Lessons of the Dark Knight

By HAIM WATZMAN
An article in Issue 12, September 29, 2008 of The Jerusalem Report. To subscribe to The Jerusalem Report click here. It's after 10 p.m. on a Saturday night and I'm descending an escalator in the Jerusalem Mall, located in the Malha neighborhood. My head is a bit muddled at this hour - a late one for me. I'm on a father-son outing - I'm going with my two boys, one a soldier, the other a high school senior, to see some good guys beat up some bad guys. We slide off the moving stairs at the second floor and swerve left to the Gil multiplex movie theaters. The boys have chosen "The Dark Knight," the new Batman movie. I grew up with Batman comic books and the old twice-a-week TV series, but it's a long time since I've had contact with Bob Kane's eyeless hero of Gotham City. I missed the earlier films with the caped crusader's latest incarnation. My junior high school comic book addiction seems to belong to the biography of a different person. That kid knew who the good guys were (Batman, Robin, Jews, liberals, most Supreme Court justices) and who the bad guys were (the Joker, the Riddler, Mr. Freeze, Communists, Republicans, Nixon). The bad guys wore makeup, dressed funny and sought world domination. The good guys had big muscles and washboard abs (except for the Supreme Court Justices, the liberals and the Jews.) My own boys, growing up closer to real battles, may be more worldly about conflict than I was at their age. But the black-and-white dichotomy of the three-color comic book or Technicolor film fits the adolescent mindset today no less than it did a generation ago. It's an age when we all dream of being lone heroes who flout convention and social constraints in the name of the good and the pure. At middle age, I often find myself more interested in the villains than in the heroes. The bad guys often seem more complex and Gotham City's bad guys definitely have better senses of humor than all the members of the Justice League combined. The classic heroes know exactly what they're doing and why. Guys like the Joker are more intriguingly complex. The Joker once said of his life, "Sometimes I remember it one way, sometimes another... if I'm going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice!" But I was one of just a handful of 50-somethings in Gil's cinema No. 2 on Saturday night. It was an action-movie audience. That is, mostly young males between the ages of 14 and 29. In Israel, this translates to many who are reservists, soldiers and kids striving to get into a good unit. It's an audience taught by history, experience and national mythology that the only honorable and effective response to aggression is to hit back even harder. Good violence drives out the bad. I am expecting a film that will confirm that thesis. A few minutes into the movie, though, it's clear that that's not exactly where this saga is going. "The Dark Knight" portrays a society in which a spiral of brutality, committed by both bad guys and good, has decayed into a hell in which no one is safe and in which no one is innocent. I glance at my sons. I glance at the young men around me. Are they seeing what I see? The story is that Gotham City has had some success in fighting the organized crime gangs that have plagued it for so many years. Part of that success may have to do with Batman's extra-legal war against them, but a lot has to do with a new, energetic mayor and a brave young district attorney who are working to clean out the corrupt police department and establish the rule of law. Establishing the rule of law also means stopping Batman, who obeys no laws in his fight. Batman catches criminals, but he treats them in ways that, outside the superhero world, could best be termed torture. But Batman's very success in banging the brains out of underworld offenders has stimulated a third force to enter the battle. The Joker is a psychopath who's in it for the game and who mirrors Batman in his disregard for law and social convention. He wields the weapons of death, dread and duplicity in beating down the gangs while continually raising the ante in his battle against cowl and cape. Gotham becomes the playground in which the two adversaries play their game. My boys, I suspect, are just seeing chase scenes and explosions. There are certainly a lot of these. I think I discern how this film was born. Story man David S. Goyer and screenwriters Jonathan and Christopher Nolan (the latter being also the director) were sitting around over some beers brainstorming about what gimmick could make their next big-budget project stand out from the pack. It's tough in the 21st century, when pretty much every taboo has been violated and every yuck factor exploited. "Hey," says David or Jon or Chris, "no one's ever blown up a hospital before." "Awesome," replies David or Jon or Chris. "And what's the grossest thing that you'd find in a hospital that people haven't seen on film yet?" "A guy with his face burned half away?" suggests David or Jon or Chris. And there it was. With the gimmick in place, all they needed was a story and script to back it up. Hollywood and the market being what they are, David and Jon and Chris couldn't have made this film without including these two really disgusting elements. Still, a writer's choice of yuck gimmick grows inevitably out of his view of the world. In "The Dark Knight," the yuck is not for yuck's sake, or not only. It sets the tone for this portrayal of a society in decay. Batman himself is beginning to comprehend that his vigilantism has actually spurred his nemesis, the Joker, into ever more fanatical attacks, and that an end to mob rule and the Joker's delusional violence depends on a restoration of the rule of law. Violence and counterviolence have reached such levels that everyone is a potential victim and everyone a potential perpetrator. The only way to save oneself and one's family in this world is to work for one antagonist and betray another. In local terms, it's civil-war Beirut with masks and makeup, or how the internecine warfare of besieged Jerusalem of 70 A.D. would have played out with Batmobiles and an unlimited supply of plastic explosives. It's a world in which a hospital is a legitimate target and in which people gaze on a face half-consumed by fire with only the barest of flinches. It's a world that my kids are a bat-whisker away from growing up in. The premise doesn't quite live up to its promise. Too many dei jump out of too many machinis. Too many times large objects blow up without anyone really getting hurt. The souls of too many heroes remain, in the end, untainted by the violence they wreak. Nevertheless, this Batman film retains an ambiguity exemplified by its title. The night is dark indeed, and the white night of the fairy tale is here a black one who, seeking to do good, gets a lot of people killed. So did "The Dark Knight" plant some healthy doubt deep down in these adolescent minds? The chortles and cheers from the audience seemed to indicate that it hadn't. A day later I asked my younger son whether he thought that the film had a purpose beyond providing a good action experience. "I realized something else was going on, but I didn't understand it," he admitted. Well, he's only 17. As the professor who taught me 20th-century English literature said, a lot of what you read at this age is an investment. You won't think much of it now, but a few years hence you'll suddenly remember it and realize what it has to say to you. So maybe "The Dark Knight" will surface in my sons' minds the next time a government promises that a military adventure will end terrorism once and for all, or the next time a politician proclaims that Israel can overcome its enemies if we just "let the IDF do its work" without civilian interference. Perhaps they'll recall Bruce Wayne in his penthouse above decomposing Gotham and consider that pure motives are not sufficient to guarantee a good fight. Perhaps they'll remember Michael Caine as the urbane, rational butler, Alfred, sagely urging escalation as Gotham burns. Maybe they'll reflect that a good and effective fight against one's enemies also requires forethought, restraint, a proper chain of command, and respect for the law. Without the law, our Sages said, we would eat each other alive. Good guys included. • Haim Watzman is the author of "Company C: An American's Life as a Citizen-Soldier in Israel" and "A Crack in the Earth: A Journey Up Israel's Rift Valley." He blogs at South Jerusalem [www.southjerusalem.com]. An article in Issue 12, September 29, 2008 of The Jerusalem Report. To subscribe to The Jerusalem Report click here.