The reason for that, and the reason why I find the Nolans' formulation of morality to be pedestrian, is that the means through which the Joker expresses his status as an agent of chaos are a series of games that essentially posit a moral dilemma. Thus, the choice between Rachel and Harvey. Thus, also, the choice between the two boats. Either alternative is impossible. By their nature, moral dilemmas strain the bounds of morality; you can't do the right thing in such situations.

But the point here is that, whether you do or not, you are aware that the options you have available to you are rendered impossible because of their moral implications. Moral dilemmas, their status as games from the Joker's perspective, rely on the potency of their function as sources of intense moral tension. Batman gets the people on the two boats out of the moral dilemma they are in by preventing the Joker from blowing both boats up. The decision not to blow up the other boat does not get either party out of the situation, no matter how much the film insists that they are good people for making that decision. In deciding not to blow up the other boat, both essentially condemned themselves to death. Is this right or wrong? Is it right to do so when you have dozens of other people, including children, on your boat? It's arguable, which is my point.

If the Joker really was an agent of chaos, he would have blown both boats up irrespective of what the people decided (one suspects he'd have done that anyway, but my point is that he wouldn't have given them an option at all).

Moral dilemmas are dirt cheap as a means of rendering a particular scene or story serious. What the Joker does repeatedly in the film is the same thing that happens at the end of Spider-Man 1. Spider-Man has to choose between saving Mary Jane and a bus full of children. He saves both, of course, because that's an entirely different film with different aims. The Dark Knight insists on being a much more serious film, and so the stakes are higher. Rachel dies; the people on the boats would have died too if not for Batman's intervention, and at various other moments in the film, people die when demands are not met in time (or even if they are met).

Getting back to Harvey Dent, Dent's transformation into Two Face supposedly marks the Joker's triumph at the end. First, why?

Let me answer this in a perhaps unconventional way by going back to the status of Batman as a relational hero. If Batman is a hero in opposition to the bad guys, what happens when the good guy whom he posits as the correct, conventional, good hero becomes the bad guy?

Batman's answer is to re-position him, Harvet Dent, or least his image, as the good guy again, taking upon himself the features that rendered Dent as Two Face the bad guy.

Let me try to relate some of the seemingly disparate threads in this languorous review here. I said earlier that the Joker operates within a moral framework while disavowing it, and that his turn to moral dilemmas shows that. What he does with Dent betrays a similar dependency on morality. Here, it's not the moral dilemma, but what I suppose we can call vengeance/moral relationalism/relativism which does the work. Basically, Dent's transformation into Two Face is concomitant with his adoption of a morality wherein retaliatory suffering forms the appropriate standard of behaviour. This is partially counteracted by his insistence on chance as a determining factor, but chance seems to have a secondary role here; chance has nothing to do with his decision to track down and kill the people he wants to kill. Chance is only given a function once the course of action is already decided. What I mean is that chance has nothing to do with Two Face looking for the drivers, for example, even if it has something to do with deciding whether they will live or die.

I don't find anything particularly profound or impressive in any of these constructions of (a)morality, and I wouldn't make a big deal out of it if the film did not insist that all of this is so significant. The Joker and Harvey Dent command this film; they are haunting figures, and Batman's association with them renders him a (more) haunting figure as well. But I think this has much more to do with what Ledger, Eckhart, and Bale make of their characters than the writing or the script. There is only that much that they can do, however, and ultimately, I don't find the ideas that underpin the film to be very brilliant. Stated otherwise, I don't think The Dark Knight ever gives us a proper justification for why it is so serious.


B+

But the point here is that, whether you do or not, you are aware that the options you have available to you are rendered impossible because of their moral implications. Moral dilemmas, their status as games from the Joker's perspective, rely on the potency of their function as sources of intense moral tension. Batman gets the people on the two boats out of the moral dilemma they are in by preventing the Joker from blowing both boats up. The decision not to blow up the other boat does not get either party out of the situation, no matter how much the film insists that they are good people for making that decision. In deciding not to blow up the other boat, both essentially condemned themselves to death. Is this right or wrong? Is it right to do so when you have dozens of other people, including children, on your boat? It's arguable, which is my point.

If the Joker really was an agent of chaos, he would have blown both boats up irrespective of what the people decided (one suspects he'd have done that anyway, but my point is that he wouldn't have given them an option at all).


B+

I also think that the Joker knew allowing the two boats the chance to blow each other up would cause much more chaos than simply doing it himself, his goal is to produce chaos not be chaos itself.

I think he just wanted to fuck with people. That's how he has fun.

The Dark Knight



Let me begin in two ways.


