The Dark Knight

The Noble Lie of Gotham: On the Fantasy Structure of The Dark Knight

Let us begin not with the Joker, as everyone wants to, but with the scene everyone seems to forget five minutes after watching it: the two ferries. One ship of ordinary citizens, one of convicts, each given the detonator to the other. The Joker's experiment in applied ethics. And what happens? Both refuse. The convict, in a moment of grunting Christological dignity, throws the detonator out the window; the citizens take a vote, find themselves too cowardly to act on its results, and so on, until dawn breaks and Batman saves everybody. We are meant to exhale. See? People are basically good. The Joker was wrong about us.

This is the precise moment the film's ideology achieves total saturation, and it should make us extremely suspicious. Because the entire architecture of The Dark Knight — its grim realism, its Patriot Act allegories, its Hans Zimmer ulcer of a score — has been constructed to convince us that we are watching a film unflinching enough to look into the abyss. And then, at the abyss's edge, it produces this unbelievable Hallmark card: a black convict and a frightened white businessman jointly redeeming the social contract. The film cannot end with the boats blowing up, because the entire fantasy frame requires that the people, deep down, beneath everything, be salvageable. The Joker has to be wrong. The whole apparatus of Wayne Enterprises, the surveillance grid, the rogue billionaire vigilantism — none of it is justified unless what it's protecting is, finally, worth protecting. So the boats must hold. The chocolate laxative must work: we get our cynicism and our humanism in a single bite.

Now consider the Joker. The standard reading — agent of chaos, anarchist, terrorist, etc. — already concedes too much to the film's self-presentation. The Joker is not a nihilist; he is something far more disturbing, which is a moralist. He burns the mountain of money. He doesn't want anything Gotham can give him. What he wants is for Gotham to see itself: to recognize that its civility is a thin laminate over a constant low-grade panic, that its laws function only because nobody seriously tests them, that the symbolic order — the big Other, the fiction that Somebody Is In Charge and the rules basically work — is a collective hallucination sustained by everyone's mutual agreement not to look directly at it. He is the figure who looks directly at it. This is why he has no origin story, or rather has several mutually contradictory ones: he cannot be psychologized, because to psychologize him would be to reinscribe him in the very symbolic economy he exists to short-circuit. He is what intrudes when the fiction tears.

And what does the fiction need, in order to keep from tearing? It needs Batman. Here we should be careful not to fall for the film's own auto-critique, the hand-wringing about whether Bruce Wayne has "gone too far" with his sonar surveillance system. That hand-wringing is itself the ideological operation: it gives us the comforting sense that we are confronting hard truths, when in fact what we are doing is laundering them. Batman is not a transgression of the legal order; he is its obscene supplement, the unofficial violence that the official order requires in order to pretend to be non-violent. Commissioner Gordon knows this. The Mayor knows this. The audience knows this — and nevertheless. This is the fetishistic structure of the entire film: we know very well that a billionaire in body armor torturing suspects in Hong Kong and wiretapping every cell phone in the city is not the solution to anything, but nevertheless, when he does it, we feel a tremendous sense of relief. The film's "moral seriousness" consists in naming this disavowal and then luxuriating in it.

The truly remarkable maneuver, however, is the ending — which is to say, the construction of the Harvey Dent lie. Batman takes the fall for Dent's murders so that the people of Gotham can keep their hero, their symbol, their fantasy of a clean institutional response to evil. This is straight-up Plato by way of Leo Strauss: the noble lie, the truth that must be hidden from the demos because the demos cannot bear it. Gotham's citizens, who in the boats sequence were granted a sentimental capacity for moral heroism, are here revealed to be exactly what the noble lie always assumes them to be — children who require a comforting story, incapable of metabolizing the fact that their White Knight became a murderer. The film wants both: the people are good enough to refuse the Joker's game, but not good enough to handle the truth about Harvey Dent. This isn't an inconsistency; it's the entire ideological machine. The masses must be virtuous enough to deserve saving and stupid enough to require lying to. Otherwise the figure of the lonely guardian — the billionaire, the surveillance state, the dark knight who carries the burden so we don't have to — has no reason to exist.

And this is why The Dark Knight is the definitive cinematic document of its political moment, far more so than any of the explicit Iraq War films of the period. It is not an allegory of the War on Terror; it is the fantasy structure of the War on Terror in distilled form. We — civilized, peaceful, going about our lives — are menaced by an irrational evil that "just wants to watch the world burn," that cannot be negotiated with, that exists outside the rational framework of interests and grievances. To defeat this evil we must do terrible things, and then we must lie about having done them, because the people whose freedom we are defending are too tender to know what is done in their name. The genius of Nolan's film is that it presents this entire ideological complex with such grave self-awareness that watching it feels like critique. You leave the theater believing you have been challenged. You have not been challenged. You have been comforted in the most sophisticated way the early twenty-first century knew how to comfort itself.

The properly subversive gesture — the one the film flirts with and then frantically forecloses — would have been to take the Joker seriously: to entertain, even for a moment, the possibility that the symbolic order he is tearing at deserves to be torn, that the noble lie is not noble, that the people on the boats might actually press the button and that this would tell us something true about the order they live under rather than something pathological about them. The Dark Knight cannot go there. Almost no Hollywood film can. This is why the Joker, in the end, has to be defeated not by being refuted but by being hung upside down and converted into a quotable monologue, a Halloween costume, a meme. Capture him in the symbolic, make him into a character, and the wound he opens can be sutured. The fantasy holds. The boats don't blow up. The lie about Harvey Dent becomes the foundation of a new civic order. And we, the audience, walk out into the lobby having enjoyed our two and a half hours of seriously confronting nothing at all.