The Dark Knight (spoilers) -- I hate this trope

Cafe Society
1

I finally got around to watching The Dark Knight yesterday and ended up disliking it not a little, primarily because it depended completely on my least favorite movie trope – the unstoppable, omniscient, omnipresent psychopath.

Granted, the Joker had a metric load of cash from the heist at the beginning of the movie that must have made hiring henchmen a bit easier. But just about everything he did should have involved him becoming dead.

a) Towards the end of the movie, the Joker admits that he doesn’t need or want the mountain of cash. So why kill the various henchmen during the first heist? Because it’s fun, I guess? Or just to establish to the audience that he’s a psychopathic bad ass?

b) The Joker keeps “hiring” henchmen by killing their bosses and saying “You’re working for me now.” That’s a good way to get fragged instantly. As far as we know, the Joker has no special powers that would help him prevent this.

c) The Joker’s big plot to kill Harvey Dent involved chasing him with a semi loaded with automatic weapons and RPGs. This plan depended critically on not a single cop or SWAT team member returning fire while the Joker and his men remained full exposed for a five minute chase scene. (In fact, just about every Joker scheme depended heavily on the Gotham police being completely incompetent, up to and including ignoring the guy in a police uniform whose face is completely covered in grease paint.) And this plot, apparently, was just part of a bigger plot to get captured and then escape with the Hong Kong financier. A plot which makes * no sense * unless you are protected by the omniscient psychopath script clause.

d) Probably my biggest complaint is the Gotham Hospital explosion. This was a big explosion. Really big. So how did we go from hordes of police emptying the hospital to the scene where the Joker wanders outside to an apparently deserted street and detonates the blast without being shot on sight? Where are the police? How did no one in the hospital notice the tons of explosives that it would have taken to cause the blast?
I’m also not sure how the Joker rigged the ferries so that their engines failed, radios failed, and (apparently) the cell phones of everyone on board failed all at the same time. There might have been an explanation of that, but I was no longer paying close attention by that point.

e. Finally, how does the Joker manage to last more than 10 seconds against the Batman in the climactic fight? On one side you have monastery-trained fighting machine in state of the art battle armor who can take out six men in a fair fight and on the other we have a guy with no apparent enhancements. And whatever happened to the first movie’s “I can’t kill you but I don’t have to save you.” ethic?

My complaints all boil down to this: how does a nutcase who insists on wandering around with grease paint all over his face manage to flawlessly pull off heist after heist, arrange unstoppable kidnappings and assassinations, and mine buildings with (apparently) tons of high explosives and gasoline? I can buy the Joker in the Tim Burton version. The style of the movie was Comic Book Noir, so you could buy the unbelievable. The style of the Dark Knight was, as far as I could tell, Grim Reality. Hill Street Blues, or maybe The Wire. Batman (and the Joker) doesn’t work as well in this style.

2

Wow, I just watched it for the first time this morning and had all the same problems with it you did, especially how he sort of wandered out of the hospital and got on a bus without a single cop seeing him.

One I’ll add: Harvey Dent went from Mr. Law-and-order to cold-blooded killer just a little too quickly for me.

3

Well, first you have to understand that the Joker is the trope. He created it. He is the original inhuman psychopath one step ahead of you. Things all got soft in the 50’s comics, but he started out that way.

Second, many of his moves make a lot of sense if you understand that he basically is Batman. Whatever Batman is, he’s the equal and opposite. Yes, the movie appears realistic - but make no mistake: Batman is a superhero and so is The Joker. Both of them take punishment that should put any normal human being down for good, and then they get up and ask for more. Fundamentally, it’s a comic book movie and despite the brutalism, still uses that origin to no end.

The Joker actually did plan things pretty well, however.

(a) Exactly. The Jokers essential non-super “super-power” (other than “NOT DYING” as long as Batman is around) is that he completely understands people. He gets into everyone’s head and knows everything about them very easy. He predicts what kind of moves they will make under given conditions, and this movie uses that ability in simple but eficient ways. He also benefits from having inside sources which know what procedures are going to be used.