First, I suppose as a counterpoint to my critique below, let me say outright that I found this to be a marvellously entertaining, stunningly beautiful film which was brave, thoughtful, and daring. The acting is great, the writing usually good, and the narrative, though occasionally tiresome, generally taut. If any film was meant to be seen on IMAX, this one is it. The vistas of Chicago (Gotham) and Hong Kong are magnificent. The camera knows this, and the film lingers intermittently on the grandeur of the cityscapes, as if it is that grandeur that, in its assurance of how large the setting is, imbues the action itself with its own kind of grandeur. If The Dark Knight seems epic, it is in part because of the two cities it showcases.

Second, my viewing of the film was affected by my personal understanding of the history of Batman as a figure. Based on what I have read (and I don't claim this to be the truth, I only want to share with you my understanding of Batman's history), is as follows: Batman was created in the late 1930s/early 1940s, and from the outset signified a more serious superhero than the likes of Superman. The character, however, quickly came to function as a kind of fool in a bat costume, with several writers/artists engaging him in an essentially fun, ridiculous series of adventures, such as those that entailed him fighting aliens. This is how Batman managed to remain popular despite a crackdown on comics in the 1950s. In the 1960s, the figure became at once more serious than before, with storylines such as those involving aliens being cut out, and at the same time, because of the ridiculously campy show, more foolish than ever. I believe it was Frank Miller who, in the 1980s, established the foundations for the kind of overly serious Batman which we are now most familiar with. The first four Batman films , I think, vacillate between these two representations of Batman, with Batman and Robin pushing Batman once again toward the camp extreme. Batman Begins, and even more so The Dark Knight, form the other extreme.

I want to take this last point up because I think it's important. Although I've tried to avoid reviews, comments, etc. regarding the film until now, I couldn't help but notice that several people commented that this doesn't feel like "just" a superhero film, that it seems like something else. I think those people are right, and I think that this is exactly what the Nolans were aiming for. Three questions arise: How does this idea relate to the fact that this film is so avowedly serious? Why is it different? How is it different?

Regarding the first question (and I think the second), I don't think it's possible to answer in any other way but to say that this is what the Nolans decided would make The Dark Knight a film outside the bounds of the conventional superhero film (I mean, its seriousness). The implicit assumption here is that superhero films do have conventions, and therefore boundaries. That's true enough, and The Dark Knight does not rid itself entirely of all of them (how could it?). So, you have a fixation on gadgets and equipment and stunning vehicles (is it just me, or is there a heavier fixation on this stuff in Batman films? I think it's because unlike Spider-Man or Superman, Batman has no superpowers other than those his equipment supplies him with). And so also, you have an emphasis on action (and the action sequences are wonderfully done).

Sort of spot on here. Batman is a summation of the planning he can do in his head and the tools he needs in order to execute them. His mind compensates for the brute strength he needs, his gadgets compensate for his mobility and reaction times hes incapable of having on his own.

Much more importantly, the relational structure between various characters that forms the basis of all superhero comics I can think of exists here as well: you have the superhero (or anti-hero), the villain(s), and what may broadly be called the crowd ( and which includes those 'normal' humans who assist the hero).

Not exactly this time. Read on. This is where your gray area starts setting in. This is how i saw it.
Gordon - Your hero
Batman - Your Anti Villain
Harvey - Your hero till the end .... his methods turned ugly but if you notice, his intentions till teh end could not be called evil
Joker: Your villain

But this is where the film becomes strange. The film is different, more serious, if you will, because it meddles with that structure. And this is where we get into the morality of it all.

Let me map the simplest of moral structures onto the relational structure I outlined above. So, we have the hero/anti-hero who is good, the villain who is bad/evil, and the crowd, which moves between the good and the evil (it's never this simple, not if the comic/film is good, but let's use this structure as a starting point). Batman, by his very nature and because of his personal history, makes for an uncomfortable fit between the moral and performative dimension of the hero figure. What I mean, simply, is that his status as a hero does not automatically go along with the moral assumptions of that role; Batman isn't a hero because he's particularly good; he's a hero because he doesn't want to be bad/evil, and because if he were not a hero, he probably would be bad. Remember that in Batman Begins, he almost killed the man who killed his parents. His entire moral code as outlined in The Dark Knight is not to perform that ultimate act (ie, murder). The result is that Batman is perpetually defined by what he is not (ie, the villain). His function in the film as a superhero is a relational one. The ending of the film makes this very clear: he is whatever Gotham needs him to be at the moment.

