[Imagine some squiggly effects here and harp-playing to signify our journey back in time.]
Wednesday, July 16
Ate dinner at a Thai place in Shadyside called Typhoon, which featured mediocre food at monster prices. We could only afford a few appetizers before going home hungry.
Thursday, July 17
Filed my I-9 with CMU, so now I am "in the system." [The word "system" should echo for a bit.]
Friday, July 18
Not knowing anyone in Pittsburgh, we made our first effort to meet "friends of friends" by getting together with another work-from-home Oracle tech writer and his wife at the Double-Wide Grill in the South Side. We had a pretty good time with them, and the food was good, too. At one point we were talking about the Dark Knight movie we'd be seeing the next morning, and they said their 10-year-old was begging to see it. Having read a little about it, I warned that it didn't seem like a good movie for kids...
Saturday, July 19
Caught a 10am showing of the Dark Knight, and Virg and I left the theater feeling we had been beaten down for 2.5 hours. The movie gave Virg a headache (like its predecessor), and cast a dark shadow over the rest of our weekend. Contributing to this feeling were the movie's two strongest elements: Heath Ledger and the movie score.
I'll begin this post as a standard non-revealing movie review. Then I'll warn you when I'm about to spoil the movie by picking apart the ending and its message.
Ledger's portrayal of the Joker was creepy and horrific to watch. He was an unpredictable psychopath. And what made him so scary was that there was nothing cartoonish about the performance. He made you believe that this was truly a real human being with an extremely twisted mind. I agree with many who feel that Ledger's Oscar-worthy performance has earned his Joker a place among cinema's greatest villains. Don't send your 10-year-old to see him. How this movie pulled off a PG-13 rating is beyond me.
The movie score was dark and unrelenting, and where necessary, supported the Joker with musical elements of an equally perverse and unpredictably violent nature. But for the most part, the score is Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard's bigger, darker, and more tragic take on the beautiful work they began in Batman Begins. Their romantic and pounding music has been looping in my head for the past few weeks now, and I can't get enough of it.
There's no debate about Ledger or the music. The rest of the movie has been harder to wrap my mind around. My first impression was that it wasn't as rich as Batman Begins, and was far more chaotic. The movie tries to follow a lot of characters. Often it seems pretty rushed and muddled. And there was a lot of stuff that seemed pretty stupid in the last 45 minutes--particularly the ferry predicament and the rapid and pointless decline of Two-Face. And I didn't find the ending very satisfying.
Harvey Dent learns of the bat signal.
[stolen from thedarkknight.warnerbros.com]
But here's the thing. The Dark Knight is now listed on IMDB as the #1 movie of all time. And the movie really sticks with you. So, is it a smart summer action movie, or is it a sometimes flawed attempt at something much bigger? It took several days of searching the Internet to find an intelligent discussion of the movie, but I found it in a comment posted on The Washington Independent from user drvictordavishj. His look at the movie elevates the Dark Knight to something much smarter and even politically relevant. He begins by writing, "... I would argue that the film is not necessarily all that pro-Batman."
And suddenly all the things that Batman does that seemed out-of-character for a superhero are completely explained away. He's not supposed to be a hero. You're not supposed to feel good about Batman's actions in the movie. That's what makes him a dark knight.
If you haven't seen the Dark Knight, stop reading now and skip to my account of the next day, which has a very good bit about ice cream. But then please go see the movie, because I'm dying to discuss it.
--- SPOILER ALERT ---
I'll begin spoiling the movie with the ferry scene. First of all, there's something very stupid going on here. The people of Gotham are placed in a "social experiment" where the rules of the game are given to them by the Joker--the character who has told us that "the only sensible way to live in this world is without rules." And true to his creed, the Joker has repeatedly lied to us. He tells Batman where he can find Rachel and Dent, but lies about who is at which address. He scares the people of Gotham into leaving the city without using the bridges and tunnels, apparently just so that he can trick them into taking the ferries he has rigged for his social experiment. Yet after all that, the people of Gotham continue to take him at his word regarding the rules of that experiment, and worse yet, the movie assumes that we in the audience will, too. This time, it turns out the Joker is not lying to us. But just a little while later, the movie assumes we'll believe his lie when he dresses his hostages up in the masks of his henchmen.
