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The cinema is awash with comic-book superheroes - but none of them is truly heroic. Heroes, in our egalitarian age, no longer embody the dream of the superior individual who is greater than humanity; nowadays, superheroes must be as flawed and screwed up as we are. They drink too much (Hancock), have anger issues (the Incredible Hulk) and are self-obsessed (Iron Man). Things have come to such a sorry state that, as we shall see, even Batman (Christian Bale) is not allowed to be the hero of his own movie.
The hugely anticipated sequel to 2005’s Batman Begins is set, once again, in Gotham City. And, once again, the vision of the director, Christopher Nolan, supplants the gorgeous gothic excess that Tim Burton conjured up for 1989’s first Batman film. In The Dark Knight, we get the clean-cut minimalism of monumental buildings and glass skyscrapers, but around these glistening towers of power hangs the deathly pall of 9/11.
Nolan explicitly signals the connection in the opening shot - a camera, like a silent plane, flies towards the window of a skyscraper. And, for its chief villain, we have the Joker (Heath Ledger), who collects hostages and sets off bombs. There’s also Batman’s unlawful rendition of the mob’s accountant from Hong Kong. This heavy-handed, wearisome 9/11 connection is the artistic equivalent of a fake tan: it provides the film with instant, spray-on seriousness. For art-house chaps such as Nolan and his screenwriter brother Jonathan, it’s a way of showing that they haven’t just made a big, dumb summer blockbuster: oh, no, they have made a big, thinking blockbuster that engages the masses in important issues.
The 9/11 analogy just doesn’t make sense, though. The idea that the Joker is some kind of urban terrorist figure, as he is referred to at one point, is absurd. “Some men just want to watch the world burn,” says Lt James Gordon (Gary Oldman), and that’s true, but they’re called pyromaniacs, not terrorists. Bin Laden and co don’t do it for the kicks that come from chaos, as the Joker does.
In films such as the stunning Memento and The Prestige, the Nolan brothers managed to dazzle and surprise us; here, they stupefy us with the familiar and the formulaic. Jonathan Nolan has set the story in the everyday world of cops, the mob and lawyers, a world we all know so well from great American cop shows. Television does this sort of thing so much better: why bother? Especially since the script then ignores the realism of its setting. It offers none of the echoes of reality you find in the best imaginary worlds. The idea that the district attorney, Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), would have to become a hero for Gotham, because Batman is seen as a “vigilante” who should be arrested, is silly: the man ridding the city of scumbags, however unlawfully, would be a hero. What a waste of the terrific Bale - his Batman is all costume and no content. People mistakenly think that if you give a character a “dark side”, he must be interesting, but this Batman manages to be dark and boring.
Of course, there’s the Joker. There’s nothing jokey about this Joker; he’s a grungy, greasy psychopath who will leave his signature smile carved on your face. He provides the element of the fantastic and freakish that the film needs. Uncoupled from the confines of realism, Ledger is free to let rip and give us a character who is scary because you can’t hurt him. He is in a place beyond good and evil, human and “other”. Suddenly, the screen comes alive in what is a one-man show of verbal play and sadistic theatre.
Yet when Ledger isn’t on screen, The Dark Knight goes on for so long, it should be called The Long Dark Knight of the Soul. It has no sense of fun, no spirit of joy or play.
Instead, it offers up a lot of moralistic waffle about how we must hug a terrorist - okay, I exaggerate. At its heart, however, is a long and tedious discussion about how individuals and society must never abandon the rule of law in struggling against the forces of lawlessness. In fighting monsters, we must be careful not to become monsters - that sort of thing. The film champions the antiwar coalition’s claim that, in having a war on terror, you create the conditions for more terror. We are shown that innocent people died because of Batman - and he falls for it. Here is a Batman consumed with liberal guilt and self-loathing. I wanted to scream: “No, you Guardian-reading freak, don’t you see? It’s the Joker’s fault, not yours.” But I knew I would never reach him, for today’s heroes want to be zeroes.