This is where you went wrong. Batman is not whoever Gotham needs him to be. Batman becomes whatever Batman thinks Gotham needs him to be. This was a subtle difference defined throughout the movie. Through the course of the film, there are 5 perpetually good people: Alfred, Lucious, Gordon, Harvey and Rachel and notice that whether it helped Gotham or not, the real good people at one time or another always questioned his actions or realized that he was full of himself ... because he made his own decision on something that may ultimately solve the problem at hand but in the long run, is showing signs of a growing problem with the character itself.

Hence Batman may have been defined by the one action he may not take but he was definetely not defined by 'not wanting to be bad' because he did what would be considered wrong on a number of occasions. More than anything Batman is perpetually defined by his WANT to be good and righteous, as opposed to his want of not to be bad.... subtle difference here and i think you may catch on to it. The problem became that the whole good and rightrous thing is defined solely by him, throughout the entire movie .... no one else.


This is a vastly different conception of the superhero than is found in the case of Spider-Man or Superman. This is why, for example, the Spider-Man films are so different (better in some ways, far worse in others, but essentially incomparable).

The film seizes on the status of Batman as a relational hero to subvert the structure I outlined above. It does so through the figures of the Joker and Harvey Dent.

The rampant corruption in Gotham forms in some ways a necessary background to all of this, but corrupt officials and cops are nothing news in comics or elsewhere. This is part and parcel of the ambiguous position of the crowd with respect to right and wrong. Some are bad, some are good, sometimes almost everyone is bad, and at other times (such as on the two boats), it seems almost everyone ends up doing the right thing. There is nothing unusual in all of this.

I can't seem to understand how i am the only one who actually picked up on this. The people on the boat never ended up doing the right thing really. Nolan showed time and time again during that boat scene that no one wanted to take the responsibility of blowing up the other boat, but the majority had no problems with actually letting someone else blow it. Upto the last minute, no one stopped the 2 guys willing (or pretending) to detonate the boat .. they stood and they watched. there was almost a sigh of relief from everyone when someone decided to take that detonator. People had no problem on the boat doing the wrong thing, as long as they didn't have to be responsible for the act, again a general theme of Gotham's universe where good or bad, people are willing to stay in the sidelines. BB showed that there are a few good people and even they aren't willing to do anything .. that most of the city was bad. Joker proved the complete opposite as well.

There is, however, something very unusual about the Joker figure and Harvey Dent's plight, and in both cases it is a matter of extremity. In the case of the Joker, it is the extreme position he takes with respect to morality (essentially, that he is outside of it), and in the case of Harvey Dent, it is the extremity of the reversal in his position during the progression of the film, away from the white knight toward Two Face. The two are interrelated.

The Joker considers himself to be an agent of chaos. He calls on Harvey Dent to create anarchy. Is this actually the case? In my opinion, no. The Joker's actions are not an effect of his amorality. They are an affect through which the illusion of amorality is expressed. The Joker is the most moral of characters; precisely because he insists on his status as a being outside the bounds of morality, he repositions morality as a central conception in his worldview. He needs the moral framework to function in order to define himself with respect to and against it (thus, I think, his insistence that he needs Batman at the end; Batman as a conduit, a means of rendering this futile rejection/need for conventional morality which troubles the Joker so much). But he does so in a way that subsumes him under the moral framework.

unnh .. you may have read too much into this. Being outside the bounds of morality and not letting moral decisions effect you implies that you perceive good and bad morals in the exact same way. Considering Joker's actions almost always focussed on the negative morality, i'm not quite sure if i can believe what you are saying. He is using none of it to define himself. Joker, as a character, is a character that decided to live in the moment. The man throughout the movie was clearly suicidal and he was out there for the thrills. His entire speech to dent was all about Chaos. Be specific and no one cares. Be vague and the world goes to chaos and the entire character feeds on it. His relationship with Batman is such. Batman works on rules (morals or no morals to joker was irrelevant). Joker considered him just as insane as he was, felt he was the exact same person as he was, fit into society just like he did cept he happened to be on another spectrum. Batman didn't add to the chaos. Joker's entire relationship with Batman is based upon his fascination with him .. he can't live without him. That is why when he turned Harvey into two face, notice how it wasn't so much that my work is done, but i've completely lost interest in him. Harvey never made any moral choice at all. He left those things up to chance. Joker didn't care if Harvey now did good or bad, as long as he brought chaos and added variables to rigid rules.

The reason for that, and the reason why I find the Nolans' formulation of morality to be pedestrian, is that the means through which the Joker expresses his status as an agent of chaos are a series of games that essentially posit a moral dilemma. Thus, the choice between Rachel and Harvey.

