"Angels are partisans not of Good, but of divine creation. The Devil, on the other hand, denies all rational meaning in God's world. World domination, as everyone knows, is divided between demons and angels. But the good of the world does not require the latter to gain precedence over the former; all it needs is a certain equilibrium of power. If there is too much uncontested meaning on earth (the reign of the angels), man collapses under the burden; if the world loses all its meaning (the reign of the demons), life is every bit as impossible." - Milan KunderaIn Milan Kundera's novel The Book of Laughter & Forgetting, he not surprisingly deals much with the idea of laughter and its meaning. According to Kundera, the Devil invented laughter: "Laughter is the province of the Devil. It has a certain malice to it (things have turned out differently from the way they tried to seem), but a certain beneficent relief as well (things are looser than they seemed, we have greater latitude in living with them, their gravity does not oppress us)." In light of this, the Devil is thus both a liberator and a tempter. He is a singularity of abyssal irony, something we all find in ourselves but could never become completely. He both repels and attracts; he is a she and she is an it. As Max Von Sydow reminds us in The Exorcist, "Satan is a liar and a cheat." But does he ever lie about that?
In Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight, The Joker, so superbly played by the late Heath Ledger*, is none other than a modern take on this Devil character, i.e. humanity's absolute Other. Unabashedly unified in his chaotic whimsy, he is also lacking the strength of restraint and the power of compassion, the stuff angels are made of. The choice to have The Joker tell two completely different stories about how he got his scars shows how completely inhuman he is; for him, there is no past and no future. His seductive qualities lie in his complete immersion in the moment, in the act of orgasm, of complete and singular fulfillment of desire above all.
Batman, on the other hand, is very human. He needs the rich, kung-fu-chopping Bruce Wayne to exist (as all the imitators make painfully obvious). Furthermore, if Bruce Wayne ceased to exist, Batman would surely descend into the world of The Joker. "Absolute power corrupts absolutely." Alfred burning Rachel's note, ensuring that Bruce will never know the truth about himself, has secured Batman's reality as a role and nothing more. While Bruce Wayne's reserves about being Batman are deeply human, his choice to persist as Batman is divine. The twist is his status as an anti-hero, but even this is no more than par for the saviour course; after all, Jesus being crucified was part of God's plan, and his being part-God was just as critical.
To withdraw from Theology and move over to Idealism: Gotham City is nothing less than the jumbled mind of Man**, disconnected from its destructive instincts and irrationally but ignorantly bound to a superficial order of things. In Gotham, you basically have The Joker as Chaos, Batman as Jesus, and People as People in all their near-sighted, vain, but ultimately endearingly graceful glory. Chance is the absolute reality these people must face, and it is their attitudes towards it that define them: The Joker laughs at it and does what he can to master it for his own amusement, Batman gravely looks it in the eye and does what he can to combat its destructive downswings, and People are largely trapped in its ebb and flow. Indeed, The Joker and Batman are apart from Chance while People are caught in its gears, perhaps even constitute it. Within the sphere of Chance, The Joker's anarchic machinations create the necessity*** for Batman, and without either, Gotham wouldn't be Gotham and humans wouldn't be humans.
Bullshite analysis aside, I loved this movie. The performances were explosive and the plot sizzled with relentless excitement. I think Harvey Dent was an extremely interesting sub-plot and I think his necessity to the story is fascinating. In reality, he saves Batman and is the hero Gotham needed, albeit thanks to a white lie. Harvey Dent "falls" because he cannot fathom The Joker; he cannot account for his existence. He naively believes that evil is evil and evil is not him, thus with blind good conscience he makes it his goal to eradicate it. One devastating twist of fate, however, leaves him a shell of a human who, like Anton Chigurh, begins tragically to worship the amorality of Chance in order to quench the often seemingly unquenchable thirst for justice in a world where The Joker not only exists, but thrives. Also, it is probably his cleft chin, but he continually reminded of the Father in Troll 2 (!).
A question for other people who have seen The Dark Knight: Does The Joker intentionally mix up the addresses of where Dent and Rachel are being held or is he mistaken? If it's totally his show as it seems, how did Ramirez enter the fold? Was it a mob set-up that The Joker happened to privy to, or did he author it?
* - SO FUCKING SUPERBLY.
** - I apologize for this sexist lapse. I only use it for rhetorical effect as well as appropriateness. Come on, those German assholes were straight-up misogynists.
*** - I say necessity in terms of Freedom being the ultimate goal of human endeavor. The Joker seems free, but of course he is not, being slave to his whim and endless desire.
5 comments:
I believe the Joker intentionally mixes up the addresses. Contrary to his "i have no plan claim" he schemes/needs to keep Dent alive in order to make his point about man's ultimate corruptibility. I was under the impression that Ramirez had been in the mob's pocket for quite some time.
