Might just be: Best. Retort. Ever!!!
There sure is a lot of ground to cover in this thread, but it’s late and I’m lazy, so I’ll just restrict myself to one topic that seems to have been misunderstood by some folks: Harvey Dent’s fall from “White Knight” to the murderous “Two-Face.”
Dent didn’t go from “zero to psycopath”; in fact, the movie does a good job of establishing from the start that Dent, though a good guy, has got some bats in his belfry. His manner and personality throughout are a bit manic. He’s vaguely dishonest in his dealings, even with his girlfriend, with that fixed coin flip routine. He’s unfazed when he survives–by dumb luck–the courtroom assassination attempt–the sort of ‘lacking a pulse’ reaction more common to psychopaths than normal people. Dent expresses approval of the idea that “you die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” By half way through the movie, after the parade scene, we see Dent on the verge of torturing the Joker’s hapless henchman in an alley, until Batman steps in and stops him. And remember (same scene) Dent’s reaction after Batman tells Dent he will turn himself in–screaming rage. And then, not long thereafter, Dent’s life and physical being are all but destroyed. As the Joker says, by the time of their scene together in the hospital, all Dent needed was a little push. But the Joker didn’t make Dent a villain–the villain was already there, right from the start, waiting to come out. And it didn’t happen in the blink of an eye–it was a process going on from Dent’s first scene.
One more thing, re: the Joker blowing up the hospital, walking out into the street unmolested: when someone calls in a bomb threat to a building, only the imbeciles hang around leaning up against the front doors. In that situation, you usually CLEAR THE AREA, set up some kind of a perimeter some distance from the structure. Thus, no cops right there nearby. Plus, we know at least some of the Joker’s henchmen are on that last bus. (Notice how the TV reporter gets yanked onto the hostage bus by someone in the doorway.) Presumably, those henchmen would have helped clear away any law and order types who got too close or could have intercepted their boss after he comes out of the hospital.
There are a lot of things in the movie which I thought, on first viewing, didn’t make sense, but on subsequent viewings I realized made sense. That’s why I found *The Dark Knight *more impressive with each viewing. It may help your appreciation, if you’re a doubter, to watch the movie again.
Nicholson never played the Joker. He played Jack Nicholson playing around with the idea of pretending to be the Joker.
I think you misunderstood that scene. The Scarecrow was the one doing the selling and he was working for himself at that point. With his life as Arkham’s chief psychologist over, he turned into a mob boss out for himself. And then Batman put a stop to that.
Agreed. Watching it a second and then third time made me realize that for as long as The Dark Knight is, every piece fits together with every other piece perfectly.
It really makes me wonder how anyone who loves action movies or comic book movies could dislike it. And it really pisses me off that it was completely snubbed at the Oscars.
Well, it did win two Oscars, so “completely snubbed” seems a rather inaccurate overstatement.
The sound mixing was absolutely horrendous. You can either turn the volume way up in order to hear the dialogue, or turn it way down to avoid being deafened by the gunfire and explosions.
I’m also not a fan of fight scenes in which you can vaguely make out a fist and a face and not much else. It always seems like a cop-out.
I want to respond to several things in here that I think are why people didn’t really enjoy the movie.
This is a VERY important point. One of the things I love about the Batman character is that Batman is who he really is and Bruce Wayne is the cover. They touch on this at the end of Batman Begins when Rachel is talking to him about how his actual face is his mask, or right before it when he pretends to be a drunk asshole to his party guests to get them out… They continue this in The Dark Knight like with him running off with the ballet, when he ignores the people asking him about the panic room, or saves the guy by trying to catch a light. He’s painting himself as a rich boy who couldn’t care less about anyone else. That’s at least as much a part of his cover as the mask is. Why would someone like that risk his life night after night as Batman?
Dent’s fall seemed rushed to me when I first saw the movie, as I was expecting him to be a villain for a good chunk of the film. However, after seeing it a few more times, it really took the whole movie to set him up. Just like the Joker said about madness being like gravity, the whole film just moved him closer and closer to the edge, and then he just stepped over. So if you miss some of the setup, it looks rush.