The choice between Harvey and Rachel was not a moral choice. it was an emotional one. Fo Harvey and Batman. Saving either was not a decision made upon any morals whatsoever. Playing the switcheroo was not to morally play with someone either. it was to emotionally break both character. i think you seem to be mixing morality and emotions up.
Thus, also, the choice between the two boats. Either alternative is impossible. By their nature, moral dilemmas strain the bounds of morality; you can't do the right thing in such situations.

But the point here is that, whether you do or not, you are aware that the options you have available to you are rendered impossible because of their moral implications. Moral dilemmas, their status as games from the Joker's perspective, rely on the potency of their function as sources of intense moral tension. Batman gets the people on the two boats out of the moral dilemma they are in by preventing the Joker from blowing both boats up.

People on the boats, for whatever reasons had already acted before batman could prevent it. The time went up by over 5 minutes. And again, the entire boat scene, while based upon some morality was more a question of responsiblity and the inability to act.

The decision not to blow up the other boat does not get either party out of the situation, no matter how much the film insists that they are good people for making that decision. In deciding not to blow up the other boat, both essentially condemned themselves to death. Is this right or wrong? Is it right to do so when you have dozens of other people, including children, on your boat? It's arguable, which is my point.

Again, not a matter of right or wrong. A moral decision here was only based upon what a person is willing and not willing to do. It was far easier for both parties to take the life of someone as long as they were not the once pressing the trigger, whether that meant their boat is blown up or someone on their boat takes the responsibliity of blowing the other one up. Thats the simple decision that was consistent throughout that entire scene. Again, what chance does Gotham have if the good people do nothing. TDK expands that and essentially tells us that no one in Gotham is really willing to do much to begin with, being good or bad.

If the Joker really was an agent of chaos, he would have blown both boats up irrespective of what the people decided (one suspects he'd have done that anyway, but my point is that he wouldn't have given them an option at all).

With no option, there is no chaos. If both the people on the boat knew the joker would destroy them, people would resign to their fate. Again the speech with Harvey ... you tell someone something specific, there is no fun in that and people don't care as much. You let the whole of Gotham know that one boat may destroy the other and its not just the boat but an entire city waiting to see who would pull the trigger. None of us know if at the end, joker would push the detonator anyway. But till the end the chaos ensued. When no one blew the other up, it didn't really look like Joker was disappointed or shocked .... his real purpose was achieved.

Moral dilemmas are dirt cheap as a means of rendering a particular scene or story serious. What the Joker does repeatedly in the film is the same thing that happens at the end of Spider-Man 1. Spider-Man has to choose between saving Mary Jane and a bus full of children. He saves both, of course, because that's an entirely different film with different aims. The Dark Knight insists on being a much more serious film, and so the stakes are higher. Rachel dies; the people on the boats would have died too if not for Batman's intervention, and at various other moments in the film, people die when demands are not met in time (or even if they are met).

Not really sure how any of those were moral delimmas at all. Rachel dies over an emotional delimma, batman was going to save both boats at the end of the day, not choose one.

Getting back to Harvey Dent, Dent's transformation into Two Face supposedly marks the Joker's triumph at the end. First, why?

Let me answer this in a perhaps unconventional way by going back to the status of Batman as a relational hero. If Batman is a hero in opposition to the bad guys, what happens when the good guy whom he posits as the correct, conventional, good hero becomes the bad guy?

Batman's answer is to re-position him, Harvet Dent, or least his image, as the good guy again, taking upon himself the features that rendered Dent as Two Face the bad guy.

Let me try to relate some of the seemingly disparate threads in this languorous review here. I said earlier that the Joker operates within a moral framework while disavowing it, and that his turn to moral dilemmas shows that. What he does with Dent betrays a similar dependency on morality. Here, it's not the moral dilemma, but what I suppose we can call vengeance/moral relationalism/relativism which does the work. Basically, Dent's transformation into Two Face is concomitant with his adoption of a morality wherein retaliatory suffering forms the appropriate standard of behaviour. This is partially counteracted by his insistence on chance as a determining factor, but chance seems to have a secondary role here; chance has nothing to do with his decision to track down and kill the people he wants to kill. Chance is only given a function once the course of action is already decided. What I mean is that chance has nothing to do with Two Face looking for the drivers, for example, even if it has something to do with deciding whether they will live or die.

I read the above 4 times and i've given up trying to understand it. i will say however that Harvey did not lose his morality nor did he lose his sense of purpose. he never became a villain. see the thing is, you seem to imply that harvey lost his moral code but he didn't. Harvey at all times knew what the right decision was but also what he emotionally wanted to do. And all he did was that he no longer wanted to side with one of them but left it to chance. if the coin favors a moral choice, he'll make it. if it favors his emotions, then so be it. which is why your course of action being decided does not apply here. Finding and tracking Rachel's killers did not create an ambigous delimma. he would have done so even if he wasn't two face. How he deals with them or how he brings them to justice however, was an ambiguous delimma. and thats where he let coin tosses decide people's fate.

