newcritics

Chris Nolan’s epic Batman sequel, The Dark Knight, is modern Gothic eye candy of the highest order. Shot in IMAX and best seen that way, the movie is a dizzy-making thrill ride replete with centrifugal tracking shots and a blue black palette that mirrors the darkness of the movie’s soul: It’s a Hollywood superhero movie in which people die - including heroes - and those who survive are all left wracked or destroyed. Except the Joker of course. He hangs suspended, an immovable object to Batman’s irresistible force, as the villain himself points out.

Yes, Heath Ledger’s Joker really is all that. And the two-and-a-half hours of terror he inflicts on the denizens of Gotham is sickeningly brutal (if Gotham is our New York proxy - played here by Chicago - it’s like the Son of Sam and September 11 all rolled into one), making The Dark Knight the feel-bad hit of the summer.

Nolan - who wrote the screenplay with his brother and veteran screen-writer David Goyer (who adapted Blade for the screen) - resisted the temptation to tell a Joker origin. Sticklers might quibble over the Joker’s motiveless malignity. But like last year’s great screen villain, Javier Bardem’s Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men, the Joker has always had a force-of-nature/agent-of-fate quality. It’s the classical Greek dimension of the Batman/Joker relationship that drives literary fanboys mad, and the movie exploits it to the hilt (”You complete me,” the Joker tells Batman in the movie’s best joke, during what feels like the movie’s only brightly lit scene, a brutal interrogation in a Gotham City police station).

From the start - Batman #1 in the spring of 1940 - the Joker was a cipher. He didn’t get an origin in the comics for 11 years. And that origin didn’t get it’s definitive retelling until 1988 (Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke, a breakthrough “Prestige-format” one-shot that remains the greatest single comic book ever published). With Ledger’s death, this screen Joker will remain a cypher. I can’t imagine another Joker story in the movies for years. But the Joker’s origin was always something of a McGuffin. For the drama to work its enough for the Joker to be Batman’s mirror - white where the Batman’s black, smiling while the Batman broods, obsessed with chaos while the Batman is compulsively devoted to order.

If the Aeschylean drama of Batman v. the Joker were all there were to The Dark Knight it would already be one of the greatest comic book movies ever made. But Nolan’s decision to weave in an origin story for classic Batman villain Two-Face gives the movie a human dimension that kicks it up a notch. Where Batman and the Joker fight a war of Platonic ideals, Two-Face - a half-disfigured crusading District Attorney turned villain obsessed with duality and random flukes of chance - presents the war between good and evil, chance and design, chaos and order in a single scarred body and psyche. Ledger’s Joker gets all the press, but Aaron Eckhart’s ambitious, vengeful portrayal of Harvey Dent/Two-Face movies the movie along. (Maggie Gyllenhaal is also an enormous upgrade over Katie Holmes although Batman never needed a love-interest.)

The Dark Knight may well be the pinnacle of this moment in the pop culture sun for comic books and the fanboys who love them–the moment when Batman, not a dumbed down or campy Batman, but our beloved Batman and his psychopathic mutual dual twin opposite - win an Oscar or seven. It’s been a seeping, generational change that has drawn superheros to the surface of the literary and entertainment worlds. Its still a transformation that irks some (”Pop nostalgia clings like a kudzu weed to everyone who ever grew up feeling alien-freaky—i.e., all of us who somehow knew we were born to die uncool.” John Leonard scolded the ever-so-cool Jonathan Lethem in The New York Review of Books for his obsession with comic books and pop music). But The Dark Knight’s received almost unanimous raves. It still may not be the movie that converts my mother-in-law (though the moral darkness and fabulous acting will help), but it is almost certainly the best Batman movie that will ever be made, up there with the best Batman stories of Steve Englehart and Frank Miller. And that’s saying plenty.