By the way, the Joker isn't the only one who lies to us in the movie, as drvictordavishj points out. Batman authors the biggest of these lies at the end of the movie, but Alfred also lies by burning Rachel's note, and Gordon lies to his own family by faking his death. Yes, these are all noble lies, but are we meant to applaud them, or to see them as tragic necessities? And even Harvey Dent lied to us when he told us he was Batman. Was he heroic, or was this perhaps the end of his heroism?
But back to the ferry. At first, I thought it was pretty lame that no one in Gotham was willing to save themselves by detonating the other ferry. Are we supposed to believe that Gotham is good after all? But after reading drvictordavishj's post, it's clear that the people of Gotham are not heroic. It would have been heroic to vote against detonating the other ferry, but that's not what they did. They voted to destroy it. They were just too gutless to fulfill that vote by taking the necessary action. They knew they needed to act outside the law, but were too weak to be vigilantes.
Another thing that bothered me at first, but I've since made peace with, I think. First, the Joker seeks to steal money and to charge the mob for his work. Then he burns his money anyway. And, first, the Joker tells us he wants to kill Batman. Then suddenly he's so strongly in favor of Batman's presence in the city that he decides not to kill Batman and even aims to have a man killed just for threatening to reveal Batman's identity. This inconsistency bugged me, but then I realized that inconsistency is the heart of the Joker's character. As he says, he is "an agent of chaos." He'll kill for sport, but then next time he'll spare a life just for the sport of it, too. Alfred has the key to the Joker's twisted mind when he says that "some men aren't looking for anything logical, like money. They can't be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn."
Maybe the Joker knows what Alfred has figured out--that Batman created the circumstances that allowed the Joker to come to power, that the Joker needs Batman, and that without the Joker, there would be no need for Batman. As Alfred tells Bruce, "You crossed the line first, sir. You squeezed them [the mob], you hammered them to the point of desperation. And in their desperation they turned to a man they didn't fully understand."
On to the ending. IMDB'S Dark Knight page includes fragments of the movie's final dialogue:
BATMAN: Sometimes, truth isn't good enough, sometimes people deserve more. Sometimes people deserve to have their faith rewarded.
...
GORDON: We'll have to hunt you.
BATMAN: You'll hunt me. You'll condemn me, you'll set the dogs on me. But that's what has to happen.
...
GORDON: Because he's the hero Gotham deserves, but not the one it needs right now ... and so we'll hunt him, because he can take it. Because he's not a hero. He's a silent guardian, a watchful protector ... a dark knight.
I didn't understand the difference between the hero we deserve and the hero we need, but I was sure it was the key to the movie. drvictordavishj explains it as follows:
"The key is the way Gordon draws a contrast between Dent 'the hero we need' versus the Dark Knight 'the hero we deserve.' Nolan [the writer and director] is saying that we need a law-abiding idealist, but that we don’t deserve him. He’s not saying it’s good to have a president who’s a wire-tapping torturer, merely that we don’t deserve any better. Nolan is ultimately saying that strong societies don’t tolerate Dark Knights. If we do, it’s only because we lack confidence in the institutions and values that we’ve inherited. After all, with all his gifts, Bruce Wayne could have easily been Harvey Dent, but because he lacks confidence in legitimate institutions and his moral inheritance, he’s not the philanthopist and healer that his father was. He’s the sign of a sick society.... This movie is about the tragedy of the White Knight, not the vindication of the Dark Knight. Nolan has already decided what Bruce Wayne really is."
You can find drvictordavishj's full comment and its context at:
http://washingtonindependent.com/view/batmans-dark-knight#comment_26224
And so it took the dark knight, the hero Gotham deserved, to lie to them that Harvey Dent had remained steadfast as their white knight, the hero they needed. As Alfred says to Bruce, "Endure, Master Wayne. Take it. They'll hate you for it. But that's the point of Batman, he can be the outcast. He can make the choice that no one else can make, the right choice."
The movie questions what right Batman has to operate outside the law, and why others can't do so as well. But it's not clear what the movie's answer is. Maybe he has the right simply because he's willing to do what no one else can. But then why don't those people who imitate Batman have that right, too? Because they're too weak to survive in that role? Or maybe Batman has this right because the corrupt city of Gotham has in some sense surrendered that right to him, through their failing institutions. Or maybe Batman doesn't have that right at all.