I don't find anything particularly profound or impressive in any of these constructions of (a)morality, and I wouldn't make a big deal out of it if the film did not insist that all of this is so significant. The Joker and Harvey Dent command this film; they are haunting figures, and Batman's association with them renders him a (more) haunting figure as well. But I think this has much more to do with what Ledger, Eckhart, and Bale make of their characters than the writing or the script. There is only that much that they can do, however, and ultimately, I don't find the ideas that underpin the film to be very brilliant. Stated otherwise, I don't think The Dark Knight ever gives us a proper justification for why it is so serious.


B+

Okay, I'm going to try my best to negate your negatives (i.e., argue with them a in a convincing and proper manner). And here....we...go!





There is no reason to suppose that the Joker's notions of chaos are somehow linked to the supposedly ambiguous situations which he sets up. They are not ambiguous anyway. Moral dilemmas are impossible to resolve, but they are not ambiguous. The Joker consistently resists any notions of planning, but nobody, from what I saw in the film, plans as well as he does.





I didn't say they are good people. I implied that the film very clearly posits what they do as something that is good. And it is good because it supposedly means that hope can still linger in the human mind, blah blah blah. Pop preaching garbage.



What do you mean by corruption? From what I can gather, it seems that you are suggesting that his corruption takes the form of insanity.

The suggestion that the Joker is corrupt positions him within a moral framework, once again, just as he's trying to break from it. I can't find any evidence in the film that he considers himself to be corrupt or insane. At any rate, his aim is not to corrupt. He has purportedly no aim.

But your statement goes at the heart of what I've been trying to say: even as he claims to have no aims (being an agent of chaos is all about having no aims, or if any aims, then in a negative sense), he is re-placed within the moral framework, painted as corrupt, and operates within it as such.




The concept is essentially the same. Whether the game is rigged or not is entirely irrelevant.



You just reinforced my argument. Chance isn't left up to chance, so to speak.



That triangle IS the script, heh.

You are assuming the Joker's stated conditions are factual, but where is your proof? Certainly, not from past experiences or reported instances of the Joker's actions. You are on the boat, you have no idea if you turn the key that you are actually saving your boat, blowing it up, or blowing up both boats. Your best course of action is to wait and hope someone can defuse the bomb, or it doesn't go off. Action has the lowest value of reward. The Joker enjoys the discomfort no matter how it is achieved, and was visibly upset he had to detonate the bomb himself.

As an agent of chaos, he planned on blowing up both boats, what harm is adding a bit of suffering while he works? We all do side projects to make our work day a little more enjoyable. We have to do a project, let's put a side bet on it, see if we can do it in a certain amount of time, without asking a question, inebriated,etc...

The Joker considers himself to be an agent of chaos. He calls on Harvey Dent to create anarchy. Is this actually the case? In my opinion, no. The Joker's actions are not an effect of his amorality. They are an affect through which the illusion of amorality is expressed.

Oh Boxie

Good review.

And its also nice that you mentioned right at the beginning that a lot of this was based upon your understanding of the character. What surprised me though about your review was that some of the points you mentioned, i didn't expect you to say them considering you got BB spot on but then, didn't notice how this movie, essentially built on the same themes. Don't take my comments as criticism. But take a look at soem of the things you may have missed out on. The Pedestrian street morality you mentioned is something you'll hopefully see in a different light because to me, it seemed quite obvious that Nolan made a movie where your expected moral norms are not exactly clear cut and exercised in this film at all.

Not exactly this time. Read on. This is where your gray area starts setting in. This is how i saw it.
Gordon - Your hero
Batman - Your Anti Villain
Harvey - Your hero till the end .... his methods turned ugly but if you notice, his intentions till teh end could not be called evil
Joker: Your villain

This is where you went wrong. Batman is not whoever Gotham needs him to be. Batman becomes whatever Batman thinks Gotham needs him to be. This was a subtle difference defined throughout the movie. Through the course of the film, there are 5 perpetually good people: Alfred, Lucious, Gordon, Harvey and Rachel and notice that whether it helped Gotham or not, the real good people at one time or another always questioned his actions or realized that he was full of himself ... because he made his own decision on something that may ultimately solve the problem at hand but in the long run, is showing signs of a growing problem with the character itself.

