"The Dark Knight" Sucks: There, I Said It.

Well... SOMEONE had to!

May 30, 2022

In the sixteenth episode of HBO's Game of Thrones, Lord Petyr “Littlefinger” Baelish arrives at the castle Harrenhal to meet with Lord Tywin Lannister, the Hand of the King. Tywin is the most powerful man in Westeros, Baelish an ambitious climber always hatching schemes to win the Iron Throne. The two men approach power differently: Tywin instills fear with brutality built on legacy and fortified by a sharp mind; Littlefinger slithers in the shadows, devouring every chance to take advantage of warring families distracted from his duplicity. He is a secondary threat with too much value to eliminate. At Harrenhal, he speaks to a man who knows this. Neither can fool the other.

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In light of Renly Baratheon’s assassination, the War of the Five Kings has come to a critical juncture. A large army has deserted its fallen leader to fight for his brother, a skilled commander with a large fleet and the best claim to the throne. Littlefinger says that it is “his belief that moments of chaos afford opportunities lost soon after.” Tywin, unimpressed with the remark, looks him in the eye and responds, “You say that as if you were the first man alive to think it.”

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The Dark Knight is the Littlefinger of movies.

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It is true, down to the word itself. As the Joker visits a severely burned Harvey Dent at Gotham General Hospital, having orchestrated the death of his fiancée, he lectures Harvey on the nature of humanity. It is not morals or ethics that determine our fate, but familiarity. We thrive in plans and structures, believing that our codes and edicts can and will protect us. We do not bat an eye when things go accordingly; introduce a little “anarchy,” shake up the “established order,” or sprinkle in a bit of “chaos,” and everyone goes berserk.

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Let us recall December 29, 1922, when five delegates signed a treaty ratifying a nation forged through five years of revolution: the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. For 300 years, the Romanovs had ruled Russia as an absolute monarchy, but a fledgling economy led to nationwide food shortages. On March 8, 1917, thousands of industrial workers went on strike in Petrograd (modern-day St. Petersburg). It was the start of the revolution that changed the world. It was one of many instances of ordinary citizens taking up against oppressive governments to alter their future for the better. It, like its many predecessors, upset the established order, but it was not “chaotic.”

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The world is a creation of those who seize control. The results can be bloody, expose that seeming solutions were facades, and chart a course for humanity that seems more prudent in the immediate than it does in retrospect, but to write off such actions as chaos is reductive. As such, The Dark Knight is not the movie it believes.

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A film cannot be an ode to lacking purpose or conviction and be as self-serious as The Dark Knight. If a man wants to watch the world burn, he cannot set a pile of money ablaze while vowing to grant Gotham a “better class of criminal” more than halfway through the movie. If he wants to torch the Earth, why trust others to realize his ambitions? He says he wants to send a message, not sit idly by while his “chaos” and “anarchy” level the world to ash.

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The Dark Knight does this repeatedly. It capitalizes on dialogue designed to establish themes and resonate, believing it can exploit their value to make the rest of the movie seem a dive into those ideas. Without allowing its characters to have genuine agency, forcing them to react to abstractions rather than create their specifics, it definitively cannot be what it claims.

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If Batman “knows” where Rachel and Harvey are, and the film insists on having the Joker rub his nose in the tragic choice, Bruce can only do what is expected and on the power of someone else’s will. Villains serve an invaluable purpose and exist for many reasons, but one is to deter our heroes' of self-determination: movies must pick the correct times to force good men into impossible situations and allow them to choose their path.

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Even in its final moments, where Gordon laments a fleeing Batman sparing Gotham from damnation by taking the blame for Dent’s crimes, it does not understand us, or even itself. As he tells his son of Batman's fate and what this next step means for a fractured city, he calls the Caped Crusader “a silent guardian; “a watchful protector;” “a dark knight.” It is poetic until you realize he is talking to an 8-year-old who has no clue what he’s talking about. It forgets the world it inhabits to fish for a good ending.

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In fairness, movies function differently for everyone. We seek varying things within the generality of escapism because the meaning of escapism depends on the individual. A person struggling with loss or addiction will interpret a film differently than one looking towards the future with optimism and hope. No one person is exactly like another; even if we can feel someone’s empathy, we are still alone. Films let us explore ourselves and latch onto something that feels entirely for us. The Dark Knight forgets that its audience funnels themselves into the movie, not the other way around.

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Without this understanding, it becomes a film beloved by people whose perspective on the world is as narrow as the peephole through which they view it. It can rejoice in phrases that sound profound but crumble under even the slightest criticism. It can bellow about the code of criminals past without exploring the intricacies of Gotham’s underworld to legitimize the threat the Joker poses. It can have its hammy villain mutter under his breath as Batman speeds towards him on a dark street, hammering home the desire of forcing heroes to violence without dissecting the meaning of having that hero become one with his enemies. It can have someone remark that you either “die the hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain” without actually upholding that principle. It can have a tortured man, driven to unspeakable acts by grief, label chance the only morality in a cruel world without examining whether that is true.

