When Zhao Qiao and Arthur Fleck step outside, they enter different worlds and different times. A gangster’s moll and a failed clown share little in general, and when one lives in 21st century China and the other in 1980s New York City (let’s not be coy), there’s even less of a link. Those singular identities are what they have in common, though, and how they forge those identities through worlds indifferent at best to singularity.

Qiao and Arthur both live outside of polite society, but while Arthur wants to get inside via a comedy career and acceptance by his talk show host idol, Qiao is quite content to live with her lover Bin as a gangster. Each is jolted out of these dreams by an attack and a gun – when a rival gang beats up Bin, Qiao fires his pistol into the air to frighten them away; and when Arthur is attacked by Sondheim-quoting yuppies on the subway, he kills two in self-defense and one in cold blood. 

Polite society is not a fan of such violence, and actions that take a few seconds have consequences that spin out over miles and years. Provincial officials were willing to ignore Qiao and Bin’s low-level extortion and violence before but they crash down with the full power of the state when shots ring out. And when the state and its avatar, billionaire philanthropist/amateur politician Thomas Wayne, decry Arthur’s actions, Arthur starts to wonder why he should aspire to their world.

GARBAGE DAY

The first time we see Qiao in Ash Is Purest White is through a hand-held camera on a cramped bus full of weary travelers. She’s barely out of her teens, going somewhere in a century that has barely begun – it’s actually footage from a film director Jia Zhangke was shooting in the early 2000s, and while that relic quickly runs out the movie stays in that time period for its first third. Qiao and Bin casually rule the roost in the decaying mining city of Datong. The industry is dying but there are clubs and bars and gambling halls where young people can feel alive. Outside of society they’ve created their own world where Bin’s gun can fall on the dancehall floor during “YMCA” and the beat goes on while Qiao calmly puts it away. Qiao pulling the trigger on that gun later is a choice visible on her face for a few seconds – she does not fire at any person, but she knows she’s shooting that world dead.

And she takes the fall, insisting the unregistered gun is hers and getting a full five years while Bin serves a lesser sentence. Almost none of this prison time is shown, just enough to get the full weight of five years as punishment, away from everything and most importantly the one you love. When Qiao gets out Bin is gone, along with much of their generation. Everyone’s moved to a more bustling city that’s on the rise, literally, as the massive Three Gorges Dam project hikes the water level. It’s impersonal in the way of new buildings and indifferent especially to Qiao, who’s new and town and without friends. Everyone has jobs with the state now and no one, not even Bin, can spare time for a crook who did hers.

Penniless and friendless, Qiao doesn’t rely on society – she manipulates it and extorts it with no hesitation and a determination that doesn’t contain the possibility of doing otherwise. At one point Qiao is bureaucratically stymied by a functionary covering for a cowardly Bin and Qiao looks at the other woman like she is dead, not with a glare imparting death but the cold eyes of someone who sees an empty, worthless body before them. Society offers her nothing and she asks for nothing.

A man, a woman, a gun — what else do you need

She starts grifting people herself, singling out guys on bachelor parties and pretending to be the sister of a woman they’ve knocked up demanding hush money – it doesn’t take too long for this to hit. And when a taxi motorcyclist suggests a quick fuck, she steals his ride and leaves him in the wilderness, telling the cops he tried to rape her and that they need to get in touch with Bin. When they finally meet, Bin says he’s moved beyond the old life, but won’t say he’s moved beyond her. That’s something Qiao has to say for him. And she takes her leave, for a long, strange train ride where she meets a man who says he’s going to hunt for UFOs and is looking for a partner. Qiao briefly joins up with him until he admits he’s just a schmuck who runs a convenience store, another guy without the fortitude to live on the outside. So she goes back to the province where the story began, to find what’s left of the gang in the city where she made a place for herself.

The first time we see Arthur in Joker, he’s getting the shit kicked out of him in a grotty alley by a bunch of teenagers who think (correctly) that it’s funny to beat up a sad-looking clown. The Gotham of the early 1980s is a shithole for many people, but it seems both specifically designed to oppress Arthur, unlike the more impersonal cruelty of Qiao’s modernizing China, and oddly unspecific outside of its references. Arthur has a social worker to give him Pills for his Medical Condition That Makes Him Laugh until this is stopped because of Budget Cuts, no further details provided in the story but plenty of grimy shots aping Taxi Driver to cover the gaps. News reports refer to “super rats,” a gnarly notion which movies from Graveyard Shift to The Princess Bride know must be shown in their full glory – here one gets a blink-and-you-miss-it cameo. More than that would a bit too substantial, in a comic-book way, for this comic book movie. It is crucial that the idea of a society in decay be vague and free-floating so that the anger against it feels also feels inchoate, formless yet powerful. Charles Willeford once said: Nothing is inchoate.