(b) See above. The Joker does know his boys will turn on him, and exactly how and when to act in order to make sure they stay loyal or die before betraying him.

(c) He wasn’t trying to kill Harvey. He calculated this was all just a plan to trick him into coming out into the open and acted in order to do that. He forced the truck into a bad situation, stripped any defenders, had a plan to deal with air cover, and much heavier weapons than they had. And this was for a plan which intentionally ended with him getting caught.

(d)

4

I agree pretty much entirely with smiling bandit. I don’t think that Nolan is really going for “realism” as much as myth-making; the world of The Dark Knight is a world similar to ours, but one where (essentially) human deities exist with people. To push that idea to its fullest, Nolan makes everything surrounding The Joker happen seemingly by magic: he has no backstory, he simply exists. He has no plan, yet he molds every situation in the film perfectly. He needs there to be explosives, and there are.

Which could definitely be seen as a cop-out, but I think it’s one that’s necessary because, like smiling bandit says, everything The Joker is is defined in terms of Batman. Were there no Batman, he literally wouldn’t exist, and everything he does is an equal and opposite reaction to Batman’s core values, beliefs and actions. It’s a set-up that, again, is more concerned with the mythology of the situation than the nitty-gritties.

5

Part of the reason the Joker is so successful is that he takes so many huge risks. Most things the police does to prepare or protect against criminals are based on the assumption that the criminal cares whether he gets shot or caught or whatever, but the Joker doesn’t care. Sure, his risk-taking is going to catch up to him eventually; it just takes the whole movie before that happens.

6

I agree with most of your complaints. The only thing I’d say is that this Joker had a real death wish and really didn’t care if anything killed him. He got some dumb luck.

Him not dying at the end was really weak. Tim Burton established that it’s OK to kill off super villians in movies (probably his biggest and least appreciated contribution to the genre), but I guess the temptation to bring the Joker back in this new franchise was too great. Weak, and the producers got screwed anyway, in that Ledger died. That’s how dedicated Heath was to making the movie end correctly.

7

Saw this on one of the movie channels recently. It was…ok, I guess. Lots of 'splosions, but few other redeeming qualities.

Really didn’t buy the deal with the boats. In the real world, I figure both boats go boom before the announcement is even finished.

Yeah, I’m cynical. Why do you ask?

8

I agree with Finagle. I thought it was a very, very silly movie, trying very hard to be serious.

Basically there’s no underlying continuity of character. The Joker repeatedly flips back and forth between being a methodical schemer and set-of-his-pant nutjob depending on whatever’s required to set up the next big series of explosions.

Heath Ledger is amazing in each scene he’s in, but collectively the scenes don’t add up to anything. There’s no center to the character. Only a collection of tics and gestures.

9

Well, as for

a) It saves money if he’s the only one who gets away. Also, fewer witnesses or people to give any info on him.

and e) Batman was already run ragged, probably disorietented by using the “sonar” vision and was fighting three dogs and being beat down by a pipe. Also, if he had killed the Joker, Mr. J would have died knowing he’d won and dragged down Batman. No such philosophical victory for Ras’al’Ghul.

10

This was the bit that bothered me the most. The fact that Joker’s credo seems to be ‘plans don’t work, chaos works’, and yet, everything he does (and is succesful at) was obviously very meticulously planned. It was sort-of a blaring error for me who’s always felt that while J is crazy, he’s not ‘I’m just going to let things happen and they’ll work out’ crazy. He is, to me, a mastermind planner.

As for the ‘no center’, the more I think about it, the more I think that’s right. It feels genuinely as if the writers said, “Hey look! It’s THE JOKER! We don’t need to have any depth to the character, we just need it to be the really popular villain!” In retrospect, it seems vaguely (although not terribly) insulting to the viewer. Sort of a ‘Gratuitous Joker’.

11

To establish to the crime community that he is capable of a massive heist of the mob bank that leaves no loose ends. It tells them, “You guys may be bad asses, but I’m just that much better, I came out of nowhere, and no one has a clue as to where or who I am.” Seriously - why *wouldn’t *he take them out?

