Content area
Full Text
Time Magazine's Richard Corliss, reviewing The Dark Knight, wrote that "[director Christopher] Nolan has a more subversive agenda. He wants viewers to stick their hands down the rat hole of evil and see if they get bitten." Corliss's focus on evil makes sense given both the variety of villains populating the movie and the depth of Heath Ledger's Academy Award winning depiction of The Joker. I contend, however, that buried within the varied villains of the movie is a rare and precious vision of the good. It is in moving past the battle between Batman and Joker to focus on Harvey Dent that one finds a more complex vision of the good than what the two dominant figures embody. Focusing on Two-Face, the villain who provides hope, allows viewers to escape the pain of the "rat hole of evil."
Arguing how Harvey Dent emerges as the central figure of the film, and how both Batman and The Joker promote ultimately untenable visions of the good requires an in-depth analysis of evil and villains. I begin by building on Umberto Eco's 1972 essay 'The Myth of Superman," which I update by articulating why the figure of Batman has become increasingly important in the twenty-first century, replacing Superman as a focal point in our culture. I then analyze how Nolan depicts evil in the movie, focused on three kinds of villains: mobsters, The Joker and Two-Face. In order to make sense of the variety of villains, I turn to Immanuel Kant's conception of evil as a way of understanding the importance of The Joker, and then review Paul Ricoeur's conception of fallibility in order to make a case for Harvey Dent as the heart of the film. It is by emphasizing Dent's character that the movie makes its grandest moral statement, undermining the heterodirected nature of superhero logic that permeates other films and graphic novels in order to present the human capacity for autonomy and freedom.
Heterodirection and the Myth of Superman
Scholars throughout the humanities find that our worldviews are both undergirded and reinforced by the cultural artifacts that we unthinkingly consume: although we seek out meaningless diversions as a way to relax after a tiring week, the products provided for us are not offered...