Not even that wallpaper

Fearless Leader Julius Kassendorf has made a good argument for Joker’s futzing with reality, that richer imagery generally indicates fantasy sequences, and that this is part of a criticism of Arthur’s anger and persecution. There are a few obvious fantasy sequences of Arthur wooing his neighbor that are explicated as such but other scenes in this mode are harder to grasp – Arthur does get beat up in the beginning, someone does shoot those musical yuppies, there is definitely a big clown riot at the end. And outside of Arthur’s perspective, there is plenty to indicate widespread dissatisfaction if not outright hate of the society so many Gothamites are trapped in while Wayne and people who don’t feel trapped view them as unfortunate at best or “clowns” at worst if they speak out. Qiao is the rare person who follows her own path. Here there are many people yearning to breathe free. But who will lead them?

Whether the movie is criticizing Arthur or not, it ties his power as a symbol of this resistance to his shift from being put-upon to doing some putting upon of his own. Ambiguities are raised – is Thomas Wayne his father or not? Is his terrible comedy just a bad joke or a way to actual fame? Is Arthur crazy or just mad? – only to be irrelevant in the face of action. The action of Arthur killing several people and nearly killing others of course, but also the action of Arthur whining about it the whole god damn time. A whiner makes noise so people pay attention and Arthur’s apotheosis is not his giving society “what it deserves” with a public execution on national TV, but going out in the street and being loved for it by a literally faceless mob.

The roar of the masses could be farts

Joaquin Phoenix plays Arthur with denuded body (his ribs are begging for the touch of a xylophone mallet) and twitchy limbs. He demands attention as much as Arthur himself does and in that way his acting is appropriate. Both Phoenix and Arthur are performers, Arthur’s stand-up is terrible (but not his fault! He needs his Pills for his Medical Condition) but it is him, choosing the glare of the spotlight and putting himself out there by his lonesome for everyone to see what he can do. Qiao is played by Zhao Tao, Jia’s longtime partner on and offscreen, and Zhao the actress does something different: She gets old and she holds back. The hair/makeup/costuming team does great work here – not by visibly “aging” Zhao up or down but by giving her the style in clothes and appearance that fit a person in her 20s through one in her 40s – and Zhao does the rest, seeming to age on camera with the inevitability of Ellar Coltrane in Boyhood, her movements slowing and her face giving less away. And while Arthur needs the stage, needs to send out what he has to say, Qiao for all her fierce independence is content in the flow of the audience. She dances to disco and listens with intent to a street performance and then to a large stage rendition of a cheeseball pop song. Despite following her own path, she is set to receive.

Society will not listen to Arthur, not that he really wants it to. “You wouldn’t get it,” he tells his second Black female social worker of the movie as he’s being locked away in Arkham Asylum, the place where all of Batman’s scariest bad guys go. And then we see him leave the interview room, blood coating his feet, before being chased by some (disorderly) orderlies. Is this murder another fantasy? I’m inclined to believe so, which makes it no less cowardly a closing scene. Arthur spends the movie killing people who, in his words, “deserve” it, and the movie looks to generate tension by aligning his rage with ours, against bullies and cowards and everyone who’s working to keep us down. A real joker would let this violent death, imagined or not, be the punchline. Here it’s a final reference, another image of prettily conceived violence, as Arthur runs out of the frame, with society’s law and order in pursuit. He’ll be caught, of course – what would a comedian be without an audience? It’s unclear whether society needs Arthur but he needs it, to push against and to be appalled at his pushing.

End of the line

Qiao spends years in her former province running a gang of increasingly middle-aged dolts. Then, one day, Bin is dropped off at the snazzy new train station on the outskirts of the city, slowly modernizing like everything else. He’s in a wheelchair, bitter and unable to walk. Qiao takes care of him, integrates him into the gang and brooks no insult to what he is now. The break she made years ago has not been healed, but the bond they had before that, outside of society, is not something Qiao could or would deny. It’s not water under the bridge, or over the banks of a river with $50 billion of dam behind it. That’s how society would look at it but society can go pound rocks. Alex Chilton once said: I would be an outlaw for your love.