I think the most crucial scene to Dent’s fall is a scene that doesn’t even include him. After the Joker’s arrest, when Batman is interogating him, Joker makes it clear that he knows that Batman has feelings for Rachael by the way he saw him throw himself out the window after her. He gives the addresses for where Dent and Rachel are, and Batman says he’s going after Rachel but, when he gets there, he finds Dent. So I see that as the Joker knowing that Batman would go after Rachel and switched the addresses so Batman would be tricked into saving Dent instead. Hell, the Joker even said that giving them the addresses was the point. This “proves” to him that Batman cares more about him (especially after what happened in the alley), and also means that Gordon didn’t try hard enough to save Rachel. The Joker knew how it was going to play out and knew how Dent would perceive it because he wouldn’t know why he was saved and Rachel wasn’t.
I also agree with what was said upthread that what the Joker tells to Dent isn’t the truth, it’s just what he has to say to him to convince him to seek his revenge. Combined with Dent’s perception of how he was saved and Rachel wasn’t, the Joker was able to make Batman and Gordon look like schemers, just like the mob he had been fighting the whole time. There really wasn’t any difference anymore. Dent realized that the only difference between the corruption of the police and the mob is which side of the law they’re on.
Finally, for the Joker, I actually think him not having a past is important. Having a past makes a character sympathetic. If he’d fallen in a vat of acid, we’d be able to “understand”. And to some extent, we sort of do when he starts talking about how he got his scars, but by the second time, and certainly by the third (which he never finished), we realize it’s just a way to get into people’s heads. There really isn’t a good way they could have explained his past that wouldn’t have made him at least slightly sympathetic. Instead, we’re left trying to figure out what his motivation is, just like Batman and everyone else is. That’s what makes the character interesting, is that everyone THINKS they understand what he’s doing, but no one really does until Batman and Alfred have the conversation about the bandit and Alfred finally reveals that the only they caught the bandit was by burning down the forest; Batman would have to break his rules.
The Joker’s entire motivation is to make people do things they wouldn’t normally do. His bank job, while it did net him some setup money, was designed to get the mob to hire him. Just like Batman misunderstood him, he thought that Batman was corruptable, which is why he originally wanted him to take of his mask, but once he realized that wasn’t enough, he raised the stakes by trying to corrupt Batman. His whole chase of Dent was multi-pronged. If Batman killed him, he won; if he got captured, he won. He made it look like he was trying to kill Harvey, but you should notice that once he brought out the bazooka, he wasn’t targetting the SWAT vehicle with it; he wanted Batman’s attention.
Hell, even his whole blow up a hospital scheme, while it did ultimately keep Reese from “spoiling his fun”, I think it was really just an excuse to get the hospital evacuated so that he could get to Harvey and corrupt him.
I think the Joker was very well written, but a lot of it requires picking up on some subtle hints and rewatching the film with the knowledge of what his actual motivation is.
Actually, I think he was targeting the SWAT vehicle. Isn’t that how the Bat-Tank got destroyed – by jumping in front of the rocket?
There’s something else that doesn’t make sense about the whole chase-the-SWAT-vehicle-with-Dent scene. The theory at that point is that Dent is Batman (something that anyone could probably have disproved with a bit of research). So the Joker either knows it’s a trap or thinks Dent is Batman. In either case, why try to kill Dent? If Dent is Batman, he’s gone in disgrace. Mr. Incorruptible D.A. is a vigilante who goes out at night and beats people up. If Dent is * not * Batman, then Batman has cast Dent to the wolves and people continue to die. Batman looks even worse than ever.
So why go through the whole stupid, chancy chase scene? And don’t say it was just to get at the financier. If he was all the Joker wanted, all he had to do was take an orphanage hostage and demand his release.
He blew up all the other vehicles first. I think you’re supposed to be unsure as to whether he was actually trying to kill Dent or not.
The Russians were buying from him… complaining about the fact his drugs seemed to have bad effects on their clients. I assume Scarecrow was trying to earn some bucks and continue his experiments street level…
sounds like Scarecrow to me
Very good point. The Joker surmised that Batman would be more successful at saving his target than Gordon, and the Joker wanted Dent to be saved. Can’t corrupt Harvey if he’s blown up. The Joker cared less about what happened to Rachel; in fact, making sure she died would, as he knew, twist the knife in Batman’s side that much more, as well as driving Dent closer to the brink. A brilliant move all around.
Absolutely. The Joker’s full of shit in that hospital room. He’s only telling Dent what Dent needed to hear to flip his psycho switch. An unreliable witness, to be sure.
