James Bowman on 'The Dark Knight'

James Bowman hates ‘The Dark Knight.’ He hates comic book movies in general, but he very specifically hates ‘The Dark Knight.’ Give his piece a read. (Go on, I’ll wait.) OK. Done? I know, I know. He’s kind of a curmudgeon. But he’s a smart one, and since this blog has been depressingly devoid of ‘Dark Knight’ commentary over the last couple of weeks I think I’ll take a closer look at some of his thoughts.

(Before I begin, I’d like to make one general, film-crit-theory critique of his review: as Mr. Bowman has admitted to me, he cannot engage in the willing suspension of disbelief necessary to judge this movie on its own terms. Instead of declining to review it he has pushed ahead. This is his right, of course, but I think it’s something of a futile exercise: It’s my personal/professional opinion that if you can’t accept a movie on its own terms you have no business reviewing it. This is why I typically stay away from reviewing musicals; I can’t get past the idea that people interrupting their day to sing silly show tunes is entirely unrealistic and vaguely idiotic. Even those that I kind of enjoy–like ‘Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory’ or ‘Sweeney Todd’–I would feel uncomfortable reviewing.)

Mr. Bowman is annoyed by several things in ‘The Dark Knight,’ but I think the thing that most gets his goat is the popularity of Heath Ledger’s fantastic portrayal of the Joker. After discussing ‘Psycho’ and psychoanalysis for a bit, he writes:

Today’s evil icon is not Norman Bates but Hannibal Lecter: the psycho who is not a psycho for any reason, except for the reason that he just loves being a psycho. As a result, evil becomes a sort of fashion statement. It doesn’t really count as evil if there is a motive or an explanation for it. It must be evil for evil’s sake. There is no better example of this than the new Batman movie, The Dark Knight, currently setting box office records, partly because — I believe — of just this transformation of human evil into something glamorous, something with the power to seduce even the best of us.

As steeped in the postmodern age as I am, I find his qualm mildly befuddling. Would Hannibal Lecter be a more effective villain if we understood his upbringing? His tragic childhood, etc.? I think the answer to that question is clearly no: look at the resounding critical and commercial failure that was ‘Hannibal Rising.’ The Joker is different from Lecter (at least, the Lecter of ‘The Silence of the Lambs’) insofar as that he does offer up an origin story. Two of them, as a matter of fact. As I mentioned in my review, I think this is a key point: the brothers Nolan were trying to get across the point that it doesn’t really matter where the Joker comes from–he simply exists. And he must be stopped.

But Mr. Bowman then goes on to write that the lack of motivation leads to all other lapses on the part of the filmmakers:

All the Joker’s tricks occur as if by magic — they are, like the evil deeds of the villainous hero of No Country for Old Men, inverted miracles — because, in the comic book world of the serial killer, not only have we dispensed with motivation, we have also dispensed with other sorts of explanation.

That’s simply not true. Now, we could argue all day long about how plausible it is that the Joker is two steps ahead of everyone else in the movie, but every single event can be followed logically. I’ll take the time to explain them one by one if you, my humble readers, would like me to, but since Mr. Bowman fails to point out an actual example of a logical slip, I’ll not bother to guess at what he was writing about.

One more longish quote from Mr. Bowman:

I have heard the convergence of Batman and the Joker compared to that between John Wayne and Lee Marvin in John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. But Ford was telling us that people want to believe heroism grows out of reason and law and civilization but that it really doesn’t. Instead, it is a throwback to the most primitive honor cultures before there were any law or civilization, which are things that cannot be contracted for. The Dark Knight tells us the opposite: that both heroism and villainy grow out of reason and law and civilization and that, therefore, these things are mere shams and subterfuges masking a Hobbesian reality devoid even of honor, in which man is a wolf to man and there is nothing to believe in but the individual Nietzschean will, either to good or evil.

This is simply a misreading of the movie. Batman springs not from reason or law or civilization: he belongs to an older order of honor, one committed to doing what’s right even while being branded an outlaw. Batman is operating in a city that is just as lawless as the wild west of Wayne and Marvin. About ‘The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,’ Mr. Bowman once wrote:

The point being made by Ford and his screenwriters, James Bellah and Willis Goldbeck, is that what’s needed for the establishment of civilization is, in the first instance anyway, not law but heroism. Someone has to risk his life to put an end to the threat of violence and disorder to the whole community.

And I ask you, fair reader: how is that any different from what Bruce Wayne is doing as the Batman?

I could go on (especially about his silly complaints that the hero faces no threat of death–as if killing the protagonist was commonplace in the Westerns of old), but since I’m nearing 1,000 words already I’ll probably give it a rest. There are thematic complaints that you could make about ‘The Dark Knight,’ but the idea that it privileges criminals above heroes isn’t one of them.