Hence Batman may have been defined by the one action he may not take but he was definetely not defined by 'not wanting to be bad' because he did what would be considered wrong on a number of occasions. More than anything Batman is perpetually defined by his WANT to be good and righteous, as opposed to his want of not to be bad.... subtle difference here and i think you may catch on to it. The problem became that the whole good and rightrous thing is defined solely by him, throughout the entire movie .... no one else.

you seem to imply that harvey lost his moral code but he didn't.

Harvey at all times knew what the right decision was but also what he emotionally wanted to do. And all he did was that he no longer wanted to side with one of them but left it to chance. if the coin favors a moral choice, he'll make it. if it favors his emotions, then so be it. which is why your course of action being decided does not apply here. Finding and tracking Rachel's killers did not create an ambigous delimma. he would have done so even if he wasn't two face. How he deals with them or how he brings them to justice however, was an ambiguous delimma. and thats where he let coin tosses decide people's fate.

You really are in need of watching that movie again because unlike missing plot points, it seems like you missed out completely on some of the things the movie was trying to communicate. You've mistaken emotional choices as moral choices and you've also somehow decided that people made certain choices even though in those situations, there was no choice to begin with.

But wouldn't you say that the film is fully aware of how unworkable and hypocritical Joker's system of morality (or purportedly, lack thereof) ultimately is?

Like, it would be unsettling if the villain committing atrocities in Nolan's conception of things had a justified and fully consistent worldview.

And honestly people, don't attack Box. He still ended up enjoying the film and gave it a B+. Not everyone can fall in love with a movie. Even the classics. If he had hated it, yeah maybe you can attack him because I find it hard how someone could not like this movie. But if he enjoyed it but didn't find it a masterpiece, its okay. He's not the only one.

After reading it 6 times, I think box's review makes no sense.

Uh...Box's review?

Btw, did anyone note the curiously Marxist undertones in the film? I can't believe that the Joker, of all people, is the ultimate Marxist I suspect that the Nolans don't take to Marx that well, heh, and it's obvious to me that they don't.

Batman Begins and The Dark Knight are apologist pieces for capitalism. Who'd have thunk?

Yet, in the second movie, Wayne Enterprises seems to be as successful as ever. Indeed, as I suggested in the original post, diverting some corporate funds to crimefighting might well be in the interests of the stockholders because Gotham City's high crime rate discourages and investment and thereby reduces of the value of Wayne Industries stock. As for Bainbridge's claim that Wayne violated antitakover laws when he regained control of the corporation at the end of Batman Begins, this - if correct - would be consistent with the libertarian theme I identify. After all, most libertarians view antitakover laws as unjustified government restraints on the market. Wayne's takeover of Wayne Industries might well have made the firm more profitable by removing less capable incumbent managers. There may be similar libertarian objections to at least some of the other corporate laws that Bainbridge accuses Wayne of violating. Perhaps the movie can be interpreted as a critique of government's role in the corporate world as well as its role in traditional law enforcemenet [sic].

I don't see how you're in a position to tell me that I'm wrong or right about Batman. What do you mean I got Batman Begins spot on? Are you evaluating my opinions with respect to yours as the standard, or those of the Nolans? And what gives you or them the authority?

Its nice to see that much like the movie, you've somehow found things i've said upto this point that are implying right or wrong. I said i was confused about how you said those things and hope you'll see something in a different light.

As far as questioning opinions and having the authority to do so, the right was given to me the day the internet came alive .. you know .. something we do on this forum on a daily basis.

I was under the impression that the context in which I made the statement made it clear enough that what I meant as what you qualify, that Batman thinks this is what Gotham needs.

If it was, it doesn't seem like the rest of your review supports it. hero or antihero, you've painted batman in your review to be the opposite of what joker and harvey are. If we're going by the assumption that Batman is what Gotham needs him to be, then he remains this good person who is trying not to do anything bad. But if we go by the assumption that batman is what he thinks he needs to be without ever actually bothering to listen to anyone else, the character's goals and that of the actual city will keep diverting away over time. That's the very subtle difference between those 2 different ideas and your review seems to support the former point repeatedly.



Eh, what? You're playing with words here, nothing more. His want to be good and righteous (and I'm not sure where you see this in the film) would be tantamount to his want not to be bad or evil. It is strains him not to kill the Joker, that strain is not solely indicative of his desire to remain good or righteous; he has to prevent himself from becoming like the Joker (I suppose, from his perspective, bad or evil, once again implicating the Joker in the moral framework the Joker attempts to disavow).

