However: if you can learn what justice is, why so serious about a mere plot?

for Peter Lund

1. Does justice require redemption? Batman Begins assumed this and ran into a problem: how do we know who the redeemer is? Ra’s Al Ghul’s anger at Gotham was perfectly justified, and it was sheer chance that Batman found one good cop – Jim Gordon – who was able to stop Al Ghul from killing him and then causing fear to annihilate the city for good.

Socrates would never demand that we look into necessary causes: those are divine matters, and those who look into the heavens for answers are most unnecessary when our concern is earthly. They would assert that justice is merely conventional anyway, a construct we use to keep ourselves from a more difficult truth. The joke’s on them: they have no clue what willing tools they are when push comes to shove, how ugly the truth actually is.

So that we start with a redemptive figure is more than fine: if that’s our opinion about the source of justice, it matters and needs to be addressed. But again, who is the redeemer? The Joker gets everything right, even when he lies. Jim Gordon says as much finally – the Joker wins, he drove whom he wanted to drive mad. The title is ambiguous enough that The Dark Knight could be Batman or Joker; the Dark Night which the movie takes us through, where even daylight is almost always a scene for murder and mayhem, is created by the both of them and only comes to rest when they’re talking to each other.

The Joker is wrong only on one thing, and it is “chance” that he’s wrong in a very particular situation about how low people will go. They go pretty low the whole movie, and can be trusted to go low consistently enough for chaos to reign. Is he the true redeemer of Gotham? The one that prophecies exactly what happens to Batman at the end?

2. There are three notions of justice in the film: Philosophic, Redemptive and Procedural. The movie engages the problems created by the tension between the latter two. No human can truly redeem. But a divine figure that does redeem makes human justice, procedural justice, look like a mess. It only looks like plans that can backfire, plans that don’t care for individual lives or the truly good.

The Joker’s contention is the Sophistic contention that academia and law schools thrive on, and the Presocratic contention still alive amongst many professional philosophers today: we only have procedural justice, faith in the laws. A redeemer can only uphold that, a redeemer is only human, and so redemptive justice is doomed to fail.

American Constitutionalism is procedural justice with a twist that keeps tyrants away. It makes no necessary, explicit provision for the redeemers we need each and every day – people who take bullets for each of us, people who go into towers hit by planes knowing they might not save anyone, let alone themselves, people willing to take the blame an angry mob can dish out now and throughout history.

3. So where does the philosophic conception truly come in? Is Batman a philosopher? Alfred? Jim Gordon? Lucius Fox? Dent? Rachel?

None of them are. Batman, Jim and Dent all believe that Dent can be made a redeemer within the procedural, and thus pave the way for a day no redeemer is necessary. They immediately overreach, it seems – they attempt to destroy all organized crime at once, but in doing so push organized crime to desperation. Joker is more than willing to teach men who they truly are; it is no coincidence he robs a bank with a school bus.

It seems strange that there is overreaching in eliminating the mob. Batman doesn’t kill people, and the mob’s concern about money and power limit them in truth – Harvey’s right when he speaks in the Mayor’s office about the mid-level guys being kept off the streets even if all the charges don’t stick against the bosses, if they don’t squeal. The mob doesn’t have the nerve Joker has – they have limits. So why exactly is the mob so desperate as to unleash Joker? Is it merely because they’re going to lose everything?

Alfred says the mob didn’t know what they were getting into, but that’s not entirely true. Joker clearly kills the low level thugs he uses to commit his crimes. He is clearly someone not afraid of anyone, and certainly not afraid to die. Any mob thug – any conventional bully – would shake at that. That’s the strength a criminal admires, the strength that Bruce Wayne confesses he doesn’t understand when he thinks criminals have incentives and can be caught that way.

What “undoes” Joker is cell-phone triangulation, the fact that he’s a messenger. And as pointed out above, it doesn’t really undo him. A voice cannot be caught.

3. The philosophic beginning is the overreaching. The fact is that Wayne, Gordon and Dent aren’t overreaching. Setting up Dent as redeemer is perfectly acceptable for citizens to do in a democracy: we elect leaders. We entrust others with justice.

Redemptive justice can lead us to say this is the sin of pride: you don’t get to pick your redeemer. But Alfred and Lucius Fox and Rachel are the people who doubt Batman. Rachel doesn’t love Wayne as much as she loves Dent, and Dent’s flaws become all too obvious at the end. Lucius Fox thinks briefly that Batman will spy on people forever if it is useful. And Alfred tells us that some people want to just watch the world burn, but confesses to have stopping the person responsible for teaching that lesson by burning a forest.