The good cop / bad cop routine? Not exactly. [stolen from thedarkknight.warnerbros.com]
In one of the most powerful scenes of the movie, the imprisoned Joker at last finds himself face-to-face with Batman. And in spite of his grim situation, there's no question that the Joker still has the upper hand, that he's still pushing Batman. Here's a snippet of the dialogue from the scene (from IMDB):
JOKER: You have all these rules and you think they'll save you.
...
BATMAN: I have one rule.
JOKER: Then that's the rule you'll have to break to know the truth.
BATMAN: Which is?
JOKER: The only sensible way to live in this world is without rules. And tonight you're gonna break your one rule.
I didn't know what the one rule was in the theater, but the Internet tells me it's that Batman will not willfully bring about a person's death. It's debatable how true he's been to that creed until this point in the movie. But the more interesting question is whether the Joker's prediction is right. Does Batman go on to break that one rule? Maybe the Joker thinks he can bring about so much chaos as to force Batman to choose to kill the Joker himself. I was certainly rooting for Batman to kill the Joker. That seemed like the only way he could save Gotham, especially when even its prison fails to hold the Joker. If that's what the Joker was hoping for, then Batman is victorious. As the Joker says at the end of the movie, "You truly are incorruptible aren't you? You won't kill me out of some misplaced sense of self-righteousness, and I won't kill you, because you're just too much fun."
Does Batman break his rule when Two-Face is killed? I doubt it, but I look forward to getting a closer look the next time I see the movie. Perhaps the most interesting question is: who wins in the end? Does Batman win because he is incorruptible, because he finds he can endure, because he does make the choices that no one else can? Or does the Joker win, because he has corrupted and destroyed Gotham's white knight, leaving Bruce Wayne unable to retire as Gotham's dark knight?
You are certainly meant to feel that the Joker has corrupted Harvey Dent, but I felt this transformation was too quick and implausible. And although the Joker was certainly responsible for Dent's physical condition, it's not clear that he really brought about Dent's transformation in character. The Joker's speech to Dent in the hospital is great writing, but it's hard to believe that it convinces Dent to turn on Batman and Gordon, when Dent should be blaming the Joker himself. I would have preferred if Dent was corrupted into operating outside the law to destroy the Joker, because his going after Batman and Gordon is just stupid.
After seeing the movie, I read a number of reviews that argued the movie should have ended 45 minutes earlier, with the Joker's speech to Dent and the image of him walking away from the exploding hospital in triumph. I admit there was probably a great ending there. Other people argued that including Harvey Dent made the movie too cluttered. Removing Harvey Dent would certainly leave us with a great summer movie, but it would also strip it of the richer questions of what it means to be heroic.
Early in the film, Dent tells Bruce Wayne that "You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain." The line struck me as a non sequitur introduced just to seem prophetic later, but I'm looking forward to watching the scene again. What does it mean? Does it mean that Dent believes no one can endure in the role of hero forever, that eventually any hero must sink to the ways of the villains? If so, Dent seems to acknowledge that he can't be triumphant in the role of hero--that it will take something less heroic in order to triumph. In the end, Batman endures, and perhaps triumphs, but not as a hero, for clearly he has sunk to the ways of the villains--in every way but one.
--- END OF SPOILER ---
Ok. I promise no more about Batman.
Sunday, July 20
Trying to break out of our foul post-Batman moods, we forced ourselves out into the oppressive heat, beginning our outing by trying the tiny lunches at the non-air-conditioned Kiva Han cafe on Craig Street in Oakland. Then we went across to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History (just days before I could have gotten my CMU discount). The highlight of the museum is definitely it's dinosaur exhibit. Not only do they have full skeletons for lots of dinosaurs, they've got them posed as if they're interacting among dirt and trees, or flying over your head. It doesn't have that sterile museum feeling, so it's really very cool. Also, it's literally very cool in the exhibit, so bring a jacket, no matter how hot it is outside.
"Dinosaurs In Their Time"
[stolen from a November 2007 article on www.happynews.com]
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