Sucker Punch, Part II: Lethem and The Star Wars Generation

Recently, in a New York Times article entitled “The Art of Darkness,” writer Jonathan Lethem (his popular novel The Fortress of Solitude features two teenagers who transform into superheroes) expressed displeasure with this newest incarnation of Batman. I, like Lethem, waited until the end of the summer, once all the hubbub had died down, and most voices had chimed in, to creep into a sparsely attended showing of The Dark Knight, instead of taking part in the electric atmosphere of fan-boy opening night. It didn’t seem to diminish the effect in the slightest. Yet, while I left the theatre’s confines exhilarated at the film’s audacity, Lethem felt battered, and he formulates The Dark Knight’s blurry thunder not as impressionistic virtuosity, but a failure to re-imagine a viably heroic Batman. Lethem laments:

“The Dark Knight,” with its taciturn and self-pitying vigilante, its scenes of torture, rendition and interrogation, its elaborately leveraged choices between principles and human lives, might offer a defense of the present administration’s cursory regard for human rights abroad and civil rights at home, in the cause of reply to attacks from an irrational and inhuman evil. Poor Batman, forced again and again to violate the ethics that define him, to destroy the world to save it.

He believes the film’s stylistic flourishes, its scattered sound and fury, is ultimately impotent. Rather than providing insight into our current culture, it merely mirrors our current inability to cope with darkness. We have no coherent moral answer to the new complexities we face, and so we wind up giving a shrug of incoherence – or worse, incoherence devolved into a fearful and violent response that denigrates us as well as our “enemies.” But I don’t feel Nolan arrives at, or is aiming for, the cinematic equivalent of flummoxed moral catatonia. Quite the opposite: the director implicitly indicts the Bush administration as the primary proponent of the “moral shrug.”

The truly wild thing, however, is that Nolan makes this politically relevant move at the cost of sacrificing his title character. If there is a slightly veiled condemnation of the Bush administration, it is made possible because the director explicitly accuses Batman of succumbing to the modus operandi of moral shruggery (not a real word). I think Lethem misses the boat almost entirely by expecting this newest Batman to fit a more traditional mould. The logic goes this way: Batman may in fact be a rough analogue to George Bush, a proto-fascist, compromised “hero” who trades honor for results – most strikingly when he orders his startled tech-whiz Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman) to monitor all private activity in Gotham by means of sonar in an attempt to corner The Joker. But yet, I insist this is not a pro-Bush film. Why? Because – and this is what I found exciting – The Dark Knight, in terms of what it has to say morally, is, in the end, not really about Batman. Instead, he acts as a kind of symbolic red-herring. If we take a close look at the story’s complex moral structure, a different focus emerges. In a kind of narrative sleight-of-hand, Batman and The Joker occupy the main stage, but they are not the ones battling for the soul of Gotham – as we might naturally assume from previous history. Rather, they function like permanent oppositional forces of nature locked in eternal combat, in which a once-purer Batman has now been drawn into a dynamic that requires he use questionable means just to maintain balance and stasis with his nemesis (as The Joker says, “an unstoppable force meets an immovable object.”)

No, our real attention should be paid to a different hero, who stands as the only remaining locus of moral possibility in Gotham – namely, Harry Dent (Aaron Eckhart). The noble, crusading lawyer becomes a casualty of the epic struggle of order versus chaos as played out between Batman and The Joker. Transformed into Two-Face, with one side of his face untouched, and the other a hideous skeletal visage, Dent is a stark manifestation of the opposing moral forces within the psyche of a vulnerable human being, rather than as represented stoically by a super-hero or deliriously by a super-villian. To the film’s credit, it has the courage to show that, even on this last remaining front, failure occurs. Two-Face is eventually seduced by the Joker; darkness prevails. But it is the counter-move to that failure, engineered in consort between Batman and the political leaders of Gotham that is most devastating. For, it demands that Batman, now reduced to only an empty symbolic hero, a cipher, use his clout to cover-up the condemning fact of Harry’s moral choice. The Batman absorbs the meaning of that choice into the fabric of his public persona, in order to preserve Dent’s integrity and a final shred of moral inspiration for the corrupt, and corrupting, Gotham City. What other film has the courage to point an accusing figure at its own hero? (Not to mention killing its heroine in a fiery death) As Batman himself says at the end of the film: “sometimes people deserve something better than the truth.” That statement, its context in the film, and its implications for the use of symbolism in the human arena, is as profound as any you will find this year at the movies.

Jonathan Lethem and I are part of what could be called the “Star Wars Generation,” those whose coming of age is partly defined by seeing A New Hope in its first-run in the theatre (usually many times over – Lethem admits to upwards of 20 times). As he notes in his review of The Dark Knight, this same group grew up on the Batman television series starring Adam West. As for myself, by six years old I was a Batman junkie – drawing him, colorforming him (remember those?), reading him in comics, building him in puzzles etc. And the heart of my mania was the series. When my friends and I watched Batman and Robin fight the Joker or the Penguin on TV (with graphic comic-balloon flourishes: POW! BAM!), we were blissfully unaware of the campy undertone which made adults giggle at it. For us, this was serious business. Flash forward about ten years to another seminal moment in Batman history: in the mid-eighties, comic book artist/writer Frank Miller started applying a uniquely sophisticated, artsy, and dark approach to the canon of superheroes. He revolutionized Daredevil, published a series of urban decay meets samurai-warrior stories called Ronin, and then transformed Batman into “The Dark Knight.” Reading the Miller Batman stories, the Star Wars generation had its first encounter with a self-consciously avant-garde aesthetic entering comic books. (Miller is like the Jackson Pollack of Marvel). Once more, we were given a chance to take Batman seriously.

Miller’s Batman is a direct ancestor of the hero we find in The Dark Knight. And for an amazing third time, my generation, now grown into adulthood, have an opportunity to (without much embarrassment or guilt) enjoy a serious version of Batman. Each time the character evolves, it is hard to see going backwards (as The Joker tells Batman, “I know the truth: there’s no going back. You’ve changed things … forever.”) I find it pertinent that The Dark Knight supplanted the first Star Wars film to hold second place on the all-time box-office champion list. The phenomenon of The Dark Knight, and its importance for a generation of filmgoers, may turn out to be equivalent to Star Wars. The two films, however, could not be further from each other in terms of worldview: Luke Skywalker’s gee-whiz heroics were pitted against a wayward father who, in the end, repented and rejected the “dark side.” It was essentially a feel-good experience. Batman as The Dark Knight, on the other hand, is a character who cannot turn to his father (killed in Bruce Wayne’s childhood) for guidance, and by the end of this film, is morally adrift. As for the Joker, who tells a tale of a father who sliced a permanent evil grin into his face, any question of fatherhood is gone forever. The Joker’s story about his father may or may not be true; it is one of several origins he tells. In a sense, though, it doesn’t matter; loosed from all bonds, The Joker now operates in timeless motives that defy context and society entirely. He is a wild child, a feral kid with no past and no future, and he revels in the vacancy. When he torches millions of dollars and declares, “It’s not about the money. It’s about sending a message– everything burns,” it is a brilliant, transcendent moment. For, if a criminal doesn’t care about money, which after all makes not only crooks, but the whole world go round, then what does this super-villian care about? To ask that question is to see a black void emerging from the unlikeliest of places: a summer blockbuster.

Next: Part III – Heath Ledger and The Dangerous Method