Philosophy in The Dark Knight
The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung’s idea, “people don’t have ideas; ideas have people,” echoes through Christopher Nolan’s 2008 film The Dark Knight. There are many reasons why the storytelling of this film is highly sophisticated, but one of the more important reasons is that, in it, Nolan plays with ideas as gracefully as a good thinker ought to. He beautifully shows how the line between good and evil is really malleable, especially when these ideas are running through a flawed species such as man.
What’s highly interesting about these characters, these villains specifically, are that they are not run-of-the-mill everyday bad people, like the thugs and goons, or even the highly organized mafia portrayed in the film: these are people with very strong ideas on good and evil, and as a result, how their ideas pan out into their behavior, make them intensely evil. And the backed convictions behind their ideologies and terrorisms, make their terrorisms even more terrible.
In his rendition of the Batman universe, to drive the ideas of good and evil home, Nolan created villains that provide, throughout the films, very clear reasons why they do the atrocious things they do. In Batman Begins, the leader of the League of Shadows, Ra’s al Ghul’s point of view was that societies that degenerate beyond repair, in which every layer of the system has been corrupted and compromised, must be destroyed completely, and that giving them a chance to improve, slowly, brick-by-brick, is nonsensical and futile; as according to him, “criminals mock society’s laws.” One of the reasons why these convictions took birth in him was because his wife was taken away from him once, probably by criminals (it’s not mentioned); and, as a result, becomes a different kind of villain; a Hegelian villain. The German philosopher had written that the only evil is the one who thinks of himself as purely good. An idea that was taken further a few decades later, by philosopher, Nietzsche, who gave us a chilling warning, “beware not end up becoming a monster by fighting monsters, for if you gaze into the abyss too long, it gazes back at you.”
Nietzschean ideas are very much present in Nolan’s storytelling. In fact, it is quite clear that the Joker has read Nietzsche. From his opening lines in the film, “Whatever doesn’t kill you, simply makes you stranger,” to the fact that he reduces Harvey Dent, the ambitious and idealist D.A. of Gotham who wants to clean up its streets, down to his level; by making him corrupt as well. Joker was very well aware of the nature of a man who “fights monsters” constantly, and that he is very close to falling into the abyss. And Joker precisely does that, with a “little push.” Joker makes his ideologies very clear with his opening lines: with his twisted sense of humor, he changes the famous Nietzschean optimistic quote and makes it nihilistic, simply by replacing the word “stronger” with “stranger.” Hinting at the fact that the society’s hardships hasn’t made him “stronger”, as the philosopher claimed it does, but has made him even more alienated, made him stranger. His solution to the problem of existence is then to tear apart the society, through his own meticulous schemes and plans, backed by a heavy dose of nihilism.
The Batman, who’s also carrying traumatizing wounds, of the death of his parents by one of the same people who his father was trying to help, has taken a different road instead. Mentored by Ra’s al Ghul himself, Bruce, on the day of his initiation into the League of Shadows, decides, philosophically, that he won’t turn into a monster by fighting them. And his sane rule of preventing himself from “falling into the abyss” is that he would never kill a life. This rule actually reflects our society’s profound idea that every human life is worth something; no matter how atrocious the crime, every man, before being a criminal, is, first and foremost, a soul; an equal in God’s eyes; and therefore, must be treated with respect and dignity; an idea that Ra’s would have scoffed at. This makes the Batman completely different from his enemies. In fact, this is the crux of our civilization, partly because of the spread of Christian tradition in the West. Batman, therefore, the hero, carries the soul of civilization, through this one rule. I believe that the Joker even respects him for this precise reason; he is terrifyingly surprised by his principle. But because the Joker is so deep into his belief that all men, when pushed to extremes, can become as evil as he has become, that he cannot, or perhaps, he doesn’t want to change his mind and accept that human existence is good after all, and therefore worth preserving. There’s a Mephistophelean element to his outlook, that life is filled with so much of unnecessary suffering, that it must be completely extinguished, and that, ultimately, something is not better than nothing. And thus, these Luciferian ideas drive Joker’s monstrous behaviors.