The flaw isn’t pride – the flaw isn’t believing in others and giving them pride. Rachel loves Dent mainly because she doubts Wayne, whom she first confessed her love to. Only Batman believes in Gotham: he has no second line of defense against people blowing each other up because the Joker set things up that way. His only true pupil is Jim Gordon, the Commissioner because Joker killed the last one, the head of police over a department filled with traitors.

But Batman’s still not a philosopher, not even close. The issue of pride is what allows us to jettison the “redemptive” complaint and move to the deeper issue of what makes people tick and how things work. Once we see that pride is what connects the cops and the criminals, we understand that Alfred was correct, but maybe not for the reason he spoke. It isn’t because criminals are desperate over money and power that makes them turn to savaging the city, or because they’re going to go to jail once and for all. It’s because they’re desperate simply, from their very inception. What Wayne, Gordon and Dent tried to do is what all of us have to do. This is the requirement for living in the merely human realm – we need redeemers, and their pride cannot always be the same as their humility.

4. What makes the movie tragic but not nihilism (quite frankly, a rarity for Christopher Nolan) is that Joker is an honest Presocratic. He’s the philosophic core of the movie, and perhaps even a philosopher himself. One that writes with blood.

Our establishing shot is a building with black windows. One of Joker’s thugs breaks the window, reveals the light, and fires a rope across the expanse to the mob bank. From the roof he uses a cell phone (or cell-phone like device) to disable the alarm.* Joker, of course, plans for the murder of every single one of his goons and helps kill several of the bank’s patrons. It is no coincidence that the one who disables the alarm is killed when the Truth almost becomes clear.

Batman in action against a Chinese accountant: he breaks into the dark building in China at night and knocks out all the guards. A cell phone like device within the building disables the alarms. The windows are smashed in their entirety as Batman brings the man to justice – he’s flying away from the cops that the accountant has bribed.

The final battle between Batman and Joker is atop a dark building at night where Joker has regular people dressed as his goons, taped and roped up such that the cops have every incentive and duty to fire on them.

The only scene where light prevails of these three is the darkest of all. Joker doesn’t have to kill all his goons: all of them are happy to do that to each other.

5. I suppose I have to address Joker’s actual speech. Very well: the multiple stories he tells aren’t merely an excuse to kill, they’re an excuse to kill with a knife. In the holding cell he is emphatic that he uses a knife to see people as they truly are. What’s interesting is how bombs and bullets are used – as tests for others mainly. Not just the end scene, but the hospital threat, his goons attempting to kill the mayor, his escape from the mob meeting, and of course the scene where he and Batman fight in the open.

Batman calls him out on his scars and the tests, saying that all aren’t as sick as he is, but truly underestimates the power of the knife. It doesn’t seem philosophic that one’s words should be a weapon, but all philosophers use elenchus. Arguments need to be refuted and the character of their user revealed.

There’s only one time the Joker lies outright and can be caught (his lies to the mob bosses and Batman are part of his plan). Every other story could be true, and given the character of Gotham previously, probably is true. He only lies with Dent in the hospital room. Btw – it is no coincidence that Dent is associated with hospitals, betrayed by hospital bills. The issue is whether or not he cares to heal or needs to be healed; does asserting “you make your own luck” admit of a need for healing? Or that he might make mistakes? That – not pride simply, but a much more narrow contention – is his deepest fault, and why he’s susceptible to the reality of fear which creates both Batman and Joker.

In the hospital room, Joker says he never makes plans: this is the baldest lie, but one that demonstrates an exceptional truth. He has Dent – whose character he knows he has broken – put a gun up to his head and dares him to pull the trigger.

The Joker doesn’t care if he dies: the point is proved. The very rules that constitute procedural justice are just a plan, an attempt to take control. If one truly wanted to take control, “rule a city,” one would be in essence seeking justice but not necessarily making plans. Given that his rule of fear does depend on everyone else reacting badly, the Joker is the opposite of Batman – not The Dark Knight, who must obey and be what people need, but the Dark Night, who truly rules no matter what.

Additional notes: *I would appreciate it if someone confirmed whether it was Joker or another who broke the window to start the movie. I would also like to know who exactly that “another” was.

There are plenty of metaphors within the movie even in the action: take note especially of “tripping” as an attack, and who is most adept at that. Socrates defends Odysseus as liar, and demonstrates lying is necessary for rule. While we can exempt Joker from being like Odysseus, why must we also exempt Batman and the Commissioner?

And yes, in case you’re curious – I only saw this movie once as of this writing (edits for clarification: 9/05/08).