Bin and Qiao live together for a time, Bin slowly regaining the ability to walk but retaining his anger. And then one day he’s gone, leaving only a voicemail goodbye. Qiao walks outside and we see her on one of the CCTV cameras she’s had to install outside her gambling parlor, a static surveillance frame of her from behind that could not be more different than how we first saw her, through another person looking for her face, shifting and sliding on a bus moving with endless possibility. That was then and this is now and if her face shows anything it’s out of our view, out of the view of anyone looking from the outside. You wouldn’t get it.

After all the conversation around Joker, some of it truly ridiculous, I decided I had to see the film for myself to judge. I’d heard a wide range of opinions on it going in: It’s bad; it’s pretty good but not great; it’s great; it’s a dangerous movie glorifying incels; Noah Berlatsky:

live look at Noah Berlatsky's "Elements of Storytelling" class pic.twitter.com/3EGy3ntOMC

— Lucky Pierre Erecto (@RuckCohlchez) October 19, 2019

I was expecting something in the “pretty good but not great” vein– a solid B. I read reviews of varying opinions and was “spoiled” on quite a few things (which I don’t think affected my enjoyment of the film); I expected a film with strong elements but also obvious flaws that dragged the story down. What I got instead was a film that got better as it went on and that in the end I found very good– perhaps even great.

Joker is an intersection of multiple stories: A tale of mental illness; a man looking for acceptance from a father figure; a tale of the deprivation of austerity and the fomenting of class war; a King of Comedy-style tale about an aspiring but woefully unequipped comedian; and, of course, a supervillain origin story. (Some of these tales may overlap.) Given that, the story actually does a good job of weaving these disparate threads together and making them part of the same overall narrative. That narrative, of course, is the descent of Arthur Fleck into the Joker, the tale of a man marginalized by a number of elements that, while never especially called out as being such but which are fairly clear as the movie portrays them, are in sum a culmination of the financialization and neoliberal austerity that was beginning to be a two-party American (and beyond) project around the time the film is set– whether those elements are systematic, like the cutting of social services, or individual, like Thomas Wayne, a human personification of the greed and callousness of capital and finance. (New York City, of course, was the hub and in many ways proving ground for these policies; it’s the effects of their implementation, and the callousness displayed by the wealthy in response, that leads to the civil unrest in Gotham City in the film.)

I wasn’t sure about how I felt about this story being made into a comic-book movie (other than that possibly being the only way it gets made), but I think that choice actually is really effective, as the familiar setting allows for a lot of shorthand exposition. We already know what Gotham City is; the name “Thomas Wayne” tells us everything we need to know about who he is and his role in this society. Oddly, while I think it generally works as a supervillain origin story, I don’t know how I feel about it being the Joker’s– although, perhaps, my perception is clouded by the many Jokers past, particularly Heath Ledger, whose take on the character was such a chaotic force of nature that giving him a backstory would have cheapened the effect. In any case, I acknowledge all these limitations are largely outside the scope of the film and a product of the necessities of big-budget studio filmmaking, so I tried to evaluate and engage with the film for what it was.

And it was engaging. I think Drunk Napoleon reminded us a few weeks ago that Howard Hawks’ definition of a good film was “three good scenes and no bad ones,” and this definitely had more than three good scenes. I have to add– while I don’t know if it had bad scenes, there were some I found predicable, though that was perhaps mostly in the earlier scenes. The further into the film we got, the more I found myself engaged. (Even the moments where Phoenix’s performance could’ve gone too weird or over-the-top to be plausible ended before they hit the breaking point.)

But what most kept me going in the film was the narrative thrust. I don’t watch many current movies, admittedly, and if I did I might feel differently. (Admittedly, I don’t think this film is all that deep, but then I don’t think it has to be to work.) What I do feel is similar to what I felt about The Favourite, a movie I really enjoyed for two reasons: Every scene advanced the plot or escalated the stakes, and every character in every scene wanted something. Joker doesn’t quite display that level of discipline, but it has a clear narrative thrust and forward momentum both in the plot and in Arthur’s transformation. Every step happens believably as some fragile thread of his reality gets unwoven, from losing his job to losing his mental health services to being humiliated on late-night television (admittedly, this is probably the least plausible part of the story, but it’s still believable if unlikely) to finding out the truth about his parents (well, two versions of the truth) and what kind of man Thomas Wayne is, until one more indignity on top of the others– after doing a good deed, no less– leads him to an impulsive decision, one he follows up on swiftly and with intent, and one he finds himself astonishingly at peace with. Thus begins Joker’s shedding of his Arthur Fleck mask, of his attempts to perform the behaviors of civil society.