This is one of the things I like best about the movie. Giving the Joker a back story would have been too paint by numbers. It’s much more effective to have the Joker have no back story. Remember when he’s been locked up in the MCU and Gordon says they’ve got nothing on him–no prints, no ID, not even any labels on his clothes. The Joker is almost a ghost, which makes the extraordinary things he does seem more within the realm of possibility.
As for Scarecrow, I don’t think he’s working for the Joker. He’s just having a powwow with his client, the Chechen mobster (not Russian–check the credits) when the Batmen, fake then real, show up to queer the deal. He’s an independent operator at that point.
I really do find *The Dark Knight *to be quite a fascinating movie. It’s surprising to me that so many people find it unsatisfying. To each his own, I guess.
At this point, the Joker’s just a random criminal, running around, robbing banks and such. The Batman doesn’t even consider him a threat at first. Which I hope they play up in the next movie. If Batman had gone after the Joker right away after Batman Begins (when Gordon tells him about him), he probably could have taken him down pretty easily.
Or maybe Ol’ Jack’s been playing the Joker all along (certainly since One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest)
Watching this again and had another WTF moment (unrelated to the Joker, but the thread’s already here). In one scene, Batman bends a gun barrel into a right angle. Huh? His suit doesn’t augment strength, does it?
To a certain extent, at least, it’s because just enough time has passed that “The Dark Knight” (like every other critically and commercially successful work of art or media since, well, ever) is in the midst of its Hype Backlash.
Hmmm…I’ve got it freeze-framed right now and it looks like he’s wearing * some * face paint – his face is white and lips are redder than normal. Not to mention the huge noticeable scars at the corner of each mouth and the generally creep expression. I stand by my original point – no way he would have remained unnoticed unless protected by Plot.
Something that I found kind of interesting in the movie after seeing it: I can’t think of a time when the Joker straight up killed an innocent, as it were. He went after DAs, cops, mobsters, and vigilantes, and set people up to kill each other at his behest, but he himself never seemed to go after anyone who had not already become involved.
Also, I think the first time that Batman talks to Fox as Batman, and not as billionaire playboy Bruce Wayne who dresses up and goes out at night to fight crime and play with the company gear, is when he reveals his Big Brother cell phone spy network. Fox is suitably wigged out by the reality of what he’s involved with. It was almost a disappointment to see that Batman was willing to get rid of that ability to find crime anywhere it went, but I guess it’s symbolic of him stepping away from the abyss that the “White Knight” Harvey Dent ended up falling into.
Dent’s less-than-perfect honesty was pointed out before (scoring a date with his subordinate by using a double sided coin?), but it seems to me that when he was Harvey Dent, the White Knight, DA of Gotham, he was not willing to accept the wrong choice (ie: Rachel will go out with him, he will go after the Joker, etc.), but once he became Two Face, and his coin became damaged on the one side, he was able to accept “bad” choices, including cheap moves like flipping the coin to decide if he would kill the mob boss, then flipping again to see if he would kill the guy driving the car the boss was in instead.
I knew the helicopter was going to crash as soon as it showed up, even if it went down in such a way that was both completely retarded and just suitably wacky to be worthy of the Joker (really? You’re going to use a trip wire? Not shoot it with some of your not unsubstantial amount of heavy firepower?)
I can’t remember where I came across it (maybe Wikipedia), but there was a theory I saw where the Joker acted the way he did because he was aware of the lack of a Fourth Wall. Basically, he KNOWS he’s in a comic book/cartoon/movie, and thus none of his actions actually have any consequences, and he acts accordingly. That said, this was never indicated in the movie, but it’s a fun way to look at the character.
It’s so funny reading these cockamamie threads, hehehehe. It’s almost like people are arguing the differences between Homeland Security and Al Quaeda, or Cheney and Obama… Hitler and Churchhill (but which was the Batman?).
Batman got too fascist for me.
I believe he has a framework rigged to his gloves. Bends the barrel then uses it to hold onto the van before being knocked off and losing the gear. I think he later complains to Alfred about the servos hurting.
I believe there are studies that have been done that document people instinctively looking away from those with facial scarring.
And here’s the scene in question, it’s obvious he’s a little pale, but I don’t see any face paint.