Throughout the film, the Joker is making chilling jokes on humanity’s civility and code. For instance, after announcing to the world that he’ll kill people every day until Batman reveals his identity, he ends his threat by saying, “I am a man of my word.” A phrase that usually showcases the integrity of an honest man, a civilized man; but when Joker says it, especially after the threat of killing men every day, it displays his disturbing sense of humor. Or the fact when he says he “likes this job”, while driving a ten-ton truck, smashing everything that’s coming in between, trying to kill Dent. The story even presents different degrees of evil: when the Joker attends the secret meeting of the Falcone crime family, its members are unsettled by the fact that a random nobody is getting away by stealing half of their life’s savings; one of the members, Gambol, is highly offended by his lack of manners. The Joker’s lack of regard for life in general, including his own, and an alarming nonchalance and a lack of respect to these high-end criminals is obvious when he enters their meeting unannounced, and replies to their very first question, give me one good reason why they shouldn’t kill him on the spot, by “how about a magic trick?” The Joker is so far beyond their evilness, that even the mafia is surprised by his insanity and cruelty.
Alfred Pennyworth, Bruce’s confidant, and one of the wisest characters in this trilogy, understood the Joker more deeply than anybody. He explains the irrational nature of the Joker through his dialogue, “some men aren’t looking for something logical like money; these men cannot be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with, some men just want to watch the world burn.” In fact, through this insight, Bruce truly understands who’s he battling against.
The Joker has highly mechanized plans of bringing chaos and anarchy into the society. And he is not lethal merely because of his high intelligence, but also by the fact it is backed by destructive philosophical ideas. This makes him deeply dangerous. For instance, when he announces that he’ll blow up a hospital, if a man named Reese, who was going to reveal the identity of Batman on air, wasn’t dead within sixty minutes. The cunningness of his plan is later showed by the fact that he actually just wanted to turn Dent into Two Face, who was in a hospital; that had been his main plan; he would have blown up the hospital anyway, but he also, on the side, threw in the chaos of letting citizens kill a man in sixty minutes, just like that. He brings in chaos by putting ordinary people under intense moral dilemmas, pushing them to extremes: should they kill an unknown man in sixty minutes, or let him blow up a hospital that’s filled up with their family and friends?
Martha Nussbaum, an Aristotelian scholar and a moral philosopher, upon reading the Greek tragedies, had concluded that, essentially, only good people can have a tragedy. A person, for instance, doesn’t face the actual moral conundrum if he, say, doesn’t care if he misses his child’s musical performance instead of missing an important work meeting. Only morally good people, who have something at stake, can experience the pain of tragedy. By having to choose between two impossible choices.
The Joker firmly believes that he can eventually push everybody to madness and chaos. But his belief cannot be ignored completely. There is some truth to it; our civilization is highly fragile; and it’s a miracle that it keeps on going. Because, without somebody’s interjection, in this case, good actors like Gordan, Dent and the Batman, it is quite conceivable that, when pushed, the fragile civilization of Gotham can collapse into chaos, as Joker so surely believes.
So following the Joker’s or the Devil’s logic, if existence only brings misery, why keep on sustaining society? What’s the point of civilization? Why value human life? And why not extinguish life itself? I don’t know exactly why, but there’s an unspoken, unarticulated feeling, that dictates within me, and all of us: the mysterious conscience; that governs in almost each one of us. That tends to push the darkness away. That forces in each of us to go against evil. And that’s exactly what happens at the end of the film.
The Joker, in his final moral experiment, reveals two evacuation ferries, one carrying civilians and the other prisoners, are rigged to explode at midnight unless one group sacrifices the other. But the Joker is completely shocked to witness that neither of the parties were willing to blow the other up. This is a highly intense moral dilemma that the Joker was cunning enough to construct, with thousands of people’s lives at stake. But more than that, it was the test of the character of the collective consciousness of the Gotham City. The Joker has a brutally condescending view that the ordinary people, the masses, are not worth preserving, because at the end of the day, “when the chips are down, these civilized people will eat each other.”
But Nolan, not only showed the heroism of powerful good actors like Batman and Gordan, but also the collective heroism of the common people, which even included the criminals. The criminals were inherently good too, for not pushing the button of the detonator. It is frightening to understand that the Joker, then, was not in for merely killing people, but he was going after something much deeper. He wanted to vanquish the spirit of society itself. But what’s even more surprising is that, it is the ordinary people that prove him dead wrong. There is, after all, something worth preserving then, the code of our civilization, the idea that each of us has a soul, an indestructible value, that needs to be acknowledged, respected, and protected.
The Dark Knight is a powerful tale that forces the audience to grapple with these moral conundrums, that the Joker presents to all of us. His convictions regarding the false goodness of humanity makes us question about our world’s morality too. We might not articulate it out loud, but through these characters who are powerfully backed by well-reasoned philosophies, we are unconsciously struggling with it as we watch the film. By arming his characters with these dangerous ideas, Nolan makes these heroes and villains even more powerful, and as a result, the narrative storytelling of good versus evil even more compelling.