Something that came up in our site’s Shield discussions (of course that show would be referenced) was a comment someone made (I believe it was ZoeZ, although I could not find the actual comment) comparing Shane to Frankenstein’s monster, demanding Vic recognize the ways in which he created the person Shane is now, how Vic’s actions led to Shane’s actions. Joker strikes me similarly. Much of Arthur’s drive is the journey to be recognized: as a comedian; as a product of a system of deprivation and austerity and capitalism; as the son of the father who continually denies him. As a human being who matters. In a certain sense, Arthur Fleck becoming Joker is very much like Walter White becoming Heisenberg: Two men who demand that their lives make an impact on the world, for good or ill; two men who demand recognition; two men who are much more at peace with themselves the more they embrace their dark sides. (Arthur is even more desperate than Walter, who had plenty of opportunities to take the other road; in addition, Arthur’s first step to being reborn as Joker isn’t a conscious decision like Walter’s, but a reaction, a not-unreasonable response that becomes unreasonable as Arthur finds he likes killing.)

I’ve seen criticisms that it doesn’t offer any solutions or deep thoughts on Society, but I don’t think it needs to. I think it offers a look at what people might do in a Society such as this one– they’re not rallying around Joker killing three finance bros if finance and wealth wasn’t crushing Gotham underneath its boot. And in that, it is very effective. (I think a lot of folks don’t appreciate the audacity of getting a “KILL THE RICH” movement depicted on screen in a big-budget film.) I think expecting a film to provide societal solutions is an unfair weight to put on it; this is storytelling, and it’s quite effective as such. I don’t expect a film to provide answers; I want a story, not an argument, and Joker tells the story of how people might plausibly act in these conditions and circumstances, in particular one particularly unhinged and beaten-down person.

That said: Did I find it thrilling seeing mass resistance to capital’s project to dismantle society depicted on screen, especially as many such mass demonstrations are happening worldwide in real life as we speak? You betcha!

Also, I don’t know why Todd Phillips is complaining you can’t do comedy anymore. Joker is funny. Not all the time, but when it’s funny, it’s hilarious. Granted, Mrs. C and I probably laughed more than anyone else in the theater, due in part to just how dark some of the comedy was, but damn, those laughs were real and legitimate. Unfortunately, writing this several days later, I don’t remember them all, but I laughed out loud at least a half-dozen times, I think starting with the “gun in the children’s hospital” scene. (Then again, maybe the movie’s not as funny if you’re not the kind of person who cheers when the clown-mask protesters surround the cops after they shoot a guy on the train.)

Speaking of comedy: The two comedians we hear in the club are Gary Gulman and Sam Morril. I’ve seen the Comedy Central special Morril’s “parking a car” joke comes from. It’s good; he’s funny! I’ve heard great things about Gulman but I’m not as familiar with his work.

I didn’t think it was perfect. Some of the choices were a little on-the-nose: a couple of moments where the score heavily underlined Arthur’s thoughts and feelings; the flashbacks when Arthur is visiting Arkham; Arthur’s final “joke” to Murray Franklin, a little too clear a statement of purpose for his state of mind at that point, in my opinion. For that matter, I thought the Murray Franklin story was probably the weakest narrative thread of the film, a little contrived and not really necessary as part of Arthur’s descent, but I also understand its plot necessity in creating a spectacular moment for Arthur to be fully born as Joker and for the city’s protesters to rally behind him. (Robert De Niro himself makes a great avatar for the politics and power which give the film its backdrop and lead to the civil unrest therein, given his stature and past work with the CIA.) Perhaps tightening or shaving down this plot in a way that it doesn’t require so much screen time would have helped– the movie does check in a shade over two hours as it is.

