Batman isn’t the star of The Dark Knight. That’s plain old conventional wisdom at this point. But Christian Bale’s foil, Heath Ledger’s iconic Joker, isn’t the star either. Not really. Nor is it Harvey Dent, Gotham’s white knight, or Jim Gordon, the archetypal honest cop, or Rachel Dawes, the doomed idealist, or Lucius Fox, the steady hand, or Alfred, the faithful servant.

The real star of The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan’s cinematic superhero landmark, is the concept of ethical behavior — and the performance stinks.

Written by Nolan and his brother Jonathan, who’s currently taking an equally high-minded and heavy-handed approach to ethical issues in Westworld, The Dark Knight is fixated on the opposition between right and wrong, order and chaos, and hope and despair, all to a degree no other superhero movie as come close to touching. While most costumed-and-caped adventures are content to let such issues stay subtextual, with the superpowered slugfests between heroes and villains serving as a metaphor for these underlying conflicts, The Dark Knight spins them into the whole plot.

Who’s a better example for Gotham City to follow out of its long-standing hell of crime and corruption: Dent, an elected official who obeys the will of the people and observes the rule of law, or Batman, a self-appointed vigilante who follows no rules but his own? Who’s right about the nature of humanity, Batman, who wants to serve as a symbol to inspire the stifled good he believes exists within everyone, or the Joker, who wants to prove that all systems — from organized crime to democracy — are just pancake makeup applied to a scarred mass of nihilism and brutality? To stave off chaos, is it permissible to inflict order on the whims of one man?

The answers the film wants us to take away are obvious. Dent, not Batman, is the hero Gotham needs; Batman, not the Joker, sees the hearts of his fellow citizens clearly; even in the face of overwhelming danger, the power to stop it must be checked before it becomes just as dangerous.

These aren’t the answers that the film actually provides. By emerging just before the dawn of Barack Obama’s presidency, when the general consensus in America seemed sick and tired of the unending and overreaching War on Terror as it was of the terrorists said war was ostensibly designed to fight, The Dark Knight tapped into a national mood — the film repeatedly describes the Joker’s actions as “terrorism” — and sent the audience home with a positive message. But the film itself is a hopeless political muddle, constantly trying to have its liberty vs. security, order vs. anarchy, vigilantism vs. legitimacy cake and eat it, too.

I made my debut at Polygon as part of their enormous suite of stories on the 10th anniversary of The Dark Knight, with a look at the film’s much-ballyhooed, totally incoherent political and ethical stances.

Tags: Batman, Christopher Nolan, movie reviews, Movie Time, movies, polygon, reviews, the dark knight

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