I’ve just seen The Dark Knight, so have compiled my thoughts for this blog. This is more of a critique than a review, so if you haven’t seen the film yet, you might like to wait until you have before reading the entirety of this article. As far as the typical ‘review’ part of this post goes, suffice to say I largely agree with a very good review I heard on Radio 5Live last week, from Mark Kermode, which you can listen to here. The remainder of this post is, as I’ve said, more a critique than a review, so it might contain information you’d rather not read before seeing the film (though I’ve endeavoured not to include any obvious ’spoilers’). You’ve been warned, so click ‘more’ and read on at your own peril.

There’s an oft-heard sentiment about certain films (and books and television for that matter) which says ‘it’s good for what it is’. I’ve never understood that sentiment. It seems to me to be saying that something lacks the potential to be any better (i.e., ‘it’s just a comic book movie’ or ‘it’s only a kids’ film’), but that seems to me to be confusing simple with stupid. Simple premises don’t lack potential, they just lack complexity, and that’s often a good thing; Transformers, for example, has a simple premise - it’s big robots that change into stuff, half are good, half are bad - so it demands a simple kind of quality, but what we get instead is stupidity. Simple and stupid are not the same thing, and to say ‘it’s good for what it is’ seems to me to be suggesting that they are - work of obvious quality, no matter how simple, doesn’t need that caveat; only stupid things do. It’s like giving someone a free pass for stupidity; saying to the maker, ‘if you lower your ambitions, we’ll lower our expectations’. There can’t be a better way to guarantee mediocrity than that.

Nevertheless, the ‘it’s good for what it is’ sentiment is one used for almost every film which presents a suitable excuse to do so. Batman presents many suitable caveats - ‘it’s just a comic book film’, ‘it’s for kids’, and so on. The single greatest triumph of The Dark Knight is that it avowedly refuses to rely upon any such caveat. It doesn’t choose to be stupid simply in order that it might be judged by a more forgiving standard. It attempts to be all it can be - to live up to its full potential. Whether it does or not - and why - is a matter of opinion, and to some extent a moot point. Given that this is precisely the kind of film whose makers (or more to the point, whose financiers) could so easily provide themselves with the security of guaranteed caveated mediocrity (also known as ’shite’), the decision not to do so is really worthy of top marks in itself. Even if it were a failure, a film of such obvious ambition would be worthy of admiration, in the manner of a plucky underdog, and there’s much to be said for that in itself.

So, the reason The Dark Knight succeeds is simply because it tries to live up to its potential - to be as intelligent, as meaningful and as thought-provking as it possibly can be. Here again the lie is put to the caveat, because as this film shows (and as many comic books have long shown, though perhaps invisibly to most critics), Batman and his ilk are capable of great and substantial meaning - it’s only failure to try that really robs them of it. In the case of The Dark Knight that means grasping several consequential themes which are implicit in all iterations of Batman - the repercussions of justice enacted outside the law.

The American subconscious is highly visible in large parts of this film. Whether knowingly so on the part of the filmmakers, or as a manifestation of their own share of that subconscious is hard to tell and something on which opinions are likely to change as the film plays out anyway. It’s replete with a great many justifications for a great many questionable things. Batman is deeply flawed. He can claim no real moral superiority over anyone else - he uses violence without a second thought, constrained only by the rule that he won’t kill (though this, in fact, only increases his tendency towards torture, carefully calculating how severely he can injure his opponents, how agonising he may make their pain without actually killing them). He is naively and recklessly ignorant of the consequences of his actions, if not outright heedless of them. At times he and those who support him call upon the defence of doing what he does in the name of an amorphous, subjective concept of ‘good’; the real world parallels are obvious. That’s not by any stretch of the imagination to suggest that The Dark Knight is a pro-war film (though that uncomfortable thought does enter the mind at times) but the point is that even many of those firmly opposed to the war still want to believe in America - and more generally to believe in the possibility of freedom through liberation, in safety and security through the protection offered by others - and thus have at least subconscious need of believing in the possibility of somebody having done the wrong thing for the right reasons. Batman, whose desire to do right is simply beyond question in the eyes of the audience, gives powerful proof by his own misdeeds that it is indeed possible to do just that.