12

The Joker’s one main goal was to bring Batman down to his level and get Batman to kill him. If the Joker had died, then the Joker would have won. I don’t think Joker living had anything to do with bringing him back in the next movie. Instead, it was Nolan’s way of saying, “This is a new type of superhero movie.” Think about it, the bad guy always dies in the end in pretty much every superhero movie. The only one’s I can think of that don’t are Lex Luther and Magneto.

13

I agree that the Joker’s omnipotence is a bit hard to swallow upon reflection, but I have a nitpick and a disagreement:

If you’re referring to the scene where the Joker and his men substitute themselves for the ceremonial firing squad, he is not wearing face paint at all.

Well, yeah. Just because the Joker SAYS he’s not a planner doesn’t mean he’s being honest. He’s a psychopath and a criminal; why assume he’s being forthright? His intention during that speech is to push Harvey Dent in a certain direction, not to tell the audience his actual personal philosophy.

See, I’ll also disagree with The Hamster King. The Joker absolutely does NOT flip back and forth between being a schemer and being an erratic nutjob. He’s never an erratic nutjob, not in a single scene. Okay, he’s a nutjob, but he’s never erratic. He’s nihilistic and psychopathic and not someone you’d want to go on a date with, but everything he does is according to a plan, in every scene he’s in and everything we know he did when the camera wasn’t on him. Not once - not one single time - in the movie does he deviate from his master plan unless he’s forced to. It’s not something that comes and goes at all; in every scene he’s got things worked out ahead of time. Indeed, the Joker is dangerous and scary in part because he acts, whereas others react. His power comes from planning, being a step ahead, and forcing others to react to his moves. The Joker may in fact see himself as an agent of chaos, but he does not personally subscribe to having to organize himself that way. What matters to him is fucking up everyone else’s day, not his own.

His personal M.O. is that of scheming and elaborate plans - precisely what he accuses the mayor, Batman, and Gordon of when he’s riling up Dent. His “I’m just a dog chasing cars” schtick is bullshit, and he knows it; he is accusing Dent’s rivals of being what the Joker himself really is. That’s what criminal psychopaths do.

On the contrary, I think what Nolan et al. were going for was to deliberately overturn one of the most popular superhero movies tropes there is; the Elaborate Villain Backstory. We got that with every Batman film - all of which, including the first, I thought were just awful. All the Spider-Man movies do that. X-Men had Magneto’s origin story in the very first scene. Superhero movies almost always do this, giving us a (usually overlong) backstory as to how the villain got to be a villain, often in a way that makes the villain seem tragic in some way. Some are more plodding about it that others; the Spider-Man movies are just terrible for this, whereas Iron Man did a great job letting you know the Iron Monger’s motivation without actually doing a whole short film on him. (A notable exception is the first Superman movie, which doesn’t really explain how Lex Luthor came to be a criminal mastermind living in the subway.)

I think what they were going for was to NOT do that. The Joker is supposed to be without explanation and tragedy. They even riffed on it a bit by having him tell contradictory backstories, all of which are likely lies. He is a force of nature; no history, no name, no explanation, and seemingly no motivation but destruction. I found it very refreshing and original.

14

But if the Joker just wanted to blow up a boatload of people, he’d blow up a boatload of people. That’s not interesting to him (or this movie’s version of him).

Or take what I expected to happen. The people on the “good” boat decide to press the button and blow up the prisoner’s boat. Except when they do that, the Joker lied, and they blew up their own boat. Except that would be an example of the Joker enforcing traditional morality–hey, they selfishly tried to save themselves by blowing up the prisoners, but blew themselves up instead–Haw, haw haw! See kids, evil is bad!

But that would have been out of character for this version of the Joker. He’d much rather see the average people blow up a boatload of prisoners, then have to go home and live the rest of their lives knowing that they’re the kind of people who’d blow up a boatload of prisoners to save themselves.