In the end, Joker is a disparate number of elements, some individually which work better than others, but on the whole I quite liked it. It moves pretty well; it plausibly chronicles Arthur’s degradation; Phoenix is great (for me less for the tics and for the palpable way he sheds Arthur’s discomfort as he becomes the Joker); it’s gorgeously shot (and I can’t emphasize enough how nice it is to see Gotham City pop with color after years of grays and blacks and grays); it’s very funny when it tries to be funny; it makes you sympathize or even empathize with Fleck as he goes further and further down the rabbit hole of the monstrous; it still manages to elicit disgust with some of his actions even as you do so; and it contains some of the most explicit depictions of the deprivations and depravity of capitalism and the power of direct action against it I’ve ever seen on a mainstream big-budget film. The fact that I haven’t even covered a number of story and character elements in this review speaks to how much is going on here. I went in expecting this to be pretty good, not great, and it substantially exceeded my expectations, remaining consistently engaging and giving me a lot to think about and talk about afterward. If all that doesn’t make a good film, what does?

(Look, I really want to act in good faith writing this article, but I also have a sneaking suspicion most of them picked up these points from someone else, which only makes it even more baffling to me – wouldn’t that get boring very quickly?)

What’s strange is that I think I get why they’re looking forward to the movie. I mean, I’d have to, they keep repeating themselves, but they don’t quite word it the way I would. The look of the film, the tone, the things protagonist Arthur Fleck does and says; these are things that validate their emotions. They feel lonely, they feel angry, they feel humiliated, and they feel like the rest of the world actively shuts them down and taunts them, and here is a movie with a guy who feels all the exact same things. I’m struck by one line that seems to have caught on: “All I have are negative thoughts.” I believe there’s much overlap with the men who love Rick & Morty for giving them the phrase “Nobody belongs anywhere, nobody exists on purpose, everybody’s gonna die. Come watch TV,” and for much the same reason. What’s especially interesting to me is how these men don’t actually want solutions for their anger and pain, only artistically comfortable validation of them. I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing. Art can lead us to recognising our own emotions, and then perhaps we can find a solution for them somewhere else. Obviously, the flaw is when we either wallow in an emotion as opposed to solve it (which is what 99% of the incels, MRAs, and other assorted groups are going to do, simply repeating the basic fact of their suffering as opposed to dealing with it) or find horrific solutions (which is what Arthur Fleck and the real-life shooters do).

I suppose that does explain some of their bizarre actions. If your starting point is requiring a story to validate an emotion, then by definition, that emotion is not stable, and seeing it attacked or even not actively validated must be frightening, like seeing somebody breathing heavily on your house of cards. Constantly commenting on posts about movies you love (or hate) must be something like keeping the emotion safe in the same way one keeps a house of cards aloft by hitting anyone who comes near it, as opposed to, like, reinforcing the base of the whole thing, or even not building a house out of cards (uh, the metaphor is getting away with me here). Like, the absolute strangest thing I have seen one of these men do is when I saw someone say that they didn’t like The Last Jedi at first but found it grew on them with multiple watches, and a guy responded with a smug laughing emoji and something like “you’re working so hard to convince yourself it’s not a shit film”. I’m playing armchair psychologist here, but that’s a statement that not only presumes that art is not subjective and that all people have unique emotional reactions to stories (when we have demonstrable proof that people can like the exact same thing just as much in entirely opposed ways), it projects this one guy’s emotional reaction onto the whole population, and anyone who claims differently is trying to justify not expressing exactly what he believes. The best interpretation of this guy is that he’s so insecure in his emotional reaction that he can’t handle dissenting opinion and has to attack it and destroy it and rationalise that these people are jumping through hoops to pretend they don’t feel what he does (the worst interpretation is that he’s operating in the exact bad faith he assumes the original commentor was and is just being an asshole).

It’s interesting because it puts into perspective what I do. I couldn’t give two polished, well-hydrated fucks how anyone feels about The Shield or Tarantino movies or Cowboy Bebop; I often find the different perspective interesting, but I’m not invested at all in making people like them (or for that matter making people dislike Steven Universe or The Sopranos). This has sometimes gotten me in trouble, when I’m not concentrating and forget that, oh right, sometimes people get upset when you talk about things you don’t like about a movie they were just celebrating because they’re not trying to find some kind of explanation for your differing reactions (I don’t care about what people think but I do care about needlessly upsetting people for no good reason, if nothing else because those conversations are so fucking tedious). But there was a point where I resembled these men, even if in a different way; I like to think that essay-writing has sharpened and stabilised my worldview. I see these men try and beat people into submission with phrases they picked up, and I see the younger, more insecure version of myself who tried to impress people with cool insights I’d picked up and been impressed by, and seen them eviscerated by people who’d put more thought into their way of thinking, as opposed to simply half-assedly repeating something cool someone else said. It’s aimed to a slightly different purpose – getting people to think the way I think as opposed to liking what I liked, although I had my moments of that too – but it’s the same basic principle. I wonder what the post-essay-writing version of those guys will look like.

