have become. All the fanboys and -girls, in revering The Dark Knight as a species above standard superhero fare, have failed to notice or at least acknowledge the unpardonable tedium attendant in the movie’s climactic orations.
The tedium and the solemnity — the self-serious earnestness that would be out of place in even the gravest of milieus. Here’s Two-Face, nėe Harvey Dent, monologuing while he holds Lieutenant Gordon’s little boy hostage. Let’s listen in:
You thought we could be decent men, in an indecent time! But you were wrong. The world is cruel. And the only morality in a cruel world is chance. Unbiased, unprejudiced, fair.
Now Two-Face is holding up a coin — heavy symbolism, that — and talking about how he’s going to flip it to see whether the kiddo lives or dies — after all, that’s all the chance Rachel had, and….Oh, yeah — Rachel. That’s Maggie Gyllenhall’s character. We haven’t gotten to her yet. She was played by Katie Holmes last time. You see, her and Harvey, before he was Two Face….Never mind — Batman is trying to monologue now:
What happened to Rachel wasn’t chance. We decided to act. We three.
Here he’s including Gordon, also present. Two Face asks, “Then why was it me who was the only one who lost everything?”
Batman: “It wasn’t.”
“The Joker chose me!”
“Because you were the best of us. He wanted to prove that even someone as good as you could fall.”
“And he was right.”
“You’re the one pointing the gun, Harvey. So point it…at the people…responsible.”
You know what? I don’t think we need to hear anymore. During all this monologuing, Batman could’ve rescued the boy and killed Two-Face at least seven times over. (Two-Face tends to let his gun wander while monologuing.) In lieu of putting this drama on the screen, Nolan and his co-writers — brother Jonathan Nolan and David S. Goyer — obviously found it easier to put it in the characters’ mouths. When writers have wit and whimsy on their side, that’s usually a winning strategy; when writers are as humorless as these gents, what we get are comic-book characters reciting the Nicomachean Ethics at gunpoint.
Nolan told the New York Times on the movie’s release that “I believe that even the most popcornlike movie can be done so incredibly well, and can have something that you really have to work at.” By “you,” he means us, the viewers, who pay to see the movie, not him, the director, who’s paid to make it — who’s paid to take the complex and make it make it seem simple, but who prefers instead to take the simplistic and make it seem complex.
Let’s move on to the one character in The Dark Knight worthy of our extended attention.
If it weren’t for the Joker, you wouldn’t be reading this essay, because this essay wouldn’t have been written. Coming to terms with Heath Ledger’s iconic performance — legendary even before the movie’s release — provides all the incentive necessary for coming to terms with The Dark Knight. Is the performance overrated? I don’t see how it could not be, given the timing and circumstances of Ledger’s death, and given the paucity of the performances his Joker shares a movie with. Still, there’s something undeniably special happening when Ledger’s on the screen.
He expressed nothing but respect for Jack Nicholson’s Joker, as portrayed in 1989’s Batman: “If Tim Burton was doing The Dark Knight and asked me to play the Joker, I wouldn’t have taken it, because to try and even touch what Jack Nicholson did in Tim Burton’s world would be a crime.”
Because Batman Begins had already been released, Ledger could see that the character was “open for fresh interpretation. And I also instantly kind of had something up my sleeve, which happened to be exactly what Chris was kind of looking for. We sat down and shared ideas, and they were the same. So we just went with it.”
Four months before shooting, Ledger began keeping a journal as the character, which may just be a first in the annals of Crazy Actor Preparation. The New York Times came by his house for a visit, and there was the diary, next to a chess set and “assorted books.” The journal was “filled with images and thoughts helpful to the Joker’s backstory, like a list of things the Joker would find funny. (AIDS is one of them.) Mr. Ledger seemed almost embarrassed that the book had been spotted, as if he had been caught trying to get extra credit in school.”
In the terrific documentary I Am Heath Ledger (2017), we hear him confessing that he “locked myself away for six weeks in a room, and I kind of came up with this creep: walk around like a madman and finding posture, finding stance. Finding his voice is very important, because when you find the voice, you find the breath within the voice.”
Find the breath within the voice. I don’t know that it’s ever been put so well — funny the way higher understanding often leads to higher expression. And the way it leads to higher performance. On set, Ledger was having a high old time. His voice coach, Gary Grennell, addressed a common perception when he testified in the documentary, “A lot of people like to think that it was a strenuous process for him, but he would come off the set, and we’d chat, and we’d have a laugh and joke, and we had more fun than was…than was respectable, for hardworking artists.”
“It was the most fun I’ve had with a character, hands-down,” Ledger said. “Creatively, it was just…it was too good to be true.”
This wasn’t the impression taken away by certain of his co-stars, some of whom — like Michael Caine and cinematographer Wally Pfister — retrospectively remarked on Ledger’s apparent fatigue. Caine: “He was exhausted, I mean he was really tired. I remember saying to him, ‘I’m too old to have the bloody energy to play that part.’ And I thought to myself, I didn’t have the energy when I was his age.” And Pfister: “[He seemed] like he was busting blood vessels in his head. It was like a seance, where the medium takes on another person and then is so completely drained.”
