This actually isn't the first time I've written about the Dark Knight on this blog, but I went back for another watch after seeing a Movies with Mikey episode about it.
It's a little crazy to think that this movie was released nine years ago. The Dark Knight is of course the middle part of a trilogy, and much like Star Wars the second entry is widely considered the best, with the first taking a lot of credit for introducing the tone and story that the second one would perfect and the third movie taking some heat for not living up to the second (as someone who was born four years after Return of the Jedi, though, the original trilogy was so locked together as a trilogy for me that I didn't make much of a distinction, and even if the Ewoks were a surprisingly cutesy addition to the series, I never felt that that dragged down the epic space battle above Endor or the final lightsaber confrontation in the Emperor's throne room. But I digress.)
And even the Dark Knight trilogy (and how many second movies can retroactively become the title the trilogy is named after?) didn't start the comic book movie craze that critics have seemed to be sure was going to die out like five years ago. You've really got to go all the way back to X-Men in 2000 and Spider-Man in 2002. Technically if you wanted to you could trace things back to 1989's Batman, though I'd argue that the era that one started died with 1997's Batman & Robin (and it wasn't so much an era as much as a Batman series, a lot like the Superman movies that began in 1978.)
Actually, officially the Dark Knight trilogy has gone the way of the Burton movies, as Warner Bros is onto a new Batman. We'll see if we get one critically-acclaimed movie out of DC's Snyder-verse before they mercifully reboot it again, but in a way, the failure (critically - I'm not interested in talking about money here) of the new DC movies has really cemented Nolan's trilogy as the version of Batman to beat.
One thing I find interesting about Nolan's trilogy is the way that it stands on its own. Today we're so used to the success of the Marvel movies and the desperate attempts to replicate that with DC that the notion of making a Batman movie that doesn't presuppose the existence of Superman is, retrospectively, unusual.
Batman Begins worked to strip down the superhero genre to its core, and it was able to do that thanks to the fact that Batman fundamentally doesn't have superpowers. There's nothing supernatural about his abilities and Nolan attempts to justify things as much as he can with at least partially plausible explanations. Scarecrow's fear gas is actually this drug used by the League of Shadows. And the League is not magical - they're just highly organized and fanatical.
But Batman Begins portrays a Gotham that is a little outside the familiar. The Narrows are a massive shantytown that doesn't look like what you'd find in a modern American city (or if it is, not a city I've been to.) For all its realism, Batman Begins feels a lot more like a fictional setting.
In the Dark Knight, Gotham is straight-up Chicago. There's no real attempt to hide this (even though it's pretty obvious that Gotham is DC's New York analogue - though to be fair I always thought Metropolis was supposed to be Chicago and then found out the two cities are right next to each other, which is both insane and also really reinforces that New York chauvinism in comic books.) The aesthetics are much less stylized and more realistic, leaving Arkham Asylum behind for a bunch of steel-and-glass skyscrapers and wide streets awash in daylight.
Nolan's Batman movies didn't want you to follow through the rabbit hole into a world where all this was possible. Instead, he brought the tropes of the comics to us in the real world.
Batman Begins took a lot of steps to explain how a person like Bruce Wayne could decide to be a superhero. But it also made the assumption that we were living in a world that didn't have superheroes. The existence of the League of Shadows is really the only otherworldly aspect to the universe, and everything - from Scarecrow's fear gas to even Batman's ninja-like skills - flows from that one source.
And the Dark Knight ditches it.
There's absolutely no mention of Ra's Al-ghul, and at most we get a brief glimpse of Jonathan Crane involved in a deal with some relatively standard mobsters - something that seems pretty beneath the great Scarecrow.
Instead, we're presented with a city in which Batman (still referred to as "the bat man" because no one has gotten on board with superhero naming conventions because why would they?) has become the scourge of the underworld - an underworld that still consists of rather straightforward mobsters.
It's almost as if the film wants us to kind of forget what happened in the first one. The only important information is that Batman's there. The rest of Gotham we are meant to assume is just like any other big American city.
And that's when the Joker comes in.
If Batman Begins was about methodically laying out how a person could decide to become a superhero, the Dark Knight strips down and builds back up the idea of a supervillain. And it does it so well that I don't even think it's a controversial statement to say that its version of the Joker (already probably the greatest supervillain in comics) is the greatest portrayal of a comic book supervillain in film history (Mike Neumann, from Movies with Mikey - see the link at the start of the article - argues much farther, claiming that Heath Ledger's portrayal of the Joker is the greatest cinematic performance of any sort of all time. I don't know if I'd go that far, but partially just because I'm hesitant to award such broad superlatives.)
The Joker is a different sort of villain. All the mobsters Batman's been dealing with are just your typical greed-based thugs. If we step back to acknowledge the villains of the first (and as it would turn out, third) movie, the League of Shadows is a far more dangerous foe, but they do have a goal, which is to see the collapse of the city (a little odd to focus on one city when it's more likely that they'd want to see the collapse of the entire American hegemony, though I think we're managing to accomplish that just fine on our own these days.) The Joker is, it seems, far less concerned with specific goals and accomplishments.
Batman's theoretical goal is that he puts enough criminals away that the city begins to heal, and that the proper authorities can get control of the situation. But the manner in which he has chosen to accomplish this has inspired the exact wrong sort of person.
While he's a romantic rival, the truth is that Batman really wants someone like Harvey Dent to take over for him - rather than having a costumed vigilante, having a tough DA who can bring order back in a legitimate, legal way. You know, the way that a democratic society is supposed to work. Ultimately, Bruce Wayne wants things back to normal.
But by becoming this larger-than-life icon for the city, he's drawn the attention of the Joker. And the Joker is overjoyed that the old, normal world has been shattered by Batman.
And this is what makes him a fascinating villain. Because his plan doesn't actually require him to gain anything. In fact, he makes it very clear that he doesn't actually want any of the sorts of things that criminals would want. He sets fire to a stack of money that makes Walter White's fortune look like pocket change (and in the process murders an accountant who's tied up on top of the pile - something the movie never takes a moment to remind you about.)
In a sense, the Joker wants to build a new world. And he wants to populate it with people like himself, but also like Batman.
Ultimately, if there is a true goal of his efforts over the course of the film, it's the creation of Two-Face. And we see Harvey Dent go from the sort of hero Batman wants to take over for him to a rage-fueled monster. Two-Face doesn't become a mobster and he doesn't kill for greed. The Joker pushes him to the point that he snaps, and rather than tying himself to logical goals, he picks his chance-based decision-making coin - a device that the Joker absolutely adores.
The Joker came out of nowhere - at no point do we ever find out anything reliably true about his backstory or how he came by his worldview (there's one line that suggests that maybe he was a soldier who was involved in some kind of traumatic event, though that line could also be a totally hypothetical example.) But he pushed an admirable man into becoming a mythological monster.
Two-Face doesn't actually wind up living long enough to be a supervillain in the same way - but true to Nolan's mission in these movies, that's fine as long as it serves the story. But in transforming Harvey Dent so completely, the Joker manages to ascend to true supervillain status. The Joker is stripped down to his bare essentials, but by doing this, he becomes even more mythic. He becomes elemental.
We never saw any more of the Joker. The most obvious reason for this is that Heath Ledger died before the movie came out. He would up winning a posthumous Oscar - the only Oscar for a performance in a comic book movie. It's never going to be possible to look at his performance with objectivity - here was an actor who was just coming into his own, who may have gone on to have a legendary career, but instead died before he was thirty (which is how old I am now.) His Joker not only set an incredibly high bar for anyone playing, well, any iconic pre-established character, but also now stands as his most beloved performance.