"The Joker tell two completely different stories about how he got his scars shows how completely inhuman he is"
Not just standing in as a Devil character but as the Entertainer, constantly in the act of self-reinvention - fluidity in its own way as a form of consistency.
As far as Gotham is concerned, I think it's interesting to note the visual changes in the cityscape from Batman Begins. The first film dealt with restoring not just order but sanity to the city. Under Batman's watch, The Dark Knight sees the transition from clutter and steaming vents to an almost austere urban landscape. Notice that except for a few scenes the streets of Gotham are conspicuously empty even during the day; the city may be 'saner' now but it is far more repressed. And repression leads to even stranger acts.
also, I don't agree (entirely) that Kundera's quote on Satan is appropriate (entirely) to the Joker. I've been debating with myself as to whether the Joker is an irrational entity. He might DENY rational meaning in the world but his actions and his arguments are all essentially rational (especially in comparison to the strict morality of Batman - where's the sense and logic in that?)
In regards to modern rationality and identity, I found this comic especially relevant . I tend to agree with this interpretation of the Joker. My favorite Joker moment is the first meeting with the mob when one of the mobsters accuses him of being crazy. The Joker is clearly annoyed but calmly corrects him "no, no I'm not."
I really think that in all serious Batman/Bruce Wayne is utterly and irretrievably insane - that's what makes it possible for him to make the choices he does.
I believe that the mob (and thus, the police), not the Joker was behind the address mix-up. The Joker was privvy to the initial whereabouts of Dent and Rachel, but I think the mob changed the addresses because ultimately they wanted Rachel over Dent to die (or both of them, if they were lucky). Rachel (like Dent) put tons of mobsters behind bars, but also was driven to her room of petroleum barrels by Alvarez herself. Once Rachel knew Alvarez was involved with the mob (Gordon's very own "men"), how could the mob/police let her live? Therefore, I believe Batman really meant to save Rachel, but as chance would have it, he saves Harvey.
As for the large amount of explosives and the sadistic way of knowing one or the other is going to die with the intercom system, I believe the Joker came up with idea (we see a similar, though unrealized rendition of this with the ferry boat explosives dilemma in the latter half of the movie), but he in no way worked out the logistics of the addresses, etc.
I also think the idea of the mob/humans being in control of the Dent/Rachel-petroleum fiasco shows how ultimately limited the two "characters" are (namely, Batman and Joker). Humans are more capable of scheming and shape-shifting, while Joker and Batman (though Batman, very reluctantly) are held in the poles of good and evil. White knight, Harvey crossing over into a dark abyss of revenge was a wonderfully tragic counterpoint to this, as Harvey is drawn to act out through human grief rather than a pure, simple madness like his counterparts (Joker and Batman). (I would argue that at this point in the game, Batman's original impetus to stop evil because his parents were brutally murdered, has become very much synthesized into his character, thus he is more like the Joker than Harvey Two-Face in "Dark Knight.")
Other question: Is Harvey really dead???
Much like "No Country For Old Men," I felt a profound alarm of "what can happen now?" after Rachel was blown to smithereens and especially after Harvey was put in the hospital. The last hour of the movie made me absolutely anxious because it had left the realm of "normal" action movie.
On a side note, I am relieved and delighted that I do not feel the need to compare (as in "who is better?!") Nicholson and Ledger's Joker. I loved them both, and greatly appreciate both interpretations of the Batman/Joker relationship.
Josh - I agree with you but I think you're cutting to the chase. To "deny rational meaning" is not to deny rationality per se; instead, it is a "loosening" of the relationship between meaning and rationality. It is an expression of the unacknowledged irony involved in everyday actions guided by everyday beliefs (the sun will rise tomorrow, etc.). Indeed, The Joker is the the most "sane" and "rational" character because he is a Performer and nothing more; he is performing an absolute, rationality, and how it, if unanalyzed and even worse not understood as such, is tyrannical, specifically at the service of an abyss. Divinity is insane because it involves an irrational ground, i.e. a belief, that which establishes temporal consistency of character beyond the ironic consistency of fluidity. "An unstoppable force meeting an immovable object" - this is critical to understanding the relationship between Batman, The Joker, and rationality/order. A force is immaterial while an object is material itself. A force is infinite in its merely virtual existence, appearing only through action, while an object naively figures itself as something beyond action. While each is made of the other, the object IS order primarily (it is ossified Force, if you know your thermodynamics), rather than primordial Chaos. SO if Order is divinity/belief/irrationality, it is also necessary to us being conscious beings. Rationality and structure would not exist without us, so for Chaos to play the part of rationality is merely to show how completely wrong we are to think that rationality itself is meaningful without fiction.
Jess - in the world of comics, no one is ever really dead.
Michael - bravo.
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