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Chance is not the only morality in a cruel world; that is the entire point of chance. It is unbiased, but that does not make it moral. If the parameters for cruelty are unjust killing and the death of purity (and not the selfishness of grappling with loss), then the idea is too vague to justify flipping a coin and calling it justice. The entire premise of fighting for Gotham relies on its ability to transcend a place where indecent men create indecent times. Writing it off because that happens is impractical. The only thing that has changed for Harvey is that Rachel fell victim to that indecency. You cannot legitimize a concept if it is rooted in one man’s freshly-warped perspective on the world.

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You do not either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain, not in the way The Dark Knight envisions. Sports teams rise on the backs of dying victors, once beloved for their own new successes and then reviled for becoming the old, invincible guard. As the new blood courses through our veins, we thrive with our renewed youth. When we realize there is no more to that new life than the one that came before it, we turn on them. Politicians get elected with landslide victories only to suffer reprisal as the impossible choices before them conflict with their constituents' ideologies, and lies get dragged into the light.

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It is not a simple matter of it happening on principle, and the movie, despite refusing to accept this, accidentally acknowledges it before Batman flees from the incoming police force. It is not inevitable. It is a choice heroes must make. Bruce could let the truth be known and allow Dent to suffer the posthumous punishment for his deviancy, but he elects to shoulder the burden to protect the people from themselves. He chose to be a hero and is now choosing to become the villain. Bruce echoes the line as though he realizes the truth of what Harvey meant, but Dent spoke of it as some inevitability of circumstance. If it had spent time exploring Bruce's choice instead of congratulating itself on conceiving limp ideals, it could have earned its self-belief.

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The Dark Knight’s legacy is not wholly undeserved. Its dark visuals and brooding tone have inspired countless superhero films over the last 14 years, for better or worse. Its attempt at commentary, diving into humanity instead of fleeing from it with outrageous costumes and corny set-pieces, inspired deeper thinking about the genre's potential. It is a classic case of the original surpassing all imitators, that nearly a decade-and-a-half after its release, it can still compel in a visual respect far more than its successors. It is a film whose merit is rooted only in its artistry, even if its visual cues are too obvious for its own good. Unfortunately, it is also a case of the idea of something being more compelling than the execution; for all its ambition, it lacks the depth it falsely believes it possesses.

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Whether it wants to be clever in discussing limitations or sharp in examining decency against imposing evil, The Dark Knight cannot do anything but congratulate itself for floating ideas that contradict themselves or crumble under the film’s executions. Its self-belief navigates it through a ridiculous sequence where civilians and prisoners debate sacrifice vs. salvation but cannot overcome believing 30 million people would bank their hopes for collective redemption on the integrity of a lawyer.

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It is the consequence of falling in love with individual lines and not the necessary work to make their philosophical implications tangible: a film people remember for specific moments, but not how it capitalized on them thematically. If The Dark Knight focused more on developing its ideas and less on embracing its self-satisfaction, it could use its aesthetic to complement some genuine thematic exploration. It could answer whether Bruce brought Rachel’s fate upon her instead of having him pose the question to Alfred and granting him a superficial answer in return. It could recognize that it cannot bite off all its thematic meat without choking on it. From the invasion of technology on civilian privacy to the drama of a doomed Gotham hospital, the movie wants its narrative to encompass a million things like an old epic that thinks a lifetime is worth seeing on principle.

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It creates a reliance on fake-outs to inspire an aura of suspense or curiosity for its progressions. The Joker has to switch the locations to trick Bruce into getting Rachel killed; the clowns are the hostages instead of the doctors. Even in those moments, it cannot commit to something tangible. It wants Gotham to have proven its optimism by refusing to sacrifice each other, but a convict dooms his ferry because of its occupants, and the most vocal proponent of murder on the civilian boat opts out in cowardice. The motivations do not align with the film's desired results. The idea isn’t feasible beyond the movie simply saying it.

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But that is The Dark Knight: a movie that says a million things and exploits their conceptual appeal to mask its inability to mean anything. It fancies itself an epic, overstuffing its narrative across a long runtime, but lacks the spectacle. Its strength is in defying the conventions of the genre to take a bleaker turn, but confuses being grim and dark for having depth, and all of its pseudo-intellectualism is the perfect partner to the foreboding. It gives the impression of being a great film, and its legacy certainly dwarfs those who see it for what it is, but perception is not always reality. It can be a nostalgic flick for younger millennials and the catalyst for the superhero genre turning onto darker avenues. It can be a great foundation without building on it effectively. It can be a great idea that collapses when stood upon by its director. It does not deserve credit for being a beautiful shell. After all, it may toss many ideas into the ether, but no matter how desperately it wants to convince us otherwise, it was not the first film to ever think them.