When doubts begin to emerge of the rightness of a particular course of action, but the well-meaning still retain faith in their intent and try to extricate themselves from the mess without abandoning their original aim, a certain kind of rationale surfaces - one that says ‘things have got to get worse before they get better’ or ‘you’ve got to break some eggs if you want to make an omelette’. Such rationales figure prominently in The Dark Knight (perhaps tellingly, in the middle third most of all). At times it feels like many of the characters - and the sympathetic, heroic characters, no less - are actually endorsing this kind of thinking; that Batman has actually become some kind of ideological crusader who really does value his perceived notion of ‘justice’ or ‘good’ over human life itself. There’s always the danger that words put into the mouths of characters as beloved by the audience as Alfred the butler, Commissioner Gordon and Batman himself will always be taken at face value, and so it’s tempting to think of this ‘collateral damage’ logic as the filmmakers’ own, but events as depicted actually suggest otherwise. Great efforts are taken to show the effects upon the average individual when the powerful treat the world as some lofty intellectual playground in which to test out their moral philosophies (something very much missing from most modern heroic tales, in which the heroes are free to act out their own particular brand of valour without concern for its effect upon others).

In the end, though no character quite says it, what The Dark Knight shows is that no matter the ideals behind the kind of ruthless single-mindedness Batman and international liberators alike so easily fall prey to, it ultimately just mires everyone in brutality and fear, and relegates human life to the point where its value is determined only by how it ended - whether murdered intentionally by the bad guys or killed inadvertently by the good ones, forgetting that in both cases the victims are equally dead. Sometimes breaking eggs doesn’t make omelettes at all; it just breaks eggs. There must be many amongst the presumed ‘average American’ audience who once favoured the war - favoured many wars - but have since recanted that support in the wake of its bloody aftermath: those are exactly the kind of doubts that come to mind when we see Batman - in whom its impossible not to want to believe - seemingly overstep his own bounds, and later forced to realise that he has.

As ever, knowing for certain whether this really is the message of the film is virtually impossible, but of course that’s the point, because raising the question is the real aim. Do we hear Alfred say ‘things have to get worse before they get better’ because that really is the case and we should therefore accept the cost of it, or do we hear him say it in order to show just how easily any of us can fall into that way of thinking? Of particular consequence in The Dark Knight is that both points of view are supported and then contradicted by the chaotic Joker, while amongst the ostensible good guys, opinions are divided (indeed, many seem ignorant of the question), making it impossible to simply opt for a ‘Batman = good, Joker = evil’ reading of the dilemma.

And then, a conclusion surfaces quite unexpectedly at the end of the film which suddenly seems to make these themes secondary to a broader point, specifically one on the nature of heroes. The statement made here is that heroes are all things to all people, and thus judging their actions is difficult, though judging one’s own actions based on notions of heroism is very dangerous indeed. Just as the empire-possessing Victorians depicted King Arthur as a majestic figure ruling benevolently over a vast kingdom from his great city of Camelot, only for the post-colonial era to see him redrawn as the last defender of a civilisation in decline, and just as Che Guevara’s legend launched a dozen revolutions while his face sold a billion t-shirts, Batman has variously over the years been an upholder of the law – siding always with the legal authorities – and at others a lone vigilante enacting justice of a renegade, anti-authoritarian kind. He has been both a symbol of absolute, definitive legal order and a freedom fighter. Such recasting is the fate of all heroes, and by Batman himself proclaiming in The Dark Knight’s final moments that he will be whatever people need him to be, he becomes a recursive embodiment of the hero – an icon constantly redefined by others in order to resolve their own identities and project their own cultural myths.

The phrase ‘cultural icon’ is badly overused, and it’s seldom really warranted, but in the case of Batman – like King Arthur, like Che Guevara – it is entirely merited, and for a fictional character created within living memory that is quite an achievement. To have understood that this is Batman’s real significance is precisely what enabled The Dark Knight to live up to its potential. No matter how simple or how complex the meaning at the premise’s core, it’s identifying it and understanding it which prevents the film being stupid and having to rely, as so many rivals do, on the flawed notion that ‘it’s good for what it is’. Mercifully, that’s not a judgement anyone will feel the need to make on The Dark Knight.

Matt