15

It’s funny, I also had serious problems with the premises and they’re almost completely separate from yours — though I suppose they dovetail well… especially 3. You can be EITHER maniacal or rationally contemplative, but you can’t really be both.

reposted from somewhere else…

  1. What the hell is Scarecrow doing in this movie? He seems to be thrown in so randomly. It was a well-written and interesting character in the first one, and now he’s thrown in in a way that only seems like the second scene with the first one explaining it somehow on the cutting room floor. It’s basically “How do we give a wink and a nod to people who liked the first one? Well Scarecrow’s still alive, let’s throw him in a parking lot small-batch drug deal that Batman busts up. I’m sure no one will wonder what he’s doing there, or why Batman is interested in this one small nickel-and-dime deal then goes back to fighting roving painted lunatics.”

I mean, for all the sense of having him in the scene, he might as well have gotten out of the van and said “It’s the Scarecrow. With my friends Huckleberry Finn, Don Quixote and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Now, do you want this dimebag?”

  1. All that running around must make him breathless. Enough already with Bruce Wayne / Batman heavy breathing. Is he a superhero or a phone sex operator?

  2. Joker’s motivations (or lack thereof). I guess having a villain who isn’t doing it for any REASON… someone who’s just flat-out maniacal, is a little different. Though as an audience member you still feel a bit cheated by not having a rationale. But you can’t really simultaneously be calculating but without a purpose, mad but organized, interested only in chaos yet trying to protect yourself… In Silence of the Lambs, you don’t see Buffalo Bill being concerned with how he’s going to make his house payments, it just makes for a more confusing character, not a deeper one. And hell even he had reasons, even if they were carnal. Hell, Nicholson’s Joker was maniacal, but if you’re gonna be insane you should be at least a little sloppy.

  3. Maggie Gyllenhaal just seems bored. She acts the same around her life long love as she does Commissioner Gordon as she does the Joker. She seems disinterested and devoid of emotion. Great movie heroines, you can tell what their thoughts and hopes and emotions are even if you had the sound off. Here, you can’t even tell what she wants. Ingrid Bergman could have single-handedly ruined Casablanca if she’d been this blank throughout.

  4. The end of Batman Begins

    Ra’s al Ghul: Have you finally learned to do what is necessary?
    Bruce Wayne: I won’t kill you, but I don’t have to save you.

How are you going to have Dark Knight be about whether Batman’s willing to off a baddie if he’s already made that decision in the first one?

16

One of the key facts about the Joker is that he can’t die as long as Batman is around. Letting him live is not a cheap way out, it is central to his character. I do think, though, if the movie had been a comic, they might not have spelled it out that he was really still alive. But then everybody would be whining whenever he came back.

Oh, and the Gotham city police have always been incompetent. That’s why they need Batman so badly. And if they were competent, Batman himself would have already been caught before they realize he was basically a good guy. So both Batman and the Joker use this to their advantage.

As for the trope you mentioned, that is the Joker’s special power, and has been, since he was created.

17

Before Tim Burton’s Batman, supervillains never died. Now they frequently do, but in addition to the ones you mentioned, Mr. Freeze, Poison Ivy, and the Riddler lived, Dr. Doom lived (Fantastic Four), and the Sandman lived (Spidey 3).

I see a strong pattern between the superhero movies where the villiain lives and its suckitude.

18

I can’t answer the rest of your questions, but I can attempt this one. The Joker is supposed to have made Batman question his choice to never kill anyone. In fact, that’s the Joker’s whole point of existence. He wants Batman to kill him, as Batman is already nearly crazy, and killing someone would put him over the edge. The Joker is essentially the personification of Batman’s “evil side.”

The problem I see with the movie is that Batman’s no-kill policy hadn’t been established long enough to make his wondering about killing the Joker have the right impact.

19

Just taking what you said at face value, any superhero movie created before Tim Burton’s Batman had to have sucked, for your correlation to be true. I have yet to hear anyone argue this case. For example, did all of the Superman movies suck?

I’m thinking we may have an example of Correlation bias.

20

:confused: All the supervillains died in Superman II.