If you call that a play on words, its as much a play on words as saying batman is not defined by being good, hes defined by him not wanting to be bad. and i'm saying thats not true at all. there is a lot of evidence of this. The man wants to be right everytime and thinks thats the good thing he did. He stops anyone from using guns because he thinks its not the right thing and that its not good. He gives himself up regardless of what the city may need because he cnonsidered that to be the right step, he defied gordon and went to rescue those people because he felt he was right once again, set up a surveilliance system because again, he considered it the right thing, even after he told lucious he only trusts him with it, he still considered all those things to be positives and goods. His motivation was always that if he didn't do those things, he was somehow not doing something good .. it wasn't that it in anyway turned him bad. His failure to act in any of those circumstances would have not resulted in him being a bad person but it would have stopped him from being a good one.

I don't think so. It's irrelevant what the Joker thinks, or what the film wants us to think about the Joker, anyway. The film as I saw it is profoundly confused about the position of the Joker morally, because it attempts to account for his supposed amorality by means of moral dilemmas, moral relativism, frivolity, etc. None of this is convincing.

Joker's character was out there trying to live in the moment. He wasn't trying to live inside or outside of morality ... he just didn't want to consider either of it .... ofcourse his interest and fascination was with chaos and putting people into emotional or morally ambigeous situations achieved that. his intentions throughout the films barely ever went further than that.


The two are not mutually exclusive. At any rate, what it meant to Batman or Dent is beside the point. In conjunction with the Joker's other games, it can be read as a moral dilemma, and I think must be read on some level as such. In fact, if you don't read it as such, you've succumbed to the effects of the Joker. Sad, that.

I don't see how it could? If someone put someone's mother and sister on a rope and said you could save only one, how could it possibly turn into a moral choice? Saving either in no way puts you in a position where your moral rating in anyway would ever change. saving either is just as quantifiable and losing the other is just as quantifiable as well. Morality in this situation completely cancels itself out.

All questions of responsibility and the inability to act are fundamentally moral.

That statement is a moot point considering by the time batman takes action, all moral, emotional responsiblities are completely out of their hands. Their decision on any kind of responsibility, even if i go by your argument existed upto 12:00 ... during which time batman did not save them. Batman's actions in no shape or form affected the moral, emotional, ethical or professional decision of any single person on that ship. That my friend, is not an opinion. Its just a simple solid fact, much like the harvey rachel situation.

Again, not a matter of right or wrong. A moral decision here was only based upon what a person is willing and not willing to do. It was far easier for both parties to take the life of someone as long as they were not the once pressing the trigger, whether that meant their boat is blown up or someone on their boat takes the responsibliity of blowing the other one up. Thats the simple decision that was consistent throughout that entire scene. Again, what chance does Gotham have if the good people do nothing. TDK expands that and essentially tells us that no one in Gotham is really willing to do much to begin with, being good or bad.

What? How is this not a question of right or wrong? The choice to not be either good or bad, by the way, is a moral one as well. The film unquestionably posits is as a matter of wrong for people not to act. Rachel Dawes made that very explicit in Batman Begins, and The Dark Knight does not deviate from that, ever.

My reply was in context to the statement you passed and once again went into a situation where morality on both sides balances itself out. If your statement says that decision to blow up or the inability to blow something up ends up killing people on either boat (which you did say) ... hence its not a question of right or wrong from that perspective. if you feel that either situation requires you become responsible for the deaths, than you cannot in any shape or form choose a right or wrong answer to that question. Inability to make a choice in that situation therefore, is neither moral and becomes a strictly emotional exercise once again as all moral quantifiers once again, are equal regardless of which action you take. While i disagree with the whole 'are you responsible for life on either boat', my take on the entire thing was that joker proved to me pretty much that people on the boats were definetely immoral in this regard because its not the end action that defined them (which was the BB theme), it was their intentions that really showed everyone what their true nature is.

He looked pretty shocked to me. There's a problem with the term chaos here once again. We're playing on two different meanings here, and the Joker is partly to blame.

He was more confused than anything which within seconds turned to a simple "can't rely on people and i'll just do it myself. he was almost .... 'ehhhh .... fucck it .. lets move on'.

Chaos as you just described it is confusion, panic, social unrest. I've been talking about the moral dimension of chaos, chaos as a concept beyond the immediate level of action. Yes, the Joker means, on one level, simply social unrest and panic. But the film insists, in all seriousness, that there is something more important there. Too bad that it doesn't get what it itself says.

And you read too much into it again. The film almost always focussed on chaos on a social level and on a personal level ... save this or save that ... do this or do that ... pit my emotions vs my ethical code ... and it had one practical example of each of those settings that it played out ... at least for me beautifully .. but thats a subjective discussion and not worth debating over.

See above, see my review.

I did, i replied. i still confused.

Read it a fifth time!

Trying to and not getting anywhere.