Synopsis: In this movie, a man dresses up as a bat in order to fight ninjas.

Commentary: The central question of the movie is “What is Justice?” The movie gives us two answers to this question: one is Katie Holmes’ District Attorney’s simple pronouncement that “Justice isn’t Vengeance.” That would seem to be the essential difference between Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) & Ra’s Al Ghul (Liam Neeson)’s characters: Liam Neeson blames Gotham for the death of his wife, and his want to destroy the city means he has confused justice and vengeance. Christian Bale’s loss of family led him to what is truly justice, as he rejected vengeance as something worth having.

But that answer is too simple to explain everything that goes on in the movie, starting with the part where Batman leaves Ra’s Al Ghul to die. “I don’t have to save you” seems a pretty cold act, even if it isn’t directly killing. The truly just man does no harm, and regrets deeply that any harm has to happen. Slick one-liners don’t quite make Batman perfectly just, in one sense of justice. Further, the bad guys consistently have the best lines in the movie, the lines that ring in our heads with a seriousness that cannot be dispelled. The mob boss is a perfect example of this: responsible for killing the killer of Bruce Wayne’s parents, thus interrupting Bruce’s attempt at vengeance, he tells Wayne to grow up and learn that the world doesn’t care what one stupid vengeful kid thinks. Power trumps obsessing over oneself, and while both activities can said to be selfish, it is true that the desire for justice wrongly directed will always be subordinate to a criminal understanding of the world, which exerts power, ironically enough, because it is more dispassionate.

The real answer to the question lies in the movie’s development of the theme of fear. The bad guys speak about this both directly and indirectly: Ra’s Al Ghul is the one who has mastered fear, and in teaching Bruce Wayne, his entire education is about overcoming fear. When Al Ghul says invisibility is a product of patience and agility, he means that control of fear is an active and passive phenomenon: one must be agile so as not to be seen, and thus not provoke another’s fear; one must be patient so one doesn’t give oneself away because of fear of already having been seen. The mob boss’ speech also speaks to this theme – why does he hold so much power? And note the mere existence of Scarecrow, a villain who holds all of Gotham scared by himself, even as merely a tool, because of his control over fear.

Bruce Wayne’s own take on fear is the central moment in the movie: asked by Alfred why he chose the bat as his insignia, when he is scared of bats, he answers (roughly) “I wanted my enemies to share my fear.” Despite all of Al Ghul’s training, he’s still scared, even of bats. What differentiates him from the criminal who trained him – Al Ghul showed him how to be Batman, in essence – is that he’s scared of himself. The problem with criminals is that they’re scared of nothing. Justice, then, is fear of what one is capable of. To be unjust is to try to lack all fear.

It is at this point we can see a crucial error in the second half of the movie, when Al Ghul becomes a raving lunatic as opposed to a man with an iron will. For Batman’s education, contra Katie Holmes’ character, has come about entirely through the bad guys. The most just man is he who can look into the abyss and see as they see, and turn away at the last second. But it isn’t because of anything rational that the just man turns away. Al Ghul is right – Gotham is corrupt and deserves to be destroyed. It killed Wayne’s family, and permits innumerable injustices every day at the expense of its citizens and others. Justice on a cosmic scale demands that Gotham die. Further, who cares about procedures in the case of the farmer that had murdered (the final test for Wayne to graduate from Al Ghul’s academy is the killing of a man that might be innocent. It is at this point Wayne runs away, becoming Batman)? Even procedural justice isn’t perfect: we have the procedures so we can ignore the bigger question about whether every procedure is perfect. If we thought about justice all the time, we wouldn’t be able to act. In the end, it is Wayne’s faith in Gotham that saves him: the one good cop, the Commissioner, is the difference in the battle between Al Ghul and Batman.

But that dodges the central question, and makes Al Ghul worse than he is: the writers have to have him say crap like “I have a city to destroy” and have to have him be a scumbag who, having been saved by Wayne once, still shows his ungratefulness by trying to destroy the city. We have to make him wholly bad, after all, so we can have a happy ending. This is Hollywood. The definition of anything that has a happy ending, btw, is “comedy.”

I hold that the movie should have been treated tragically. Al Ghul should have been a scumbag who got rescued by Wayne and was ungrateful. But when confronted by Wayne regarding his plans to destroy the city, he shouldn’t have sneered, but merely made the appeal to the fact that forces are in motion that neither understand. That’s the more consistent and fundamental teaching about justice: we don’t know where it comes from, we don’t even agree on it. But it is the most important thing in a Fallen world.