the dark knight

http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/010555.html
"Rebel Without A Cause"
August 6, 2008
by Mark
k-punk

http://www.azure.org.il/article.php?id=477
"Batman's War on Terror"
by Benjamin Kerstein
Autumn 2008
Azure

Both articles are analyses of The Dark Knight (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0468569). The former article doesn't make too many assertions; it just discusses how the film can be read as an allegory for the war on terror (it also discusses the history of the franchise and the rise of the comic-book movie). The latter article extends this analysis, rebutting a neoconservative reading of the film as legitimating extreme methods, by pointing out that they always fail. I want to focus my analysis on The Joker (although there are interesting things to be said about Dent / Two-Face as well - for example, that his coin only becomes fair after he goes mad).

The first author writes,

"As the full dimensions of the Joker's plan begin to take shape, it becomes clear that his terrorism has no rational, comprehensible motivation. It is, rather, a form of psychotic performance art: The Joker is determined to demonstrate to Gotham City that chaos is the natural state of things and that the laws and norms of society are powerless illusions. Ironically, the Joker's insanity is born of his conviction that he is, in fact, the only sane man on earth. “The only sensible way to live in this world,” he declares, “is without rules.” This ruthless nihilism presents Batman and his allies with a menace they can neither understand nor control. The Joker fears nothing, wants nothing, and cares about nothing. As Alfred sagely tells Wayne, “Some men aren't looking for anything logical, like money. They can't be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.”"

The second author writes,

"What's interesting about The Dark Knight is that is not really about Good versus Evil at all but 'good causes' versus aberrant modes of cause/ causality. The Joker and Two-Face are mad rather than bad, and their insanity is centrally connected with their relationship to cause. The Joker is pure Terror, that is, Terror detached from any cause:

You see, nobody panics when things go according to plan. Even if the plan is horrifying. If I told people that a gangbanger was going to get shot, or a busload of soldiers was going to get blown up, nobody would panic. Because it's all part of the plan. But tell people that one tiny little mayor is going to die and everyone loses their minds! Introduce a little anarchy, you upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos. I am an agent of chaos. And you know the thing about chaos, Harvey. It's fair.

While Batman is drawn into utilitarian calculations, The Joker is free in the same way that the death drive is free: he acts with indifference to consequences, glorying instead in a kind of ungrounded unbinding of orderly causal sequences. The reference to "fairness" above is not idle. As an imp of the perverse, The Joker stands for an inverted (or freaked) Kantian justice. In many ways, we are looking at the reversal of Kantianism into Don Giovanni Zizek has described many times (Don Giovanni's decision not to save himself, to maintain his commitment to his libertinism even when doing so will result in his execution, becomes an ethical gesture). The Joker acts without any pathological interests, grandly symbolising his lack of instrumentality with the burning of the pyramid of money."

There are some interesting things to be said here. First of all, both authors think they have a pretty good grasp of the Joker's intentions (despite the latter author's later remarks that the Joker has no interiority). In both cases, they seem to take the Joker's speech to Dent - about showing how everybody who makes plans is just misguided - as revelatory of the Joker's true intentions. This is probably a mistake (after all, the movie makes clear that the Joker is far and away the best planner around). After all, the Joker is a consistent liar (consider the stories he tells about the origin of his scars). He also consistently manipulates people by talking to them: his aim is to control through words, not communicate - consider his treatment of his fellow bank-robbers. In many cases, the only insight we have into his plans is what he says about them. But given his lies and manipulations, we really shouldn't trust anything he says (especially the speech to Dent, which is a pretty effective way of getting Dent to do what he wants).

In the end, the Joker is a nut we can't crack. At times, it is pretty obvious what he's doing: okay, now he's robbing a bank, now he's killing this crime boss, now he's attacking the armored truck transporting "Batman." But sometimes it turns out that we didn't really have any idea what he was doing - that the attack was meant to end in failure, and that it was a fake attack. And beyond that level, it is very hard to say why the Joker does much of anything. As the latter author remarks, he's all surface, no insides that we can glimpse.

This is, I contend, what makes him such a fascinating villain: he's like a force of nature. But he's also human, and we demand an explanation, a way to make sense of his wicked actions. But there's none in the offing, which makes him all the more mesmerizing: we can't categorize him, put him away, and forget about him.

(So: what does this tell us about ourselves? Why do we demand an explanation? What kind of explanation are we looking for? Should we really expect there to be such a thing?)