The Dark Knight Is a Liar

In college I watched “Strangers on a Train,” the Hitchcock movie. “The Dark Knight” reminds me of “Strangers on a Train,” except it involves two superheros rather than two ordinary men. In both movies, you have an evil sociopath and an almost-sociopath . . . the good guy who might only be good because he’s had luxuries the bad guy never did. In both movies, morality is dangerously flexible. There are no blacks and whites, just a chasm of spooky gray between everything. No one walks away clean.

In “The Dark Knight” Gotham is driven so awry by self-interest that chaos reigns and it’s near impossible to know right from wrong, truth from fiction. We think that the first caped crusader in the parking structure is Batman. Wrong, it’s a cheap imitation. We think Scarecrow is up to no good; wrong, he’s ill-advisedly trying to help Batman. We think Gordon’s been shot. Wrong, he’s alive. We think Ramirez is a good gal. Wrong, she hands Rachel over to the bad guys. Most tragically, we think Harvey Dent is one of the unflappable heros. Wrong, he is as corruptable as anybody . . . because, as his comic book name Two-Face suggests, there is in each of us a second self that wears an ugly grinning monster mask.

In such a crazy mixed-up world, we can count on Bruce Wayne because he’s indomitably. . . .indomitably, . . . . well, indomitably noble. I have few bones to pick with a man who is indomitably noble, even if it is a nobility enabled by the inheritance of the patriarchal millions. Bruce Wayne went to the Himalayas one movie ago and earned his stripes, and I respect him for that. He lived like a poor man. He got beaten down and re-built by the guy from Schindler’s List. Bruce Wayne is no pussy rich boy.

And yet . . . . and yet, there is no escaping that he is a very, very rich man, and that his wealth is what enables him to be a superhero, most literally by funding all the contraptions that make him super. There’s another way in which his heroism is attrubutable to his social class. By the end of the film, the main characters and audience all know the truth about Bruce Wayne, Batman, and Harvey Dent. Harvey Dent did a lot of killing. But in this movie, heroism is not about truth. Heroism is about using plausible falsehoods in order to manipulate “the people of Gotham” toward a desired end, which presumably requires that Dent had died a hero. Who decides the desired end? Batman, of course. Who is Batman? The richest man alive. What does being rich get him? In a city where money makes people very, very bad, Bruce Wayne’s independent wealth makes him very good.

It’s the argument made in defense of the aristocracy as far back as the 1700s: it’s not money or wealth that corrupts a soul, it’s the greed inflicted by a need to make money that corrupts your soul. So if you have a lot of money to begin with, and don’t have to be greedy to get it, then you are actually a moral step above the rest of us poor blokes who are forced to get our hands dirty. Bruce Wayne’s like the eightenth-century village squire, holding dominion over a village because he is “best qualified” to determine the lots of all his villagers, since his money makes him dependent upon no one. He is “disinterested” rather than “self-interested,” motivated purely by his sense of what is right. It is no accident that the title refers to Batman as a “knight,” an aristocratic nomenclature with heroic undertones . . . . traceable to medieval Europe, of all times and places. Nor is it a coincidence that Batman’s perspective is never questioned, challenged, or complicated by the film’s overarching ideology. Aside from a little willful romantic blindness when it comes to Rachel, Bruce Wayne’s/Batman’s viewpoint is reliable.

I have read several blogs that talk about the strains of fascism in The Dark Knight, and I lay no claim to originality in noticing the concentration of power around a single viewpoint. People who want to side with Batman have argued that, while Batman and his cohorts don’t question this perspective, the film itself does. I wish that were true, but I see no evidence of it. As far as I can tell, we’re supposed to applaud Batman’s “sacrifice” and mourn the destruction of the beacon with which a community trustingly summoned him. The world’s a sadder place not because Batman’s moral authority has been compromised and our hero, it turns out, is only a fallible human. Nope. The world at the end of the film is a sadder place because it has a hero and doesn’t even know it . . . a hero it should trust but doesn’t know that it can . . . .because he’s decided to take the fall for Dent.

And that’s where the film either loses me or gets even more fascinating (I can’t make up my mind). At the end of the film, there’s a fair amount of discussion of what “the people of Gotham” will accept as true, and of how to handle that acceptance in order to control them toward a certain ends. In this case, Batman will assume responsibility for Two-Face’s crimes, thereby preserving the idealism inspired in the citizenry by Arthur Dent’s fearless goodness. Well, okay . . . sort of. It makes Batman into a poignant sacrifical lamb, someone who acts heroically for the most altruistic reasons, in complete silence and darkness, unknown to all and universally unthanked. It makes you wonder about most heros . . . if a tree falls in the forest, and there’s no one to hear it, does it make a sound? I realized I’ve always taken as a given that heroes are defined by public gratitude . . . where is he? we need him! I admire him! I wish we were all more like him! But no . . . . in this case, Batman will be despised by his public.

So, what a guy, right? Well, the problem is, Batman lies. He lies about who committed these crimes. He lies to “protect” Gotham . . . and that’s what makes him heroic, his willingness to be corrupted if it protects Gotham from chaos and self-interest. But what if he didn’t lie? What if he told the straight out truth: that Arthur Dent was Gotham’s finest and the Joker poisoned his mind?

Well, then, that would be a democracy, where citizens are told the truth, the balls-out truth, by whoever is in charge of the information, and then the citizens learn from that truth and make their own choices about how to act in the shadow of it. They vote or protest or donate or write. But we are so far removed from this standard of truth that the biggest-grossing summer movie hero of all time plays fast and loose with it and, in the end, we applaud him for it. And it was when I was rooting for the lie at the end of the film, along with everyone else in the audience, that it struck me. Rather than judge Batman’s decision by a standard of truth, I was judging his decision solely by a standard of plausibility, asking myself questions like, Why didn’t he just blame the Joker? What possible holes in the story might give it away? How did Two-Face repossess that nealty half-singed business suit?

Walking away from The Dark Knight, I started to wonder about the truth and, in the context of my own life, realized that plausibility and truth have somehow become synonymous. That not only do people manipulate the truth, but (as cynical as it sounds) we expect them to manipulate it, and we judge them by how masterfully they do so.

The postmoderns postulated that this was a good thing: that in the name of some transcendetal, universal truths, a lot of pain and suffering has been inflicted on people, cultures, tribes, nations; that when a powerful body claims that Truth is on its side, it’s usually to justify some serious damage to a weaker body. The idea that there are no Grand Narratives, no singularly transcendent (as in transcending point of view, background, culture) Truths, and no singularly “Right” ways to be was, theoretically, liberating for the oppressed.

So there’s no Truth; there is only the matter of perspective. Unanchored from any consensual objective reality, there is no one thing that ever happens, no single event–there are multiple versions of it, endless numbers of versions, as many versions as there are perspectives. Not one is authoritative. And being only human, we each have a justification for the perspective we choose, justifications that have less to do with our reaching after some higher truth and more to do with what we want. So by what standard do we then judge which truth to act upon? Well, as in the case of The Dark Knight, it’s the standard of plausibility. The question that the film leaves us with not whether it’s acceptable to lie in service of a desirable ends. Of course it is; that goes almost without saying. The question we bring back into the light with us is whether or not the lie is plausible, whether it is well-intended.

It very well may be. But, as they say, good intentions pave the road to hell.