“You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” – Harvey Dent

I love this movie. I’m starting with that total bias and it’s one that I don’t think will ever really change. People do change though, as I have in the decade since The Dark Knight seemed like the most important film there ever was, and my relationship with it has changed, for better and for worse. I saw this ten years ago at sixteen years old and was completely stunned – hard to critically analyze something so grand (“he’s…too big…”), even when you’re a burgeoning punk who faithfully reads movie criticism. Now I’m older and of course I can now cheerfully pick it apart. The more hard-boiled dialogue is cringeworthy (and mostly drifts away by the time the incredible third act arrives), the plot doesn’t make much sense, and yes, the Batman voice is still funny because if he really runs with it he can sound like an even deeper Tom Waits.

But none of that took away from the movie’s remarkable power – and I finished this viewing more moved by it than ever. When you’re a teenager you don’t really have a lot to lose – you have no stake in the world. The Dark Knight may be a film where a man in a bat suit fights a clown but it’s an adult superhero movie, a drama where people make choices with real consequences that affect not just themselves but the city, the population. They lose what they love sometimes because of that, or destroy others in the process. (One of the things that fuels the plot is how the characters have inherent weaknesses because of what they care about, whereas the Joker doesn’t care about anything except destruction. See above for why the Ledger-Joker was huge with teenagers.) I had a radically different experience watching this because even if I’ve shifted towards the anti-authoritarian side of things I sure as hell care more about everything than I did way back when. The main characters give a shit, have responsibilities – so do I. Nolan made a superhero classic because he combined that Adult sense of care, of maintaining the greater world, with a huge scope and a plot that results in Tragedy, pain, and the comprehension of a dead man’s words.

This is why The Dark Knight became iconic.

The film is 152 minutes long, and none of it wasted. The screenplay is a miracle – as much the writing can be wooden, it has an incredible sense of economy. Every scene is either necessary to the plot or successfully establishes conflict, development, and pushes the arcs of the characters further and further until their end points. (Ramirez’s mother is in the hospital – Dent expresses doubts over Gordon’s men being honest – Ramirez is corrupt, and drives Rachel to her doom – Dent finds out – Ramirez is forced to put Gordon’s family in danger. Remarkably linear and harder to pull off than you’d think.) And each line is there to create as much impact as possible, from “Why so serious?” to the wrenching “Because you were the best of us!” The film works to create as much viewer engagement as possible short of working our hearts with a defibrillator. In the ten years since the MCU has strived to create a pure formula just to reach these heights, and one of the reasons it hasn’t truly worked is that The Dark Knight has driving, lasting ambition, a purpose beyond “Here are these people you enjoy in a plot”.

At its core Nolan’s movie isn’t a superhero film, it’s a crime opera. The movie adapts the style and feeling of Heat, down to the gunshots that rip through the speakers, to a comic book structure, using the superhero genre to create a genuine tragedy. Like LA Confidential, another ancestor, this is a work about men who enter an uneasy alliance in order to fight crime, and the terrible cost of that victory. “The public has no idea what justice costs the men who perform it.”

The Dark Knight is a profoundly American film then, obsessed with the compromise and struggle to preserve order in a world of actors, of chaos. The movie looks at the choices made and invests them with real weight – it takes place in a world where the main characters who hold responsibility shoulder it and have to do what is best for everyone, not just themselves. Their actions have symbolic and literal meaning. (Zizek has argued that the set up and tone of Dark Knight Rises is fascistic, and though he’s a leftist troll it’s definitely food for thought here.) For all the touting of these Batman films as “realistic”, Gotham is depicted as closer to a city-state, the body politic engaged with each other and the elite few being mostly well-meaning and using power for the benefit of the masses. The films were called right wing but they’re really not. They’re classical.