This comes across as a bit condescending. I know the film I saw, and I strongly feel that it is off on a number of things, even as it is quite brilliant in many other ways.

its not meant to be consdescending. i would be condescending if i stood here and sat and judged your opinion on the film and kept telling you that you failed to see things. i have no problems with your opinions. my reason for saving what i did stemmed more from the fact that you're calling a bottle a cell phone and a giraffe a pigmy hippo, things that were never there to begin with. i can agree to disagree with you on how we interpreted the role of batman, of the joker but to sit and say that batman's choice to choose rachel over harvey was a moral delimma seems like of loopy to me.

If it was, it doesn't seem like the rest of your review supports it. hero or antihero, you've painted batman in your review to be the opposite of what joker and harvey are.

If you call that a play on words, its as much a play on words as saying batman is not defined by being good, hes defined by him not wanting to be bad. and i'm saying thats not true at all. there is a lot of evidence of this. The man wants to be right everytime and thinks thats the good thing he did. He stops anyone from using guns because he thinks its not the right thing and that its not good. He gives himself up regardless of what the city may need because he cnonsidered that to be the right step, he defied gordon and went to rescue those people because he felt he was right once again, set up a surveilliance system because again, he considered it the right thing, even after he told lucious he only trusts him with it, he still considered all those things to be positives and goods. His motivation was always that if he didn't do those things, he was somehow not doing something good .. it wasn't that it in anyway turned him bad. His failure to act in any of those circumstances would have not resulted in him being a bad person but it would have stopped him from being a good one.

Joker's character was out there trying to live in the moment. He wasn't trying to live inside or outside of morality ... he just didn't want to consider either of it

I don't see how it could? If someone put someone's mother and sister on a rope and said you could save only one, how could it possibly turn into a moral choice? Saving either in no way puts you in a position where your moral rating in anyway would ever change. saving either is just as quantifiable and losing the other is just as quantifiable as well. Morality in this situation completely cancels itself out.

What is common to the two well-known cases is conflict. In each case, an agent regards herself as having moral reasons to do each of two actions, but doing both actions is not possible. Ethicists have called situations like these moral dilemmas. The crucial features of a moral dilemma are these: the agent is required to do each of two (or more) actions; the agent can do each of the actions; but the agent cannot do both (or all) of the actions. The agent thus seems condemned to moral failure; no matter what she does, she will do something wrong (or fail to do something that she ought to do).

That statement is a moot point considering by the time batman takes action, all moral, emotional responsiblities are completely out of their hands. Their decision on any kind of responsibility, even if i go by your argument existed upto 12:00 ... during which time batman did not save them. Batman's actions in no shape or form affected the moral, emotional, ethical or professional decision of any single person on that ship. That my friend, is not an opinion. Its just a simple solid fact, much like the harvey rachel situation.

if you feel that either situation requires you become responsible for the deaths, than you cannot in any shape or form choose a right or wrong answer to that question.

He was more confused than anything which within seconds turned to a simple "can't rely on people and i'll just do it myself. he was almost .... 'ehhhh .... fucck it .. lets move on'.

And you read too much into it again. The film almost always focussed on chaos on a social level and on a personal level ... save this or save that ... do this or do that ... pit my emotions vs my ethical code ... and it had one practical example of each of those settings that it played out ... at least for me beautifully .. but thats a subjective discussion and not worth debating over.

its not meant to be consdescending. i would be condescending if i stood here and sat and judged your opinion on the film and kept telling you that you failed to see things. i have no problems with your opinions. my reason for saving what i did stemmed more from the fact that you're calling a bottle a cell phone and a giraffe a pigmy hippo, things that were never there to begin with. i can agree to disagree with you on how we interpreted the role of batman, of the joker but to sit and say that batman's choice to choose rachel over harvey was a moral delimma seems like of loopy to me.

Just two small questions that may have been answered but it is kind of hard to look through 31 pages of reviews, so I will just ask and see if anyone knows the answers to these very small, nitpicky question.

1. Just curious for those of you with the script, did Heath Ledger improve a lot of his lines. I know he improvised the clapping when Gordon was appointed commisioner, but just curious if anything else was improvised.

2. When the mob is having their "group therapy session," or someone people may know this as when the Joker does magic. The Joker says to Michael Jai White's character, Cane, I believe that "the suit isn't fake, you should know you bought it." Does anyone have any theories as to what that mean? Did the Joker just kill one of his men and take his suit or did the Joker used to work for him? Any other ideas?

He just stole 67 million from the entire mob, I'd have to assume he used their money to buy the suit. It wasn't a direct attack at White's character, he just took it the hardest.