"I'm a dog chasing cars. I don't have plans. I just do things."
It seems that there is an increasing tendency in popular culture toward darkness, and specifically in the area of summer blockbusters. Since Lucas' final Star Wars movie Revenge of the Sith, people have been clamoring for darker fare. I think that darkness is a misnomer though. I think what people are actually looking for is reality or verisimilitude in fiction, which I'll define as consideration paid to actions of consequence. By definition, summer blockbusters are made from larger than life stuff, namely explosions, but also far-reaching politics, and extraordinary social situations. Realistic (in a literal sense) reactions to which could reasonably be death, oppression, and loneliness; dark stuff. Though the newest Batman movie Dark Knight is certainly dark, it is only a result of the sobriety with which the movie looks at it's subject matter, and it's genre.
Dark Knight opens with surprisingly austere titles and a lack of opening credits. It lends the movie documentary-like credibility. From the very beginning it is clear that the movie takes itself seriously. The sense of realism pervades the movie, in both structure, and content. The Joker's appearance, for example, consisting of a messy daubing of face-paint and stringy bleach-green hair. In previous incarnations of the character, chemical-laced water caused his neon green pompadour and white pallor. Ledger's Joker has no adequate explanation for his appearance. Certainly plot elements echo this theme of realization throughout the movie, but they are all subservient to tone. So much so, in fact, that the climax seems to plainly say what the movie has been meaning the whole time.
Since tone plays such and important role, the character most completely developed tonally, shines. In this movie the Joker becomes a sort of tragic protagonist. Again, in other incarnations of the character, Joker has been a psychotic mass murder. Whether manic with glee, or surreptitious and imposing, his intent has been to kill as many people as possible. Ledger's Joker is a sociopath, and a megalomaniac, which are something completely different. This Joker has no M.O. His intent, as stated by the character himself, is unclear. All of these characteristics imply that Joker is a 'realized' character. His portrayal of mental disorder (from an albeit uneducated point of view) seems to be more realized—or at least recognizable. Might a sociopathic megalomanic have desires similar to Joker, certainly. Could they also be ingenius enough to enact those desires the way Joker does? Almost certainly not. Otherwise local evening news would be a great deal more entertaining. So it seems that the Joker is not so realized after-all, though he undoubtedly comes the closest. It behooves us here, to investigate the narrative structure, to see what is really going on. Ledger's Joker in Dark Knight in style and content is diametrically opposed to his lineage. But his structure is the same. He is a malevolent outside force who tries to kill the protagonist without thinking of the repercussions. He plays the same part in the story—as being a part of genre and the history of Batman—yet he is utterly opposed to fulfilling the role. He is an index, used to signify something with the base moved out from under him. This index drained of meaning is truly the subject of Dark Knight, and in so being brings to fruition the asiprations of postmodern effects on narrative.
It is not necessary to devolve into all of this pontification to see that in Dark Knight, a movie hailed as the darkest comic book adaptation yet, some things are realistic and some are less so. In characterization, and other in-story concerns such as tone, Joker is split betwee realism and his more cartoonish roots. Befitting his status as super-villian his serious side is less than admirable. Here Joker's most realistically drawn characteristic is his insanity. This, coincidentally, goes a long way to make the movie so dark. The most realistic aspect of the most realist character is sloppy insanity. The loss of reason is something that frightens us most. And as we see in the movie, it is one of the most horribly realized. In Ledger's Joker his criminal genius, or acumen is his cartoonish quality. In structure the Joker once again assumes the role of most-realized character. In a comic-movie where the costumes, (including Eckhart's face, and Caine's faux-foppery) are the most extraordinary things, Joker, in his insanity seems to be the only one with justification for one. Harvey Dent, of course plays opposite Joker as the structural fantasy. Aaron Eckheart's blonde coif, and square jaw, Dent's utter disfigurement, his purity of intent. Batman and Bruce both play fulcrum to this dichotomy of realism. Making him—an unspectacular example of either in this movie where both are what is interesting—disappear altogether. In Dent is where we get a glimmer of the golden age of comics, but also to a larger extent, fiction. Coincidentally, it is this stark structural separation between Dent and Joker that makes the first half of the movie drag. The movie's primary senses separated into their constituent distilled forms, and with a denatured Batman (another drained intex, though to a lesser extent) as their only link. The stories are disparate, and though given the space to be selfish in their own development, must rely strictly upon their own momentum, without any outside stimuli to effect it.
It comes to us to ask, what does this movie do? On the surface the moral of this story is, as all things in this movie, twofold. The dark moral, or dark impression that the overbearing tone leaves one with, is that people can turn on people—easily. The self-sacrificing Batman, like his precedent incarnations before him gives the true moral; hope still exists. Essentially giving Dark Knight a traditional moral for a summer blockbuster, and on one level, it works (as it always has). Primarily though (and maybe most essentially) the movie is an interplay between a dingy-realism and the subject matter's more cartoonish roots. Nowhere is that interaction more exemplified than in Joker, who is himself the most realistically drawn, and composed of the most conflict. Here we can re-examine Joker as a tragic protagonist. His past (we can assume), his childhood and family life were undeniably dreadful. But the character's history and motivation are only one of the red herrings in this movie distracting from the true subject, as the Joker belies by telling two stories of his transformation into the character. Instead Joker is a structural tragic protagonist. More than any other character in the movie Joker fulfills the same structural role within the narrative. At times it seems that he is the only one still pulling their traditional load of narrative weight. Drained of meaning and intent, Joker simultaneously steals the scene from the threadbare Batman, but also becomes the denatured protagonist, (who is himself, without knowing why) projected by postmodernism in a summer blockbuster. It makes sense then that Dark Knight is the only Batman movie to exclude 'Batman' from the title. And it does something all great titles do: caption. The marquee seems to say: "Here is your story, without the story."