This energy and abandon are what initially appealed to Nolan, who’d seen in Brokeback Mountain (2005) an actor who “had such a lack of vanity,“ who “wasn’t afraid to bury himself in his character.” To decompress from such intensity, Ledger had lately gotten in the habit of popping pills, prescription-grade. While making the movie, he confessed to the Times, “Last week I probably slept an average of two hours a night. I couldn’t stop thinking. My body was exhausted, and my mind was still going.” After two Ambien he would finally fall asleep, only to wake an hour later, unable to go back under. This manic energy was propelling him through the entire Dark Knight shoot, where Ledger was having “the most fun I’ve ever had, or probably ever will have, playing a character.”
Production wrapped in September of 2007; by the end of January, he was dead from an accidental drug overdose.
So the Joker was truly inspired, but not all of the character’s inspiration came from Ledger. There was his music to consider, for one thing. Composer Hans Zimmer, to put himself in the mood, hung in his workstation a print from Francis Bacon, Study After Valazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953; the one informally known as the Screaming Pope). That would help guide his choices as he “dug into his roots in synthesized music and punk, drawing inspiration from Kraftwerk and The Damned,” writes Tom Shone in his remarkable book The Nolan Variations. “One of the things he got from the character was a fearlessness, and consistency…and that suggested to Zimmer a single note of some sort, something urgent, dire, simple.” Zimmer spent months recording basic ideas.
The music for the Joker was especially important, bringing with it “enormous pressure,” according to Nolan, who went through the “hours and hours of stuff” provided by Zimmer. “When we started to put it together in the prologue,” he told Shone,
I remember him being quite surprised that we used the very, very beginning of one of his longest things; it was just the smallest version of the creepiest, eeriest sound. But as soon as he saw the picture, it just made this immediate connection. And then it goes bigger and bigger and bigger at a different point in the film, this tiny little thing that happens that you just associate with the Joker.
Naturally, Nolan had his own ideas for the Joker, and, like Zimmer, he took some of his inspiration from the works of Francis Bacon, which feature “a lot of very savage and primal things…that aren’t actually chaotic.” It’s the same with the Joker, who “is not disordered. He talks about chaos and thriving on chaos, but it’s the creation of chaos. The way he creates is actually quite precise, and quite controlled.”
“Do I really look like a man with a plan?” the Joker asks, knowing that the mere appearance of madness can do so much of terror’s work. To help him achieve that appearance, Nolan brought out his big book of Bacon and showed it to Ledger as well as to makeup artist John Caglione, focusing on the very same Screaming Pope that had so influenced Zimmer. “They got it completely,” Nolan told Shone. “They had the white and the red, but they started putting black in there as well and took the skin off and smeared it in this particular way. Heath’s skin is visible in places, just as Bacon’s canvas is visible in areas of his paintings.”
You know the way the Joker’s always licking his lips in the film? That started out as Ledger, the actor, licking his lips, because pieces of the scar prosthetics kept dropping into his mouth. He would lick them to keep them adhesive and in-place. It gives the Joker a distracted, dissociated aspect that makes him much creeper, much less predictable-seeming, than he would be otherwise.
These are all just some of the ways a character — even one that already exists — can be created from the ground up.
“Why so serious?” the Joker famously asks early in the movie, and when he does so he could be speaking for a large portion of us in the audience, struggling to stay upright and conscious as Batman’s philosophy makes all those abrupt turns that Nolan couldn’t be bothered to dramatize.
But then there are places in The Dark Knight where Nolan’s seriousness pays off, where he lets us take a break while he deigns to do some of the work.
The film couldn’t possibly look any better. It’s one of those insane bits of Hollywood trivia that Nolan’s house in L.A. — the one where he plotted and schemed The Dark Knight — is in the same neighborhood as the Batcave exterior used in the 1960s television series. His house may be just down the road, but his movie is in a whole different universe, visually. Thirty-seven minutes of it were shot in IMAX. This was done with great difficulty and at great expense, but it was all to purpose. (The film’s IMAX technician, Wayne Baker, was rewarded for his labors with a cameo as Loading Dock Supervisor.)
Nolan decided from the very beginning that “we’ll make it a city story. We’re going to shoot in a real city, with real streets and real buildings, because the scale of that can be massive. We are going to use IMAX cameras so we can shoot the full height of the buildings….”
The New York Times’ David M. Halbfinger saw all this in practice when he visited the shoot in Chicago, where he observed Nolan “roll[ing] with the weather’s punches, believing that the messiness of reality can’t be faked. Another filmmaker would leave [difficult shots] in the hands of a second-unit director, but Mr. Nolan doesn’t use one; if it’s on the screen, he directed it.”
In Batman Begins, the “action sequences mimicked the quickly edited demolition derby of many a summer blockbuster” — at least, that’s how Tom Shone sees it, and he’s someone committed to noticing such things. “When a car smashes into another car [in Begins], you barely flinched. When a truck rams a cop car here, such is our sense of their size and physical mass, you could almost be watching spaceships collide.”
Funny thing about that last part, because there’s definitely another sense in which, with The Dark Knight, you could be watching spaceships collide — the Avengers’ Helicarrier, let’s say (an aircraft carrier that’s also in itself an aircraft, perfectly senseless in keeping with the standard of these superhero movies that we’re all now supposed to pretend we like). What separates The Dark Knight from the other superhero flicks is a margin far thinner than the almost-exclusively positive commentary about the movie would have you believe. Why do the fanboys and -girls — a great portion of whom, sadly, are no longer boys or girls — settle for so little from their entertainment? Why have they failed to evolve a nuanced way of appreciating the world as it wonderfully — and actually — exists?
The Dark Knight isn’t the movie they need, but it’s a better movie than they deserve.