Enter then the Joker, who as wallflower has mentioned on this site is the Nemesis of the film – the comeuppance of Batman’s war on the mob and really of a man in a costume committing acts of violence. Everything that could be said about Ledger’s performance has been said – one of the great performances of the 21^st century, utterly brilliant, inhuman, terrifying, etc. so I’ll skip it. What the Joker does in this movie is force everything – he forces choices, forces Gordon and Batman to decide on things and make the wrong calls, brings Dent to self-destruction and a terrifying Recognition. And in his final scene in the film (okay one thing can be said that I haven’t seen, that Ledger looks like a demon in that last shot, pushing into the camera with that hideous closed mouth until the editing can’t bear his evil any longer), he forces two boats to make a choice…and they can’t. When I was a teen, really a kid, I didn’t buy that one boat didn’t blow the other up. Now I’m a man, and I can’t imagine either one choosing because I know what it means to act, to make decisions that impact other people, and especially when that means wiping a thousand lives out of this world. I believe that the yuppie puts down the trigger and waits to die. I believe that the convict throws it out of the boat and waits to die.

Coming out of this viewing I found myself respecting Bruce’s and Harvey’s arcs more, paying more attention to them over the Joker. It’s easy to get obsessed with Ledger here but it’s those two who become mirrors. (“I see a reflection, Harvey…a reflection…”) Batman could kill the Joker and end the horrors but he has the self-awareness not to become a monster. Bale’s performance informs that sense of control, of contemplation and it makes Bruce’s decisions plausible: he is always studying the other characters, always considering what to say next and how to present himself. Bruce recognized himself long ago and has conquered the sense of fear he had in Begins. This is a flawed man, someone with some hubris that costs him dearly. The Batman we meet at the beginning of The Dark Knight will not consider that someone like the Joker could exist, and he doesn’t believe that he needs to be Batman. That pride does cost him. But he achieved a growth in the previous film that carries him through the story.

Dent doesn’t have that recognition. He is a good man, a white knight, but also a blithe one with no comprehension of his own demons. (Aaron Eckhart plays beautifully how Harvey in the words of In Cold Blood is somebody where “Nothing bad ever happened to him before.”) When the darkness in him is awakened it just grows and grows. The climax of the film rightly doesn’t end with the Joker: it’s with raw catharsis, with three men who have paid deeply for trying to do the right thing, Rachel Dawes haunting the scene, but only one holds his gun against a terrified family. No superhero film has reached this kind of pure drama since. (“Why was it only me who lost everything?!” “…it wasn’t.” Bale’s mournful pause there is timed just right.)

Nolan’s sense of experimentation, of how to write a superhero film that could hold disparate tones and dissonant genres has been repeated and honed down since. (Logan is a fine recent example.) Many filmmakers in the decade after went for “grim n gritty” superhero films that failed to hit the balance of humor and weight his Batman films had. Zach Snyder is Nolan’s real Nemesis, an idiot who tried to grapple the better man’s notion of serious drama into Batman Vs Superman, with the result being a hilariously pompous and pretentious mess. It was the work of a director who didn’t know these movies had to be, y’know, fun. (The less said about the DCU the better, but save for Wonder Woman even competence is kind of reaching over there.)

The MCU meanwhile made the genre hybrid model (make a superhero Shane Black movie, make a superhero sci fi film) into a formula and what resulted was pretty good. But that’s it – pretty good, never great or amazing or reaching for something. Black Panther and Guardians 2 are the best of the lot and not coincidentally both have a certain sadness to them, particularly Panther, which skillfully uses an uncovered tragedy as its emotional core. At heart though the demands of the MCU and their style – to create a commercial film reaching the LCD, only experimenting if it doesn’t offend the base – render a film like The Dark Knight impossible. Nolan’s use of abrupt, jarring editing to build tension and end scenes with a jolt would likely get a polite nudge out the door now.

But if we can get moody about the chances of a superhero movie like this being released in 2018 as is in the current cinematic climate, we should also just be happy it came out at all and embedded itself in pop culture. I saw the movie with the greatest audience I’ve ever seen in a theater – they screamed at Two Face’s reveal, laughed and freaked the fuck out at the “pencil trick”, whooped at the Batpod. (To be clear I did most of this too – I still clap like a little kid at the Batpod coming out.) They were in the movie’s pocket completely, because it’s a film firing on all cylinders. It tapped into our anxieties and fears, our need for good stories. By the close, as Batman drives towards the shadows, it reached something no comic book film has since: the Epic.